“This Keeps 99% Broke & Depressed” - Fix This NOW | Dr. John Delony

why do you think people are struggling so much today anxiety is on the rise depression is on the rise a lot of unhappy marriages and relationships we've pathologized Human Experience the number of students over the years would come sit in my office and say my dad passed away my granddad passed away my dad just moved out on my mom my mom cheated on my dad and I'm depressed and I would often say no you're not you're really sad we just have so many duct tapes and pills and alternative whatever instead of just teaching people how to sit in grief you have to act differently you have to change the things that you do on a daily basis you can't just think your way into being healthy you have to change how you live just created a world that our bodies can't live in man we've created a disaster John delone thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour you have a really interesting story see you did Crisis negotiation for a very long time what was the one call that still stands out to you this day I did crisis response for years with police departments and with my students the one that comes to mind when you ask that question was a year or two ago on the Dave Ramsey Show Dave and his daughter Rachel Cruz were taking a call from a woman who was asking should she sell her house that call quickly devolved into Dave asking are you safe right now and if you're not like give me a signal and she indicated she wasn't I just happened to be walking by and to go use the restroom by the studios the call screener she yells get in here and that ended with me on the headset with this woman walking her through her husband trying to steal her kid a very abusive scary situation to the point that I looked over and the police were coming and I I took my headset off and I said I think This Woman's going to die and it was a terrifying harrowing moment and I'm a big guy so in previous crisis situations you I get involved this one was just on the phone and it was just walking her through you need to get your baby you need to get out of the car you need to keep walking down the sidewalk and she's like he's chasing me and it was it was a it was a harrowing thing until the police got there and all we had was her number and so we're calling Police Department to police department and they were amazing patching us through and it's another state and so it's multiple jurisdiction But ultimately they got there and we've got some great feedback on the back that she's safe she got the care she needed she's transitioned her life it's pretty amazing so what is a crisis negotiator and how do you get into that I wasn't a crisis negotiator that would be like a hostage negotiator that's what my dad did he was a SWAT team guy and so they work directly with the police department what I did was part of a small team um called the victim Services Unit but essentially the police show up and somebody has passed away let's say there's a a child who's died they have to work that seen homicide back they have to assume the worst and go for like what happened here right that's really tough on a mom who's weeping because her child's passed away so my job was to come in and sit with mom or my job would be to show up with the policemen and say your husband's been in a car wreck and he has died and here's what's going to happen next and most of us don't even think about what happens if there's a body in your home like how does that body get out of right and so there's a there's a process to walk through and and making sure people have resources and stuff so I'd show up to homes I'd get a a text on my cell phone and it would just say 187 or 1087 and it would have an address and 1087 was the police code for someone's died it could be a 2-year-old it could be a 16-year-old it could be an 88-year-old and you show up and Whisper a quick prayer in the parking lot and you walk in the house and you're on it seems like you can't even console somebody in that state what is your aim then is to just bring them back down to like a sane level I wouldn't say a a sane level so I'm thinking of a situation where it was 2: or 3:00 a.m. a boyfriend and girlfriend had been drinking all night and they got in a little tiff and he' bought a new gun and while she went to the bathroom he walked outside and died by su and as you can imagine it's a it's a chaotic mess and she ran out and saw him and tried to help but it was I mean it was just a disaster and so when we get there she's on her knees in the front yard at 3:00 a.m. screaming covered in blow I mean it's a terrifying scene and so yeah there's no peace there's nothing I can say that she her she can't absorb information my goal there is to get her to have a moment of peace and so for her in particular we locked arms and we walked down the street and we count the cracks and the sidewalk and we count the trees and what I'm trying to do is get her body here right and only then can you say you need to go to this hotel or you need to call your mom or you need to call your dad you you need to go take the next steps but until then when you're in full fight ORF flight man you can't hear you can't see you just reacting what if the credentials needed to become that why should people listen to you in particular I mean I've got two phds I have a three a three-legged stool for wisdom right do you have the academic knowledge you know what you're talking about and I think there's a lot of people in our world that have an experience and they want to sell that experience right they got they went through a divorce they're you know they got sober and they think their particular path is the path and they want to tell everybody about it and create a course and sell it right so I think um a you have to know what you're talking about and B you have to have walked with a lot of other people cuz your experience is just your experience right and a lot of other people have different experiences to the same end result and then I think the third thing is you have to have gone through some stuff yourself right you have to know what that weight feels like to be in that situation why do you think people are struggling so much today it seems like anxiety's On The Rise depression is on the rise a lot of unhappy marriages and relationships what's going on just created a world that our bodies can't live in man it's we've we've created a disaster and um then we blame the human body for not being able to respond to it and so we've pathologized like normal human existence man made it the made it a cancer do you think it's social media that's contributing to this Jonathan Hyatt's new book is pretty compelling you just look at the map it's like we started giving kids cell phones in 7891 and then everything is just skyrocketed so it's easy to say man it looks like we did this and then this happened um but he's presented some pretty compelling data that no it's causal this caused to that why is it so bad it's multifaceted but I think at the end of the day we've taken kids' childhoods away from them and we've encapsulated their worlds in these little boxes and the box is designed to Loop you and to catch you and that's just not an existence especially for a developing brain so are we finding that people are struggling more being younger or that older people are also having the same issues because I'm curious if it's something growing up on social media or if it's just exposure to it and no I I think you're you're asking an important question that um I would say my mental health research Community is kind of wimping out on we don't in our culture like to tell adults you shouldn't do something we like to say like you do you bro and like whatever you feel like we like we don't like to say hey what you're doing is dumb right um even as like a mental health professional you're not allowed to tell some theoretically you're not allowed to tell your client you shouldn't do that right you have to be like well how does that make you feel and like why can't you say that though why can't you just I think it's a backlash to somebody imposing their particular set of values on somebody I don't know I think it depends on the cont like Jack and I had a really good discussion a week ago and I was telling Jack like hey this is going on and what do you think of it and Jack was like well how do you feel and I told Jack straight up I'm like hey if you tell me this is stupid and dumb that'll put it in perspective to me that hey you know what this is pretty dumb I'm going to let it go I think that's why you're seeing coaches like this idea of coaching it is quickly I had a professor uh 10 years ago nine years ago say therapist y'all better be careful cuz coaches are coming for your job I think what happened was doctors had the highest credibility in the in the helping profession professions and so every graduate school wanted to medicalize the training so that it would it would add some sort of pseudo credibility to it instead of training people to sit with hurting people and just say my God are like are you okay I wouldn't do that right instead of that it was very clinical very separate very Diagnostic and I think we have lost the soul of a lot of our mental health engagements and so coaches are showing up and saying I'll tell you like you give me X number of dollars an hour I'll tell exactly what I think and I think that's what people are desperate for so you think that's a that can be a better approach just to tell it like it is or do you think it's it's it's better to medicalize it or what's I have benefited from both I have benefited from from some gnarly stuff from my past sitting with a trained Master therapist I call her my Oracle um but she's amazing and yeah she was very very skilled and I've also I particularly have not returned to a few therapists my wife got up and walked out of one once she was walking through really gnarly uh miscarriage losses and the therapist leaned forward and said when's the last time you took some U time have you DED like a warm bath and a cup of tea my wife just got up and walked out right cuz it was so it was so pandering and then there's times I call um a coach I've got two and I've got a theological coach that I ask big picture questions and he kind of walks me through and then I've got somebody that's more of a business coach that I reach out to and say I need to think through this problem and he's able to say in my house I would not do that or I see this opportunity wide how can you not see this let's talk through that that's really interesting to try to balance plating somebody and just giving them the cold heart truth and which one is actually more effective at bringing them down to a stable level well and I think that's the that's the art of it there are some people that call into my show that I take the guess and think I need to tell them right now you need to get out of this relationship and then others it's more important that they discover it for themselves like oh man worth more than this that's super interesting I want to get more onto the medicalization if that's a word of Mental Illness but we'll get onto that in one second first of all I want to ask the difference between medically diagnosed mental illness so like