#991 - Dr John Delony - The Blueprint for Better Relationships & a Peaceful Life

If you are married, your spouse should have all of the codes to your phones, email accounts, and social media accounts, and you should have theirs.

Period.

If your spouse isn't trustworthy or safe, you need to head directly into this challenge.

ASAP, you are worthy of safety and peace.

If you are hiding things from your spouse, let today be your independence day from secrets, shame, and fear.

You are worth finally taking a full deep breath.

How do people respond to that?

Not well, man.

Let's go.

Not well, dude.

Not well at all.

The idea

that

privacy and secrecy are the same thing, they've been conflated.

And I think it's madness.

I think it's madness.

If you will create a human with somebody, but you won't give them the code to your phone, I can't think of anything more insane.

That's insane.

There's a lot of dissonance going on there.

Dissonance is like a kind way to say it.

It's madness.

It's madness.

That is why.

Yeah, the number of folks that call into my show that are like, hey,

I can't, I'm not going to give her my phone.

And it's like, why?

Like, what is on that thing?

It's like, well, it's mine.

It's like, well, what is so, what are you hiding?

Right.

And I think every major pathology ends up, secrets fuel that, right?

It's gasoline for pathology.

And so, man, if you can't have a place in your life with the person you're ride or die with that you can say,

like,

can you, can you check out my phone and get this picture off my phone?

If that gives, if that causes you pause, or worse, if your partner won't do that, yeah, man, you gotta, you gotta have that conversation like now.

Yeah,

why does that sound crazy?

Does that sound crazy?

I don't think so.

I'm an old married man, so maybe it doesn't occur to me.

It would have, it would have done to me 10 years ago, but that's because there was loads of shit on my phone that I didn't want my girlfriend.

That's it.

That's it.

Whereas now, I don't care.

I don't, there's nothing on there that I need to be worried about.

Yeah.

So

what blows my mind is that conflation, that privacy issue, that privacy versus honesty thing.

So people, so my wife's a coach and I work in mental health, right?

So people are flying in all the time to stay at our house for a few days and then,

or we'll go out into the country where I've got a place and people will stay.

I'll tell my wife, hey, I'm going out.

Someone's coming in.

So that's private, but it's not, I'm not, I'm not saying like, hey,

right, I'm, I'm going to go run an errand, right?

And so, and she, she has clients, right?

But the idea that

I don't know, I think they're conflated and I think that's madness.

I think that's madness.

One interesting thing is

the openness to give your partner your devices and email accounts and messages and social media and all that sort of stuff actually acts a little bit like a

guardrail for your behavior as well.

You know, like there's

always stuff that's kind of ambiguous.

Yeah.

Some chick replies to your Instagram story.

or it's somebody from your past that is associated with an ex or party or whatever.

Like it's, you know, there's a million ways that this could go.

Your behavior with that person can be the beginning of just a little bit, it's a little sort of fissure or a crack.

I got a ton of stick for saying that

if guys want to remain loyal to their partner, but they've struggled to keep their dick in their pants in the past, it's a bad idea for them to go out to a nightclub and drink with their friends until three in the morning.

And the implication, it was both people didn't like that.

On one side, the guys didn't like it because it felt controlling and the girls didn't like it because it sounded like the guys were only loyal due to a lack of options.

I'm like, look, if you're a mild version of a guy that likes cocaine, but is trying to quit.

Being in a house with no cocaine is a fucking wonderful solution to that.

It's way easier to avoid temptation than it is to resist it.

And this, you can be the most loyal guy in the world, but if you're 15 beers deep and the wrong night with the wrong thing and you kind of didn't know what was going on, and this is a terminal, like an existential problem that you have found yourself in now,

just remove yourself from the situation.

It's way easier.

And it's kind of the same with this, that if you and your partner have this level of honesty, transparency, openness, where you're just sharing each other's social media accounts back and forth.

It's like, hey, can you just see if such and such has messaged me?

It's like, what's this fucking group chat?

With like, it's just pic pics.

It's like, yeah, I know, I know, like, fucking, if the boys, like, as opposed to, oh, I hope she doesn't open that message on the thing.

Well, and it works in reverse.

Like,

you establish trust.

I've got friends literally that we grew up on the same street in Houston, in Texas.

Same street since we were zero.

She doesn't get into those text threads.

Like, she may see the thread pop up and she knows.

Or when I see something, if I grab her phone to get directions somewhere and text threads come from her college roommates I don't open it right a because I have full trust but B um there's some there's private things but they're not secrets right

and and she could and you know what I mean but like have you seen that video it's a girl driving in a car she's in the passenger seat and it's captioned below this guy's presumably saying uh can i check your text messages and she goes

hands him the phone phone.

She goes, can I look at your social media accounts?

She goes, hands him the phone.

She says, can I look at your chat GPT history?

And she throws the phone at the moment.

I think it's this, I want to have the benefits of a fully anchored partner, but I don't want to put all of myself on the table.

I don't want to put both feet in that boat.

And you can't have one without the other.

Can you explain that a bit more deeply?

Yeah, so I want the benefits of being fully seen and fully known and fully celebrated,

but I don't want you to see all of me.

And so it's a hedge.

And if you've got past traumas, you got past relationship, you got burned and all that, the hedge makes sense, but you can't hope for all of this, right?

It's like, I want to get in great shape, but I just don't want to mess with the diet part.

Like, you can do that.

You're not going to see the results you want.

And we blame the other person for that.

It's like we're going after the food companies now.

We're going after the colors in my Skittles.

I mean, man, we're going down rabbit holes, dude.

At the end of the day, if I want to go fully into this, then I got to go fully in.

And if I don't, then I have to own that I didn't want to go fully into that.

Yeah.

You get what I'm saying?

And there is some, there's blame and there's, there's pressure.

And yeah, I get that.

But you have to say, if I want the benefit for this, I got to go all in, which means you got to risk getting hurt bad, man.

Because if you are not all in,

there's always this thing in the past.

Always.

That said, well you know i wasn't rejected because that wasn't me

just 60 me 90 me but 10 was on my career 10 was on my friends or 10 was on that that uh orbiting that's not how it goes it is 10 is you weren't trustworthy or you were going to use this against me and so i start to weaponize the same person i'm in the boat with right

and when i've got a foot on the side here i like to poke them yeah just either get in or don't get in well i think that and it goes it goes by the way you're nuts if you meet somebody you're like hi my name's john here's all my stuff that makes you psychotic right but once you cross those lines and say hey this is for real we're gonna make a run at this or we're all in or you're standing at the so you

you can be all in at at varying levels right you can correct at the very first date it's like

there is a appropriate level of disclosure at each different stage, but you can max out that disclosure as you go along, as opposed to purposefully tampering that down.

Right.

So, yeah, I think that there's people who are all in in relationships, and I think there's people who aren't.

And the people who aren't should get together, and the people who are should get together.

And the problems occur when one group dates the other.

That's fantastic, huh?

You think?

Yeah, that's Love Island, right?

Those who can't?

Like, just go, go.

You all stay there.

You know I was on Love Island, right?

No.

No, you weren't, really?

I was the first person through the doors of season one.

You didn't know this?

No.

That's where you got the joke from.

No.

I was the was the first person i wish i was that savvy the first person through the doors of season one did you win no no i didn't how do you win i've never even seen an episode uh you it's like a vote thing toward the end it's like popularity contest public popularity contest toward the end of each couple is like big brother you've yeah basically it's couple big brother okay kind of and 24 hours a day you're surveilled by cameras

that was a fucking that was a real that was 10 years ago 10 years ago this summer I was on.

That would have been a way better joke if I had known that.

Well, you doubled up.

Well, there we go.

Edit this part out.

You're right, because

even within Love Island, you see that there's people in there who are a very small cohort of people, and they usually don't stay very long that are actually in there trying to find a life path.

101st.

And then the rest of them are just trying to play the game.

So I think this would be a great analysis for somebody to do if someone that's watching that's got too much time on their hands.

If you can

take

every couple that finished the show of Love Island, UK and US,

and then track how long, either how long they stayed together or just basically what the attrition rate is.

I guess the attrition rate for couples that finished Love Island in a couple is over 95%.

I think that like

maybe one in 20 couples or less, probably, probably less than 95, like would have been able to stick together.

Are there any that are still together from those original seasons?

I literally can't think of any.

Tommy Fury and Molly May were the two like, were the big Tommy Fury the boxer?

Yeah, yeah, he was on as well.

It's an illustrious history in the UK.

But they separated, but now they're back together.

So, I mean, hardly a gold standard relationship.

Got a kid, had a kid, kids like 18 months old, separated, got back together, public break, all this bullshit.

So, but yeah, I really think

there's two cohorts of people.

There's people who are all in relationships and those that aren't.

And the problem occurs when one group dates the other.

If you're dating somebody or if you were married to somebody and they won't show you their phone, I would head straight to a therapist's office because that to me is a huge sign.

That's a huge sign that there's some, or maybe not to a therapist's office, but at least sit at a table across from each other and say, we got to put this issue on the table because there's something going on there that that person has to feel safe with you.

Talk to me about safety.

What's it mean?

Why is it important?

I don't think you can have a relationship without

safety and without trust.

But I think safety says, I can say what I want, put that on the table, and you'll be curious about it.

You won't hurt me with it.

Or it means I can say, I'm interested in.

And it basically says, I can be me, and you won't weaponize me against me.

Give me an example.

I'm a physician, and I'm not, but let's say I was a physician, and my wife gets accustomed to a life.

We're living a life as a doctor's house.

And I increasingly get frustrated with the HMO system.

And I

am taking yoga on the weekends and I'm like, man, I'm going to get, I'm going to be a yoga instructor.

And one day I come home and say,

I think I want to quit medicine and I want to do yoga, right?

Safety would say that person will instantly say, you know what that's going to cost me?

And somebody who is safe would say,

tell me more about that.

And we might get to a place where I need to go see somebody.

I'm not doing well.

I don't like the system.

I want to start thinking about their careers, but at least it would be met with curiosity, not with instant,

I'm going to weaponize this against you.

You know what I'm saying?

That may be a bad analogy, but it is taking the things that you want.

And I'll even go as far, I don't like to say this in relationships.

I'm going to say the things I need, and I'm not going to use that against you.

Right?

One of the things we talked about last, like one of the things when I'm on the road, I just like my wife to call every once in a while

she did last night.

This was the funniest thing.

So we're sat at dinner.

We so fucking funny dude.

We're sat at dinner and your phone goes and you look and it was your wife.

Did you red button her?

