How To Break Free From Your Old Story - Dr John Delony

Dr John delone welcome to the show my man Chris how are you thanks for the dude I'm fantastic I love being back in Texas where I was born and raised man it's good are you adjusting I am slowly becoming native someone told me that I was allowed to use the word Yol because I've been here for three years now that's a huge uh that's a huge Welcome Matt I get the sense that's big man I get the sense that it is me being conned into saying the equivalent of the nword for T people and the Texas Tribune is going to catch me hard aring my through all a couple of times so I'm not falling for the the S up um I I can't I can't quite get to that I'm up to sidewalk and and and trash can but you're all not yet instead what's the what's the alternative to trash can rubbish rub oh yeah yeah you got be careful rubbish B here rubbish B yeah you don't know what that means crack that open come on get it in you all right we've been waiting for this I've been excited for this moment here yeah well you'll have an unlimited amount going to the office soon well I appreciate that orange sunrise for you excellent this is my first one this is my uh live review Cherry Poppa that's outstanding that's outstanding well done man thank you well done good good yeah it's uh you're now five IQ points smarter 10 it's each sip is accept man they light me up like a Christmas tree half a standard deviation all right um I have no idea how I didn't stumble across you and the work that you do because it aligns so much with lots of the things that I'm very interested in and I really appreciate the way that you are firm but gentle and reassuring I think when you speak to people um a lot of the conversations around relationships and uh dating and mental health tend to me to either be so soft as to not have an impact or so brusk and and and harsh as to cause people to get defensive and for it to feel a little bit more about the host or the the commentator the advice giver than it is about the person who has the problem so yeah I think uh really really great balance that it's um I wanted so badly to be the uh the hman of of mental health and of relationships and early on it was very clear that's not why people want to talk to you they've never seen a big tall loud statued up Texan talk to that mother who just blew her life up like compassionately and I think in our in our Strange little weird uh ecosystem that we live in there's a lot of people that know about stuff and they've just never sat with hurting people right there's a lot of theories and a lot of ideas but man you can hear somebody who's actually sat with somebody who just lost a child and that's there's a different level of compassion right what have you learned about how to hold space for somebody that's going through a difficult time from the um my first ever relationship just broke up with me all the way through to the I just lost a child dude let me tell you this so so my wife um she was a research professor she quit her job for she's like man I it sounds strange especially for her I think I want to stay at home and have kids and that that was just like like who are you you've done with my wife it was amazing we talked through it it was awesome and gets pregnant miscarriage number one gets pregnant miscarriage number two then miscarriage number three but it was an ectopic pregnancy and it ruptured right and so she's a really strong tough West Texas woman and she sits in that living room and says I'm not doing this it's not happening again which you know like I mean she almost died in our living room well here's the thing after miscarriage one and especially number two lucky for her she was married to a guy working on his second PhD and uh I was also a crisis uh God the word that gives me hemorrhoids expert and so I would show up in the community to sit with people who' had loss and dude I rubbed her nose in my charts and my graphs and my answers and then this happened so um a close friend of mine who's suffered imagin unimaginable loss I show up with my son who was four at the time we go to the ER their wheel in her back and when you show up at crisis scenes it's hard to describe there can be Blood on the wall and bodies but you make eye contact with other responders and you know the scen safe you know it seems Placid and then there's something we call Crazy Eyes you look across and it's like oh this SCS still live like there might be a shooter still here right and you can see it and I walked in and I S made eye contact with the head of the OBG in out at Texas Tech Medical Center and I remember holding my son's hand saying oh this is it this the last time I see her they wheel her off I text somebody to come pick my son up I go to this little room that's about this big and a buddy of mine a West Texas Rancher who's a children's author walks in hat everything he's taller than me he nods I say nothing he says nothing he sits by me 30 minutes 1 Hour 1 and a/ half hours 2 hours then the physician busting the door holding a like a iPad thing and she says we lost the baby but your wife's okay and I exhaled in this Rancher who he hadn't spoken other than hey he reaches over and grabs my shoe and I look over at him and he starts crying tears I don't have yet but the the the important thing is he said no words and it didn't matter and in a culture that we won't shut up Chris um when your friend has a breakup golly dude the last thing they need is all of your theories and answers and well oh my gosh let's Google that's that's catastrophic they just need you to sit there and bring tacos bring a bottle of wine or bring whatever you got in fridge you know what I mean and we don't have a culture of presence we have a culture of answers of talking so what I've learned over the years what do you say to a mother whose kid is dead in that room right there nothing but she'll remember that hug right right she'll remember that exhale and that will get her to the next gulp of air to the next gulpa air right there's just no words man and so the more I've been sitting with hurting people I'm finding myself talking less and less and less and less the most I a beautiful story and uh the first time that I ever really started thinking about this was uh Sean Strickland on Theo Von's podcast a year ago where Sean has that really bad bad experience sort of reliving his childhood and um Charlie hoopet from Charisma on command did this unbelievable breakdown he's redone it again he's run it back on his other channel and it's so beautiful he just explains he's sha is sort of gripping this bottle uh I think he's gripping the bottle with his left hand he's so drinking from it like this and you can see he's grasping with this left hand he's actually trying to grip onto something he's trying to get a hold of of security and firmness and Charlie's breaking down his body language you can see what Theo does that drops in and then pulls him out and then he goes back in again um because Theo kind of he doesn't make it about him he does like a triple A I don't want to give any shade on Theo's he literally inspired me to become a better space holder better Communicator in difficult times um but there's some things that you do that just rip someone out just a little bit and then they they close off and they well you know like what does it matter I'm a big guy I'm I'm a grown adult and then he sort of starts to get back into it start to get back into it and then you know the most beautiful thing that Theo says in that entire exchange is he's like we don't need to talk man we can just sit here for a while if you want that's it and that's somebody who only knows that cuz they've been hurt too right not going have to say anything I'll just sit here with you powerful dude what a gift what else what else so shut up yeah one of the first things that you should do when trying to help somebody that's going through stuff what else um yeah I think I that sounds easy in theory but I think the what else happens before I have to do my own work that I believe I'm worthy of the space I'm going to hold with you right so I got to show up okay most of the people I'll say most of the people um who get diagnosed with cancer who lose a loved one who lose a pregnancy Etc they'll tell you they found themselves responsible for making sure everybody else was okay and don't text somebody how's it going like you really want to know how's it going right and I'm going to text that back to you um bring food show up and I mean I think it's it's action it's action it's action it's action I'm going to go mow your lawn and I trust you to tell me to stop I'm going to keep sending tacos and you may have 5,000 tacos and they may go straight to the trash can um but you're going to you're going to know when the fog lifts you were loved you were cared yeah you're cared for yeah I uh I had a an an incident that opened up uh something similar it was my birthday a couple of weeks ago and um I finished recording upstairs finished this episode and came down and Jonathan who's outside his dog was walking around like what the [ __ ] Jonathan's dog doing here uh oh he must be here to show us the new merch samples cuz we we're starting to get merch done and as I walked in it turned out that there was a surprise birthday like celebration for me and there was only five people there all of them worked for me in one form or another or work with me and uh it was the middle of the day on a Friday so who's free at 2: p.m. on a Friday to come and do stuff it's tiny and my best friend was getting married the next day and I was his best man here in Texas so know I'm my head's in a different place I'm thinking about the speech I've you know I've just finished this episode I got to go and work on the speech I got to remember the thing that don't do the joke about the white people and uh I come down and there's you know five people and they put a banner up and it said happy birthday and there was a cake and there were one of the guys was filming it our videographer Mike was filming it and uh I was like oh this is really really beautiful and then we sat down we had some cakes it was all laid out really nicely then they sang Happy Birthday to me and there was this bid there was this sense as I went down as you said there about almost having this odd guilt debt that you want to repay to people because well if if they're doing this just because they love me MH then I need to be able to sort of feel that in a way as opposed to there being some sort of value exchange you know all of these people in one form or another work with me work for me and uh that's fine you know we're working together we're building this project we're doing the whatever thing and uh yeah watching five people sing Happy Birthday to me at 2:30 p.m. on a Friday I did a live show in London last year to three and a half thousand people the five people was way more uncomfortable yeah because I was seen by them think think of the world we've set up um Dr Joiner he's out of uh Florida State he writes really eloquently on suicide right one of the the the three legs of the stool is of when you're doing a su assessment is perceived burdensomeness mhm there that idea right people would be better if I was if I wasn't here but look at the world we've built like I'm not going to ask you to take me to the airport I'll just Uber I'm not going to ask you can I borrow some eggs and sugar I'm just going to like instacart or whatever and I think the meta narrative is my presence is a burden too and if you guys it's it's the air we breathe that everyone I'm going to bother people even and now every relationship we have is transactional and your experience is man it's very common that you wake up and the only people in your life are on your payroll or on somebody's payroll like you're on on the same payroll and man that your body would be failing you if it let you sleep all night because it knows you're lonely right in some ways I've heard you this um do you have people in your life that you can talk to that are just your friends that you don't work with that seems to be a Common Thread in some of the conversations you have I've heard you speak of these recently housewife who there was one that had insomnia she kept waking up throughout the night oh same you said how how many friends have you got and you dug real deep and it turned out she did have it seemed like she had quite a good social network but yes it does seem we spend so much time at work and we're so obsessed with um productivity and moving forward in some way that we don't have friends for the sake of being friends with them we have friends who are uh compatriot and uh soldiers in whatever battle it is that we're fighting against getting our Brazilian jiu-jitsu purple belt against becoming better at pickle ball against learning to salsa dance against learning to do improv against the job interview that the the promotion whatever it is and uh it's an odd blend you it makes people into a 401k is it is it your opinion that there is something lesser about friendship with people that you work with too uh no I the fear I have is when you don't have Jiu-Jitsu and when you don't have I remember dude training MMA gym dude that's the most eclectic wacky group of people that had a shared mission that all got together you selected for a group that want to be punched in the face yeah but there's also like a male nurse and this guy doesn't have a job at all and this guy's a Dina student I mean random group of people um no the problem with only having friends at work is if something ever doesn't work out there you find yourself on an island in a moment when you need people people and so if you get let go if you have a problem at work then you also have a problem everywhere else in your life but it's the same issue with men who get divorced right the single most predictive lifestyle change for suicide is men who get divorced the reason being it seems women are much better at holding on to their own social networks when they get into a marriage whereas men supplant their own social networks and they use the wives right so you know the wife has loads of female friends and female friends have husbands and you as the husband become friends with the husbands of her that's it that's it man and you sit there like yeah it's hot yeah yeah how's it work good the only the only thing you have in common is the fact that your wife knows their wife and yeah usually that is you all have kids in the same age and then when that kid moves up yeah the the tether gets pulled on everything yeah yeah it's um that ability to be able to sit with oh people actually want to be here yeah for this uh there's a degree of discomfort not for this for you yes and that's hard to hold James you spoke about him earlier on the other half of new tonic um I [ __ ] love this story I tell it all the time but I [ __ ] adore it he did a load of mushrooms I I won't I won't mention the country in case they're they're going to kick him out uh did a load of mushrooms on a rock and this question came to him and the question was do people love you for who you are or for what you do and you know people loving you for what you do feels transactional it feels flimsy uh it feels volatile and you know the subtext is if I stopped doing what I do then the love would be taken away from me as well what we want is people to love us for who we are because it feels grounded and um uh forever it's attached to our sense of self where our work isn't um and it's rigid right and you know I told this story on the Pod and someone asked well it's an interesting question but a more interesting question is do you love you for who you are or for what you do because a lot of the time we want the world to love us for who we are meanwhile we love us for what we do so you're asking the world to show up for you in a way that you're not prepared to show