anxiety depression ADHD versus General Life anxiety and how do you know which one you have because although the data shows that more people are have anxiety than ever and depression than ever is is that like medically diagnosed and even what is the Merit of this medically diagnosed anxiety and depression I really take a hat tip from Dr Peter AA the great AA he started speaking this is a while ago more about emotional health as a guy who lives in that world I asked him I was like what do you mean emotional health you keep saying emotional health and he said man joy laughter relationships fun like sadness and I thought oh you're reclaiming Humanity right so there is a distinct difference between a mental health disorder and an emotional health challenge right and so I do do believe that we've pathologized Human Experience the number of students over the years would come sit in my office and say my dad passed away my granddad passed away my dad just moved out on my mom my mom cheated on my dad and I'm depressed and I would often say no you're not you're really sad and we don't have a psychology for that you're supposed to be sad right your dad just left your dad blew up your family you're supposed to be sad everything you're anchored into is now splintered you should be right and I think we are rush so quickly to take away an uncom fortable feeling and man we just have so many duct tapes and pills and alternative whatever instead of just teaching people how to sit and grief while we're on the topic of emotion I recently sprained my ankle really badly playing basketball and I had to book multiple appointments just to get it checked out going through this I realized just how hard 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zocdoc.com thank you so much Zach do and back to the episode so do you think medical anxiety is overprescribed at this point oh absolutely yeah and I've been diagnosed with medical anxiety and it was exactly right right there was a season when I was on anxiety medication I my alarms were so loud and I ignored them for so long they were so unregulated that I needed to go do something so that I could do the things that I need to do to be well if medication is not the answer what do you do instead and how can you tell that it is medication worthy versus not medication worthy I I'll I'll leave that final diagnostic to a medical doctor and sitting with an individual client I would hate for someone to listen to this and be like oh yeah dude cool right I would say as a generalized statement medication almost never cures anxiety when I'm anxious and maybe that's the the the in the small sliver I can add to this Global conversation is that when you're anxious your body's probably working perfectly that's not the issue the issue is it's to identify something that's not okay in your world right we're just looking at your beautiful fish tank out there if an alarm on your phone goes off that alarm letting you know the pH is off in that water is not the problem and you just deleting that app doesn't solve that all your fish are going to die that's anxiety anxiety is the the the alarm on your phone the real question is what's wrong in the tank we got to go fix that thing right and so I think that most of us have grown grown up in a culture Follow Your Passion YOLO do whatever you want this is a free country you can say and do like whatever and we don't like to live with the ramifications of our choices and so we call it anxiety and then we numb it away so I've actually found that analogy to be incredibly helpful for myself like if I were to take an anxiety test maybe given to me by a psychiatrist or something like that I could check all of the boxes that would say oh you have you know anxiety disorder or whatever but when I started thinking about it in terms of like this is just alarm that means my body is functioning properly and I should actually fix the house in the fire rather than just like remove the batteries from the smoke alarm then it actually reduced My overall anxiety which obviously sounds so intuitive one thing is like I hate bookkeeping absolutely despise it and all the time I'm like late and I'm anxious because of this right and so what I like to do with my anxiety is maybe I'll go for a walk or I'll do something like that just calms me down but it doesn't actually solve the root issue that's causing the anxiety in the first place so although I could check every box that shows I have anxiety disorder it actually fixed it by not taking any medication right and I've never actually been diagnosed with that or anything uh just by actually solving the root cause of the problem so I found that to be incredibly helpful in my own life awesome well and we may have talked about this previously but I don't believe the DSM like the diagnostic and statistics manual the the the Bible for mental health Diagnostics that really served two purposes one to allow researchers to talk to other researchers so if you're studying depression in California you're studying depression at the University of Rhode Island you all at Apples to Apples these studies and talk and it was designed for clinicians to talk to insurance companies to tell them here's what I'm doing and here's my treatment plan Here's the the the stack of of symptoms this person has to call them even symptoms and this is what I'm going to do about it it was never designed to be released to the internet for all of us to Google in the middle of the night the best way I could say it is I asked one time I was meeting with one of my mentors this is just a year or two ago we haven't dinner and I said can I ask you like a question I should probably know the answer to and he goes sure and I said is OD real oppositional defyant disorder kids right acting out and he smiled and goes yeah and then he goes and you've never seen it it's like what do you mean and he said OD is not your kid throwing a tantrum and punching a hole through the sheetrock OD is you ever been in a psych ward with five or six grown adults trying to hold a sixth grader down and we can't that's op like and so he walked me through most of us re we Google it I've got that I've got that I've got that I've got that and then you go work in a psych ward and you see depression or you see anxiety clinically and you're like oh I don't have that that was the most common thing that my that when I would take people and walk them in and help them get checked into a psychiatric facility within one or two or 3 weeks they'd be like whoa I'm I'm I'm okay I'm not this right or they would say I'm glad I'm here I need to get the help but often it was Oh I thought things were bad right yeah do doctors have a financial incentive to prescribe medication because it seems as though a lot of doctors are very quick just to say all right you have this let's prescribe this just kind of throw these medications at front um that was that's the takeaway I got from Dr Tia who lives more behind the scenes in that world and I think the incentive may be less about prescribing medication but it may be more I got 15 minutes with you and 15 minutes is hard to sit down and say d tell me about your dad tell me about your mom tell me about what's going on that where are the fires in your home I don't have time for that conversation you hurt here I can help with that hurt and we sign it and move on and I think doctors because of um again this this democratization of information which isn't bad I just we don't we we're not using it right I think doctors are faced with a tough choice which is Doctor patients come in and say I have X I want y because they get all those ads for all those pills all day long and they have all the smiling families on them the same as you go buy beer because they have the great commercials right or whatever and so a doctor's fac with a choice and the choice is I'll just make you happy or I have to say no and I'm going to lose you as a patient you're going to go find somebody else so we have a recurring guest in the podcast Dr K is his name and he's very much in favor of like trying out Eastern practices before we go Western and his definition of Western is it's populationbased meaning they do a big study of a thousand people oh you have depression or you have depression symptoms take this pill and maybe a plurality of them are actually solved by this pill however you also have a majority of them that aren't and so we use that and we give it to individual cases and we assume that they fit the mold although what he says Eastern teaches is that you actually have to look inwards and see what it is exactly kind of similar to the the smoke detector and the the house analogy that you give well and and for me it was important to find out no my smoke detector is broken that was a that's another layer right and my smoke detector was was going off about nothing about ridiculous things and so I needed to go get that tinkered with so that I could begin to do the things I need to do to get well like you mentioned yeah how do you know where the anxiety is coming from because sometimes you could just feel anxiety and you could say oh it's this thing but it's really not it's not that thing it's maybe something deeper than that or maybe something unrelated to that that you're attaching to something else how do you figure out where that's where the smoke alarm there's smoke I think there's five or six seven things that all of us experience on a daily basis that you kind of began to ask yourself man when's the last time I exercised when's the last time I got out in sunlight when's the last time I was with friends that I didn't have to perform for and I think you just start slowly digging into like what's the state of my finances and my job and then it's like well of course dude if you owe a bunch of money and you have nothing in retirement and you have a mortgage and suddenly you're getting email at work it's like hey over the next six months we're going to start Contracting our work for your body would be failing you if you weren't anxious right that'd be insane you might lose your house you might lose your food right those are basic survival things and that's not anxiety's fault that's not something you need to go medicate away that's not that's something you need to address those those challenges do you think there are any malicious or selfish intentions for the overprescription of medication or overdiagnosis of mental disorders you said this on a podcast and I found this very very interesting and I I looked into it a lot more you said medical health professionals wanted to be a part of the medical establishment in terms of getting paid one researcher says depression so does another and so forth so we all know what we're talking about and can report that to the insurance companies and get paid then the internet happens and that becomes something we can just Google and get then it becomes the way that we talk to each other oh you're sad you're depressed you're anxious or spung up you have anxiety disorder becomes a label and then just Off to the Races it doesn't make sense that large scale all of our bodies are failing us at the same time for the first time in human history right that was the that was the big aha moment was sitting in a in a a nerd lecture