Or did you just let her?

Yeah, because she knows I don't answer my phone when I'm in a at a meal.

Did you actually you actually red buttoned her?

What does that mean?

Like you cancelled the call or did you just let it ring out?

I don't remember.

I can't remember either.

Anyway, I have a good thing about I try to touch my phone when I'm at dinner.

Your phone rings, you see that it's your wife.

This is something that you've asked her to do because you like to know that she is thinking about you to the point where she'll ring you.

Yeah, you watched Sorry come up

and then just go back to talking.

That was the funniest thing.

Like, I called her right when I got into the car, but

it's, but she doesn't say when I get home,

how dare you ask me to call you?

All you ever want me to do is reach out.

She knows, hey, that's one way that my husband likes to feel loved when he's on the road.

Like, because he gets lost in the sea of travel and whatever.

And she doesn't weaponize that against me, however, small that might be, right?

Why is safety so important?

I mean, that's Maslow's 101, dude.

You can't, you can't fully exhale until you're safe, whether you're safe physically, whether you're safe professionally, whether you're safe relationally, you can't exhale.

I think that's a core human need.

Do you agree with that or no?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I wish I could be more sophisticated.

I think that's wired into like small tribes of people.

Like, I have to know my tribe's with me.

If your tribe gets up and leaves and you wake up the next morning and they're gone,

you know, you're not going to live, right?

I think that's wired into us at our core, core, core.

How do you think it's built in a relationship?

What's safety?

It's practiced.

It's practiced from the moment I meet you.

Will you open the door for me?

Are you going to pick up the bill?

Are you going to respond when I text back?

If I say, hey, I don't like that, are you going to when the waiter comes and says, nah, we're good, right?

It's built piece by piece by piece.

Or,

hey, text me when you get home.

You don't text.

Like that's, that's practicing safety or not practicing safety.

And that can beget a conversation.

Hey, you didn't text me last time when you got home.

I can't stand feeling like I'm confined.

Like I can't stand.

That's when you get to have a conversation about honesty and integrity.

I don't like feeling like I have a chore when I get done meeting with somebody.

I really like when somebody calls.

We can have that conversation.

I think that's something intention which you need to navigate.

That's exactly right.

Otherwise, it becomes was that

the old Postman quote, if I don't say anything.

Oh, unspoken expectations are premeditated resentment.

That's right.

If I don't say anything and I feel like I got a chore every time I leave,

then I'm going to start resenting you, right?

So does compatibility in one way between two people look a lot like what you need to feel safe and what I am prepared to do in a relationship work well together?

Because you can imagine a world in which getting a text good night is a really important part when you're a part to make you feel good.

That's something you want for the other person that feels massively constricting.

And if you just build lots of these things up over time, one person really wants a thing, the other person cannot deliver that without it feeling like a huge sacrifice on their part.

Is that what incompatibility is or compatibility?

Yeah, but I...

I still like to distill it down to a choice, right?

Like I get to choose to be

inconvenienced and i'm going to text you right or i like to choose i get to choose

if if it's that big of a deal i need to go look in the mirror and ask myself why do i feel so constricted when this person says hey will you just check in why do i feel i would need to sit down with my wife if she's like i just can't call you at nine o'clock when she goes to bed really early like i just can't call you like we would need to have that conversation right because she would be choosing to not call but yeah that is compatible that's compatibility versus incompatibility i like that it is i'm putting down what i want will Will you choose to do this or not do this?

Well, I mean,

super compatibility would be something like, this is something that I really want.

And the other person going, I love to give that.

I absolutely love to give that.

As opposed to.

Yeah, but that switches, right?

I think you have to be careful with the initial feeling of that.

Because you hear about that all the time.

Like, we love to do this when we were dating.

And now that we're married, you don't love to do that.

So I think it's continually not saying what I want to do or what I really feel like I, it's will I serve you?

That's true.

I understand, but there is a degree of how heavy is the weight for somebody to make that choice.

Absolutely.

It's way easier for somebody to be like flying with a tailwind than flying into a headwind with this stuff.

Absolutely.

But I want the person on the other end of that to own, own that, not to blame.

Right.

What's the difference there?

Let's say that you've got two people who have

one person really wants a thing, the other person really struggles to deliver it without it being a super super heavy weight that they have to pick up.

It's just not their love language or whatever it might be.

How does that?

I think the

current cultural narrative is everything relationally that makes me uncomfortable, I have to blame you for it, for needing this or wanting this.

And all I want people to do is to say, in this relationship, I don't want to.

I don't feel safe doing it.

I don't like doing it.

I don't want to do it.

And I want people to own that instead of lobbying their grenade over the fence.

What would lobbying the grenade over the fence be?

Coming up with sophisticated

dating dynamic articles and posting them in the Times.

That might be one, right?

It might be running you down, weaponizing it against you, right?

You always need me to call.

You always need me to call.

You always need me to call.

Instead of saying, I get so tired at night, I put the kids to bed.

I just crash.

Like,

I'm choosing that.

And then we need to have that hard conversation, right?

And then I can go.

She loves me.

She's falling asleep at nine o'clock.

She's running the whole house with me on the road.

I'm a big boy.

I'll be all right.

It's another version of of trust.

That's it.

It's another part of, I don't have these weird little secrets.

That's it.

These bits of me that I feel shame around.

I'm not prepared to show you.

I'm not prepared.

I don't feel sufficiently safe for me to be able to say, I get tired after I put the kids to bed.

That's it.

That's it.

But that's a you.

That's me.

That's I.

I'm putting that on the table versus I'm going to perpetually blame everybody else for my discomfort.

I'm going to say, I don't like this.

I don't feel comfortable with this.

Or I've got all these other things and I crash.

You can choose to interpret that as I don't love you, but I do.

I really do.

And then I get to be the big boy on the other side of the table and decide what I want to do with those feelings.

But it's just about taking ownership of it, right?

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What are some of the powerful but non-obvious ways that safety gets degraded?

i think it i think in two ways one if somebody has the courage to put that on the table and the other person hears it and metabolizes it and then i'm going to say chooses to not

um it gets degraded in that way and i think it gets degraded in big ways like you you sleep with somebody else but it gets degraded often little by little by little by little um or the other way it gets degraded is you don't say anything and right you

i don't know your partner comes in on their phone all the time, all the time, all the time.

Well, they set it down and then you take the phones and you put them away, right?

And then they go get it.

Well, you didn't say, hey, it bugs me when you walk in and you still, you're still carrying your work day on the phone, or you're still just swiping when you walk in the door.

Instead of saying that and then dealing with what happens when you put that on the table, you try to act your way to it, right?

And then it goes back to that resentment part.

But trust is, I don't trust myself with you, or I don't trust, I'm not safe enough to put this on the table, or you're going to take this and weaponize it, it, or you're just going to disregard it.

Which is messy.

Is this related to solving for peace?

That's, yeah.

I don't want to go to bed at night knowing I didn't say a thing,

and I need to go to bed at night knowing I said that thing with somebody who wasn't going to weaponize it against me.

Dig into the solution.

It's just basic honor and dignity, right?

Dig into the solving for peace thing for me.

I'm probably pathological with it because my my whole my whole job is talking with like

dysregulate highly dysregulated people well it's that but it's like hey man i've got seven dude this may be you i don't know i've got um

it's it's the instagrammification of like finance stuff i've got 17 like uh passive income properties that are leveraged 140 right and i've got this and i've got this and i'm moving this around

and let me put it this way here's one i get so much grief for paying off i think my mortgage was 3.0 maybe

dude i just got abused online what an idiot you don't know how to do math like you're such a fool right because you could have put that in a basic high yield savings account

and it's like dude i i it's a sleep tax that's what i call it like i put my head on my pillow knowing nobody can take my house away

and we don't have a psychology for that in this culture it's all about amplification and it's all on paper money versus they can't take your house, dude.

And it just

different people will have different priorities.

Of course.

Yeah, yeah.

And for me, it was that.

Of course.

You grew up, it didn't need to be some fucking childhood ancestral trauma.

That's a thing.

It can just be simply,

I have a story in my mind from somewhere.

That's it.

Maybe outside and maybe inside that I really want.

I know that my dad, my mom and dad paid the house off maybe in

their mid-50s.

And I don't think I've ever seen my dad as proud of something where he said, you know, mortgage-free.

It's mine.

Totally mortgage-free.

And there was no expedited bullshit, like you're paying it off at 40 times the pace that you're supposed to

normally.

This was chugging away on a 25-year mortgage.

Chipping, chipping.

Some shit like that.

And then they get to the end of it.

And yeah.

It's solving for peace relationally, solving for peace financially.

It's solving for peace professionally, right?

Like,

man, the the number of folks i work with that are just

they're just melting and i always want to ask like for what man like what do you for what

like well you know like

most

i i tried to be uh cute with jordan peterson one time i was like nobody can answer that question for what and he he clapped back in in the right way he was he said uh

of course that's the hardest question to answer cyclotric for what what do you want

and yeah i think it took me it just taken me a long time to get there but for me my house man, want peace, and then we'll go from there.

Yeah, I uh I think that a good part of this is explained by this wonderful quote.

I had so I had Adam Lane Smith on.

Have you seen him?

Oh, yeah, yeah, I know Adam.

Yeah, so Adam, I think, would be another one for the attachment guy, round round table, fucking super crazy bullshit stuff.

Uh, he just had this wonderful fucking insight around complexity.

So, he said that your life is

your issue in life is not that it's uh

too busy but that it's too complex your system is built for hard work uh not for complexity uh and his argument is that you can deal with any workload as long as it's sufficiently simple and linear enough and i kind of get the sense with the peace versus war thing too that

if there is a really really heavy weight but there's just one of them or two of them

Probably super easy.

That's why you got two hands.

Thank you.

Or if there's a purpose for it.

You'll carry it forever if there's a purpose for it.

But complexity, yeah, that's still

Tillab was somebody that I told you.

I got obsessed with Tillab when it came to complex systems.

And instead of dealing with reality, we just make it more complex.

We make it more complex.

And we duct tape and nail another, you know, we

jack up this side and shove a brick under it.

And it just means that when the thing does fall, which all complex systems do,

it will just have fall higher to fall.

Right.

I've got a good story about this.

So I ruptured my Achilles.

Oh, no.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gnarly.

I stopped.

How long did it put you out?

Full 12 months.

That was actually five years ago.

That's interesting.

I did Love Island 10 years ago, and the halfway point between then and now to the day was the day that I ruptured my Achilles.

So that's an interesting arc.

Playing cricket, ruptured my Achilles.