up for yourself that's right you don't love you for who you are for the fact that you actually care about other people that you have empathy that yeah sure it looks a little bit wimpy when you cry at Christmas films but it's because you've got a soft side to you or because you're really reliable you know like like genuine good traits that are as Timeless as you can be you no no no no you've judged yourself on the last 10 hours of productivity and the fact that you got distracted on YouTube for 30 minutes despite the fact that you've crushed it even if you look at your productivity over the last six months you've crushed it as well but no no no you're going to you know exactly where your shortcomings lie and the scabs that you can pick at and the scars and you know exactly what to say to yourself to torture yourself about these things and you're not a nice friend to you but you want the world to be a nice friend to you you want the world to love you for who you are meanwhile you love you for what you do I just thought that was such a lovely little no I think that's a I um cut me off if you've heard me talk about this it was after book number two comes out so I grew up in a house we didn't have a lot right and money was electric uh it was always a sense of tension always always always always and the book comes out um my wife and I she was raised by teachers my dad was a policeman and then he became a minister so we lot of authority my therapist when I walked in I was like but as was a cop and a minister she was like get in the lake house right it's very happy we've got lots to work very happy um but both of us come with not a lot right and so then you find yourself in this wild new world right where of abundance don't know psychology for it I'm downstairs my family has comeing they've been with a maybe seven to 10 days too long and they know it I know it it's that strange like i'' be good if yall left and they're like we'd be good if we left and it's just that awkward they leave I've got covid um as they're leaving and then I'm working out in the gym in my basement my manager calls and he says hey you know those two speaking event gigs we were hoping to land you got a second and the way he called I was like ah man we didn't get it he calls and starts yelling into the phone we got him and I start yelling because these were the last two like transformational financially for me and I start cheering I start yelling yeah my wife comes downstairs into the basement she's like what are you yelling about and I was like we got I'm going to this speak of this thing and this thing and um she's very stoic West Texas woman like just we withdraw and wait till things are calm she didn't do that she came forward this time and she got this close which is not how she does conflict and she said I'm watching my husband die and I'm watching himat here the whole way and I'm gaunt I'm exhausted I'm sweaty I'm sick I'm people out and I'm cheering and then she said this she said the pie piece the the pie chart of how much I love you and the pie piece for how much money you make is full and then she said we have enough and she turned and walked away and I angrily was like what the hell is enough and it was pychology for it and I didn't understand what does that mean when someone just says no no no no I picked you the joke in our house is she bought real low on me right like she bought when the stockin at really low on me um she's like I picked you and this is cool this is awesome but I picked you and at part of the exchange she was like you can go do your speaking events I told you when I married you I would never tell you now go do it this is for your ego this is not for us and I got hot but then I have like I went straight to the therapist office but we ended up in this in this moment she said I want you to take your fist and put it in your chest and say the words to me I love this man and that was the first time I was like oh I'm I'm over my head I'm stuck I couldn't say the word I couldn't do that act and in front of another grown woman I could not say I love this guy and then I was like I got a problem right I'm asking the world to give me something that I won't honor myself to get myself it's tough it's tough how did you work through that very very slowly very slowly yeah it's it it sounds obscene to think I've got to practice but I have to practice saying you're a good dad yeah it sounds cheesy I carry this with me this is it like when the thoughts pop in like ah your kids would be better off if you were at home right now no they wouldn't they're doing great right it's that negative selft talk and just resetting that aut you're doing some CBT homework that's exactly right all the time yeah my act act yeah I've started CBT this year and uh I I did um twice weekly Psychotherapy for you okay and um how was that tough actually in retrospect wasn't so tough at the time um I loved it uh my therapist was amazing it taught me an awful lot about myself it taught me more about myself than one and a half thousand sessions of meditation uh and many many years of journaling um because somebody else is pointing at the things that you've got that are going on inside of your mind but it opens an awful lot of Loops that it doesn't close cuz there's no action steps yeah that's exactly right yeah correct uh and maybe for some people who aren't as dopamine nor epinephrine as me that's fine because they can just sit in the story but if I if I've got open Loops I'm going to try and fix them and I think that this is there's lots of different modalities where people can improve their mental health where people can improve the quality of their life uh your outcomes may vary as they say in trading or whatever it is and I think Psychotherapy is really really useful for learning about yourself but you need something which is more action focused so for me uh CBT has been fascinating um it's been very rewarding but [ __ ] dude it's hard because for the people that don't know cognitive behavioral therapy is basically one hour a week where you speak to a guy and then the remaining whatever it is 163 hours a week where you do homework you challenge your thoughts yeah you do homework he gives you homework and it's not I have in if you looked at the reminders in my phone you'd think I was a crazy person I've got like punch the bully it repeats every three throughout the day um journaling practi anyway it's been really interesting um but talking about I didn't find that as useful I CBT is obviously it's the it's the gold standard I found the act the app acceptance and commitment instead of challenging the thoughts so much just letting them walk by or letting them be that guy at the table that always you always know that guy everybody has that friend and all right you spoke and I appreciate it I'm going to move on that's interesting and that it keeps me from going to war with myself otherwise I stay in I stay in constant conflict with myself and that gets exhausting for me before we continue do you often feel sluggish foggy or crampy throughout the day that's not just tightness that's dehydration calling element contains science backed electrolyte ratio with sodium pottassium and magnesium and you will genuinely feel the difference when you take it proper hydration isn't just about drinking sufficient water it's about having enough electrolytes to allow your body to actually use those fluids salt plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health regulating appetite and curbing Cravings best of all element have got a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration so you can buy it and try it for as long as you want if you don't like it for any reason they just give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box that's how confident they are that you love it plus they offer free shipping in the US right now you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drink LM nt.com slod wisdom that's drink LM nt.com mod I wrote this the other day it kind of I think it resonates a little bit with what you're talking about there some advice on how to support men men want to aim high without feeling insufficient if they fall short men want their suffering to be recognized and appreciated without being panded to or patronized and made to feel weak men want to believe that they can become more without feeling like they're not enough already men want to be able to open up without being judged men want support without feeling broken men want to be loved for who they are not for what they do too long didn't read blending inspiration with compassion is not an easy task how do I set lofty goals which drive me to fulfill my potential without feeling less than if I don't get there tomorrow said every guy ever the desire for self-love and high performance comes into conflict inside of the mind of everyone men especially sure some men are all drive and goals with non- introspection and sure some men are all reflection in inner work with few external desires but most men desire a mix of encouraged self-belief and understanding support H inevitably these two things come into conflict basically every man just wants to hear I know you can be more but you are enough already and even if you just stay where you are I'll be right here next to you you're going to be great but you don't need to be great and I'm with you no matter what or as said best by seril Simpson's mom boy I don't care if you hit it big because you're already number one yeah that's powerful and that reminds me of what your wife said yeah you know like this is all great but it also throws into harsh contrast why am I doing it if people love me for who I am why am I doing what I do yeah well if you're doing it because you think it's going to feel some way on the back end that's that's the tales all the time right that's the great that's the the Jim Carrey speech right I wish everyone could become rich famous it's not going to fix yeah it's nonsense and I think the the alternative that we've got the last 15 20 years is well I'm just going to opt out and play video games and that's a recipe for disaster too I think we uh you know Michael Easter's book The Comfort Christ which I think is a masterpiece I think we have a culture that's that's allergic to discomfort and so I think that tension is that's where Joy is that's where meaning is is I'm enough and I can hold that Loosely enough so that I can hit that guy real hard they they had a breakdown in ESPN the other day of Alex uh and his they're talk about how hard he hits that it's otherworldly and the they had interview with a referee is like he the sound it makes when he hits another human is different right and I just thought man can can you imagine me all do that but they say it comes from how calm he is right his ability to stay at until he uncorks and um my coach used to always say like dude you're like a bear you're like so tense all the time and it takes away and so I think if men knew oh she loves me no matter what that actually drives that anchor deep into the concrete so you can repel off the edge and go do something bananas and it sounds counterintuitive mhm yeah that you don't need to push me I'll push myself more if I know that I don't need to let me know I'm anchored yeah I mean you know that's a a phenomenal piece of advice and I I put that essay out and perhaps unsurprisingly a lot of uh girls the women who uh caught a hold of it or follow me on Instagram so well like women want this too and I'm like yeah I'm they I'm sure they do can tell that drives me crazy that makes me insane dude the every conversation has to be so Universal at all times you got to equivocate God Almighty if I write a note on Instagram to Dad's that's just what about moms I and yes mom's too but I was I failed as a dad in this moment I just writing myself a note you'll notice that it doesn't really happen in the other direction God Almighty dude it's wild it's wild I had a conversation with Richard rebs sat here um Richard oh my gosh yes of boys and men yeah so he's great American Institute of boys and men and um it was the second time he'd been on and we got we went for like three and a half hours it was phenomenal um and I mentioned I was getting a bit frustrated at the fact that every time I talk about the problems facing boys and men I need to do this weird social land acknowledgment yeah yeah dude about the fact well we must recognize that there is issues that women have faced and we have to remember that it's only been a recent time that men have been falling behind and we must not forget the fact that we've got sexual assault blah blah blah and after we've got all of that led to begin to talk about men it's the Seinfield not that there's anything wrong with that right everything has to have a qualifier and I'm like can I say this once at the beginning of my career and never have to say it again like because it's you know part of its clipping culture that if somebody's able to pull you out of context by not having said the thing and even if you do if you say it at the beginning this happened to me the other day I said the thing I said it and it just got cut off I'm like right well [ __ ] I might as well can't but what about this what if what if as a as a society we just chose I'm going to think the best of Chris well the problem is God Almighty D we don't like to think the best of people because hypocrisy on the Internet is like catnip right being able to catch somebody out this was the reason you remember when Joe got uh popped for his nword video which is like five minutes of you hard actually Harding your way combination of aing and Harding anyway um this video goes live and uh Joe's like yeah [ __ ] that looks bad that's that's that's not that's not good and the internet was told by Legacy Media this is what this guy is truly like and this is what it means about him he's really the secret bigoted racist homophobic xenophobic transer blah blah blah that we've always known he was they were saying this is the tip of the iceberg and we know that below it is all of this but the problem was most of the people they were trying to convince are like I've listened to 500 hours of him speaking you're saying that this is the tip of the iceberg I've seen the whole Iceberg I know there's nothing down there or I have a reliable sense that there isn't anything down there and that situation kind of taught me what gets sucked in what what causes people to get sucked in to this and the precise thing is a vacuum of information and this speculation the the opportunity for people to point a finger and say ah see I got him I [ __ ] I got him yeah and um no the the principle of Charity is not extended to people on the internet but it's not extended to people in our homes like the gotman say when you distill all the way down what makes a great marriage beyond all like religion Finance are yall friends like I've got a buddy who lives what five hours West of here his name's John too he was fat John I was hyper John and back in the day dude would always leave cans out everywhere always always always always this single worst text responder in human history it doesn't matter a guy cannot respond to a text it's phenomenal not one time have I ever left his house and thought he leaving can's out what is he trying to say about our friendship not one time when he doesn't respond not one time have I thought does he does he does he not love me what does this mean for us not once he's my friend that guy stood in front of me and throwing punches on my behalf literally he's opened up his house to me for decades he's my friend right and but I don't give my wife that what do these towels mean right or like like what is happening in this house like oh there's a dish in the dishwasher what is she trying to tell me right and we make this huge character assassination we just it's Madness I don't even so I don't think