at a university and the guy was talking about ADHD and the genetic links right and epigenetics and how those switches go on and off and he said by the it was it's just an aside and he said by the way this can't possibly be an entirely genetic issue because that's not how jeans work they don't all flip on at the same time and that means it's got to be environmental and that was the light bulb like what if all these kids that suddenly have ADHD Across the Western World what if their bodies are right what if they are just responding to two parents that are either absent or they are working 90 hours a week and they're shoved in a school system that right it's like what if their bodies are all right or correct what does that mean for us and that was a way more terrifying thing for me systemically than everybody's a little bit anxious right what if is an alternative to that instead of it's these factors what if the factors have a consideration to that they they push people in that direction but people watch others around them they tend to mimic other effect yeah so if they see wait a second a third of my class is little anxious a third of my class is they have ADHD a third of my class is doing this I think they're more likely to take on those behaviors like it seems as though almost mental illness is something that's really I don't want to say celebrated online but people will post their stories or issues and get a lot of praise and supported in ways where if somebody said hey my life is great right now I couldn't be happier I have a great relationship a great job people would say well I have this and I have this because you're lucky so it seems like there's this weird incentive where it's like the worse you post about yourself the more support you get versus if you have your life together it's almost dismissed 100% And I I I think we can look at that through two lenses I tend to look at that through a little more compassionate lens versus uh like a moralistic or character issue children are designed to lean into adults that are safe and if the adults in their lives whether they're teachers or mental health professionals or whoever a teacher aids whoever they happen to be around get a steady diet of here's a disorder here's a disorder these disorders On The Rise look for these behaviors look for these behaviors and you see a kid in the back tapping right right I was always moving my leg and always tapping stuff right when I was a kid it was deloney shut up settle down right I would have loved some more compassion but I fast forward and think of my son who's a middle schooler he's tapping and he has a teacher that gently puts her hand on his shoulder and says hey this is a safe place for you I'm glad you're here and his body goes whoosh it is now got a a biochemical reinforcement that it can get connection through movement and being itchy because that teacher is compassionate and kind and you do that over time right you get to high school and they ask you do you have anything that we need to know before you take this test well I get really it's tough for me to take tests how about we just double the time for you would that be a gift and you're like yeah right and so all these things in order to help folks and I've worked with students with special needs for my whole career right and I fought for their ability to go get those those those things but I think over time your body responds to where is the compassion and kindness coming from and because it's not coming from these other traditional places we our bodies are designed to be surrounded by aunts and uncles and weird cousins and a tribe of people that is gone and you have a kid who finds himself or herself going to the bus by themselves cuz Mom and Dad are already at work if Mom and Dad are even in the house anymore is it 40% of kids born to a single family household biologically that's mad house and it's not cool to talk about but it's a mad house and so you take this kid and an adult puts her hand on their shoulder and say you're safe here yeah and you build over time and incentive and now you've got a an internet ecosystem that if you win well clearly you didn't just do it on your own it's because you had some sort of fill in the blank or clearly it's because of these other factors not just because you worked real hard and got lucky um and then the other side of it is yeah like man well I've got this this and this and this everybody patch you on the head it's it's heartbreaking and man it was about three years ago um and is was working with a team I have now there was a light bulb that came off that was like man I refuse to participate in a world that tells you this is all you're ever going to be I'm just going to Pat you on the head you go to the corner we'll take care of it I refuse to do that because it's not true but how do you change that because it seems as though if your reward system is a victim mentality and that you're praised by that how do you go against the grain and say I'm going to give up all of this praise and choose to ignore it or like like it just seems like a very counter intuitive thing to do it's hard I think what we're lacking desperately is a picture that's why I think your show is valuable I think that's why these conversations are valuable I think it's why my Show's successful I thought people wanted to listen to my show cuz I was so smart and I thought like yeah it's growing cuz I'm so they're not that's not why they're there I'm not that smart they've never seen a big guy with tattoos sit with somebody who's hurting and be like man I'm so sorry like can I just sit with in with this for a second right so I think we're people are desperate for a picture of what it looks like what's a picture of hard work look like that's why people flock to the red pill world right they've never seen a picture of a masculine guy going and lifting weights that's why they flock to you guys they never see their dads didn't teach them about money and you're like no I'll teach you right and I think that's why this ecosystem exists and it continues to do so well um but people don't have a picture of what that looks like in their house they hear it and they hear it and it's like you know what this woman this teacher of mine she loves me I'm going to go there I think one of the reasons I listen to your channel is because I like to think if I know these situations ahead of time and I hear your responses I could fix them before they would even happen like I know some of your situations are kind of extreme and so I'm not like you know thinking oh that's going to happen but I like hearing about potential pitfalls to watch out for and hearing that like oh this marriage is feeling because the partners aren't putting in the time with each other and not then you know it's it's the kids are taking all their time and focus away and they're both working and they haven't connected themselves and so I I like to take those little bits and pieces and say okay how could I apply that to my own life I love that and some things relational you can't hedge somebody's mom's going to get cancered right somebody's dad's going to die there's going to be a car wreck and so I think it's I think you do those things really to it's almost like a retirement fund and a cash account right you do those things so that when the storm hits you're you're load you're you can you can withstand that storm but you know what before we go into that I want to talk about a website that I use and read all the time and that would be our sponsor Yahoo finance whether you're a seasoned investor or just starting to learn the basics Yahoo finance really has you covered with Yahoo finance you could stay up todate on the latest market trends track your favorite stocks and get real-time financial news that matters to you one of my favorite things about Yahoo finance is that you're able to just type the name of a company into the search bar and then click find you'll then get all the information you need from recent news articles to related videos performance overviews valuations analyst ratings research you get everything right there in one spot oh and Graham Yahoo finance also makes it incredibly easy to stay on top of your financial goals by giving you powerful tools like customizable watch lists and interactive 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lot of cons rovery around mental health and it seems to a lot of people dismissive when someone says oh anxiety disorder is similar to a smoke alarm even though it could be an effective thing why do you think it is so controversial to so many people it's become an identity it's who I am because if I'm not this then who am I right and I think it's become a label and when you start messing with people's labels man it gets it gets dicey and if you're a young child and you're told you have this thing this is the shape of your life for the rest of your life they sit in the seat and they Buckle in and that's they head on down that track and then you got some guy coming along it's like no I was in that track too and it's not true um and the other side of it is like I've got OCD that's what was one of my earliest Diagnostics okay and so I've had to work through not healing like my body responds to stress in certain ways I don't fight myself when I check the locks at night it's annoying but I go check the locks a few times then I go to bed right and or I'll text my wife from from being out of town did you check the the garage door she or she'll text me like prophylactically she'll be like John I door's locked right and so I don't fight it and then there's other things like I need to be on time to work right and so there's other times I consciously exhale I can't go back up and check the oven again I got to get in the car and go to work and I live with that discomfort and then it dissipates my body knows I Sol that so easy cuz there are doorbells now or not doorbells there are door locks now that you can check from your phone know but one of your if one of your things is the tech surveillance then that's one of mine so I don't like having everything is on Wi-Fi now like even your refrigerator you could tell like oh that's on Wi-Fi you set your temperature oven I'm sure it's on wi my wife tells me I was born in the wrong Century so yeah why do you think it's so important that people have identities like this that they latch themselves on to oh I am a person with blank or this is a quirk of me and this is why is that so important for people you know it goes back to a thing and I would I don't have any science it um goes back to a thing Tony Robin said a decade ago which is our culture is addicted to problems we meet each other problem Centric it's very rare that I enter into a world like I did today where you were showing me this incredible thing that you've created out like that you've built over 3 years you met me with joy isn't it beautiful outside come look at my that's very rare you said that I did I said you came during the best time in Vegas cuz it was so nice outside most people like with how hot it is it's so C like right uh my Uber driver lovely guy but greeted with man you're lucky on this one dude cuz usually that's how we that's how that's how we say hello right um you walk into the