And this weekend, I didn't think, you know, this is during COVID.

It was a brief interlude where the number had come down and everyone was able to go outside and I was playing sport.

I

go into the hospital.

They

do the diagnosis on it.

They say, you need to come back in 13 days.

We're going to open you up and stitch you back together.

By the way, there's some painkillers.

Go fuck off.

I'd driven my car to the cricket ground.

After that, I needed to go and collect a TV that I'd ordered to the supermarket so that I could put it in the new rental property I'd just brought, ready for the IKEA furniture builder guy to come in the next morning, open this stuff up, because on the Monday, it was the viewing day, it it was the first day of photos, and then people were moving in three days later.

And if I didn't, this huge cathedral size deck of cards that I'd built

and one thing, you remember when the Evergiven, you know, that huge Suez Max size tanker got stuck in the Suez Canal?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was there for six days or something.

And the entire global supply chain is so finely tuned that one tanker for six days in one canal is able to ruin the entire billions and billions of dollars of they're probably still dealing with the repercussions of that in small ways now

four years later that was what my life was like and that's what my life is always always like I always think if one thing if one spanner gets thrown in the works there is no wiggle room in the system and in some ways That allows you to maximize your time and that's really ex it's thrilling to me that's it's fucking squeezing everything out we're addicts

We're addicts to thrill.

Yes.

But

when shit comes and like you, fuck, I didn't.

I left foot.

I had an automatic car, thankfully.

It was my right foot that went.

I left foot drove home

from the fucking hospital.

Which put everybody on the road at risk, right?

Correct, correct, correct, correct.

Yep, wild.

Wild.

There's a, there's a, I believe there is a direct link between the rise in anxiousness and margin.

And a lack of margin.

Okay.

Financial margin, relational margin, home margin.

But we have such an allergy to boredom.

We have such an allergy to

peace.

It's an allergy.

What are the most common issues that men call you about?

What do you wish more women knew about how men operated?

Man, if I had to summarize the

male dilemma, it's

like,

what did I do and why don't people like me?

From my elementary school teachers to my parents, to my doctors, to my schools, to my

dating prospects, to my

collegiate education, to my employers, like to the media at large.

I don't know why everybody doesn't like me.

That's probably the most common question I get.

Why doesn't my wife like me?

What is it about me that's so inherently wrong?

and there's a litany of reasons why you don't do this, you're to this, you fill in the blank.

But um,

that's the ultimate question: why don't people like me?

Belonging,

no, it's worth, man, it's worth.

It's that question of worth.

Um, I don't know many men, and I don't, I don't live in the red pill sphere, right?

Or the

whatever, but like, I don't know many men who don't want to be a net positive.

I just don't know them.

They just get the message at a very early age.

Hey, quit wiggling in class.

There's something wrong with your brain.

Hey, don't say that so loud.

Hey, don't be so aggressive.

Don't be so running around.

Don't be so, don't be so you.

And ultimately, that message,

it becomes part of your nervous system, which you walk into every situation.

Like,

I'm a burden on this room.

I'm a burden on this family.

I'm a burden on this workplace.

I'm a burden on this culture.

And

we're at the tail end of

a world where men can say, okay, I'll just

opt out.

And then now we're blaming you for opting out, right?

And so

it's a privilege to be able to opt out.

That's quickly coming to an end.

But yeah, there's this idea that

I don't want to cause everybody around me all this pain.

I'll just step out.

And

that's not a good solution either.

But

think about that worth question.

I'm not worth going to the gym.

I'm not worth going to see a therapist.

I'm not worth going back to school to get more education to get a new job.

I'm not worth any of these other, the efforts it's going to take to go do something better, to go be something different.

I'll just be quiet.

No one try.

Why would I try?

I'm not even worth the effort.

And every time,

I think many domesticated men, I don't know if you can say that,

their homes are a failure factory, right?

I want to help.

Well, that's not how you do that.

You need to do it like this, and you need to do it like that.

I remember a conversation with my wife

about helping, and it occurred to me, oh, here's the underlying problem is I sleep just fine with a dish, with a sink full of dishes.

Like, I'll do the dishes when we're all out of dishes.

And so she can count, like, I did the dishes five times this week, you did them once.

And then she can rightfully say, I'm doing so much more work around here.

And I could say, oh, I didn't know that.

It didn't occur to me that work needed to be done.

So we have to do the alignment stuff up front.

But if I'm walking around all the time, I can feel when I'm a burden in my house, when I'm in the way, right?

And then I start to imagine them in the way everywhere.

And so if we're looking at masculinity as an illness or if we're looking at men's problems as an illness, then at least be compassionate enough to treat it that way, right?

You and I were talking last night, like

men won't share their emotions.

Now there's a whole new thing.

Like men are too emotional.

We're the only ones who have to care.

Like at some point, man, people are just going to say, I'm out.

I'm out.

And it's, that would be the,

that would be not a good result.

What would your advice be to

women on how they can make their partners feel more worthy?

Man, it's a trope as old as time.

But it's Brene Brown that says, what you go looking for in the world, you're sure to find.

And I love the way she says that.

Find one thing on a day-to-day basis.

Dude, I made an app for that.

Just a day-to-day practice.

Find one thing that you can see.

Like, hey, I really see how hard you're working last night.

Thank you for that.

Or

you came to bed at 10 instead of 2 a.m.

Like, man, you feel lighter today.

Like, find one thing.

Begin to practice admiration, even if you got to search for it, man.

But it begins to send a message.

I like you.

I like you.

Sometimes it's as gentle as just putting your hand on somebody's arm, right?

When you're driving, instead of, hey, look, there's a

red light.

Look out.

Slop.

Slow down.

We better go left.

Why aren't you going left?

Turn the radio down.

Just a gentle, like, man, or a hand behind your neck, man.

Just something that says, I'm glad you're here.

I think we over-dramatize.

It's so small.

It can be so small.

Or thinking,

that's not how I would have emptied the dishwasher, but he's a good man.

You know what I mean?

Or I can see thank you for that.

Or that's not where

the drying rack goes.

Or that's not how you pack those kids' lunches.

Or at this particular school, that school's nut-free and this one's not.

And you put the granola bar in the,

man, I'm so glad he's making lunches.

And then when I'm, I've exhaled, I can say, quick reminder.

You know what I mean?

But it's just,

I don't know.

It's just,

it's just saying, hey, I appreciate you.

I appreciate you.

And then having the courage to say, here's, here's a better way or here's another way.

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If you want to go on an adventure, if you want all of the things in your life to be fixed, just start telling the truth.

And

every time that I end up having a conversation about like relating within a couple, it just comes back to that.

Well, I think there's another arc to it.

I have to see you.

And I can't see you through the lens that is my life.

And I think true relationship is I'm taking off the glasses that I see the world and I'm going to see you.

And then I'm, that's going to allow me to practice knowing you.

And if you will, if you will see and know that person and then tell the truth, because I think you can weaponize truth also.

Like I feel, I feel you are.

Telling the truth is, let's just get there culturally.

That'd be awesome, right?

If we could just be honest with each other.

But relationally, I have to see

not the wet towels on the floor.

I have to see her.

And then I have to know her and know she did not put those towels there as a stab to the patriarchy.

Like, what must have her day been like?

I'm gonna pick up those towels, you know what I mean?

Because if you came and stayed at my house for two weeks and you left towels on the floor, I just pick them up because we're friends.

Like, I'll just pick them up, and I'll be like, God, Chris, do you pick up your towels?

But because she's my romantic partner, it has to be this big existential dramatic.

How much of it's compounding as well?

That this is building up over time.

This is the towels.

Yeah, you're right.

It goes back to telling the issues last week, the thing the week before, before, and it's unspoken expectations.

And also, just pick up the towels, man.

You know what I mean?

Okay, so question on that.

This sounds great, but I think a lot of people, especially that are in longer-term relationships, will feel like this sounds wonderful when you're setting the tone three months in or six months in.

You're always setting the tone.

But

how do you have some sort of a breakwater if you've got a mountain-sized amount of unspoken expectations,

words that haven't been said,

premeditated resentments that you need to somehow get out.

And you go, okay, you had this conversation with your wife.

This is a breakwater.

We need to move forward, build something.

This marriage is over.

Yeah.

You build a new one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What does that look like?

Someone says, I feel like this is the sort of relationship that I want inside of the relationship that I'm in, but it's not the relationship we have.

And there is a big backlog of stuff that neither of us have said to each other.

How does someone navigate that?

I think you start by writing down all the I's, all the stuff that I brought to that mountain.

Because it's really easy to go to that mountain and be like, you've been doing this, you've been doing this.

I'm going to sit down and say, I have become a person that I don't like inside of my own marriage, inside of my own long-term relationship, and I want to work with you to build something new.

And then you have to hope

that they're willing to put their stuff on the table too

instead of weaponizing what you just put on the table.

And that's a, that's a tough, scary place to be.

But I think the reality is they're going to say, well, you remember what you told me that you did this thing.

Like, that's a thing, right?

But here's the thing.

That marriage is over.

That relationship's over.

When you get that mountain back, when you have that moment,

it has to be different.

That thing's got a period at the end of it.

And so you may let it run out of gas until the

volcano explodes.

It's going to explode, right?

So, I can do it now with I, and you can weaponize the eye, and then we're going to end up in

a divorce court somewhere, or we can just let it do its thing.

But

it's there now, and so you might as well be a person of integrity while the thing's happening.

What about the opposite?

What should men know about how women operate?

What are the things that women are calling in and saying to you most frequently?

Some of my women colleagues disagree with me on this.

And so I'll

caveat this with that.

But

I think women were sold to Bill of Goods also.

And

the question that pops into my head is, why won't he change?

But I think the deeper question is, I did all of these things that they said, and why don't I feel better me or my world or the life I've constructed for myself?

And what are the most common things that they have done that have not borne?

I waited this many years to have kids.

I waited till I was financially secure.

I waited till I had a career.

I waited until I was on my own two feet.

I got this level of success.

Or the opposite.

I went all in on this relationship at a very young age.

I went fully all in.

I think the meta message has been, if you will do these things or the trad wife thing or the full CEO thing, whichever one it is, that somehow you're going to feel complete on the other end of this deal.

And that feeling is elusive.

It just keeps moving.

And so there's a, there's a partner in your life and it's constantly, you just need to, you just need to, you just need to.

But really the thing is, I'm desperately seeking this feeling that this is going to be okay, this rooted sense of anchored in.

And

it's a constant, constant, constant.