it I think what's happening on the Internet is a is a magnification of what happens in our own homes we're so unsure of ourselves we walk around with these glasses on trying to find where everybody else has holes so we can be like yep yep yep yep and that's the way we try to prop ourselves up to say uh I I I've got value too right I can get value by burning everybody to the ground inside my own house a selfworth hands on the shoulders of other people's shortcoming that's it that's it instead of exhaling saying when I walk in the door and there's a pile of towels good God what her what what must have her day been like I just pick up the towels or when I walk into John's house I just pick up the cans or when he finally texts me back right like hey what's up like yeah I'm happy to hear from him man he's one my best friends so it's it's it's a Madness it's a Madness speaking about challenges why do you think people regularly get into relationship with partners that they feel like they need to fix yeah I think that old that old adage in in marriage therapy is true you marry you're unfinished business I think the the way I would describe it is your nervous system puts little GPS pins in there when you're a kid and you're constantly asking why doesn't that man love me he's supposed to and or why is this shiny little box more important than me or why did my mom pick up that bottle of wine and not pick up me and you constantly are trying to solve that loot and man you get older and you want to your your body repeats what it knows and you go into try to solve that situation again and you do it again I was just talking to somebody in in the outside of the grocery store just a minute ago about the same exact thing your body just goes in and tries to solve it again and solve it again and you got to get outside that Loop um otherwise you just repeat it and you repeat it and you repeat it because over time you realize ah a seven-year-old is not the problem seven-year-old is never the problem well I suppose you can become Enchanted by by a person that you're attached to yeah which fills a literal void inside of you and when this is a primary caretaker this is good but when this is an inappropriate partner it's not so you're used to I think a lot of the time if you grow up around difficult adults children can't change or get rid of their caregivers so they just learn to cope they they learn to solve it yeah they learn to hold on to long enough in the hopes that maybe the person will take Mercy on them and change if you're five you don't have a passport you don't know how to leave the house so you become if you were not cared for in the way that you should as a child you learned to become unusually good at surviving onga diet of Love or you learn to sing and dance and get it right I've got to perform I I remember uh one of the coolest things about going back to grad school as an old man is I had to do a practicum again and I was working with This brilliant man named a psychologist named Dr Michael Gomez and I remember we were sitting with these kids that had some pretty remarkable trauma and one of the kids was making Straight A's and during a debrief I said uh this he's like all right who's who's going to struggle here where do we go and I said this one's gonna be okay and I said why he goes well he's performing well he's doing GRS he's making great grades and he said something that has rattled me since he said straight A can be a trauma response too John and you can burn a building down you you will be you kids will find a way to be seen or they'll find a way to hide they'll find a way to stay safe and they'll nuzzle up against you so I I think kids are always trying to solve and yeah there's some that have to survive on just sips of oxygen right through a straw but others will be really good on that t-ball Field Band because that makes my dad exhale well I mean that's why when we look at you know the highest performers in business and and uh content creation output and the World of Sports and all the rest of it for the most part what you should look at these people with is pity not envy you think what has happened to this person to cause them to need to do that to themselves that's not for me to say that all high performers don't have some don't have a good balance of you desire for more and running away from past traum and all the rest of the stuff many do but most don't most are doing it because they need validation from the world because they didn't get it when they were kids yeah I remember watching that ESPN documentary with Michael Jordan and there's that scene where he's smoking the cigar in the hotel room and he looked at the camera and he said you don't want this life and he can't go to the bathroom downstairs like there's just full of people right and I remember it cuts to a scene of the banners and the rafters and again I'm sitting there on my couch in my small little house and I just remember looking at all that saying for what like for six pieces of cloth for Glory like for what right it's a weird realization though especially when it comes to high performers because we assume that if we had what they had we would feel fulfilled and the reason that they're not fulfilled is because they're ungrateful not because the Fulfillment is hollow that's exactly right the issue is with them not with the thing that they've been given the fuel that's right um yeah I think and dude I I'm doing the same thing like the moment my first book went number one we I was in a meeting two weeks later be like all right what's the next one right I I got right on it man it's it is dude it just TAPS in man [ __ ] we both do act but yeah I think um you know there's a lot of different insights on the the dating somebody that's a problem thing I think the there's an Allure of somebody who doesn't love us back there's an Allure of someone but the Allure is a question why can I solve this can I solve this can I solve this of course because a lot of us like fixing problems because we but but we also export our value to somebody else oh yeah right and if this person doesn't like me can can I morph and change and transform so that that I can become likable if we can convince someone who doesn't seem to like us all the time to care maybe that means that we're worthy that's right right we solve the problem of course if we can fix them as well maybe it means that we're fixable too like in their mistreatment of us we see reflected the same level of mistreatment that we give ourselves right right right like I actually always did think that I wasn't worthy of and now it's being given to me and if I can redeem this person externally maybe it means that I can fix what it is that I've proven to myself inter as well I think uh you know the the weirdest element of this that I was thinking about was variable schedule reward so the way that slot machines were and just that when you see someone that's in a crazy relationship turbulent it's hot and it's cold and it's all the rest of it you think what the [ __ ] is like what are the both of these people getting from this relationship and I get sense that there's you don't know what you're going to wake up to today it's like if you don't know what you're going to wake up to today that might be really painful but there's just a very very ancient bit of your brain that [ __ ] loves it yeah exactly dop me's a hell of a drug well and we've uh I actually came to her book through you uh Luis Perry's book she noral she was on again this week um there's a uh quote in that book that has just bounced around inside my head it's haunted me but it's about have we solved for so many existential issues that plagued Humanity forever that we're simply were bored to death oh I this is the exact mus hierarchy of needs thing yeah but see I but I I have a man I have an unsubstantiated uh hypothesis about even that the masel hierarchy we can talk about right but I think I think we're I think we're bored to death I think our brains are cooking because we've got food at the touch of a button we got water in every room in our house we've we've got these problems solved and then it's got we need that slot machine man and we'll get it from that guy that backman up you know the idea of concept creep where um as a as the um incident of something like let's say racism becomes less and less over time the definition of racism expands the level of racism stays the same but what constitutes racism has changed in order to keep the level the same because the actual incidents have reduced in the same way as I think uh climate at ated deaths have decreased by 50 times it's like 98% drop in the last 100 years let's say something like that 168,000 people get lifted out of poverty every single day so we've had to redefine what climate crisis means that's not to say that there isn't a [ __ ] problem with the climate they course um but yeah when it comes to in your life if you're the sort of person who is used to fixing problems and you don't have many problems anymore you'll begin inventing you will begin finding them in places where they don't need to be not because you are a good problemer but because you're addicted to solving problems yeah and the my identity is found and I solve problems and I will manufacture them and I will create them and I will seek them out and my wife will often she'll she'll gently Pat the table or Pat my leg when I get off into and then in Syria that she's we're right here we're Nashville we're Nashville and it's such a such a like okay yeah I can solve this this one today I can be nicer to my daughter right now yeah uh I think on the difficult Partners thing if you don't have a full tank of self-love how dare you deny the love of somebody else even if it's tricky or filled with poisonous ingredients you know what I mean like I have I don't think of myself that highly and this person isn't treating me that highly either yeah but they're treating me yeah that and and it sounds like a cliche thing that I I'm always nobody's going to exercise nobody's going to go through the pain of of any sort of life change or any sort of relationship change if at the end of the day you don't think you're worth the change right and so it's easy to keep going out and seeking these these nonsensical lack of reality like truths that exist in our world now because I don't even think I'm worth doing the hard work to right it's it's dve Ramsey's built an Empire on live un less than you make and it's like that's insane right it's Madness that's just math dude right but we create all these other alternate realities to make ourselves go cuz I don't even think I'm worth the hard the hard math a quick aside if you're anything like me packing for weekend trips somehow takes longer than the trip itself which is why I've partnered with pneumatic because this backpack is the best most beautiful most life-changing piece of luggage that I've ever found it's got a compartment for everything no more playing suitcase Tech met or rolling your clothes like it's some sort of burrito Chef you planned a beautiful trip do not let a disorganized bag ruin the vibe look if you're still on the fence about their product they come with a lifetime guarantee so this is literally the final backpack that you'll never need to buy and you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason so you can buy a new bag try it for a month if you don't like it give you a money bag and they ship internationally right now you can get a 20% discount see everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nom matic.com slod wisdom that's Nom matic.com slod wisdom yeah I mean look we accept the love that we think we deserve there you go and and that's the problem yeah because this is why you see people who are consistently in the same sorts of relationship it's intellectual cutting yeah it's intellectual self harm oh right yeah not worth it yeah I've got it with myself into submission yeah I want to ask you can I can we pontificate fire why I've been wrestling with maso's hierarchy once you get above physiology and love I don't know that this idea of esteem and self-actualization can coexist on top of these things I think they are interwoven okay and I think that we may have um given oursel an illusion that you you you become actualized as you're choosing to love every day despite hard things and how to forgive and you find esteem by consistently being part of safety and consistently being part of a community and coming back in when you get separated and this idea that they're separate and somehow there we're all going to become this little lighthouse on the hill I just don't think that I think we're at the end of self-actualization this this notion that we can somehow be set be all be little lighthouses on a hill I don't think that's how we're wired and designed I think it's more difficult in the modern world because let's face it the safety needs the basic needs the survival needs like you they they're looked after you don't have to do anything for them yeah so all of those needs now for instance good example um you're not going to starve most people listening to this podcast I would like to think aren't going to starve um but that doesn't mean that someone is going to cook a meal and put it on your dinner table right so there's a difference between having food in the house so that the people around you don't starve Y and serving them through something which they still need exactly is that what you're talking sort of a relationship between the two well I think implied especially in the modern world is um and again I don't know what maslo was thinking but there's absent participation in these bottom wrongs there's an expectation that they're going to exist for us so that I can get to the the more important stuff of sitting in a room and thinking about how great I am Whole Foods has got that sorted the police have got safety sorted yeah yeah so so the world owes me these things the world owes me love the world owes me these things so that I can get to the more important stuff which is on top and I think that's false I think the more important stuff I will find out I'll become actualized through a constant lifetime of Love well there's definitely an element that anyone going through an existential crisis anyone asking themselves am I really enacting my Logos forward is this my highest contribution to the world yeah is in a position of ultimate luxury that's it because the only chance that you have to ask yourself that question but it diminishes the the mom who day in and day out and day in and day out and day in and day out that's self-actualization dude I want to make moms great again the or or the dad who dude doesn't do the job that we do they he goes up and down fifth and sixth street collecting trash day after day after day year after year after year you don't do that and then hopefully you can get some self factorization on the side you're going to look back and say this city operated because I was a part of it that's self-actualization right it's not this this place you go to this destination that you're removed from these other things they they're tightly integrated yeah that's interesting well you know I mean how many people do you know that have reached some degree of success I two people that I think of Tuck Max and Ryan holiday both of whom live in opposite directions out here from Austin uh to people who big businesses very successful authors wellknown renowned money opportunity ities blah blah blah essentially retired to do the thing that they used to do full-time part-time and to hammer fence posts in fulltime huh like they ranching and wrangling and [ __ ] hoing the ground and fixing fence posts and the Sheep's got stuck and blah blah blah yeah well why it's because chopping wood and carrying water actually gives you a sense of satisfaction that it's hard to find elsewhere but I got to