office and you just say man how's your weekend you hear what's going on overseas you you read the tweets this week right that's just how we you started it but you started it when you walked up you said Oh What a Beautiful maybe I started it what you know is this grass across the street I'm like yeah man that's grass and and someone like you will probably use it like like that's a good psychological mechanism right like to like a tool for the tool belt I've just worked hard over the years cuz my natural disposition is worry and anxiousness and the great um Amos trki the psychologist said worry is um an absolute waste of your life he says it's stupid because if the thing you're worrying about comes true you actually experience it twice once you when you fret about it and once when it comes true and I was like yeah that's dumb and so for a decade I've been working to reset the default setting to walk outside and be like mean is super hot I'm going to get this sweat all this crap out like it just instantly goes to what's the most joyful way I can experience this thing and then if I get hit by a bus I'll deal with that when I get hit by a bus that's a great frame of mind I know for a fact like if you're going to work and you hit traffic on the way to work the likelihood of you talking about that is like 50 times more than if it's wide open roads but if somebody shows up to work and you're like how's the drive in and they say dude it was amazing like there was no traffic I just sang really loud like like four cool Katy Perry saying that makes me happy but workplace people would be like idiot like oh yeah must be nice must be nice to live where you right and that's our response to to people who um present with the best possible scenario but is that just human nature I feel like it has to be at this point I mean like psychologically speaking our bodies are wired to look for the tiger coming at us yeah I got to say there's like an evolutionary reason for like it talking about problems more than we are celebration way the other thing it could be is that the people who celebrate too much maybe put a Target on themselves that they're a threat to others m in that Madness like in a small tribe right and one one person is like single-handedly being like yeah I slept with all these women and I hunted the tiger and I did this like that person objectively would be the threat to everyone else below them and so it's almost like if you if you talk about your problems you're seen as more of like one of the guys say well but here's the here's the challenge and I love the great conversation I I think it's it's the cancer of this madness of this individualistic it's what we're trying to do is not real I have a life philosophy and I didn't come to it existentially I came to it just practically have a guy I didn't read a single article about covid I didn't I I couldn't read all of that virology I did have a friend who's a cancer researcher that uses viruses to right and so I called her I was like what do you think I'll ask you like hey man off air like what do you think I should do with this money why cuz you have it and you actually do it we're so obsessed with what about me and I think that's just such an insane burden to carry I will never research air conditioners because my friend John King is the CFO of an air conditioning and heating and plumbing company I literally text him I got to get a new air conditioner what should I get and he says where are you and he says get this one I don't waste a second research it cuz that guy knows that stuff and I love him and he loves me and he knows my kids and I love his kids and similarly if you said hey deloney I would I put my money for me and my family here who do I think I I don't know anything about why would I who do I think I am right I email or text George camel on weekends and say hey dude I've got this account I need to move it where should I move it and he'll say I'd move it here that's his world I don't know right and so I think we're so obsessed I wish someone would come out and be like I kill all the Tigers my bent is dude I need to learn from that guy not that guy right and I I think it's just shifting I want to be with you not against you man this isn't about me winning this is about us winning you mentioned somebody in your book you said it was a student of yours named Laura who was brilliant hardworking hilarious and who's going to change the world however after a diagnostic confirmation she now just has anxiety she came into your office and you guys had a really interesting exchange you feel like you've had this conversation millions of times with different people who believed they had such Bright Futures and then all of the sudden they were diagnosed with someone and it rocks their world that's my I think all practitioners need to be careful about Diagnostics I've had a good discussion with Jordan Peterson about this like there is something important about naming the dragon there's something important about saying you're not crazy here's what your body's doing and here's it does it with a whole bunch of other people they call it social norming right you're not nuts there's a this this is happening everywhere but I I want to be very careful about saying and this is forever and this is your this is your card right this is you have a cap on you forever instead of saying hey your body has is responding to stress in these ways here's where it's going to be tough here's where you got to keep your eyes open and here's where it might be magic for you right somebody who is a little bit anxious might make an an incredible attorney and if you fall into the trappings of trying to make partner and working 90 hours a week and not taking care of your body never going outside and drinking it every event it'll bury you right so it's both and I want an attorney who overthinks through things and over worries on my behalf about things I want that but I want that person to be healthy with that with that bend right so I think it's a matter of you've got this like that can bury somebody without context what do you think the importance is of being spiritual or religious or having friendships in terms of overall fulfillment and happiness I just uh blurbed a book from an experimental psychologist and that's the first time I've seen somebody I know it's it's happened for all human history but it's the first time I've seen somebody say all the psychological literature out there gets right up to the door and says those with a religious practice those that plug into something bigger than themselves financially emotionally relationally psychologically everything trims up now of course there's abuse and all that but on the whole and but they'd never go through the practice because it kind of unwinds the idea that there's nothing Beyond right there's nothing bigger than us that that self-actualization is the goal that self-actualization is the goal but do you think maybe that could be because people lack purpose and I think religion gives people both a purpose and a community and those two things contribute a lot to happiness like if someone has a community and purpose in their life would that be the same as having religion in their life the only thing is born out um I I did have a um a theological a theologian okay he's a professor he was challenging the data that says church has gone is is declining in America and he's like no it's not he said it's just a CrossFit and it is guys getting together and watching the fights and it is internet communities about like coral reefs right I mean it's people are still getting together and Sh trying to trying to figure out how to share and do life together um I do believe there's something behind the curtain though and I think purpose and um Community lead you to that thing and I think I would I would rather people give it a shot than to try to deconstruct it before they get there if that makes sense that's fair the main thing that stuck out I've never been to church not in my entire life I'm 25 years old I thought you went with Ryan I I did go I went for the first time about a month or so ago and the one thing I remember from my experience at church that still has a lasting effect wasn't necessarily like they went over some story of Moses and everything like all of that all the readings none of that really stuck out to me very much but the main thing that stuck out to me and provides me with lasting like joy and just something to to think about when I'm alone is you had a huge group of people that were all celebrating something bigger thans and I feel like my entire life and a lot of viewers I'm sure you guys can attest to this you grow and you live in a hyper individualized Society where everyone is solely focused on themselves but finally when you have a group of people that do something on behalf of someone else or for some other purpose for some reason that just feels good and I think that's probably why a lot of people when they have kids it's like the most joyous and fulfillment and just like provides a purpose for you greater than yourself I've taken a lot of flack for that on the on the uh with the internets folks right um I didn't know what I didn't know until I held a kid I thought I knew what love was I was incredibly in love with my wife I was incredibly in love with my life I was incredibly in love with my faith and my I didn't understand it though right and like a it was so shapeshifting for me that I was scared to have a second kid because I was afraid I wouldn't there's no way I could love like this and I didn't realize there just another chamber opens up right and it's like no no you can go like Love's bigger the challenge is you can't Roi it on the front end like you can't like the math doesn't work right oh you're going to lose all your money you're going to lose all your time you're going to lose all the stuff and so and the challenge with having a kid is you don't you can't be like all right I'm going to trade that fund right that was a bad mutual fund you can't you're stuck with it um I had one it was a monk I spent two years with he's he's amazing he was a bioethics professor he'd leave in the summer and go live in a monastery he's amazing man but he said that's why you have mentors ahead of you for when you are swinging on a vine through the jungle and your Vine runs out and you let go and you don't see the other Vine coming but you do see those guys up there those men and women up there that have gone before you and you realize okay it's coming and you're just free falling and you're like oh God so I to me that's what the path is I do think you're exactly right it's every all of it is based on Roi and what about you and what about you and what about you and how do you protect you and I think we are missing oxygen when we do that it's like breathing through a breathing through a a you know a piece of cloth and you just miss all that air let me ask you this why what what has been the the the about going into a church or just never occurred to you I it it's never occurred to me my mom she grew up Jewish my father grew up Christian and it just never like they stopped being religious when they got together and never really had experience and I'm sure mine is the same my mom grew up