The other one is, honestly, is,

are all men scumbags?

Is every man out cheating?

Is every man filling up his life with video games and pornography?

Is every man...

And

it's harder and harder to defend when you look at the data.

But

it's a recursive problem, right?

I don't feel like I have any worth.

My home is a failure factory.

These porn and video games don't reject me.

That's it.

I'm just going to, yeah.

Then I am going to take the exit ramp where I don't bother anybody and I'll just burn a hole in my head.

Dude, that sucks.

It sucks to hear and it must be rough to

the least popular opinion for a guy to give on the internet with the most female audience is it must be tough for a woman to navigate dating at the moment because guys see all of the ways that it's way easier for women than it is for men.

But

the thing that I would say to guys that this is a huge, huge like blue ocean for them for is

you have somebody that's been in counseling for like fucking forever and does a call-in show with millions and millions of people that watch it.

And this is one of the biggest problems.

Look at how low the bar is.

Dude, I tell my son that's how low the bar is.

I tell them all the time,

you can have it all.

It really is not.

I get it.

You watch enough

content on YouTube and you can think that because you're 5'6 or because you're not earning six figures or because you're whatever.

Hey,

those are some real things, and there's some challenges out there.

But Jesus fuck, like, how many women are calling in and saying, you know, what the problem is?

These guys just don't earn enough, these guys just don't do this, that, and the other.

It's like, I don't know if he's going to.

I've gotten that question zero times.

There's just too many short men out there.

I've never got that.

To caveat this:

how many women do you think are calling in and saying,

uh,

this guy doesn't commit or isn't romantic enough or isn't whatever as a way to hide the more base, base, shallow, he's not tall enough, he doesn't earn enough.

Maybe, maybe.

And I've been called naive before.

I like to just take people at their word.

Like if you're calling in, and we can get to it, that's not what you're really calling, but

yeah, man.

I like to just, maybe, maybe.

Yeah, maybe.

And I do get like, hey, my husband's gained 150 pounds over the last few years.

But as you dig into that, it's almost always, I'm watching my husband die in front of me.

Right.

And that's, that's usually the question: like, how do I keep my, I'm watching him die and I can't be a part of this anymore.

And yes, he's not attractive anymore.

And yes, he walks around his waddie tighties and he's, it's like, it's not a pretty sight.

But the deeper question is, I'm watching, I'm becoming someone I don't want to be because that guy at work thinks my jokes are hilarious.

And I'm starting to think up jokes all day so that maybe that guy at work, like I'm becoming somebody I don't want to be because I'm watching the person I love wither away underneath me.

And I don't, I don't know how to prop them up.

Wow.

Yeah, the bar is set so fucking low, dude.

It is.

But you know what?

I think that's an important thing.

The dating apps have screwed up everything.

No question about all that.

It's a train wreck.

But personally, I've never had somebody call and say, there's just too many short men out there.

I've not had anybody call and say, this person doesn't make this much money.

I haven't got that call.

And maybe it's, maybe it's veiled and people are being whatever.

But most of the time, it's I'm with somebody.

Why won't they?

Can they just stop cheating?

Can they just plug back in?

How do I let them know that they're worth something?

I hear you speak to so many people about when or how they should forgive their partner after an affair.

Is that even a question that has an answer?

You know, this has come up a ton recently.

It's an endemic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love watching your show.

But I tell you what, man, the place I always have people start is you got to forgive yourself

because almost every time either they'd created a world where they were so blindsided that there was a part of them way down that knew, I don't know everything going on in this house, or it's the opposite.

I didn't listen in my gut.

I knew they were spending too much time with so-and-so.

I knew they were hiding their phone.

I knew that these, I had a sense that.

And most people that experience infidelity go through a period of i can't trust myself i can't because i ignored myself or i didn't even see it coming and so before you start trying to offer before you start trying to forgive somebody else you have to forgive yourself that's a huge hurdle to get over it's a massive hurdle because you've got to forgive two people the sidewalk you walk on no longer exists there's only two people in this relationship and you have to forgive both of them yeah and you have to give forgive yourself first you got to start with you first and it's not as though you did anything wrong like that's not what the forgiveness is but forgiveness is about reestablishing trust.

I got to learn to trust myself again.

And then I got to ask myself, okay, what must be true for me to reestablish trust with you?

And that's a tough, that's a tough thing.

Because then you have to ask, well, what if he or she says no?

And that's a scary proposition to find yourself.

But I've also seen people experience infidelity and going to have, build something amazing and new.

And it's just, are you all willing to put in the work?

What do you think is the proportion of the.

I don't know.

I don't seem to know because I don't don't know

the

it's gosh, this is a horrific example that just popped into my mind.

I remember when my wife and I, when she had our first miscarriage, I found myself part of a secret club that I didn't know existed.

People came out of the woodwork to be like, yeah, us too, us too, us too.

And so infidelities often work the same way that I don't know how much of it goes unreported.

That wouldn't fill out a survey or wouldn't, you know.

What are some of the ways that you see infidelity showing up that isn't just about sex?

You've got a broader definition of infidelity than most people, I think.

I do, yeah.

It's the place where you go to hide from the life that you've co-created with somebody.

So I think you can cheat on somebody with money.

I think you can cheat on somebody with a golf course.

I think you can cheat on somebody with work.

Who's your mistress?

All right.

Where are you putting your passion and your time and your efforts and your energy?

And if your work isn't a means to an end that supports this thing you're co-creating with somebody else, as far as I'm concerned, that's infidelity.

If I hide from my family or from my romantic partner on a golf course or on a fishing boat, that's infidelity.

I am taking my vitality and I'm channeling it elsewhere.

to avoid this.

And that's different.

Like, I like to go to punk rock shows, dude.

I like to, like, I don't know.

I live over in the comedy club by my house.

I'm passion about those things, but I'm not hiding from my family.

They're hobbies.

They're, they're, they enrich me so that every year where I work, they, they throw a big battle of the bands.

It's in Nashville.

Like, everybody goes to Nashville to make it in the music industry.

Then they all have to get real jobs at some point.

So every year they throw a big battle of the bands.

One year I had a book coming out.

I was on the road.

And so I was going to skip it.

And my wife said this.

She said, I get a better version of you when you're playing music with your friends.

And so it's not a matter of hiding, not doing hobbies, not that, but if you're hiding from, if you're numbing out with.

I think infidelity is easily distilled down into intercourse with somebody else.

And I think that's too narrow of a view.

It's just, it's escape.

What about financial infidelity?

Yeah, that's the way people.

That's the way people control their partners in a major way, or the way they

hide money.

Um, yeah, it's devastating.

How common is that?

No, it's extremely common.

But it goes back to the thing you asked me at the very beginning, like, uh, with if I won't share your codes, man,

the other way I get beat up on the internet all the time by the internet warriors is saying,

dude, if you're married, share a checking account.

Like, that just, I can't.

Have you seen the difference in divorce rate between couples that do and don't share a savings account?

It's madness.

I think it's multiples

of likelihood difference.

And there'll be some selection effect there.

There will be some differences.

Of course, of course, of course.

But seriously, again, going back, if I don't,

we will share DNA,

but we won't share our bank account or our social media.

You make 65 grand and I make 75 grand and we won't share that.

And we have to say like, well, no, that's mine.

Again, it goes all the way back to trust and safety.

And if I feel like I have to say, no, no, no, that's mine.

Well, we need to put that on the table and have that conversation.

Tell you one of the patterns that I learned from your show, which I now use in

my day-to-day life.

Uh-oh, I can't wait to hear this.

I saw you do this.

I think I saw you do this twice separately.

And I was like, that seems like a pattern.

I'm just going to start maybe mentioning this if I see this come up.

People partway through a relationship where one partner lightly floats the

suggestion of starting to open things up just a little bit

open things up with another partner yeah okay so we're still you know like we've been together for however long and I just think you know like wouldn't it be

the number of times that that person has already been in

an extramarital, extra partner, and they're now trying to retroactively create conditions to make the thing that they did when you hadn't agreed it agreeable so that they can continue it in future.

And I've patent matched that.

I'm not kidding.

I've patent matched that incorrect correctly, like 100% of the time.

And it's come back into land.

Someone said,

such and such things happened.

And, you know, sort of suggesting this.

It's already happened.

I'm going to tell you.

Yeah.

I'm going to tell you something that you're really not going to want to hear.

And I'm probably wrong.

Inside, I'm like, I'm right.

John said, I'm right.

And

it's happened a few times now, and each time I've been correct.

Can you seek a sense of aliveness with the person you're with?

No, we need someone new.

And

but again,

if I

if I man,

if I

need to go sleep with somebody else to save this.

It does sound insane.

It does sound insane.

I was with someone recently.

They're a comedian there in Nashville.

And he said, I've accidentally become a Dave Ramsey apologist.

Like all these young comedians now are coming up, like, how do you do this?

And he said, if you're trying to make art and you owe somebody money, you'll never make the art you were meant to make.

Because you're always going to have to ask yourself, will this joke the one that would be the one right over the line what will my boss think or what will like i've got i got a hedge

and

he asked me like my thoughts on the death stuff and i was like hey if we are arguing on or like spend less than you make we're i'm i'm probably not the guy to argue with you because the math like it's just such a basic if you think sleeping with her will solve your intimate relationship with the like it's just that the math doesn't work and I think we have so many intellectual gymnastics nowadays that we can we can justify anything but I think going back to simplicity peace all for peace man it's just all for peace and I honestly don't know why we can't do that other than

I mean, there's the psychology of

conspiracy theories.

There's the psychology of complexity.

I just don't think we have a psychology for boredom.

Lane says we step over $100 bills to pick up pennies.

Like, man.

Just mostly eat healthy and exercise.

And then worry about red number 40 and whatever.

Do that later.

You know what I mean?

It's just a strange place we found ourselves.

And I think it's a luxury.

Well, we spoke about this.

It's a luxury.

We spoke about this over dinner last night that there isn't a particularly good

matter in the world for re-injecting excitement, and there is one for increasing peace.

That you say,

we need more commitment, we need more loyalty, we need more downtime, more regulation, you should be, you know, nervous systems should be in align, all this stuff.

But it's much scarier to say,

I'm bored in this.

This is

too mundane because it sounds an awful lot.

It's perilously close to I want more novelty, which is

straying eyes lingering on somebody else, extramarital stuff.

But that's because we've made every, and we may have talked about this the last time, but we've made every sexual encounter of the Super Bowl.

We've made every, everything has to be this eruption.

And it's insane, right?