I've been thinking an awful lot about where people take joy and satisfaction from in their work and for people who maybe have a little bit of agency or self-determination to the sort of work that they do really need to be a business owner but they can maybe contribute to how the teams are put together maybe part of a small business or a startup or maybe they are you know independent contractor or something like that and um I've been thinking a lot about bands and the way that bands um they have to work very hard but it's a very enjoyable uh career and Performing and concerts rank as some of the high highest happiness Pursuits that you can do huge huge huge studies that look at um anything that's Collective effervescence especially if you're performing but also if you're experiencing you have to presume that if you're performing you also get the benefit of experiencing at the same time and um I was thinking like okay so what is it that they're doing that's keeping them going when they're you know 50 dates deep into this big long tour and they're in [ __ ] Japan and they're sleep deprived blah blah blah and I think a big part of it is having other people to share the successes with yeah to be able to I don't just mean like coming home to your wife and her going no good for you honey or whatever it might be but a good thing happens and you have someone that you can go Ah that's [ __ ] sick you know what I mean like and it wasn't your wife in that moment but it was your manager that's right right you on the phone to your manager your manager's there screaming down the phone because you're both on a journey together that's right if you'd done your own bookings who would you have screamed to yeah I would have pumped my fist and been like cool and and forgotten about it you've got this memory you wouldn't have remembered it if it was on your own that's right you wouldn't have remembered it yeah and then having my wife walk up at one of those events she surprising me walked up with a microphone and said I'm so proud of you I'll remember that to the day I died right I'll remember that to the day I died yeah because it meant something it was a shared experience and kind of like standup comedy I've become obsessed over the last few years man just obsessed I live around the corner from a club in Nashville and I kind of go too much I love it but that and music it's got a pretty tight feedback loop to it exactly well I mean you have immediate response from the audience it's one of the last bastions of human connection you play a good note they make a noise you tell a good joke they make a noise it's very quick so yeah I think uh just one thing that's come to me although the internet and remote working have afforded everybody the opportunity to step back and to you know I can work from anywhere man you know I can be on the top of a mountain I can determine my own working schedule I don't need anybody else I just need a laptop and an internet connection I'm good that's great but it siloed you off from being able to do the thing that you actually wanted to do which was in enjoy the [ __ ] process of doing the work look some people are just looking to earn in pounds and spending pesos and they have whatever like fulfillment that occurs outside of their job fine but if you want to get some fulfillment from your job I don't think that you can solo Sigma male Lone Ranger entrepreneur it in [ __ ] B Because who when you nail this next client on a sales call for like the biggest deal you've ever oh my God like hulet pack are going to use our software dude you just made 20 grand right you just made 20 grand oh it's just me that made 20 grand who am I going to celebrate with and I'm fired up kind of but I'm not that fired up because the whole the whole reason that you want to win something is so that you can go with other people that's the Wolf of Wall Street DiCaprio's character looks like he's he's addicted to the deal I don't think he was I think he was addicted to the room cheering yeah you know what I mean to that to that celebration and the deal gets you that right yes yes so that becomes the proxy and all the money is is just the number that you get to like shout in the air with everybody else that's it that's it in the A and the oh my gosh how' you do that that's amazing so a perfect example of this I'm going to go and do uh it looks like it's the first time I'm talking about it I'm going to go and do a tour around America and Canada outstanding later this year come to Nashville please it's bucked is it oh yeah outstanding uh so as a part of that I'm going to get to I I don't need a warm-up right it's 2 hours of me talking on stage I'm going to take a warm-up because I want someone to finish the show with and [ __ ] high five and it might be Zach my ex-housemate who plays guitar it might be James Smith from Australia it might be somebody I might get you know guests to come and do warmart but I want someone there with me so that I don't go back to the hotel on my own and think about how good or how bad it was bro you know what I mean like I've got friends who are DJs dude I've got friend DJing looks from the outside like the most dialed like in the world let me tell you it is on the come up before you've got your tour manager with you before you've got an opener with you before you've got like a structure around you it's kind of a bit like hell you're playing until 3 in the morning if you've got backtack gigs I have a friend who did played a gig on a Monday in Argentina or Bonaire something and the next time he got to sleep in a bed was Saturday so it's was Monday to Saturday and he played four gigs over five time zones of whatever it was and and uh he ended up basically having like a small psychotic break talked about it on the podcast years ago now and uh he had he came to in a supermarket sat on the floor and he had laid around him one of every different type of hair product he'd been scooping it up and putting it on his head cuz he realized his hair was [ __ ] he grabbed a flet of broccoli 48 dishwasher tablets and walked out like you had a full like you know part part psychotic break you think huh that doesn't sound fun but from the outside oh my God he's living his dream he gets to play his music around the world like careful what you wish comes at a cost man yeah especially on your own yeah there's always there's always a trade there's always a trade um talking about I guess the next step people get into relationships with those that they feel like they need to fix why do people stay in relationships even if they're not being fulfilled talk to me about fulfillment and I think sometimes that's the model you have I think sometimes I'm not worth my needs being fulfilled sometimes I don't even know what that would feel like if my needs were fulfilled and so kind of you talked about earlier I'm just going to keep expanding what my needs need to be because my need is actually seeing you how high you can jump and it just keeps expanding expanding but I think for most of us we don't have a model of what it looks like our moms and dads if you look at the demographics across like there was only one parent in the house or they were co-managers of the house they didn't even like each other right and I've got no picture of what someone who actually loves me and is connected with me and quote unquote needs uh and by the way I've been struggling lately and love to get your thoughts on this I've been struggling with the idea of needs uh because I think needs have turned modern relationships into a very parasitic relationship and I think beneath that a more vulnerable scary question to ask is what I want and I think it's easy if I lob a need grenade at you I need you to do these things this this this this and this versus man I really want you to X Y and Z CU one of those I kind of take out the I need this and if you don't do this then then you're not performing or I really want you do you want me to do you see me oh that's lovely and so I think most of us are so terrified at asking the want question of ourselves and of our partner that we cast it all as needs right because the want can be denied but the need can't the want should could be denied but the need should not If you deny my needs you're an ass mhm If you deny my wants cuz you might not want that's different one of the most common questions I get from Married Men is I just want her I I just want more sex right I want more sex I want better sex Etc but they come at it with I need more sex but if you need something then it goes on the chore list along with the diapers and the this and I got to clean the kitchen which is unbelievably sexy I'll get you off and then I'm gonna go I'm gonna go to bed right a way more terrifying question for a modern male is to a wife with two kids and it's exhausting and you're both working full-time I want you do you want me and if you don't we need to have that conversation what would what would desire look like that's a scarier conversation man and there are basic needs so I don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water but I think most of this comes down to wants and that's terrifying that's an awesome reframe that's really good yeah I think in the process of of defining our wants and risking the potential for somebody to be unprepared to fulfill them for us uh we feel less than yeah or um we don't have a psychology for being wrong I think you've talked about this on another show that I listened to um before I I went to college I went to this very well-meaning Texas Church camp and they took us 18-year-old guys in a room and they're like the world's going to destroy you so write down right now what your non-negotiables for your life partner will be mhm write them down right now cuz they're going to get watered down and the edges rubbed off it's going to be bad oh okay so you were sort of at this purest yeah before the world soils you right down actually what you're really going to want you're 10 nonnegotiable I'm 26 years with the same person the same woman and I think she had two of the 10 and one of them was be a pretty girl right like be a beautiful woman and so it's what when I say I want something so often my manager that's his job to be like you don't want that like I really want this you don't want that right and we don't have a psychology for being wrong we just are so L around the nose by our feelings I feel I feel I feel I feel and man I can get what I want when I cast it in in the form of a need and you have to meet it that's fascinating I suppose as well you know it goes back to what do you think you deserve and if we don't have a we don't have we don't have a man if you had to fight and scratch and Claw and sing and dance in a third grade math class to get your mom to look you in the eye you don't think you're worthy of a want you know what I mean if you had to sing and dance on a soccer field for your dad to patch you on the back no eye contact of course but just patch you on the back you don't think you you you don't you're not worthy of wanting anything everything has to be a need well also what was the model of uh needs and wants and desires being requested and fulfilled in the household because you know a lot of the generation that are growing up now and are asking themselves these questions their parents they didn't have that sort of communication education you know there wasn't podcasts and [ __ ] Arthur Brooks and all of this stuff to help everybody through so you go okay well what was the model of how to communicate the things well what about like passive aggression that's it what about Shadow sentence about requ what and bit you never it yeah we were casting movies we didn't even know we were in and we got in trouble for not knowing the lines right yeah yeah you didn't attend a party you weren't invited yes yeah yeah yeah and then how dare you not not show up yep right yeah yep and you don't know um so yeah I think the sense of what what are you worth what are you worth what what what should you get out of this and do you even know what it is that you're asking for like if you got an idea of it um and I guess okay moving one step forward from this if somebody feels convinced that they should leave a relationship but they're struggling to accumulate The Bravery to be able to sort of pull the pin maybe they've got close a few times and they've bailed out uh what would you say to sort of motivate that person who deep down knows that it's the right thing to do but as of yet just the courage kind of hasn't come to them yeah that's a great question I think uh I think there's a practical aspect to this and then I think there's a relational aspect to this if um there's a very real um the data is pretty clear that you know more women file for divorce but women's net worth often plummets right and so there's a very real economic consequence so if you're married to somebody if you're living with somebody and you know I got to get out of this thing there's a very real math problem you have to solve and that's unfortunate and that's scary and the social services are pretty tough but there's a very real question suppose that the equivalent would be the same for men but in Reverse pay alimony that's exactly right yeah yeah yeah um and so I think there's a there's a math problem there not to say stay together for the math right that's I I haven't seen that bumper sticker but um there's a very real reality to this the other side of it is I know for most of us when emotions are a sign especially strong emotions are a sign that your body's trying to protect you and when your body's trying to protect you you're not thinking and so for me it's been very important to have a couple of men in my life that I Outsource some of these things to I'm going sit down with you make sure I'm seeing this thing clearly cuz here's what I'm feeling and it's been more than once in my life when I sit down with a few of my old 30-year plus ride or die buddies and I'm like she's doing this and this and this and they're like have you looked in a mirror man and they're able to see something right no no Warrior goes into battle Without Eyes in the sky and so I think um I often or in our in our Lone Ranger cowbo boy world we live in man it's you got to know all this all do this by yourself and so I'm constantly telling people dude go get a cup of coffee with somebody and just exhale then tell them what's going on and they may say hey there's a common thing on my show someone will call and be like my sex life screwed up we have only had sex twice last year it's a disaster it's Fallen apart and then 10 minutes into the conversation it's like well we have a 5-year-old a three-year-old a one-year-old and she's pregnant I'm like bro hang up the phone and call me back like you all you'll have survival sex you all fig the thing out like you're not broke and it's okay right um but that's just you just need somebody to sit with you um but when it comes to courage and bravery I think at some point we have to head into the discomfort I mean that's all the that's all Jud brewer stuff on anxiety but you got to head into it the thing that you're scared about and anxious about we'll get back to talking to John in just one minute but first I need to tell you about function staying on top of your health requires more than just an annual physical which is why I partnered with function they run lab tests twice a year that track over a 100 biomarkers and monitor for early signs of thousands of diseases they even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one which is five times more than you get from an annual physical you receive insights from a team of expert Physicians who provide detailed written clinician summaries of their observations and phone consultations for any critical findings getting these lab tests done would usually cost thousands but with function it's only $500 and right