Jewish I grew up Christian but I'm sure you didn't grow up with any like religious principles values did you ever attend church or anything or mass no so like there's some weird generation I think that like for some reason it's fading out maybe there's just distractions and techn who knows what it is I'm sure we could probably trace it to something eventually uh but yeah people I do see a lot of people becoming less and less religious but I also notied a concentration of the happiest most productive and positive people at least in my experience purely anecdotal they happen to be religious that is just a coin i i as a guy who's G to church my whole life and person of faith I think I've got to wear that blame I think on on a large scale church has got really interested in fighting other churches instead of feeding hungry people and taking care of widows instead of putting the government out of business with caring for the least of these we got mad at each other about who said what and how and I think it's been a wild distraction and for a younger generation of people who watch their parents just fight and be angry and be upset all the time and watching rage news all the I don't want that right I don't I don't want to be a part of that and so it it it it's just easy a plus b equals c when it terms like you have a whole generation of people being like I'm not going to do that I'm going to go lift weights right I'm not going to do that I'm goingon to I'm going to make an incredible beautiful fish tank I'm GNA I'm going to put my energy in making money right because I know how that works I totally get that it's so funny because a lot of the things that we're discussing are so controversial anch mental health drugs prescriptions not prescriptions people's personal experiences people's interpretation of data what the data actually all of this stuff is so controversial and I know for a fact people are going to leave so many different hate comments 100% this is so controversial and for those of you that want to leave these comments let's do it in an instructive or a constructive way and let's have fantastic conversation the comments I'm very excited to see what the pro and con uh side of the arguments are for all of these different things so it is a formal invitation appreciate that I I mentioned on a show then the person who cuts my show into tiny little clips and puts it on social media um I posted something I was talking to a mom who called into the show and she was just talking about she was kind of in a desperate moment like we're spending thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars we don't have on travel Sports and I said as a guy who played the early iterations of travel Sports I ran track and college for a year like I get it my whole life has been Athletics and then I was was a coach for my first job at a high school um I mean at a college I love sports I'm all about it and the the statement I made was um travel sports are destroying American families with money time they've made the kids the epicenter of this home and a kid can't bear that weight that's not the kid's job and it's not the parents job to do whatever the kid wants all the time my kids want to eat ice cream and eat Twinkies 247 man it's my job to not do that right regardless of what they want that's part of being a parent the comments were so um it was wild like Mark Cuban reach like those who live in in sports know that the data is on my side I'm right and my buddies who are uh Collegiate uh trainers are telling me dude we're seeing 18-year-olds with joint overuse injuries that you see in the elderly because they've been a pitcher since they were six and they did baseball in the fall and the winter and the spring and the summer and they had pitching like wildness you know Michael Jordan was famous for putting a basketball down at the end of the season and not picking up a ball until the SE the preseason started again he played golf he played baseball he went R running he did other things which is great for your body all I have to say is the comments were so individualistic for me and my family this was best don't ever say this again you take this down and so I think when you're talking about religion when you're talking about medication when you're talking about these things that are highly personal either you got hurt real bad or they saved your life or your marriage was falling apart and you had a kid who was at baseball and it brought your family back together amazing but I think it's important to not take your personal experience and cast it on everybody and say this is the truth it's an experience you had and I'm that's amazing that's awesome talk about your experience versus this is just the way all churches are bad no there was a a guy at your church that was evil and hope that dude's in jail although you know what before we go into that if you're running a business there is no better sound than hearing and if you want to hear a lot more often then it's time to get started with our sponsor Shopify for those una aware Shopify is the global e-commerce platform that's already helped transform millions of businesses worldwide for example Shopify is an endless list of Integrations thirdparty apps and flexible templates to customize your store exactly the way you want to and what really set Shopify AP from their competitors is their ability to turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout that's 36% better on average than other leading competitors not to mention Graham Shopify actually Powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States supporting Brands like Alberts rothy and Brooklyn in over 175 countries in fact my coffee company bankroll coffee.com is run exclusively through Shopify and when we were first starting out Shopify was that good that we didn't even want to go anywhere else plus they have an award-winning support team that's there to help you every step of the way so sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com all lowercase change your life with $1 per month trial period at shopify.com shopify.com with the link Down Below in the descript destion thank you so much and now let's get back to the podcast so staying on the topic of controversy oh good there there was a very popular tweet that happened this was probably a couple of months ago someone was basically providing a lot of reasons why therapy is not a good idea and why it hurts people right and obviously I'm sure this person would not argue therapy is bad for everyone but a lot of the times it's used as a weapon and it can become like a plague in your body as therapy some of the arguments they made was a lot of people treat whatever their therapist is saying as dogma and they listen as though it is like you know undeniable truth and they think that's an issue another argument was that they equate going to therapy as being a good person and doing the right thing when most of what is needed is actually done outside of therapy rather than in therapy they're like okay I check that box I made progress on whatever issues that I'm suffering from right now and then they go back to therapy next week and they kind of just forget about it in the meantime and it doesn't actually attack the problem because they think they are so here's what I would say to that one is there's some excellent points made no question about it I think the mental health community of which I'm a part of we have told people for 150 years that mental health is all the right thoughts in the right order and I think we have largely thrown out especially in the last 20 years um you have to go do differently you have to act differently you have to change the things that you do on a daily basis you can't just think your way into being healthy you have to change how you live if the the thing you do to work on your mental health is an hour a week we talk about this in Church all the time if your commitment to your faith is 1 hour a week on a Sunday with a doughnut and a cup of coffee that's not a faith practice right that it it should Infuse how you live similarly same with mental health challenges or emotional health challenges and so there was some critique that was right on my concern with it is and it's a this the culture rewards sensation and the culture rewards dogma and opposite Dogma right my challenge with it is it's similar to if you were struggling with alcohol if I come in get rid of all the alcohol and you don't have a I don't have a plan to help you get to AA I don't have a plan to have a medical provider here to help you detox I don't have these other things I'm afraid that there's going to be a swath of people that pull their kids out of counseling and the kid has no other resource in the world you got two busy parents who are looking for ways to cut cost and all a sudden this person comes out and goes therapy is kind of ridiculous for certain kids well sweet now I'm not taking my K now now that kid's got nobody anytime somebody just takes their arm and wipes off a table and like this is all stupid I want everybody to pause um because sometimes it got that way because the systems and the weren't set up right do you think everyone should try therapy at some point or do you think there should be an issue to go and to specifically work on man that's a great question I'm just going to go with my gut on this one is that okay I have a rule that if I as ask a great question and I don't have like a formulaic response I'm just going to go with what I think is true in the moment I think most people need a group of really close friends that they can lean on and talk to and that will show up with food when they're hurting we'll sit with them and say yeah me too we don't have that we just don't have it it's gone from our culture and so if you don't have that then yes having a neutral third party that you can talk to and do life with even if you have to pay for it is critical to survival right you need a therapist the same as you need like a joint reconstruction you wor that those people maybe have an interest or might be biased for you to do one thing over another versus a therapist who would be assuming they're qualified good that would be a total neutral third party I know some people who are close will say that they know what's best for you then maybe sometimes people say you know let's just say you're having relationship problems but your friend hates your boyfriend he like yeah you guys break up it's a piece of [ __ ] you know versus a therapist looking at the situation and saying hey well maybe it's this and maybe this and you should reconsider these things well a therapist might say every time you talk about your boyfriend you light up sure and every time you talk about your boy boyfriend your shoulders drop and you relax let's talk about your roommate how's that relationship right and then you're like well my roommate right and so a good therapist is going to watch the Lang like you know behaviors of language like your body Mo like tell me about this stuff and I'll also say man if your closest three or four or five friends are all telling you the same thing recently my manager Cody he he was like I don't know what's going on in your life dude but like you're not being your normal self and you're