Like, you got to see the, like in my world, you got to see the relief when I tell a parents who have two kids under the age of three, like, hey,

you're going to have 13 minutes to get this done.

And they'll look at each other and be like, like, nobody talks about survival sex with a young couple.

Survival sex.

Dude, we got 13 minutes between that nap and this feeding.

Are you in?

Right?

That's in no movie.

That's in no TV show.

In fact, they'll tell you, if that's what it's reduced to, then your marriage has probably run its course.

This relationship's probably over.

As opposed to just a practical reality.

Yes.

Just traffic in reality, man.

Traffic and peace.

Your air traffic control.

And by the way, you can create novelty in this funny little moment.

We can create play and laughter and silliness.

And you want to give this a shot?

All right, we got six minutes left.

Are you in?

Like, you can, while you're on vacation with your family

at a cheap hotel while they're asleep, y'all can try to figure it out in the hotel bathroom that you can barely turn around.

Like that is tiny ways that you can inject novelty and fun and play.

And that next morning when your kid's like, I want pancakes.

And you just cut eyes across the hotel room at your spouse, and you're like, man,

like that becomes,

that becomes good, man.

That's the good stuff.

And if you try to make the fireworks show bigger every time, I just think

that's how you end up overdosing, man.

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I got a bunch of guy friends that are first-time dads.

One's kid is

two months old.

No, less.

Less six weeks.

Another is six months old.

Another is one year old.

What is your survival kit of the most important strategies or realizations for new adults?

I may have told you this.

The greatest parenting advice I ever heard in my life was from Jack Black, which is...

No, you haven't haven't told me.

When he said this, I was like, that's, that's it.

That's all of my graduate school distilled into one sentence.

Don't try to make a happy, get happier.

Like, and the story he went on to tell was,

and again, I'm going to bastardize it, but his son was playing in the mud with a stick or something.

And he was like, I'm, that's not my kid.

Like, and you end up six hours later, sugared up, exhausted, fried.

You spent $300 on a thing.

And then you went to this.

It's like, man, I should have just gotten a hose out and sat in the mud and got another stick.

And that stuff he's going to tell at his funeral.

Remember that time, dad, you rolled me around in the mud versus yet another.

So, man, if your kids are happy, get on the floor and have fun.

And then the other thing is, you have to be intentional about your relationship.

And it just shifts, man.

And that's okay.

It's a season.

It's winter, man.

It's cold.

Put on a coat.

Like, we don't stand out in the street here in December and just.

What's the shift?

Curse the sky.

You've got any responsibilities.

I had a grad school colleague once that he had four kids and I was in, man, that was maybe two or three years into marriage.

It was rocky.

It was tough.

And I was like, I don't know how you do this.

And he said this, it's just a different kind of awesome.

And he goes, you know, when you first meet somebody and you're like, cannot sleep and it's amazing?

That's awesome.

And then you kind of get real serious together and you all start getting like, that's awesome.

He goes, you get kids for it.

It's just a different kind of awesome.

He's like, you can't just,

you know, swipe off the kitchen table and just get after it like at four in the afternoon, like you used to be able able to, because you got kids running around.

It's a different kind of awesome.

And also, you don't know what it's like to see your, your middle school kid run across the finish line and just feel kind of big, right?

Or I watched my daughter, she's nine, out at a, at a lemonade stand on a Saturday.

But dude, it was hot.

And I was like, man, drive by and buy some limit.

You know what I mean?

I was like rooting for her from the, you know what I mean?

My neighbor texted him like, dude, go, like, I'll reimburse you, brother.

And he's like, no, we got this.

But it's like, I want her to succeed.

It's like, it's a different kind of awesome but it's trying to drag that old relationship that old freedom the old excitement into this present thing that's what kills folks man so that when you have baby one that marriage is over it's over awesome build a new one

when my wife got pregnant i was like okay i got nine months till i get my wife back and then when hank was born i was like all right so it's maybe it's gonna be nine more after this like in a year then slowly It took me for, it took me 15 years to realize that marriage was over and it was awesome.

And now we get to build a new one with a kid involved.

Does that suggest that people who are together and intending on becoming parents and aren't yet at the point where they're about to should lean in and make the most of that time?

Because you're not, it's that kind of awesome.

It's finite.

Yeah.

And

if you are constantly comparing it to this and this, it's, it's like, um,

like, if I have a, I'm not going to measure from here to the end of that wall in gallons.

Those are both valid measurements.

It's just the wrong measure.

And so that time we were together, before we had kids and before they took all our our money and our time and our bodies and our exhaustion,

it was amazing.

And now we're going to measure this new

time in our life in gallons.

And we're going to measure this one in meters.

We're going to measure this time in our life in hours, right?

Those are all good measurements.

You just got to use the right measurement for the right season.

You mentioned before about

instinct versus rationality, gut or head, or heart.

How do you come to think about making decisions in a relationship when it comes to gut versus head?

How do you sort of stress test each of these?

I've just come to learn with, this is n equals one here, I get over-emotional about things and I make very emotional decisions.

And so I've got a few people in my life, both professionally and

long-term buddies, long-term men in my life that I will sit down with and say, here's what I'm experiencing and here's what I'm seeing.

Here's what I'm about to do.

And I mean, I wish I had a better way, better answer for you, but I outsource that because I'm not a reliable, I'm not a reliable person in the thick of it.

And I just learned that about myself.

I make up really

remarkable stories about why somebody else is.

My fundamental attribution error is brutal, dude.

The stories I make up are extraordinary.

About the dude in the square Kia that like cut me off, the story I make up about that guy, dude, it's, it's, it's an abomination.

So I outsource it because I'm not a good judge of it.

And I think anyone who says, go with all your feelings or go with all facts, both of them are, those are pathologies on either side of the bell curve.

How do you handle it?

I tend to be too head-dominant.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I need to actually listen to my gut much more.

My.

Is that a learned response?

Has your gut led you astray?

Or was listening to you

how you feel about stuff not

encouraged?

Okay.

So

everything would be sort of controlled.

Very important to have a measured response, hypervigilance, that kind of thing.

So yeah, learning to actually trust instincts and to know how,

what's an appropriate threshold for something that isn't your rational brain to be screaming to go do this thing or to not do this thing.

You go, oh, that's pretty loud, but is it loud enough?

And that's where it comes back to the trust thing, like self-trust.

It's a very interesting situation to get into.

I wonder how much of that

is borne out.

I think a lot of my friends have this too: that we're all trying to now listen to the fleeting thoughts that are coming up from our gut as opposed to the really loud, sophisticated ones that are coming down from our head.

Because

my

adult awakening was built around Farnham Street blog and mental models, and Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, and Taleb and Robert Green, and so much and Peterson, and and so much of this is

dictating top-down, like rote learning

the ways to operate that are trying to compensate for the fact that you never actually allowed that to emerge in the first place.

But that's just more top-down.

Very very top-down now in the right direction.

Hopefully, it's one that's a little bit more aligned.

But it's still not just allowing yourself to sit with,

I don't think this is working.

Or I think that that's a really fucking good idea.

Okay, so let me try out a hypothesis.

I think we do not have a cultural psychology.

We don't have a roadmap for grief.

And grief is a communal experience, and we've extracted all of that.

The great David Kessler, I think he's just the grief guru, but says that grief demands a witness.

And I don't think we have a witness anymore.

And so we

distill grief into sad, and then we go on and try to solve sad.

And we pathologize pathologize sad.

But I don't think we have a cultural under I don't I struggle with just like I went all in on this thing and didn't work

and I'm supposed to want to stay under my covers for a few days and not crush and grud.

And I'm supposed to just want to mainline whatever fat or sugary or salty substance is around.

There's some basic biological mechanisms for dealing with grief.

We used to have a parlor in our house.

That was the, and we changed it to the living room.

But they had had a parlor where they held bodies until we outsourced that to funeral professionals, right?

Like, we have no ability to sit with

this ended.

And I think that's that's unhealthy.

What do people want to hear?

This situation like that, there's been a loss, nothing, large or small presence.

That's my lived experience sitting with people who have lost children,

which I can't think of a worse loss.

Makes me wonder how like how AI is going to take over everything.

There's a biology to presence, and it is not found in an answer.

It is found in a guy coming and sitting by you

and bringing half a casserole or a bag of Taco Bell and

a couple of drinks.

Like, I'll be here.

And anybody who tries to come up with a bunch,

in the grief world, there's a whole bunch of things to not say.

What are the things to not say?

God needed another angel.

Everything happens for a reason.

reason, like nonsense like that.

Okay, it's just like a knife in your soul, right?

Um,

but just I'm coming over,

or the worst, the worst text: uh, let me know if you need anything.

Well, my kid died, I need a whole lot, right?

Which I'm gonna put the burden on you to let me know how I can take care of you, right?

Yeah, it's not just coming, so they're just showing you

with some shit tacos.

I'm coming over, and I'll sit here.

We may throw all those tacos away, I'll be right here.

And there's something

it's biology, it's presence.

Yeah.

Which is like, hey, me and my wife are going through a rough time.

I'm coming over, dude.

I don't have any answers for you.

I'll listen to you.

Right.

And that's being comfortable enough.

I, in this new job, I've just decided I'm going to stop trying to answer questions.

I'm not asked.

I'll just, I'll just be here.

You know what I mean?

Which I've had to wrestle with because my purpose was always like, giving an answer.

Nah, now my purpose is I'll show up.

I'll come.

There's

kind of a bit of a narcissism in that, too.

I'm aware that it's a lovely thing to do.

You're there for your friend.

But there is a little bit of a narcissism because it centralizes you as the helper in the person's situation.

As a presence or as with words.

When you're coming up with a solution.

I know that this is your problem, but allow me.

No, no, no, no.

I, I will step down from on the eye and allow me to bestow.

Well, it uses a hurting person.

They become a Xanax for you.

I'm uncomfortable with your loss.

Ask anybody who's been diagnosed with cancer.

They spend most of their energy making sure the people around them are okay.

And that's madness, right?

Because now I'm uncomfortable because I'm staring at.

My discomfort is making you uncomfortable.

I'm sorry.

I'll fix it.

That's right.

Yeah.

Like, hey, I just got diagnosed with cancer.

I'll be right over.

It's going to sit here.

I just got diagnosed with cancer.

Sorry.

Yeah.

Let me know if I can do anything.

So cool.

I just gave you a chore.

Now that you got this terrible diagnosis, I'll give you a chore to make me feel better.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So

if man, if I can tell anybody if somebody's hurting, just show up.

Or if somebody says, hey, I need to go grab something to eat.