now you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and bypass their weight list by going to the link in the description below or heading to function health.com slod wisdom that's function health.com slod wisdom yeah I think um some of the questions I've asked friends about when they've been on the fence unsure scared about being alone about losing this attachment you know one of the things is how much of your life is thinking about this breakup taking up like what other productive or peaceful or mindful thoughts is this taking the space of yeah how often are you not present at dinner or not present at work or you know trying to meditate or train in the gym or do any of the things that usually bring you Joy and you're not thinking about where you are and uh that's one of my when someone says hey should I break up with them I'm thinking about this this I always say absolutely you should break up with them and I just watch and if their if their shoulders drop if their face drops that may be the right move yeah because they no yeah they've got a sense of relief from from that being on the other side they're just asking you for permission that's right they're just asking you for permission there's this great uh you know Rick Hansen he wrote hardwiring happiness dude unreal imagine CBT meets uh Dharma wisdom meets mindfulness meets Neuroscience it's a hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hansen he's got a phenomenal phenomenal uh podcast with his son Forest Hanson I think it's called being well and um he dropped this quote that said uh wisdom is choosing a greater happiness over a lesser happiness and I think you know a lot of the time we assume that change is only ever going to make things worse even though when we look back almost all changes have made things better but we don't fear change we fear loss true yeah but that's uncertainty we don't necessarily feel lost we feel uncertain that's right right because losing and Abus partner isn't you're not fearing that you're fearing the uncertainty of what it would be like to be without them you know we have two needs as humans we have an exploration need and we have a security need right their intention right correct novelty yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah uh novelty safety you need to go out and get some berries you need to go to a new Bush because this one's empty but also there's a risk of going there because there might be a line behind it it might kill you um I think one of the things that's really useful is to try and have faith that you are the sort of person who can handle change well like just to think about that as an ideal like it makes a world inside of your mind where you don't need to fear things adjusting because changes happened in the past and you seem to deal with it quite well then change is going to happen in the future you're probably going to deal with that so why not this one like why not back yourself to be able to be the sort of person who can deal with change well like you've got this you're flexible and you're okay in different situations and yeah I you know unfortunately a lot of the people who have the opportunity to choose Partners to to um not just have to settle for the first thing that happens to you know have different life opportunities to move away from the to they are probably quite hard workers and the problem with being a hard worker is that you have to have a pain tolerance and if your pain tolerance is quite high that means that your pain tolerance for emotional deprivation is quite High which means that you'll stick about in a relationship that isn't serving you for a very very long time just keep going and going and going and going mhm cuz that's what we do yeah you're used to putting your nose against the grindstone and things being tough yeah and coming out the other side and going I wasn't that happy but [ __ ] I got through it yeah I got because in the past in other areas of life in the gym or in diet or in building a meditation habit or in business or in skill acquisition you have learned to associate delayed gratification you're basically marshmallow testing your way through through life right over and over again and you go well look there's certain things that you just kind of need to embrace the suck yes and on the other side of which there will be maybe not happiness but meaning and fulfillment and well-being and perhaps Downstream from that you get some like fun and enjoyment and happiness and blah blah but probably not in your relationship right I don't think anybody's going to congratulate you on your deathbed for saying he suffered in silence you know what I mean yeah except that I don't know that I mean it takes two to tango right but I think that me makes suffering the the inevitable outcome and I I remember when my wife and I were sitting across the table uh like the message I sent to her cuz we were speaking was no no no crying no fighting no screaming and this was self-directed I'm the emotional one um we got to we got to say are we still doing this this is it like cuz the marriage we've had up till now is over like are we keep doing this and but I remember that conversation when we both came to the realization we have both mutually chosen a miserable marriage and the beauty is we can choose a not miserable one and I think that agency of choice has been taken away by a culture of disempowerment so I think the idea of like it's either bail or suffering silence I think that's a that is I don't think it's that binary I think you can also both be like d we chose suck and I chose I I did something whoever you may be I I stepped out on the marriage I I gambled a bunch of money way like I did an extra bad thing if you want to frame it like that we can both choose something different and that to me is a it's not on the table anymore but if you look past the same thing happens relationally those who stick it out and they choose something different choose something magnanimous um which is very on Romeo and Juliet right you're supposed to just be Star Cross lovers M it's stupid it's nonsense you choose it and you keep choosing it and you keep choosing it man you see people who've been through hell and they're on the other side that's the goofy guys that have real short shorts on and no business wearing that short of shorts at the beach and they don't care right because that because she loves them yeah right and it's it's a different kind of it's a it's a different kind of depth that love I've heard you say before about how the time I think this is your conversation with Arthur Brooks uh the time when you want to pull away the most is the time when you're supposed to in I did it last night with my daughter she n years old man she's got a supernatural ability she knows where every single hidden button buttons I didn't even know I had she just knows and she screaming and hollering and yelling and th doing her nine-year-old stuff and started to walk away and I literally went downstairs to head out the door with a dog to go for a walk and I stopped this is that that moment that's when Arthur Brooks is ringing in my head and you turn around you walk back in and I went and climbed into bed with her and my wife's reading a book and I just climbed she shoves me out of the way I move and and then within 30 seconds you hear her breathing different and then she reaches over and grabs your hand and that's what dads do emotionally immature children run off dads go right through it like yeah you had a child unchild war about to begin it's myy old bro that's right dude was it Who ah it may have been it may have been Sala Stefano that I called recently and like hey I'm having a disagreement with my 14-year-old and he just started dying laughing goes I was going to stop you right there and I was like what am I what am I doing and I was like I'll call no it was Lane Norton I called him I was like hey I'm arguing with my 14-year-old he goes how about I just stop you right there and I was like what do I do right yeah I use for living it happens yeah right that's [ __ ] funny and then you uh roll it off and you move on right you know one final thing that I heard that I thought was such a [ __ ] great rubric for um how do you know if you've sort of really given this as good of a shot as you can in a relationship before you decide to pull the pen it was you know that you've made a serious effort by comparing the level of effort that you've put in to the people that you admire and the level of effort that they bring to something before they decide to quit like just think about that think about how much effort the people that you admire the friends around you people in your life the people you look up to think about how much effort they put into something before they go like it's time to stop trying to grow roses in this parking lot I think that gives you confidence in your view that it's time to move on you go any other reasonable person would have said this is too much even the best of the reasonable people which are the people presumably that I admire because I think what what everybody wants to hear when they've got a really existential disagreement in a relationship is you know what man you're not crazy yeah that's it you're not crazy for thinking that and you go that's it oh my God cuz I was fracked with so much self-doubt and I thought this was me being petty I thought this was me and a lot of the times it is right and you need to know that's why you got to have [ __ ] L people that's right um but I thought it was me being petty I thought it was me being juvenile I thought I was being rash uh and someone goes you're not crazy you're not crazy for feeling like that I think I think that's that's completely an acceptable position to hold [ __ ] well what do I do now I actually have a firm fact because you get stuck in are my desires legitimate should I be able to is it okay to want what I want yeah and you know if you've had a life of marshmallow testing your way through things you have learned to not want what you want that's it you've learned to put off off the things that you want in place of doing something that's harder or more boring I think the illusion though is it's going to feel a certain way right when if I get what I want that Suddenly It's going to extrinsically fill that Gap oh yeah in my chest and I think when when you u i remember telling my counselor recently my therapist recently I just want to feel what I know and that was a heavy sentence that I never said before but like I know these things to be true but I want to be able to feel them here right and that becomes the word getting from here to here that's a lot of a lot of people especially now are you know what do you say physiologically decapitated from the neck down love that uh you know they just exist and you know this is me speaking to me as I desperately try to get more embodied with with stuff but dude feeling feelings is really [ __ ] hard I went on a journey over the last year of trying to do it speaking to con and Beaton speaking to every different expert that I could find to talk about okay so what does it mean to tap into your emotions what does it mean to feel feelings you know Joe Hudson you familiar with him out of accomplishment going on a a 7-Day Retreat uh the back end of September with him uh called Ground Breakers and they've got clinical studies showing that it moves neuroticism longitudinally nudges neuroticism uh in the direction that you wanted to it makes a bunch of other personality changes but he's like it's like Navy SEAL hell week for your emotions so don't book anything for the next week yeah and uh I'm really excited I'm going to get daunted as I get closer to it um but yeah man it's a one of the most interesting questions talking about wants um is what do you want to want yeah I adore that question it's an essay by kyleen Roa from years ago his website has now been taken over by like a Ukrainian porn uh thing you know someone's got a hold of the WordPress logins and they've changed is website um but I downloaded the PDF so I revisit it pretty regularly and um yeah the question of what do you want to want you know because your your desires Define the path of least resistance that your life is going to take and a lot of the time people wait your desire so the things that you want your desires will pull you in a direction that is the easiest for you to go even if even if that is very difficult even if it's very difficult yeah of course okay and even if it is painful even if it's toxic even if it's uh malignant To The World At Large the things that you want it's the old um the man who loves to walk will work than the man who is forced to walk or whatever yeah um your desires Define the path of least resistance inside of your life okay so what you want to do is align the things that you want with the things that you want to want okay because if you don't ever step in and ask yourself what you actually want to want you end up having your desires defined for you by the worst parts of yourself that's exactly right by Society at large and by the way that you've dealt with past traumas and by the paths of least resistance and all of this stuff it all comes together and then if you're not careful you end up in a place not only that you don't want to be but that you didn't even mean to get to yes and it doesn't solve the problem you thought you were trying to solve because what you wanted was not what you wanted to want so my wife's way of asking that question we were sitting at that table was one hand on the table like how do you want this house to feel when you walk in every day and dude I vomited I was like dude I want you to want that I'm here I want you to be happy that I'm here I want my daughter to come running at me like she had a daddy daddy daddy with like a like a a inside of a wrapping paper roll I'm always in this sword fight with her that I don't even know him right my son making fart noise like I want the house to feel warm she like okay then you can't bring that last meeting in here and you got to work out and you and I both know when you eat like this and this and this we get the downstream grumpy dad three days later and it became a very but it became that how do you want this place to feel when you walk in the room in the house what a great question oh my God and let's reverse engine who the [ __ ] your wife she's Yoda dude yeah she's a Yoda absolutely she's just a wise still I didn't realize that you were the relationally [ __ ] one in oh are you kidding me yeah the guy that's got the call- in show is the one that actually doesn't know anything about but she never would have been at a punk rock Marsh pit if it wasn't for me so there you go yeah very important we each we each bring our pieces to the relationship yeah um okay taking one step forward uh what is your advice for how people can better move on from breakups they've got this gosh that's a great question rumination they're struggling checking the social media everything reminds them of them I'm never going to find anybody as good how do people move on from relationships we've got a uh allergy to grief in our culture like that's a natural process we used to we we used to have a room in the house called The Parlor where the body would would rest for two to three to four days before it was buried and now we outsourced that and we call it the living room I think it was it was a Southern Living that declared it in the early 1900s like it's no longer The Parlor it's now the living room right but we've just plucked grief out of our Lives just this reality that things don't always work out and we had a collect group of people you sat in a home with a dead relative right there right that was just a part of the grieving process and the body's got ways that you begin to breathe again and somebody shows up with food and somebody shows up with food and