being a jerk to be around you're complaining about everything thing and I literally he's younger than me and I was like whatever wait till you grow up and have right well then a week later my wife was like Hey man can we talk she's like I don't know what's going on and I was like okay now I trust Cody with my business I trust that guy as a friend as a business partner trust my wife with it my life with everything all right now I've got two data points it's probably me right I need to go to the I need to go to the mirror and that's just not having any ego in it I want to be well and whole right I think it's why you have close People final controversial talking point sweet is anxiety all logical anxiety AKA caused by lack of working out poor work life balance no support systems Etc or is there a true like genetic anxiety disorder that gets passed on here's the way I explain genetics and anxiety um the three of us all have our own house and in that house every house has a basement and in my basement I do motorcycle repair and in your basement you make candles and in your basement Jack cuz you were doing this earlier you just have a yoga studio and you just do yoga all the time and let's say that house catches fire all of our houses catch fire my house is full of lubricant flammable things lubricants oil gas and my house will explode your house would smell really good when it burned to the ground cuz it's full of all these fragrance fragrances right and yours would just gently settle into Ash That's genetics the fire is the important thing here right and so some people like me are more bent towards a more anxious response to things some people my son for instance when things get wild he gets real slow it's amazing to watch he's going to have to just keep an eye out in life when he gets hit when he gets fired when somebody breaks his heart that his his body might lean towards just shutting the door and isolating everybody acts everybody responds different that's why the the genetic are arent isn't as important as what's your body trying to do to keep you safe and then what are you doing to stay healthy at 26 I was hired as an associate Dena students at a university way over my head way over my head and within a few years it was like man you're going to be a college President someday and I was like that's right you know what I mean I raced through got a PhD thought I was all smart I was I was an arrogant idiot like you're going to be a college President you're going to be a college President one day you're going to be a college President one day good at speaking right and then I spent the next decade working with college presidents and I realized I don't want that life the closer I got the more budget responsibilities I had the more Personnel issues the more I would get more anxious and more anxious and I had to look in the mirror and say this may not be the job for me or I'm going to have to hire this job very different right I didn't want to deal with my limitation of man I can do this job it's going to cost me a lot and we don't like that we don't like the other side of the cost equation in our culture we just want to head forward we don't want a social media we some guys says I think travel sports are killing you and somebody goes well not in my house you shouldn't say that right instead of going hm my house they were great and I'm on to the next post we don't like that man we don't like the other side of that that equation that make sense that does yeah I really lik that that house analy how everyone's predisposed to respond slightly differently to different stimulus right how do people know that is it just intuitive at that point that they know I react like this and therefore I should do this I'm not enough to parse that out of myself when I get emotional or I get responding to things or reactive and I'm not learning I'm not thinking very clearly um that's why you need a community of people that's why you need a therapist that's why you need somebody to go every time you talk about this you get real short of breath or like my wife I say like hey dude I'm going to write another book she's like you're tough to be around when you write cuz you we we lose you for nine months even when you're walking around the house you're not with us you're in you're in the cloud somewhere and I'm like no I'm not I'm present with the family and she's like I promise you right and she's exactly right and so um I think you have people around you that hold a mirror up for you it's a gift one of the most fascinating things from our discussions that always sticks with me is some of the crisis stories because that is so different than anything 99% of people experience in their day-to-day and what you've gone through and what you've seen people gone uh have what they've gone through is just I feel like it would bear so much trauma and make such a a strong impact why do you think you are perfectly fit for that position and what type of person is I can only tell you my experience it's been my experience that somebody sees a dead body and somebody naturally leans in or somebody naturally turns away and I'm sure there's more to it than that that's just been my experience and the first time I showed up to a scene it was how can I help right it was a leaning into it and I remember the first time I helped a policeman clean brains off of a bathroom wall before a mom got home to see that her kid had died by Sude I called my dad and it was late and he was a homicide detective for years and I was like hey this just happened and his first words out of his mouth were you should not have seen that I was like I know it was tough and we talked through it and I had an amazing supervisor so I don't know that I'm perfectly suited for it other than when things get super chaotic um in that moment I get real still and some people do and some people don't I get real anxious afterwards it's when I'm laying in bed at night going oh my goodness oh my goodness oh my goodness but in the moment it just it just is what it is I don't know if that's training I don't know if that's over and over and over again I don't know what that is but which crisis had the largest effect on you maybe one you still think about to this day even though it occurred years ago I was in a at a university where there's an active shooter and um that was a that was a trying scary situation um students were hiding and um I was a safe voice for them and they didn't come out and it wasn't until everybody got the all clear that students were coming out of every nook and cranny it hit me like I was in such protection mode right take care of everybody mode that it was it was pretty terrifying and it wasn't in our particular building we were on a University campus um and I actually got the call and went to the building cuz I knew my students my law students would be there late but it was a harrowing deal I remember texting my the supervisor saying Hey where's this guy and I thought I thought they'd had him by the shooter and the text I got back was something to the effect of all caps this is this Situation's live and I was like oh man like it it was that was that haunts me when you get those thoughts in your head and you're still thinking about it what do those thoughts look like I call them lightning bolts there's moments like there's and it happens to all of us right but there's um an image of a mom busting through a door when she got a call that her child was dead right she's coming in or a mom hugs you in a certain way when their child is dead it's a different hug it's a it's a um it's a hug of desperation as though someone's about to fall off a bridge that's how they they hold you in a really tight allbody way and it's very unique to that that situation um those they that pops into your head and I think what was revolutionary for me it's great David Kessler he's the world's grief expert in my opinion he's the one that really hammered home for me um his book um finding meaning is a grief Masterpiece but talks about in that moment you have a choice right parents who bury their child and they that casket closes that image will pop into your head 20 years later you have a moment you you have a choice when that moment happens am I going to meditate on that and go down that rabbit hole and your body will respond somebody cheats on you and you have an image of her or him with somebody else that you can't control that it pops your head what you can control is am I going to dwell on that and think about that or you see the little tick or tape US economy about to go into a freef fall you can go down a rabbit hole or you can think no it's not I know the principles or it is and I'm protected right it's the decision am I going to meditate on those things for me there's a constant refrain I wasn't safe then but I'm safe now does that change your belief on human nature to see so much destruction and negativity no cuz it's always surrounded by infinitely more compassion and joy and people showing up to help in fact it's always a another one that haunts me is showing up to a scene where um I think he was 19 20 uh maybe 21y old young man had died um suicide and he took such amazing care so that those who loved him who were going to come have to deal with what the aftermath would have so little mess to deal with and I thought my God if you could only see how much you actually love the people around you and in turn were able to receive how much they loved you the person was so careful and kind and thoughtful about how they were going to pass and they weren't able to see you're not a burden right you are actually loved that much too and so those haunt me right but there's so much compassion and so much love that shows up after those situations often that it's it's overwhelming do you think it's healthy to be exposed to those sort of tragedies it has been for me I think the culturally culturally we have a problem and I think um I think pornography is similar is you've got young people that have or 19 or 20 have never held hands with somebody but they've seen 10,000 hardcore sexual acts there's a distortion between what your body experiences when you waste a whole movie just trying to like get your finger next to somebody's finger to see if we're going to hold hands or not and then just having your whole honic sensor blown with you know going to the wrong website similarly with death I think we've seen 8 million John Wick killings and our parents didn't let us go to our granddad's funeral because they didn't want to scare us right so we've never been in a room with a dead body we've never been at a at a collective grief moment we just watch it on the news and watch it on the news and watch it on the news and so yeah I think the exposure I think I always tell people take your kids to a funeral um kids need to be a part of that and feel that and see that because what they learn from that is this is scary and terrifying and awful and the adults are crying then the adults go to dinner and then the adults go to bed and then the adults wake up and so together we can get through this have you ever not known what to do in a crisis maybe you showed up and you were just completely stumped by it and and and what did that look like in my world back when I was like