I'll be there.

Right.

And I just learned that from a group of West Texas, like

no therapists, man.

It was just West Texas guys that I saw almost come to blows over who's going to pick up a check.

It's like, oh, that's what friendship looks like.

Like, not like, bro, you Venmo me 425 for that.

No, dude, I got it.

I got it.

We'll figure it out later.

There's just something about that, man.

And I think, even, you know, talk about Perkins has written about like,

but again, oh, that's all for peace, man.

It's all for peace.

It's the big difference between an abundance mindset and a scarcity mindset.

I don't think you need to get into Ronda Byrne, the secret woo energy attraction territory

to just

kind of understand that going through life, assuming that things will go okay is just a better way to exist.

Bill Burr's got this wonderful bit where he says,

things are going to be fine.

And even if things aren't going to be fine, is it not better to assume that things are going to be fine?

And if they're not, you'll deal with it when the time comes.

Yeah.

That's Amos Dversky's Daniel Conneman's research partner had that great line, like, being pessimistic is stupid because if it comes true, you experience it twice.

I love that.

Yeah, man.

Let's just assume it's going to work out.

I'm going to do the best I possibly can.

And if it doesn't, if like we get hit by a meteorite, we'll deal with that then.

Yeah.

But I'm going to, we're going to plow ahead as though.

But I think we're trying to hedge grief because we don't know what to do if it actually comes true.

Because it's such an overwhelming emotion.

And we have no, we're not designed to handle grief alone and we don't have anybody else to call.

The people that we do call, we feel like we need to manage their emotions.

We end up having to take care of them.

Sorry that I'm a burden.

Right.

Yeah.

There's a great piece in The Kardashians that Charlie Hooper broke down, which was one of the girls has gone through a breakup and the mum is there and they're talking and the mum says the line,

I really need you to get over this.

And it's Charlie explains it perfectly.

And he's like, that literally says, your discomfort is making me uncomfortable.

I need you to sort yourself so that I can be okay.

I don't have time for your discomfort.

Yeah.

Oh, that's tough as a kid to feel.

That is fucking rough.

Yeah.

But I think parents, parents, like sometimes

going back to what you said about your buddies having young kids, never lie to your kids.

A buddy of mine, and here's what I mean by that, not just on big stuff.

A buddy of mine

had a neighbor whose boat fell off the trailer.

And so he called all these neighborhood guys to come over and help with the boat back on the trailer.

And

he had a young son, maybe seven or eight.

And he's like, come on over.

We're going to go do something.

All these guys helped three, two, and they got the boat back on the trailer and they did all stuff.

On the way home, he said, man, we helped that guy out.

And he said, daddy, I didn't do anything.

And already he knew.

Like, I just lied to my kid.

Like, I was using the proverbial we and I kept moving him out of the way.

Hold on, back up, back up.

We're going to pick this thing up.

And so don't lie to your kids, man.

If they come in seventh place, don't say, great job.

Or don't say, man, you did so good.

You got seventh place.

Your kid knows you're lying.

Say, man, that really stinks.

You gave it your all and you got seventh place.

Or if they didn't give it your all, you can ask them, like, do you feel good about your performance on that one?

But it's telling your kids the truth, but it's, man,

yeah.

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How often do you see relationships where there hasn't been that sort of honest, open

transparency between the partners be

fixed or made worse by the presence of kids?

Because I imagine that there must be some

couples that have a child and it just galvanizes in them this, oh, we have a project.

Like we need to get really, really serious now.

But

the question of, do you think you had kids and started being truthful or you started being truthful and then had kids?

To me, it it seems more likely that the increased difficulty of having kids around around is just going to make that problem.

No, I mean, I think there's always a temptation to make the person in front of you feel good.

And

yeah, I don't know.

That's a great question.

I don't know.

But I know that every stage along the way, at least in my kid, I have a 15-year-old who's a sophomore in high school.

And I have a,

my daughter's nine.

She's in fourth grade.

Every stage has been a, there's been some sort of GPS pin in my Wi-Fi that's gone off.

That tethers all the way back.

High school was not a great time for my wife.

I peaked at 18.

It's been downhill ever since, man.

High school is the greatest time of my life.

I was a Texas high school football player.

Like, it was, it was, it was, I loved all of high school.

And so as my son was heading into his freshman year,

everything about me was like, this is it, man.

And championship.

This is good.

Yeah.

I was going to live vicariously.

It's like, dude, if you just, I was Uncle Rico, man.

Like, if you just work even harder.

And for her, it was just get small, get small, get get small.

And so, I think that happens at every stage along the way.

Um, I didn't know what interesting, I didn't know what I didn't know when I had a kid, and it made me feel super inept.

And I have, I have a script for when I feel inept, which is put your head down and go work more, which then took me away from my house more, which made me harder to be around because I knew my house was every time I showed up.

I didn't do the diaper right, I didn't do the time right.

So, it just started this thing.

So, it's just now we know enough to know, hey, we're getting ready for college and this, the, the, starting to already, the, the schools are already circling, all right?

The sharks are circling.

What college are you going to go to?

If you don't know your major, you're going to be a failure, all that.

That wasn't a good time for me.

That was a great time for her, right?

And so I now know that.

And so now we can sit down and have that conversation.

Like, man, this makes me uncomfortable.

Like, I can't wait for this, which brings us back to the table, but that's a great question.

I don't know.

How much healing gets done through raising kids?

Like revisiting, reparenting yourself, seeing the patterns that you imagining what you were like at that age.

Because not that many people have gone and done their inner child work or their narrative therapy or their internal family systems or whatever and have pieced together the arc of wow that's what it was like to be seven and me yeah and

shit i wonder how many

it's made me way more compassionate for my parents and at the same time way

um

i was just with my sister this morning and i've got an anger too that i didn't know was there um and so

yeah I don't know.

It made you more compassionate for yourself.

Yeah.

Yeah.

For the old, the younger version of you that did the whatever.

Like, oh, dad was going through stuff.

That wasn't me.

I was nine.

Yeah.

It's made me a lot more compassionate with myself.

I was 16, man.

I didn't know.

You know what I mean?

Like, I was being a 16-year-old, and I got a lot of compassion for that kid.

Yeah.

A lot more compassion.

And then I think the challenge for me is how do I extend that compassion yet?

Also

know that my son lives in a world now that the world that doesn't have any compassion for that.

He could text something that makes him unemployable forever now, right?

I had the privilege of being a 16-year-old and he doesn't have that.

And so there's a different level of

oversight that makes me more nervous.

But I'm confident that every generation of parent has some sort of, it wasn't when I was.

It wasn't when I was, I'm sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

This infinite regress of, it wasn't like that in my day.

All right, right.

All right.

Which is,

I mean, at some point, I sat down with him the other day and I was like, hey, there's, we're at a stage now where

there's certain things you can get into that I can't stop.

I can't.

I mean, I literally can't.

And you're going to have to make some decisions at 16 that I didn't have to make until I was older about what I want in my head, what I want to experience, what I want to see.

He's in a world where the wrong adder all, the wrong party, it'll kill him.

There's a billboard near the gym that I go to.

I saw that the other day.

The fentanyl thing.

With a young boy on that.

Well, this is kind of like a lineup, I guess,

of there must be 30 people, 40 people, young, old, men, women, and

fentanyl kills.

Yeah.

On that.

Presumably, some of them will have been, you know,

maybe treading the line a little bit more closely than others, but definitely in that lineup, there'll have been someone that just, oh, I'll just take a little sniff of this or whatever.

That's it, right?

Or

it was a Navy SEAL-esque adventure to find a Playboy when I was a kid.

And he's got, it's on, and even we're pretty, um,

I'm pretty much a Luddite.

I was born in the wrong century, my wife says, but

every human he interacts with has a phone, right?

With

you went phone-free with your kid, right?

We're not phone-free, but I'm, I'm, I'm pretty

pretty dark ages, yeah.

We've taken everything off of it.

It took a while to get even dumb phone.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

His parents are nerds, so my son had had to give us a, I tell you all this, he had, he had to, when he was, when he was 14

over Christmas break in eighth grade, he actually, he had a great point that paused me.

He said, at least when you were a kid, because we were no, no cell phones at all, and we lived out in the country.

And he said, at least when you were a kid, there was a phone on the wall with one of those little squiggly cords and you got to call your friends.

And he said, I'm getting left out of everything.

No birthdays, no nothing.

And I said, that's, you're actually right.

And so

he had to draft the first round of the contract.

And then me and my wife, it was basically like Chartanko.

Me and my wife was like, you are so fucking Dave Ramsey coded.

It was fun.

It is unbelievable how Dave Ramsey coded you are.

How so?

You've drawn it.

You've had to draw up this cont did he have to do a presentation?

Did you do a oh, he absolutely did.

But that's because we're academics.

That's where we got it from.

Like

you have to, uh, oh, his both of his parents are nerds.

But, like, I want to talk through now what happens when this if this thing goes sideways.

But it was good.

Like, and, um,

yeah, we've slowly, i mean he's about to be 16 about to be driving through down the highway nashville so driving but still not texting i mean he can text now yeah he can text um

yeah you can but but it's that like hey the the the wrong text thread

and it's over man it's over and so and i know that because dude i spent 20 years with screenshot text messages and snapchats and whatsapps getting during sexual assault investigations and during this and all of a sudden man like dude, I just, I've just experienced it on the other side of that thing, man.

It scares me for him.

But I have to sit down with a 16-year-old and say, man, at some point, you have to make some choices.

And I'll do the best I can, but

to love you through it and always sit here with you.

There isn't really a good

archetype for the danger of a young person making a digital error.

There's not.

You know, because full protectionism isn't helpful because they're going to walk out and

just get it's like showing up it's like showing up to a man like a town square your first time like at midnight it's just so much right that will that will be the day he walks out of the house so you can't do that to your kid um

but also man that sean ryan says that great quote about uh you're not you're not giving your kid access to the world you're giving the world access to your kid and i think that's there's some there's some truth to that

when you hand your kid a smartphone tell him to walk out the door best of luck to you make good choices you just gave the world access to your child and they're better than all of us.

There's too much money and experts, and now it's now it's not even real people.

It's an unfair fight, it's a way unfair fight.

And if you're an adult, fine, take on an unfair fight if you want to.

If you're at the bar and you want to fight all four of those dudes, I mean, you get to live with the consequences.

You can't put a child in that, it's just not fair.

It's not fair.

What do you,

as you've got to the stage now, son's 16, soon will be 18,

some sort of college thing.