somebody shows up with food and right it's like being at the beach and it feels like you're drowning but you stand up and the water's just only 3 feet deep right and we've just so if you leave a long-term relationship dude the number of students that would come into my office and be like hey I'm I'm depressed my dad just moved out on my mom and I always like maybe you're clinically depressed but I bet you're sad and they didn't have a psychology for that like we don't do that that's a thing we solve we solve for sad like no man that's a basic human emotion let's just be sad like your family broke up your dad left let's sit in that and so if you lose an important relationship man your your body's working right if it wants you just to stay under the covers for a while your body's working right if you want to go out your body's working right if you don't like if you're like wondering am I lovable that's not something to be solved man that's something to sit with and if you don't have people in your life man your body's going to spin out on you dude because it knows it can't carry that burden alone that's it is we have to have we have to have a place for grief for being sad and I think in our current world the only way to do it is to be what what looks radical right I'm gonna block people I'm gonna delete people I'm gonna take my phone off I'm going to have a group of people that are going to come to my house every every night for two weeks I'm going to play stupid board games something stupid right or whatever um I'm gonna give myself permission to not go out for a month because I'm tired I just feel Dr like man that's just that's called just honoring the system man you know what I mean just honor the system because you're going to duct tape over that thing in counseling we we we say it's called call it leakage it'll find a way out and it usually finds a way out at a real in opportune time or you can honor it and invite somebody to sit in there with you how can you tell if you've got leakage what sort of what are the most typical forms of leakage oh rage uh saying the words if they would just and I don't even care what the I don't even care who and what you're talking about if they would just the guy in the car next to you doesn't even matter if they would just yeah if you start making up imaginary stories about people like the uh I hear from most folks across the country that happens in the shower you start having imaginary conversations with people that you'll never have in real life if I see Chris again dude I'm going to tell that dude that you're never going to do that it's your body just trying to spin up uh Berne Brown calls it dress hsing tragedy when you are just constantly in a loop of planning the next sword fight that you're going to just do the super move at the end man and your body doesn't know the difference man so it goes to war in the shower you ever done that you step out and you come out of your bedroom and your partner in there and you're mad and they have no idea and they're just eating right you're like how can you just 15minute argument with you dude and I by the way I crushed you in that argument it's insane where you see your boss the next day after a night of like I'm going to tell you're not going to tell them anything right so I it's when you go into solution solving mode on rage fighting running hiding man we broke up we had plans I'm G sit here hey this is going to be weird when you come over to my house bring tacos and uh I'm not going to talk to you cuz it's going to be weird sub here we're gonna play video games right you can watch a stupid game with me I'm going to a show I bought two tickets we're going to the show no asking me about so and so but we're just gonna go you're too old to be mosh pitting John I know we're going anyway right and it's it's just honoring you're supposed to be sad you're supposed to be sad then if you wake up 90 days later and it becomes you're sking work you need to call somebody right that's when it becomes a pathology you got you got to call somebody this episode is brought to you by Aid sleep if you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold this is going to help just add eight sleeps pod four Ultra to your mattress like a fitted sheet and it automatically cools down or warms up each side of your bed up to 20° plus it's got integrated sensors to track your sleep time sleep phases your HIV you're snoring and your heart rate with 99% accuracy and it'll even start cooling or heating your bed for you an hour before bedtime which is why eight sleep has been clinically proven to increase Total Sleep by up to 1 hour every night that is the ultim Game Changer this thing is [ __ ] magic and I can't believe it exists and when I travel on the road it feels primitive and medieval and awful and I hate it and you need one in your life best of all they have a 30-day sleep trial so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights and if you don't like it they will give you your money back plus they ship internationally right now you can get $350 off the Pod 4 ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8sleep.com slod wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's EIG HTS sleep.com wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout I seem to remember in uh lost connections Johan Harry's book man what a great book uh that there's a carve out in the DSM for grief around depression yeah which to me undermines the whole D you don't get me start on DSM but that's a whole other thing it makes sense to me though that if you were to say I feel depressed my dad died yesterday I broke up with my girlfriend yesterday you well that okay the emotion might be that of depression right so the symptoms are correct but the diagnosis that's caused the symptoms or the cause of the symptoms seems to not fit it's completely irrelevant yeah all diagnosis is in the DSM is a clust a symptom of clusters I mean a cluster of symptoms right that's it it's totally devoid of context the point being you should be sleep not sleeping or you should be sleeping all day you should not be able to control your thoughts or have just fog of in your head corre all those things are right your dad died there's not a there's not a uh uh it's David Kessler who I think is the world's foremost Guru on Grief he says it's like a fingerprint man everybody looks different and that's why trying to solve it human I I spoke to human about this years ago first ever episode that we did and I was talking about getting over breakups and he said that it's the exact same circuits as grief that's exactly right is death the problem is that they're still alive yeah and you can be in touch with them you can resurrect this dead person M so imagine that a person that you felt the closest to died but you had a button that could resurrect them and it happens to be in WhatsApp yeah and there is always this sort of rumination this potential this so I think you know that's why it sounds cheesy but I always recommend somebody have a ceremony okay like a funeral relationship yeah and and that can be like sex in the city like this big glor it doesn't have to be that but it is uh and I love Kesler also says grief to a witness can't G by yourself you just biochemically you can't do it by yourself you got to have other people and so I'm going to sit with you and we're going to burn the letter we're going to write the mean whatever the mean thing is but when we wake up tomorrow probably a little bit hung over a little bit exhausted uh there's G to be a period at the end of that sentence and I'm just gonna be sad because I'm going to reach to grab my phone to call her and she's not I'm not calling her I'm GNA pick up my phone it's be no text it's so interesting the ceremony yeah you have to but you have to give your body a a period at the end of that sentence and we just Rob ourselves of it we just go to the next go to the next go to the next swipe right swipe right and we got to Exhale you're not broken I love that that circuitry that gets reused was was really eye openening for me it's it's a loss it's a loss it happens a lot with parents too when you become 35 and you're like hey that was abuse and they're like you coming for Christmas and you're like I don't know man you know what I mean uh that one's a tough one it happened a lot during uh uh during me too where huh that wasn't that wasn't so dialed that he touched me like that well it was like well it's like he's a great dad we have three kids he's a good provider good husband we have a great time hey I think that was rape back in college what do I do now right my God and it's a yeah you're you're talking about like a real psychological train wreck man that's tough and those were hard things to navigate I mean [ __ ] that this is one of the challenges I suppose of doing inner work of doing any kind of introspection that you start turning over these rocks or looking through I'm going to open these doors inside of this house I've lived in my entire life and then you realize that every so often you open one and there's a [ __ ] demon hiding in there covered in [ __ ] yeah well and and I I wonder if we man we can go down a whole Rabbit Hole in this that's PR for another show I I remember my high school metal band we played at this event at the end of our senior year called uh it's called Mike stock it was in an old skating rink and Chris to say that we crushed it bro I'm talking Legend any record exec on planet would have signed us that day it was Legend crushed it I went to college with my head hell High the band kind of dissolved then like my sophomore year college I'm at home back in Houston with my family somebody calls right bro we found a VHS of the record of the show somebody had a one of those big box VHS dude we piled around the TV yo it was not good it was so bad dude I forgot the words it was a disaster it was that's not good I forgot somebody broke a string and it got me thinking evolutionarily like my body created a story for that moment and me going back this technology that has never existed those old photo albums that have never existed for all of human history I don't know if that's super good for us and it's magnified now with kids who are like Mom take a picture mom let me see can I see the video of me the thing I just did that sort of recursive world man we're we're just we're playing roulette with our nervous system strange right because in one we're not designed to see that stuff yeah but as you just mentioned in one way sometimes we don't want to remember the [ __ ] that happened that's exactly right there's a protective measure to it correct yeah the psychological immune system as as it's known Adam masani has this thing where he says um the closest thing to an equation in Psychology is tragedy plus time equals comedy and uh yeah something that's atrocious that happened a while ago yeah can actually be funny that's what healing is right that my body doesn't go to war again it doesn't it doesn't act as though it's happening again let's say uh but you you experienced it with your psychoanalysis right it opens a bunch of Loops man and now it's like oh I got a whole bunch of other work to do now yeah and I think a couple of the things that happened there Stan tkin did your brain on love best best book on attachment that I've ever listened to only exists as an audiobook to your brain on Love by Stan tkin [ __ ] outstanding and he talks about how um memories get moved from short-term memory to long-term memory and sometimes they sit in both and if you've got them sitting in both that's really really dangerous because the short-term memory is this is still Salient and I need to keep a hold of it sit it keeps on feed feeding it and feeding it and feeding it and um yeah what you want to do is like clear that [ __ ] out so he has he has two really great uh bits of advice for for relationships uh he doesn't want stuff to get into long-term memory um so he says you have uh an incident that occurs with your partner a triggering event of some kind and he says your goal should be you need to be able to do this in less than about two minutes so you need to plan and you need to talk about how you do this something happens your your partner sort of jibs you at the dinner table and it really sort of sets you off you're in front of a someone that you're trying to get a promotion from or somebody respect or just a friend or a family member or something in your partner does something that really really gets to you you need to be able to as quickly as possible in less than about 2 minutes go to one side and say hey look like that thing that just happened and the partner needs to be able to at least bring you back down they don't need to fix it it's like look we can talk about this properly later on I just wanted to tell you how much I love you I'm really sorry that I didn't mean to do that to just like yeah because the longer that you leave that there unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments that's it and that gets ported over into long-term memory and that's going to stick about the other problem that you have is when as you know from CBT which is that what's that eye tracking thing that they do yeah yes um what are you doing with that you're trying to move things that are already too locked into short-term memory your body still thinks out they long-term memory but they're in shortterm they're trying to get it out of short-term memory and push it across because you're not going to be able to get rid it from Long memory anymore so you have two choices cut it off so it doesn't go at all but then sometimes it's gone and it's still here in short-term memory so you need to get rid of it from that too so you got EMDR for the stuff that's stuck about for too long and basically as far as I can tell um if when you think about a memory an uncomfortable memory traumatic thing that happened in your past if it still creates an emotional response inside of you your heart rate Rises you get hot you get flustered it makes you feel agitated um if you see it from a firstperson perspective if you're watching through your own eyes as opposed to sort of watching it from above and behind um if you can still sort of hear the sounds very viscerally all of this suggests that it's still in short-term memory and I'm going to guess there's like a million ways dude I love that Ethan cross talks about a great way to get out of Loops is to talk to yourself in the third person yes that's the reason you won right yeah it's it's fantastic like hey John where are what are you gonna do about this yeah yeah yeah instead what am I what am I what am I what am I all right John you messed up John you should go tell her you're sorry sorry y oh I need to tell her I'm Sor and man we're off to to protection your ability to argue with yourself is impressive what would you say you know maybe someone's listening and hey [ __ ] uh I think that thing that happened in my in earlier on in my life I think that was like kind of messed up and huh I haven't really dealt with that thing and I think it's still playing on my mind a bit where do people start with processing bad events like that if it if it's a traumatic event if it's I think it was raped I think it was assaulted I think I was abused then I always think it's good to start with somebody yeah it's always good to put on the table and man it can be really tough doing it with the person who like going to your parent or to your partner who may have done the thing because they're going to instantly have to defend themselves and man that that Cascade is is messy so that's when you get a trusted friend or a or a counselor just to say hey this happened going back to what you said earlier am I crazy and somebody might say yeah a good friend will say yeah you're kind of crazy it's not a big deal um uh or just I sat with a counselor recently and she