when I was doing Patrol work you always have a partner there was two situations where um in my house we went through three miscarriages and the third one was the nect topic pregnancy and um it RUP and almost killed my wife and then all a sudden she got pregnant a fourth time and that's my daughter now I walked into a scene and it was a mother explaining um it was a really gruesome CTIC situation but she was explaining to her four or five kids that Dad had died by that day in a really awful way and I walked in and there was little kids playing and that was the first time in my whole life my body said get out of this room and I didn't I was like no I'm I'm good it's like get out of this room and I told my partner I got to go and her name's Janice she's amazing she was like you can't leave and I was like I have to leave and then out in the parking lot she said I never seen you like this you go home all right and then a few weeks later I showed up to another scene and it was a hospital and um two uh two daycare workers had taken a van full of infants and had gone to do something and taken them back to the dayare center and left two of the infants in the very very back seat in 100° weather and I showed up to a 19-year-old mom and a 19 18y old dad and an infant that was probably not going to make it and again my body was like I had an infant at home my body's like get out of this house get out of this hospital and so um I then it's my job to tell my supervisor I can't do any more baby calls for a while and now I could go back and do them but at the time I had an infinite home I experienced a lot of loss of my own at the house and so a you always go with somebody else go with a partner and B don't be afraid to say I can't I can't right now unless you're in the military on a mission or you're a police officer and you're responding to say someone's life just the bravest thing you can do often is say me being here is going to cause more problem to the situation that's going to help and this skill that you have to bring people off of a ledge for lack of a better term have you ever employed that in a situation that wasn't necessarily a call maybe you're like at the grocery store or something and you see somebody oh always yeah but I mean but I mean it's not I think we the training is really human 101 right like showing up in showing somebody that I hear you and that I see you and can you hear me it goes back to Counting um cracks in the sidewalk and Counting trees what I'm doing when I do that somebody as simple as I I drove up to work this about two years ago and there was a small car and there was like eight bodies leaning into this car and so I just knew something's going on in that car and I parked and ran over to the car and somebody was having a panic attack in the car and I asked everybody to back up because the worst thing when someone's having a panic attack is having nine faces in your face right and I asked the woman who's having a she couldn't breathe and I said will you hold my hand she said yeah and I said will you get out of the car she said yeah she got out and I said this is going to be weird but will you take your hand and put it on my chest for a second and she goes yeah and we walked around the parking lot and within just a few minutes it was and then she get embarrassed like don't be embarrassed like your body is trying to keep you safe it took off on you that counting is telling your body get out of your fight or flight get out of your reactive we're here and we're okay right and so I think that helps at somebody spun up at a grocery store I don't know where that so mad I'm not going to fight you right I don't know why you're so mad you're not going to talk to her like that how can we Sol like what's how can we solve this oh that guy cut in line well let's deal with that right and it's just a matter of bringing a room down but that's a when you show up to somebody and they're they've cross the line and they think the world will be a better place and they'll stop hurting by not being here anymore getting through that reaction system and saying no no no I see you and the world's not going to be better without you here that's just that's human 101 man you tell a story quite often about how your daughter would not hug you o yeah um man you guys did your homework good for you um I think I've only told that like on two or three different shows that's good for you guys um yeah it started out as kind of a funny thing my older son um he's 14 now is very like very compassionate very like touches touch is an important thing for him and my daughter wasn't and I did not understand how therapeutic and healing a hug from a daughter is and I've talked to other dads of daughters and I'm like bro it's wild right and also it's not my daughter's job to heal me right so it's that weird I love it and you feel better when your daughter's like Dad he runs and hugs you and also it's not her job to make me feel better that's my job right and so it started out as kind of a funny thing as kind of a tension thing and she'd be like no dad and she'd run away and it was kind of part of our game but I didn't like that game right and long story short short it built up and built up and built up to where I knew something wasn't right developmentally this is this got it got weird right and I know enough about child psychology to know something's not healthy here and it was my wife who's brilliant was Dr deloney way before I was she's the OG she said you know you're always talking about neuroception right this I this this radar that is scanning the environment 24/7 for threats for things that aren't okay what if her teeny tiny little girl six-year-old girl body has identified you as not safe I was like that's insane I don't ever yell in my house I don't swear at my kids right I don't um I don't hit my kid like there's nothing to be scared of and that's when my wife said oh John you've got a nuclear reactor in your chest like all of us can feel it right I was like what are you I think my response was like what are you talking about right um but I called BS I was like no I don't I don't have a nuclear reactor I'm like a nice guy and she's like you're a controlled guy like it's there so I was like whatever dude so I went to someone in in Nashville who is a like probably the best therapist psychologist I've ever met and I popped down and was like I've got a nuclear reactor in my chest and that ended months later with me saying some things out loud that had happened when I was a kid that I told my wife I've been with my wife for a quarter Century she didn't know I just never told anybody and I didn't understand um the way I will'll all I like to teach about traumas your body just puts little GPS pins in things that happen when you're a kid good stuff bad stuff and when it starts to detect we're getting near that GPS pin again it will sound the it will sound the alarms man your job is to keep you safe and so my body had was tough to be around and after after months of that dude it was the way the quote unquote story ends which is not an ending she's eight now and it's amazing but I was doing something on on the ground I was trying to get get something out from under a chair or something but I was on all fours and she just bombed me jumped off something grabbed me really tight and wouldn't get off and I said a sentence out loud I said Josephine get off me and then I started laughing and I was like no don't get off me right right and I realized oh we hug all the ti like she's running and jumping and climbing all over me and it was this I'm safe right and people at work notice like are you cool man like you seem super chill and it was just this letting go man so when you say you had a nuclear reactor in your chest what does that mean like you were just High Strung I think it was my wife calls it used to call it Sunday afternoon dad or a Sleeping Bear like a Sunday afternoon dad everybody knows Dad's on the couch he's kind of half asleep there's a ball game on everybody in the house kind of knows don't go in there don't go wake up Dad right you know what I mean every and when I say that most people are like my dad right it's just that sense that in that room it's not okay and I didn't want to be Sunday afternoon dad so I didn't go turn the ball game on in fact it was probably worse I just popped in the middle of everybody but I was still that Sunday afternoon dad I still was that bear and so I think it's a body that's just waiting for the next thing right always waiting for the next thing and if trauma happens to you when you're a little kid you're always waiting for the next thing to come and other people pick up on that and it comes across as guy's an ass that guy's a jerk that guy's High Strung he was always reactive but man that challenge is way way way Upstream this is a very specific question and if you don't want to answer we can always get this out but you had a call on the show that I did hours of research into and I tried that updates I tried so hard to find like I was in Reddit threads like old it was bad like old face like you name it I was there I'm just I don't want to say too much cuz I don't want people to do it but it was a call and it was a father that was calling about four weeks after something catastrophic had happened in his house he had two kids two sons that went and planned to kill the mother so his wife as well as his younger son this is early early on huh I like looked up court records I looked up everything I could not find updates to this very specific call and it is so fascinating because this guy this father was a victim as well as someone who was a father to you know two kids that had gone on attempted murder do you know anything that happened in this case and then I found there are so many people that are curious too the only thing I don't like about my show is I'm always asking people will you call me back will you call me back will you call me back will you call me back we've never staged a single call ever and I always am like okay what happened what happened what happened very few people Circle back they just are embarrassed or they get blown up or it's we have had people reach out and be like whoa somebody at my church recognized my voice even though I changed the state and change the name and like can you take it down right that call um and if I remember correctly it's a dad with three kids and a wife has four kids four kids two of the kids are like let's kill mom they go to kill mom and little brother's there or something like that and so gets some somehow gets hurt or whatever too basb that's a sensational call that will happen to almost none of us right all parents go through a thing where one of their kids does a thing and you find yourself not liking that kid and you have another kid that's getting straight A you have one kid that's causing problems and so I love the fact very few people will get 23 in me and find out their dad was the local priest and they kept it the priest and their mom kept it a secret for all these years that will happen to almost nobody but the number of people who reach out to the show and say dude I did 23 and me and found out my dad's got I got kids I got brothers and sisters that I didn't know about like I got