How does that make you reflect on the upbringing of a kid and kind of the arc of being a parent, I suppose?

Because I remember when I moved out, I was 18 and I went to university and I didn't realize that,

you know, the most amount of time I was probably going to spend back in that house in any one go was five days over Christmas for the rest of my life.

And you just, you're just fired up.

I just wanted to go.

I couldn't be bothered the fact that I didn't have a clothes source or that there wasn't a fucking iron like ready.

I was like, I don't care.

I'm not going to iron my clothes in any case.

You know, it doesn't matter.

I just want to go.

I want to go, go, go.

This is so exciting.

I'm going to move to a big city.

I'm going to go to university.

I'm going to make new friends.

I'm going to be living on my own.

It's going to be so.

And

that's, yeah, you're not there to regulate your parents feeling like this

huge deceleration is about to happen in their life.

I'm having to work really hard not to, not to pre-mourn him being gone.

My wife had a great ruining the remaining time that you do have with him thinking about this is the last one yeah man just got to be with it and i've got to be ready to grieve on the other end of it um

there's a there's a shift that happens when a kid's 24 25 and when you

it's actually much earlier than that but when the kid leaves your payroll you can't tell them what to do anymore you your parent shifts to an encourager right or uh you know and so what i want to do now is to model a

you need to know this, not intellectually, but you need to know this in your chest.

You can always come back home.

And if you find yourself over your head, you can always come back home.

And

the fun for me and my wife is, let's make this a place they want to come home.

And that when they're thinking, man, let's go to,

let's go see mom and dad.

And that's, I don't know if that's even possible, but that's a fun thing to try to.

put out into the universe.

And also, man, you got to go have adventures.

And I'll say this.

I don't know many kids.

In fact, I know very few, if any, that are foaming at the mouth to get their license like my son is.

That's a thing that's gone away.

Like when I was a kid, turning 16 was like, give me my car key so I can get out of here.

But I have to believe that constricting so much time on social media or video games or just creating a digital bubble in our home.

Man, you can't wait to get out, which means you can't wait to go to college.

And he's already done the math.

He's like, man, I need to be at least this far from you at university because it'll be too easy to come home.

And I need to go out and learn.

And I hate that, but I love it, right?

I don't, I don't, I want him to come home every weekend, but I don't.

I want him to go out and have adventures because that's how you learn, man.

That's how you end up in a whole other continent with a whole with a job that didn't exist when you were at university, right?

Right.

That's how that's how that happens.

Yeah.

Dude, when I did a two business degrees and neither of them had social media in,

no one talked about

nothing.

The year that I went to university, 2006, was the year that Facebook

became available in the UK if you had a university email address.

That was, yeah, you had to have a university email address.

And I remember when my grandpa friend requested me, it was like, bloop, and we're out.

Like, I'm off this thing.

Yeah, I'm out.

I'm out.

I'm out.

Yeah.

Get me back in March.

But remember, you had to have an edu.edu address.ac.uk for the UK.

And yeah,

five years at university and nothing.

about social media.

So yeah, we still don't have a good way of communicating that to people that are way younger.

I mean, you don't know how to use social media.

We don't know how to mediate our own use.

I use my phone too much.

So do you.

Yeah.

I have it on a separate phone.

Yeah.

That's the only way I can do it.

Cocaine phone and ale phone.

That's right.

George Mac solution.

I've never heard of that.

Yeah.

Just going back to something that I think was really important: that

if business is your drug, rest will feel like stress.

For the people who are like hard-charging,

type A, insecure, overachievers,

what is your advice for someone learning to sort of let go of that chaos a little bit and deriving

a better sense of well-being from somewhere outside of that?

How have you done it yourself?

Because you're someone that kind of

lives for the chaos and when faced with a problem, defaults to the same thing I do, which you'll just grip the bar harder.

I'll solve it.

Just sucker off the floor.

I'll hit that, dude.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'll solve it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's wired in there.

An important exercise for me was writing a letter to myself 10 years from now and it was that for what so you're here and you got this thing and that was an important exhale

can you elaborate on that

yeah i had given myself a number that i had to be making and a salary um by the age of i think it was 35 was my big one and

when i blew through that and I felt more insecure than ever and more exposed, it was sitting down and having an honest conversation with my 45-year-old self.

Like,

and it goes back to for what?

Like, what is this going to have for us, right?

And so I think when you start decoupling yourself from how busy you are as

an identity, you just have to know it's going to be painful.

Being bored is going to feel painful, and that's okay.

And not being productive in every moment, it's going to feel like you're losing something.

Resting is going to feel silly.

Calling a friend just to see what's up is going to feel awkward.

And it's letting yourself know those things.

Is that a worthwhile pursuit?

Why not just keep crushing it?

You can, but for what?

I mean, for what?

I mean, how much higher in the hills do you need to move, man?

That goes back to solving for peace.

If you want to solve for ROI, you can.

You can do that.

And my problem is I like working.

It's a fun thing for me.

And so even the busyness is, I enjoy it.

I enjoy finding the next project and

always text, I was texting my manager earlier, like, hey, what about this and this?

And he's like, okay, man.

Like, it's always like, what's the next thing?

I like that.

I don't think it comes from a pathological place or an insecurity.

I just like it.

But it's just don't.

If you're a red lining and a red line in a red line.

It's like, man, we talked last night.

You're like, hey, how's your sleep?

And it's like, ah, geez, man.

I don't want to, I don't want to fix it.

Don't bring up the S.

I don't want to fix testosterone with sleep, man.

I want it to be a supplement.

It's like, Do you sleep?

And so

you can.

Or let me ask you: write your letter to your 45-year-old self.

What would you tell them?

I don't understand.

So, with that, I don't understand how that exercise works.

You're, I'm now 37, writing it to my 47.

I'm doing these things now for the life you're going to have at 45.

At 47,

that's interesting.

I'd say I'm working really hard at letting go of the coping mechanisms that I used to

hide

a lot of the senses of insufficiency that I had for a very long time.

That if I can make myself sufficiently impressive or statusful or charming or enigmatic

or aloof, right, in distance, in absence.

That's a good one.

That's one of my favorites.

Oh, yeah.

I'm working really, really hard to not appear like I'm working.

I'm working really, really hard to not be

six.

Yeah, it's the bad hair day punks that work six hours on their hair to make it look like they didn't work on their hair.

Red sneaker effect.

Yeah.

Yeah, a lot of it, a lot of it's that.

I really hope, I really hope that I look back in 10 years' time and go, fuck, like, I'm so glad of the work that that guy put in.

Yeah.

And this is, you know, I'm choping on this a lot at the moment.

This entire podcast is a thinly veiled autobiography, dude.

Like the whole thing is the whole body of work is just what am I thinking about at the moment?

What do I care about?

What's important to me?

And I'm fortunate that even though I'm a pretty weird guy, but I

face questions that a significant cohort of people do as well.

And what that means is that if there's something that I'm thinking about or struggling with, a non-insignificant number of other people are also thinking about it or struggling with it too.

And it means that if I just pursue my own instincts and follow sort of what to me feels like a challenge or something that I'm interested in,

in the tailwind behind me are all of these other people that are also, oh my God, never really, no one's ever asked that thing before.

Mel Robbins, a good example.

Some of my favorite conversations that people have is when another person reveals something in them that you thought was a unique curse that only you have.

And it's happened hundreds of times,

slightly less.

So recently, maybe just because I've listened to a lot of other people talking.

So I've picked up a lot of the low-hanging fruit.

but one of them was Mel Robbins, and I can't even remember who she was speaking to.

It was a couple of years ago, I was researching for

a guest, and uh, Mel's talking, she says, uh,

throughout my entire life, I always had this sense that someone was mad at me,

somebody was, I'd done something wrong, and someone was mad.

I always just felt like I had to sort of be on Tentox a little bit, and someone was going to find out whatever it was that I'd done that was wrong.

I was in the wrong, that was like a bad girl.

And

I paused it and put it down.

It's like, holy fuck.

Like this just put a word to a thing that I'd never named, identified, even knew existed.

Didn't know that any, even if I'd known those things, didn't know that it wasn't just some weird, you know,

random pathology that only my unique constitution has managed to create.

Oh, this is some idiosyncrasy of just me.

And to hear, oh, fuck, somebody else is like that.

Yeah.

It's the reason that I'm continuing to try and lean into talking about relating, talking about emotions, talking about how people feel when stuff comes up.

Because

so much of what we're doing is just trying to manage our emotional state.

And one of the most reassuring things I think that you can hear as a human is, yeah, man.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Me too.

Okay, so think about 10 years from now to your 47-year-old careers.

So 10 years ago, you were a contestant on

a game show.

Dating show.

Dating show, yeah.

I guess it wasn't the prices right, huh?

So let's assume podcasting doesn't exist.

My wife found letters from her grandfather while he was off fighting Nazis to her grandmother who kept the dairy farm in eastern New Mexico going.

while he was gone.

It's a treasure trove of letters.

Romantic letters, here's what's going on letters, the whole thing.

And she's taken to making sure, I remember her saying, like, I got to make sure our kids know these letters, like, know that.

And so, no matter what technology exists 10 years from now, what a great, like, amazing gift you'll have be able to give to your kids is a library of.

This is where I was at then.

This is the arc of your dad going from this guy to this guy.

This is our human experience.

I can think of no greater gift.

That is cool.

Yeah.

I would like to think that that at least this podcast will become part of that.

You know, it's done in the third person a lot of the time, but so many of the things that I'm talking about is, oh, fuck, that was a question that dad or granddad was asking at that point.

Yeah, man.

Yeah, that'd be fun.

Yeah, it is.

It's fun.

You always do, we always get toward the end of one of these episodes, and then you fucking turn it around.

Okay,

come on.

What else is there?

I'm sure that you've got other stuff.

No, I'm just fascinated, but it goes like a 47-year-old Chris could put his head on the pillow.

That to me.

Like, how fast can I go to sleep?

That's my metric for

software.

Yeah.

And I don't know why that's such a

you have a better grasp of psychology theories than I do.

I don't know why that's that's so hard these days.

I don't know why that's such a foreign concept.

That's a good question.

I wonder as well how many people, for how many people, that's a priority.

I get the sense for some for someone like you, and certainly for somebody like me,

I know that that is something that I need.

I know it's something

it's when I feel my happiest is when things are

yeah, peace, but that can be peace in the midst of chaos.

Of course, it can't be peace in the midst of war.

Right.

The difference between lots of things are happening and it's all high pressure, and I have uncertainty and unpredictability and ambivalence and ambiguity, and I really do not know

who's got my back and who does it.