was like no that's a big that's a big one what about a big deal what about something which is not quite if that's a nine or a 10 what about what about stuff that's fives that's write it down an exhale and there's something I think I think there's something Transcendent about getting out of your body and looking at it on a piece of paper like descriptively what are you doing are you are you reliving it are you allowing yourself to feel the emotions of it I think initially I want to know and I I want to be able to write it down and say my fifth grader has really been pissing me off lately right and then you can exhale and say does a fifth grader have the ability to piss you off because if so you're a really disregulated adult right and you can have that conversation if it is I'm feeling like I want to hit my fifth grader like I'm feeling this need I just want to punch them through a wall go talk to somebody because you're gonna hurt some right so some of that is and then uh gosh what's the guy he did all the great work on journaling I mean there is something really profound about about 15 to 20 minutes of sitting in it and writing I I haven't seen a lot of success with people doing that by themselves doing it with somebody else um so what do you how do you journal with somebody else oh I do that now with a guy named luk lafever like you like they give you prompts and then they have you think through it and they have you exhale for a bit and they have you write 10 minutes free style so this is like guided journaling it's not like you're you're not sitting with another person yeah yeah yeah yeah right oh that's cool and what's that called it's just a just a thing he does but um he called who's his name is Luke laf fever okay he's out of Naval an online course typ he's out of Naval yeah yeah yeah um but he's a guy that always he's always pushed journaling and pushed journaling and push journaling and I always kind of rolled my eyes like I'm a grown man I don't need a diary right and I knew the I knew the the therapeutic literature about like write down the stuff that's good but what I got really sophisticated at was writing down my injustices writing down my gratitudes and writing down my things I needed to do to fix it and all of that was neck up correct and no point tapping into emotions so there's a I mean that's awesome and I is there a name of his course do you know is a I don't um I can send it to you cool yeah but it's excellent yeah so Rick is is really really good with this as well Rick hen from hardwearing happiness and uh what he has is the heel framework so have inrich absorb and then optionally Link at the end so uh have a good experience so a good opportunity right now might be [ __ ] it's the first time I've met John and like I'm really enjoying this and I feel competent and that's really [ __ ] night this is my this is my job this is my life work right now millions of people that get to listen to this and I really hope it's helping them and [ __ ] that's awesome so have a good experience you need to notice it right so you need a degree of mindfulness so you need to be able to see have the experience and notice it so then you have enrich which is sort of I'm allowing it to sort of fill a little bit and you're sitting with it for as long as possible 30 seconds to a minute is really good and then you have absorb and absorb is Imagine The Experience sinking down and becoming a part of you so I think that's a little bit more embodied right so you've got oh this is nice and I'm kind of up here and I'm enrich I'm sort of feeling it's expanding and oh I'm sort of sitting in and then absorb it's like sinking down into me and that's becoming a part of me and um I think you can do this I mentioned before and I I did for a very long time like 10 6mon journals in a row basically with like minimal breaks in between it for the end of my 20s until a couple of years ago but a lot of it just ended up being homework it's like admin that's it and I'm like I'm just paying [ __ ] in retrospect I thought I was doing the thing and I can't I shouldn't shout at a previous version of me who did the thing he thought he was supposed to be doing yeah but I was largely just like filing stuff um whereas now and this is half Tony Robbins half Rick Hansen and I've dispensed with most of the other stuff from journaling on a morning and just three things that you're grateful for but as opposed to just writing them down like take one minute for each thing and just really so I had a call with my best friend the guy whose um best man I was at his wedding had a call with him yesterday for like 45 minutes I was like I [ __ ] love Zach like he always listens he's always got awesome advice he's in a good mood all the time he's really receptive uh he's so fun like he really cares he really cares about me and it's so nice and you're like allowing that sense I think [ __ ] that took a minute to do what was the other one the the fresh air this morning just smelled awesome like coming through the window in front of my bedroom it smells so good like it's really really refreshing what was the other one uh uh I developed uh bravery and courage to overcome difficult things and I wouldn't have done that previously I think about how Pat proud of yourself you are that you've done this stuff like three really one of them was literally the [ __ ] wind but so and I just you know I finished that and I was like I only had three minutes before the gym in any case I was like that was so [ __ ] nice mhm what a lovely way to start a morning yeah and uh yeah I get the sense that a lot of journaling done badly kind of ends up being a like a highlighter girl from school who has a very well organized ring binder of what she was doing that day yeah for me it becomes like a weekly report for a business correct what did I do yeah what was my was my up or down yeah yeah it's a p&l it's exactly right uh a buddy of mine's going to a retreat right now and his wife reached out and said hey would you The Retreat director asked for a few of his closest friends to write a letter and I don't know what he'll get from that letter but I tell you what it was it really was transformative for me it was so much so that my 14-year-old comes B bopping in just you know in his underwear and like hey that like I said hey I want you to read this I'm I'm GNA read this to you out loud this is me this is a letter I'm writing to my friend I want him to hear what his dad that his dad's got adult male friends like this and it was cool for him to hear that and at the end he was like cool dad like you know I don't I just have to hope it's downloading somewhere it was like now I had this big spiritual moment and he's like all right d That's cool kind of like he's upside down on my on that little Teeter thing just hanging there um but man it it lifted my spirits to know I got a friend that good I got a friend that good man so maybe maybe that's an important exercise but it takes you back right he's the guy I called my wife went into labor I don't know what to do man um he's the guy who I called when I thought I was going to get let go from a job he's the guy I called before the very first parent I had to tell their kid died I called him cuz i' heard him do it before and I was like I want to make sure I'm doing this right and he said you're doing it right don't ever call me again you got this right and that kind of blessing that everyone wants from their dad right and so it was it but but it took me back to those moments just you're you're remembering those moments and man but that was me writing him a note right yeah yeah I mean what's it like for him to but in some ways you know being selfless it's one of the most selfish things you can do right right because you get all of the positive sense of that yeah I you know what male normative ex Alexia like it's so common now among men to not feel feelings that it's got a [ __ ] name um and yeah it's like that's like spray painting your uh your dashboard like that doesn't make you tough on your cool Texas pickup truck just spray painted black I don't need these gauges what a [ __ ] that's dumb you're gonna ride out of gas and get a rack yeah right and also if you are Drive constantly looking at your dashboard you're gonna crash too right gosh man I just don't I don't I don't get and you're in this world more than me I I just I don't understand the um the tribal disassociation from reality it's just so strange I don't I look it's bananas I think it's bananas I think that there is a big cohort of people in the world who need David Goin screaming in their face to go harder and that maybe do they need that or is it is it pornography cuz I wonder from that uh perhaps it's some sort of like um is it so like insanely Sensational that it becomes you get what I'm saying yeah I do understand I I get the sense that most people that listen to shows like this a type A people with a type B problem they hard charging insecure overachievers that need to learn to chill out gotcha and and play video games but there is a really big cohort of type B people with a type a problem who are too lazy not sufficiently disciplined they don't have upward Mobility they don't have a sense of agency they don't feel like they have control over their life and the problem is that people that have got type A type A people with type B problems like oh my God sorry you've just got too much disciplin like you keep winning the marshmallow test all the time no one's going to give you sympathy for this and but they'll see your heart attack from space oh of course right yeah but it sounds like if you are a David goggin like hard charg in pick yourself up don't you don't need to [ __ ] worry about how you feel just keep on going guy that sounds like every Underdog movie that you've ever heard because every Underdog movie has a Dude down on his luck who needs to sort himself out by getting disciplined and there's an old Japanese guy who teaches him how to do kung fu and he gets the girl and everything's great right there are no movies about how to log out of slack at 6 p.m. or learn to spend a day under a tree yeah right because that sounds opulent and Bourgeois uh and privileged and a champagne problem like dude just just chill out no one gets told to just work harder well you need instruction to work harder yeah you don't need instruction to just chill out because the assumption is that chill is the set point and work is the the aberration but that's not the case for a lot of people that's not the case a lot of people a great frame dude Y type A people type B problems type B people type A problems huh that's a fantastic frame I've always thought that the way the internet has taken Gaga's message and spit it out it makes it look like a running Rocky 4 Montage correct it's but it's actually happening at all like in real time yeah but it's happening in his life but everybody likes Rocky you would not have liked that worked out it was cold man like you know one would stuck it out but it looks cool the music everyone wants to feel like if things go badly for me I can get myself back to where I wanted to be that's right right yeah yeah dude as opposed to if everything's going right for me I need to learn to chill out but you're right I mean you will see a few years ago I joined a uh like just a local you got to be kidding me like church league basketball and my knees were like no bro we had a deal going to stop and uh yeah that was two surgeries worth man but but like we had a contract but I was like no no no I can be 19 again the like no you can't dude bro the most common I used to be a college athlete and I'm about to give myself like a double [ __ ] tendonopathy oh is basketball by far by far so I played Cricket until I was 2021 I got my grades reduced to get to the university I got into because I was going to go and play at a high level for them it was I I'd done everything yeah uh it was my entire life throughout my childhood and I stopped playing for a decade and a bit and then Co came along and I was like I should play cricket again and the first game back I snapped my Achilles and that was 12 months of rehab and three and a half months in a boot and a surgery the first major surgery I've ever had and I learned a lesson I already knew yeah one of my friends like Snapped every CL every CL in his knee all of the CLS went uh Tom seura managed to snap his knee and his arm in the same move playing basketball it's like guys look if you used to be fit and you're now full 40 lb heavier don't than you used to be and you've not conditioned anything and the only running that you do is to like you know avoid the rain going from the car to the house don't try basketball because you're going to [ __ ] something up but we do it with everything we do it with drugs we do it relationships oh yeah like if people who abstain from cocaine oh I'm GNA [ __ ] run this back watch me I'm GNA I'm gonna start where I ended yeah exactly yeah yeah this is It's essentially like I press pause on a video game and the like sniffer 1,000 video game and then I'm gonna immediately reeg just going to the gym taking a bre everybody knows or marriage right you get out of a divorce and you try to date at the level of the marriage you just left like what are you doing man yeah no it's not gonna happen uh dude you're [ __ ] awesome well you're absolutely awesome and I can't wait to have you back on and today was so much fun and uh where should people go they want to keep hey before we kick off can I ask you a question you got time no makes of time as long as you want I got two questions for you okay so uh um your abil over the last few years to dig in at the what I would seriously call the doctoral level at Evolution psychology tell me about that like I'm thinking of you as one of my grad students like it's been phenomenal to watch thank you um I don't know I guess and that's not me blowing smoke because I'm I'll I'll bait and switch here in a second but I'm G like tell me about that I got interested in it um toward the back end of 2020 21 I really started thinking about mating Dynamics and I think it's so fundamental to how the world works you know survival and reproduction okay survival thing has been sorted by medicine so let's talk about reproduction and reproduction is mating Dynamics and I just really fell in love with understanding I guess the nuts and bolts of how human attraction Works about how mate values work about mate guarding jealousy male parental investment all of this stuff and I kind of got welcomed with open arms by the EP World which I was very fortunate about you know people like Rob Henderson William Costello Dr David bus you know Dr Robert pman even though he's behavioral genetics all of that world of unspeakable [ __ ] like totally cancelable academics really were very kind to me and um I don't think anyone had fully stepped into the world of EP at the level that this show was at and and and is at now I don't think anyone really opened it up and I think that it's very interesting I think that you know fundamentally question is why are we the way that we are that's you know I'm trying to understand myself and the world around me and I think that EP gives us a really wonderful look into it and then you can look at human behavioral ecology you can look at evolutionary biology um but I just found it so compelling that I didn't stop and then I spoke at HB I spoke at the human behavioral evolutionary Society in Palm Springs um I gave a I was part of a symposium there uh I'm about to get my first uh whatever it is Citation authorship on a study congratulations man so this is going to be cool I'm going to do this with Candace Blake and Mack and Murphy about I have a theory that uh people who are in shape will be more threatened by potential as use than people who are out of shape absolutely despite the fact that people who are out of shape would be having their um like true selves denied as the fat acceptance movement Falls away you know lizo is like in good like moderately all right shape now I don't know whether you've seen it she's lost like it must be over1 um so she looks very different uh but the reason being that if you are someone who's quote unquote in shape I'm aware that OIC doesn't make you in shape it just makes you skinny but um if you're someone who's in shape your Fitness signal is being derated attacked by this person being able to get an easy route to something that you had to use wellow to do and you're going to see that as a threat and uh yeah I've I've moved a little bit my my I'm still super interested in EP and if anyone's bringing out a new book on it I just had uh uh bvon hipple on um he's F I guess evolutionary anthropology technically um so I'm still balls deep in it just did a great conversation with um uh who the [ __ ] did Matt Ridley um about it's like birds bird sex and Darwin or something which is all about sexual selection that was yesterday I love it and I'm super interested I'm now moving a little bit more Neuroscience emotions in feelings um I really adore the Neuroscience stuff but so what is as can you point to something that EP has given you um interest in terms of and it's a self- serving question um like if you exhale and say okay here's what this has given me in my day-to-day life over the last four years of just Swan diving into this cuz your grasp of it is is profound what is it what is it what is the insight and the knowledge given you I think understanding that all even the most mindful person in the world even you at your most peaceful you have a sense that you are the author of your own desires of your own needs of your own wants of your own actions but realizing that you are basically a vehicle for your genes and understanding the Myriad of different ways that they pull bait and switch on you and just realizing how little you're in the driver's seat has been oddly reassuring in a way because it makes you feel less alone because you understand that you're not personally cursed by this thing perfect example here's one one good example so basically um your pathologies are not some unique idiosyncratic issue that only you deal with they're endemic and they're a part of being a human that would be like kind of I guess or they're not character logical yes yeah yeah yeah exactly so perfect example of this Dr David bus writes a book and in it he talks about how there is a a part of the male brain which is uh rewarded rewarded with pleasure uh for looking at things that just look sexual he talks about how guys will happily look at a pair of rocks that look like boobs right and they go okay it is inherently rewarding for guys to look at stuff that look sexual and he got this letter from a man who said I just wanted to let you know that your book saved my marriage because I was looking at other women and I was finding them attractive even though I wasn't going to go and do anything and I thought that there was something wrong with my relationship I thought that there was something that that was an indication that my marriage was broken because I found other women attractive I wasn't going to cheat on my partner and I love her to death but I saw other women as attractive and your book told me that yeah you're a guy you're going to see other women that are attractive as attractive and you have a system that's inbuilt in you that you do not have control over H and that ah yeah okay so when I don't eat for a while I get hungry sense but for every you know Behavior a lot of things it just makes me feel like oh I'm you know the the things that I struggle with aren't some personal deficiency yeah they are just part and parcel of you being you huh that's fantastic H I have to think about that I like that a lot that's good one more question mm and you can say I don't want to talk about this and that's fine um I've been wrestling with the weight and so when I think of not weight physically but weight of the jobs we have and when I go back to like an EP mindset we there's no way and you're at like x's and X's above where I'm at there's no way we've got the cognitive or the physical IC woring to hold this right and so I'm wondering if things like anxiousness or depressive symptoms or a need there's just kind of a path there's a path I'm watching people like head down spiritual paths I'm watching folks wrestle with autoimmune disord like I'm wondering how much of this is there's there's there's a huster on every corner saying here's why you feel this way here's why you feel this way here's why you feel this way I'm wondering if there's not something on the squat bar just so much weight and I don't have a I don't have a it's just a hypothesis I'm wrestling with that at some point every body every physical EMB body body has a different program for how do we like some people shake some people just throw the bar off some people try to do it anyway and they you know they blow their knees out um if there's something in Chris's body that's saying this thing's gotten really heavy yeah that's a good question um perhaps uh your your discussion the one podcast I just picked up was you had a really eloquent discussion and I know you don't like talking about it but I was really captivated by the just wrestling with yeah the weight of somebody going to war with their body going to war with them right yeah I mean look it's been a rough 12 months um physically for me uh America is a a fantastic country but it tries to kill everybody that enters that way it can s you a cure that's precisely yeah the food the water the air the building material everything the cars the [ __ ] everything and um perhaps I mean you look someone asked me a question about uh and this is self- serving too because I I I got my own stuff not that but look here okay here's here's a way to look at it um most people are stuck most people that are hard charging are stuck somewhere on the spectrum between guilt and overwhelm right it's like choose your direction Western man because if you've got that type energy you are going to continue to want to do stuff you're going to want to drive harder more more more I just did the number one best seller but let's look over the shoulder of it as I'm receiving it correct to ask what's next um and you know I in some ways this is very early because I'm still in it right I haven't fixed it and I if you haven't fixed the thing you can't fully feel sort of appreciation for it but trying to find some of the Silver Linings one of the things it's really done is it taught me the value of a slower Pace slower pace of Life uh taking pleasure in simpler things um because when your capacity gets restricted and this is for anybody that's going through health problems um it it brings you back to a much more sort of pure sense of yourself you're not able to use bravado or momentum or distraction in the same way that you would previously it's like stripped back right you really see or a YouTube milest tone doesn't matter when you can't breathe right yeah yeah you see you see who you are underneath in many ways and I think it reminds you of the stuff that really really doesn't matter because if you can't do all of the things you have to do a few of the things and presumably the few things you choose to do are much more important so um my my feeling around this is I do not want to look back on a life or a career of miserable successes I don't want and this is where you know uh I love hosi he's a a fantastic friend um but he is a one in a couple 100 million Constitution and I don't think that most people are built to work like he is and that's where if I had two if I had an angel and a demon sat on either shoulder the angel would be Chris Bumstead and the demon would be Alex hosi uh Chris would be saying you should just chill out and you know eat some chicken with your friends and Alex should be saying like don't listen to your feelings stop being such a [ __ ] and uh I'm way more in the seum energy than I am in the hosi energy at the moment and I think you can switch between the two sure but or seasonally right yeah yeah but I just get the sense that if you want to enjoy presumably the reason that you want success and you want to work hard is so that you can find some sort of enjoyment at the end of it and you have to be careful not to sacrifice the thing you want which is joy and happiness for the thing that's supposed to get it right which is success like you're literally cutting off at the knees the opportunity for you to enjoy things along the way because you're so concerned about getting the thing that gets you what you want that's it that's it you you the reason that you wrote the book was to enjoy something during the process of writing it you were thinking about whether it was going to be successful during the promotion of it you were thinking about whether it was going to be successful and during the success of it you were thinking about whether the next one will be successful you go at no point have you arrived it's like running toward a mirage every step you take toward horizon horizon moves one further step away from you and um yeah the only [ __ ] way to like win any game is to stop first off stop moving the goal posts because if every time you try and [ __ ] kick the ball toward it and it goes about to cross the line and then you you like move the go go another 100 yards back well that's not going to work so I'm very much in my at least trying to embrace my sort of slower more considered energy um really like really really hard trying to not take the same levels of satisfaction and dopamine from uh like chaotic busyness um you know what you should be trying to do is move your life toward an outcome that you want and you have proxies for that because like the outcome that I want like a good life real amorphus so you have stuff like I go to the gym every day and I make sure that I speak to my wife and I have a project that I care about and all of those are broken down down into subcomponents right I lift the weights in this sort of a manner and we have these kinds of conversations at this sort of a Cadence and I have to answer p and I have to do emails and so on and so forth but don't mistake the little steps that you're supposed to take to get somewhere for the thing that you're supposed to be doing and you need to regularly be reassessing is the thing that I'm doing moving me toward my goal because when you start on a journey a lot of the time you need to be answering every email and checking slack all the time and you need to be like chaos go go go go go like super Aderall mode and then a little bit later you think well I kind of don't need to do that quite so much maybe you're part of a team now in the organization that you're in or maybe it's your own business and you've got some people that can actually do that on your behalf you go your entire reason for doing this was to not have to do things you don't want to do anymore you are at the stage where you don't have to do things you don't want to do anymore and you addicted to still doing them because they gave you such a sense of comp of completion and you have existential angst if you're not busy every single day yeah you you look at your calendar as a judge of your selfworth and if your calendar is stacked how can you be a piece of [ __ ] I can't be useless look how many people need me right look at all of the people that need me if I wasn't here what would they do what would all of these just reaching out to check calls that's why Americans won't take vacations right there oh because they feel like they always need to be on the grind is it not because they're all poor and they don't get any maternity leave well there's there's definitely structural issues also no I there's there's not a psychology for what if I'm not needed it's not it's not restful there's a pastor in uh in in Nashville that says if busyness is your drug rest will feel like stress you can't you can't it's like being off coat for for a week a beautiful uh equivalent of that is the ancient Greek word for work is translated as not at leisure so the Greeks saw Leisure as the set point and work is an aberration oh wow now in the modern world we see work as the set point and Leisure as an Aber so we've turned it upside down and uh just to go back to the you know the how are you dealing with uh like is it pressure of doing all of the stuff causing stuff to arise in your body perhaps um and you know it's too late to [ __ ] turn it around now so I'm just doing my best I'm it's it's a realization you know I said to uh who the [ __ ] was I talking to about this I can't remember who I was talking to I do know I do know who I was talking to CEO of one of the companies that I work with and uh he's about to have a kid and he was saying hey man I um like my drive's dropping a bit I was like you doing your wife's 8 months pregnant like yeah and I was like well you know the science on this testosterone drops in men when they get into a relationship it drops again when they get and their wife gets pregnant they're about to give birth like you know that that's your kid like you're you're ready for this to happen it's like yeah yeah yeah and I was like can we just for a second imagine that you might have had an aneurism in 5 years time and that this has saved you from it uh because we don't know we don't know what was coming down the pack can we imagine just for a second that this gives you a new more nurturing approach to being able to run your business which actually stops some impending catastrophe that would have happened if you'd gone more hard charging just don't know where it's going to end up and uh to for the first time in today's conversation to talk about faith George jenko um refers to periods where people are struggling and uh he says every man knows God when he's at his lowest and I think about that going back to a more sort of strip back version of you um sort of remembering okay I don't have momentum I don't have ego I don't have bravado I don't have the Charisma I don't have the the charm my stories are less compelling and my aura is less energizing and all the rest of it all right what's left yeah like who am I deep down who am I now yeah yeah one of my values and my virtues when I'm not quite as flamboyant as I usually am and do people still like me do I still like me and um I think again it's still early days but I think I like me a lot more now than I did before I had to fight a ton of health problem s because it's reminded me that sort of the person that's underneath all of that stuff when I have to go to bed at 800 p.m. every night and when I'm tired all the time and when I my mood's not right and when I need to rely on people more like I think that's like I think that's a good person so and I don't think that I would have realized that or I don't think I would have known that uh if it hadn't happened that's fantastic or that Chris is Chris is a guy worth taking care of I is a guy worth feeling good yeah I think I like me that's fantastic man what a gift thanks for sh sharing that with us man I appreciate it it's awesome dude I can't wait to bring you back on appreciate you man you're [ __ ] great where should people go they want to check out all of the stuff you um um I've got uh I coost the Ramsey Show with Dave Ramsey talking about money and then I got my Dr John delone show it's Callin it's like old uh Dr Laura show like people call in mental health and marriage problems and we we get get them get them solved it's awesome right it's SI everyone should go and subscribe dude until next time appreciate you thank you brother thank you very much for making it to the end of the J dond Don jalone John Dr John delone episode uh and you can listen to me and Lis Perry talk about very similar topics in an interesting way just here come on