That's not good.

Right.

But I have lots of fights on lots of fronts and i'm prepared to go for all of them and this is exciting and in enthusing and uh safety and autonomy man yeah yeah yeah if i'm anchored in i can repel off the side and just go be crazy man and i get to repel war feels like i'm getting shoved into it yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and it's out of your control yeah yeah uh but i think enoughness is a big part of that um you know this like you said before this sense that you're enough as you are you don't necessarily need to perform you don't need to show up in any other way you can be as

whatever you are to me.

And I'll just be here and I'll just sit and I'll just listen.

And I think that the hard part of that algorithm is when you establish that, it allows you to go further and more powerfully than you could have ever imagined.

And I think that's, that's

the hard part of trying to is we've been sold that if you hack around that, then you can get that thing that you want.

And it's like, nah, man, if you can establish I'm worth the work that I'm about to put in on this thing,

then you can go.

You can go forever.

If you're chasing worth, you can't.

Your body eventually says, I quit, I'm out.

Interesting to think

people that you see that are very successful and in committed long-term relationships.

How much of, in a different universe, if somebody had chose a partner that was worse for them or better than better for them than this one,

how

divergent would those two worlds have been?

You know, how much

is

the person that you are directly due to the fact that you chose a woman?

1,000%.

Yeah.

You know, if you'd chosen somebody who was, let's say that you chose 100 and you could have chosen a 50, a zero, or a minus 50, minus 100.

What did those different worlds look like?

You know, how resilient are you to this?

And how much of this is totally contingent on the fact that you had somebody that was a rocket ship that you were able to be refueled off?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I think that's the wisest.

Like, marry Will and tell the truth and be curious.

Like, if you can establish those and then just go do the next right thing, man.

I had this thought.

I'm going to bring it up with Scott Galloway the next time I sit down with him.

He keeps having, he's got super famous for this same.

The most important decision that you make in your life is not going to be where you work.

It's not going to be where you live.

It's going to be the person that you marry.

Charlie Munger's got the same thing.

The most important decision that you make in your life is your spouse, et cetera, et cetera.

And I understand

why that's a talking point that people are pushing because people fall backward into relationships.

They're not intentional about this stuff.

They don't try and cultivate a practice of honesty.

They don't deal with their unspoken expectations.

They don't, all of these things.

I do wonder, though, whether it is putting even more undue pressure

on people.

And

this is the problem of a one-size-fits-all piece of advice for a very broad audience that some people, it's the same thing with

some of the sort of post-Me Too messaging around how guys should behave with women.

Some of the messaging, lots of the messaging says basically, don't be pushy.

The problem is

the men who really need to be told, don't be pushy,

won't take that to heart.

They're just going to plow through it.

And the guys who really need to be encouraged are going to really, really embody it.

You know?

Well, and the other side of it, the number of Texas women who are like, I just want a guy who, right?

So it's, I get the one size fits all.

I think the challenge to that, to the statement is we take that the most important person is, is the person you marry, right?

Which I

believe that, but I think we dump it on a person, not on the thing, not on the marriage.

And so I need, I force this other person to carry it all instead of saying, hey, can you and I carry this thing?

And I think that's a different, totally different perspective.

You get what I'm saying?

Otherwise, you're going to give somebody a burden no human can carry.

Like the, you know, Brad's stuff that says, like Wilcox says, like, a good or great marriage, everything in your life ROIs this way.

And a not great or bad marriage, everything like un-ROIs the other way, right?

It's like a, it's like a D-R-O-I.

But if I put that on a human being, man, nobody can carry that.

But if I say, hey, you and me, can we pull this thing together?

Man, those two horses can pull more together than they can individually.

I like that, but it does put a lot of pressure on it.

Okay, so as somebody who's 37 and not married, it's easy for me to run my mouth about this.

I got married when I was 24, right?

I was a child.

And so, tell me about the nature of that pressure.

Yeah,

it's certainly palpable,

especially if you take it to heart.

And if you want, if you think, well, what's the sort of relationship?

What's the sort of future that I want to have?

What's the sort of marriage and family that I want to have?

And I have a bunch of guys.

There is no good archetype for this, but I have a bunch of guy friends who are unbelievably eligible.

Like some of the most eligible men, maybe, maybe at least one of the most eligible men in America.

Is he over six foot though?

That's where yes,

yes, true.

And

many, many, many figures.

And

he just wants a family.

Like, he just can't wait to be a dad.

But the fact that he has waited a little while is making the pressure mount.

And And you see this in

women that have built up a career.

There's a good example with a lamp that Louise Perry taught me about.

If you're moving into a new house and you need to buy a lamp, it's a piece of piss.

You've got nothing else in the house.

There's a lamp that'll work and you build the house around the lamp.

If you've done the opposite, you've built this very elaborate internal decor, you need to find the perfect lamp,

right?

That comes in at this time.

And it's one of the unseen costs that people who wait longer pay, both guys and girls.

You know, if you wait until you're in your 30s or your late 30s or your 40s or your 50s before you finally decide to settle down,

your life, you have more preferences.

You have greater complexity.

You have this sense that you know what you like and what you want and what you deserve and how this should.

And

it's more hard.

It's more difficult to find.

So that's a

can I pull that thread for a second?

That essentially turns another person into the remaining puzzle piece for your puzzle.

Instead of being,

I had fewer things to dump out.

My puzzle was jaggedy and small and trashy.

So when we were like, hey, we have to build a new puzzle together, that was easy.

I didn't own anything.

I was right.

It just means there's more at stake for you to

swipe the table.

It feels like there's more at stake because.

You've spent all of this time building it up.

You've spent all of this time creating this life life that is yours.

But it goes back to for why.

Correct.

Ultimately, if all of this was basically you in a holding pattern, waiting, and this is, what are you doing?

Are you trying to create a life and a partnership and a family that is the thing?

Or is it just the side dish to your career?

And there is a big cohort of people for whom they, you know, the family thing is just the thing that they do.

Like that's, it's, it's what people do, right?

It's not their alchemy, it's it's not their

zenith of

their contribution to this world, right?

And again,

the problem occurs when somebody from group one gets into a relationship with somebody from group two, that I want this thing to be everything.

And we can build our lives around this.

But yeah, if you've spent a long time constructing a very elaborate cathedral, this wonderful orchestral life that's got these moving parts and it's all perfectly put together.

And

it feels like you're giving away more, even if the end goal that you need to get to is the thing that you wanted all along.

Even if all you did was be in a holding pattern waiting for this thing to start, you feel the deceleration, you feel the

imagine this.

Somebody's got a really big bank account and they need to give away 50% of their net worth in order to be able to do a thing.

If your bank account's got 10 million and it's way easier than if it's got $10.

Of course.

Right.

Like if you've got $10, sorry, it's way harder than if you've got $10.

If you've got $10 and you just give away five bucks, like, well, fucking, like, it's five bucks.

What does that matter?

Even if it's 50% of my well.

But if you've got this huge bank account, you feel

the amount that you've got to withdraw more.

It's a bigger overall number.

So, what would feeling that feeling and then going doing the next right thing look like in real life?

Commitment, I think,

a reprioritization

of

this is

that period of my life's over right as you said it's a different kind of awesome it's a different kind of awesome yeah i had an awesome where i lived for me

but eventually

you just kind of get bored of yourself

and

it's a choice between a

familiar kind of awesome and an unfamiliar kind of awesome And some people are not prepared to trade the former for the latter because they just don't know, they don't know what it is.

We're not good with uncertainty, good with unpredictability.

It's fascinating that the things that we evolved to do

to prove worthiness to a mate are the things that end up trapping.

They're getting in the way of doing the thing.

Yeah, the

thing that you want.

The peacock feathers are now like in front of our face and we can't even see the mate.

Yeah, the thing that you want is being sacrificed for the thing which you're supposed to get the thing that you want

yeah i was supposed to be successful so that i could find a mate so that i could start a family and the reason that i can't start a family is because i'm so busy working

trying yeah exactly to try and find a mate yeah yeah dude the barstools i mean that when you see don't sacrifice the thing you want for the thing that's supposed to get it it is

It is a universal rule.

Don't sacrifice happiness in order to achieve success so that when you're finally sufficiently successful, you can allow yourself to be happy.

Like so many people do that.

People sacrifice freedom in order to be

wealthy, right?

They think, well, if I turn to a life of crime, I can be wealthy.

And it's like, why do you want to be wealthy?

Well, so I can be free.

You go, if you get caught, you're in jail.

Yeah.

You're sacrificing the thing you want for the thing that's supposed to get the thing that you want.

And it just appears everywhere.

And

it's a misunderstanding of...

means and ends.

And you've got them the wrong way around.

You keep confusing the, well, just, I'll just keep saving.

I'll just keep saving.

I'll just keep working.

I'll just keep building.

And you go,

for what?

That's it.

But how much of that is a fear of,

man, this is such an abused word.

How much of that is a fear of

being vulnerable?

Because I can control all of these other things, but when it comes to building a life with somebody else,

I can only control me and that boat.

100%.

So much of it is about control.

Like

the reason that people commit to careers over relationships is that a career can't leave them.

And another person can.

I think that's why you're 95% in on the relationship.

But you can't see my text.

Yeah.

And I'm not, I'm not prepared to let go of that bit of the career.

Because if I do that and you leave, I have no hedge.

I have nowhere to hide.

I haven't got anything that's just for me.

That's just for me.

It's my, my little secret.

It's my little thing.

It's not for you.

It's the side account that you don't know about.

And I guess the hard part is you can't know how extraordinary the other side of that is

when you're all in on hour

that you can't know until you risk it all.

Or you risk getting hurt really badly.

Dr.

John Deloney, laser.

Dude, you're fucking awesome.

Dude.

Thanks for being my friend, dude.

Yeah.

Thank you too.

And man, can I just can I plug Newtonic?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You don't even pay me.

It's a, It's a laser, man.

Shut.

This has become my, so once a week, I

we have to do ads.

It's, you know, and you've done that.

Like, I get to do ads.

Let's say it that way.

And you have to read them, read them, read them.

New tonic, man, it's my laser beam.

It takes my chaotic mind and says,

you can work for one focused hour.

That's awesome.

John Deloney, everyone should go and check out your show, your books, everything.

You're awesome.

Appreciate you, man.

And you.

I get asked all the time for book suggestions.

People want to get into reading fiction or non-fiction or real-life stories, and that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read.

These are the most life-changing reads that I've ever found, and there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them, and it's completely free, and you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com/slash books.

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