like that's pretty common or more importantly what do you find out what happens when you find out your dad's not who he thought you who you thought he was he had a secret his own secret pornography addiction he had a big gambling addiction he didn't have any retirement at all or he had $5 million you didn't know about right I think the universality that's inside those Sensational calls I love it when people reach out and be like I saw the title and I was like that's not going to apply to me and suddenly they're calling their husband and being like I'm so sorry right um I'm not cheating on you with nine guys including your best man but I'm about to cross a line with somebody at work and we need to talk right and I love that they're able to find their story in these big Sensational stories recently somebody called and as we dug into it they called for one thing and I remember getting real still I's like do you have a plan to take your life and he said yeah I do and just so happens I do work with um behind closed doors with um a behavioral services team in the state where this guy lived and I said if I get you connected to an impatient group today will you go I said you got to go if you don't I'm going call 911 I'm not giving you an option you're go you're going somewhere today and he said y go how do you how do you deal with uh publishing calls like that that could open them up to a lot of negative comments like let's just say someone's on the edge maybe they're just mentally depressed maybe they're going through some stuff but to put their call online and then have them potentially read the comments about them and have those comments just be nasty well in this particular case the guy did we we'll always tell don't read the comments like they're don't read them like this is you and I had a human experience as much as we could on the phone don't read the comments um people don't understand what you're going through I don't fully know your story I got nine minutes with you right people really going to listen I mean some people but I feel like it's a morbid curiosity like you a car crash where it's like don't look but everyone looks this particular story that I just told you the guy reached out and the comments were so beautiful and so amazing and he said I've not felt this loved in a long time and so it it worked the other way this time okay but do you ever come into situations I always tell people don't look at I mean don't yeah I mean and the the request to have their show taken down has gone way down but early on especially people would ask like whoa I gave my name and my my place I didn't know my husband listen to the show he just came home and was upset and so that that does Happ I'm curious how often that happens because it seems like you could change a name we change name and location all the time hyp if Jack were to call in and I listen I would know it's Jack complaining about Graham I work with this guy business partner high profile Finance YouTuber not Graham but my name is whack from Vos Legas and uh no it um it I mean it happens I don't know how much we we've kind of we prep people on the front end enough to say we're not going to take it down um I think we've taken out a few and they were pretty pretty dire situations so on your channel your most successful videos tend to be relationship based why do you think it is that most relationships are failing um people are unhappy in those relationships yeah I'll Echo William Glasser um he's a famous psychiatrist from the day that that kind of swore off Psychiatry but he said he could fix marriage relationships in one or two sessions he would kind of said it flippantly and I remember in grad school I was like who does this guy think he is and here's what he said he said we think in pictures but we speak in words and if you can align the pictures you can get people aligned and so the this the analogy I made up about that is if my wife comes to me and like hey um you and me Friday night hottest date of your life let's do this and then she kind of winks and flirtatiously and walks away dude Monday night I'm thinking about this date Tuesday I'm wondering like what I'm going to be wearing and for how long what she going to be wearing by Thursday I'm wondering like where the helicopter's going to land all that stuff and then Friday I go home from work I shower I put on a suit I get all gussied up and I walk out and she's in running shorts a T-shirt and I'm like what are you doing she's like what are you doing I said you said we're going on a hot date and she's like yeah dude it's 7 tacos for $7 at the Taco Hut right um and then I get mad and then she gets mad that I'm mad and we both said date and I had a picture that looked like this and she had a picture that looked like that and so I think most people in relationship you hire Jack like I want you to be the co-host your job is to kind of be cool but ask the hard question questions be way better looking have amazing hair right um but you have a picture of what this what he's going to be doing and he shows up and his picture of what you told him is just different because y'all both said co-host and he had a picture of co-host and I think we need to do a better job of saying here's um here's what I have in mind here's what this looks like even with my kid I I remember telling my seven or eight-year-old my son when he was young he would kept talking and talking over some adults and I said hey will you be cool and then I started laughing I was like yeah you don't really know what that means cuz you're eight right here's what this means right and so we just launch Words at each other make sure you vote right well I got a picture of what that looks like and you do too and now I find out you voted the wrong way and now we're fighting and we just got to align the pictures and then if we have a true disagreement then we'll have that disagreement but most of us don't how much do you think current culture uh going online and Society is affecting relationships today no it's destroying it in what way well have you ever had a fleeting thought of about somebody you dated or somebody you had a crush on when you in middle school and you're like no I never never had a crush um I think for all of human history you wonder like what happened to so- and so well now I can just pull out my phone and find out and then I can reach out to her and say how's it going here's my cell number give me a call and now we're off to the races right so we've injected these things that have never happened before in human history and we also man I don't we don't have the psychological capacity to deal with every tragedy going on every corner of the world all at the same time and we're considered cruel and not compassionate if we're not up to the minute on every tragedy going on we we can't we can't hold all that so it makes it very hard to be present with somebody when you're just buried by the weight of the world there's something that you said that phrased that in a slightly different way that really resonated with me which was like would you let 7 billion people in your family room well you do every morning at 6:00 in the morning yeah yeah on your phone it's access to all of these other things that don't actually impact you but they say that they do mhm there's a former Navy SEAL who recently said uh he and he's a cyber guy and he's like man when you give your kid a smartphone you're not giving him the world you're giving the world to him right and a seven-year-old can't compute waking up in the morning and opening a phone and getting the opinions of 7 billion people on what he should be doing and why and who I am any different yeah it's just it's just it's too many voices too much mess too much chaos we're not wired for it so what do you think the biggest problems are in relationships when people call in what's the issue what's the most common problem that people say they have agency and boundaries um last night sitting at the table with a group of people who listen to the show somebody didn't have the courage to tell their mom I I can't take care of you like this anymore they don't know how to set a boundary they don't have permission they've been responsible for their parents emotions for so long and they don't know how to they don't know what to do next and most people have been told as we talked about earlier all you are is this or this or this and they don't understand that they can be so much more and they just need permission to leave they need permission to say you can't talk to me like that you can't hit me anymore and most people don't don't know that they have that kind of agency and what about in romantic relationships oh man there's all kind of problems with those yeah but I mean it distills down to here's a conversation I had so um back when I had a large staff I invited the dean of a business college come talk to my team and his name was Dr Lidle brilliant guy and he was a business professor and he was a de in the business school he comes in and begins to talk about his family's core values and their family strategic plan and I R I was like oh geez this guy leave it to a business professor to ruin family too right and so I interjected and I said you have a strategic plan for your family like your wife and kids and stuff and here's what he said he goes how long do we Vision cast strategic plan 5-year plan job descriptions for our jobs and I remember he ended with this sentence for our businesses for things that don't matter and then we just go home and we just kind of do dad like our dads did or we don't do dads like our dads did and we kind of were married like our parents were married and we kind of just fall into what they did and so I think the largest challenge to Modern relationships is a lack of intentionality is this idea that I don't know how to do this it's kind of like being on a plane a few times and being like I can fly this that's how we treat marriage like I've seen a marriage or two I can do that right and we don't study it we don't research it we don't dig into it we don't figure it out we don't come up with practices we just like try to be married and then we say stupid stuff like well that marriage just ran its course no it didn't we just quit like y'all stopped and so I think people we're not we're not I'm myself includ we're just not intentional like we should be on something that matters this much A lot of people call into your show on the brink of divorce why are most divorces initiated by women and what have you noticed to be the number one cause of this it's a modern it's a modern concept and it's it's economic viability for all of human history women weren't allowed to work my mom in 1970 when she married my dad was not allowed to sign a mortgage in the United States that's my mom this isn't that long ago uh my mom was not allowed to have a checking account without my dad's signature in 1970 right I think it was 73 when that changed and so for all human history women were tied economically to the men in their lives and now all of a sudden six or seven out of 10 college graduates are women like the they're they're crushing men in multiple categories and so now they can't don't have to put up with that crap anymore and they can leave and so yeah when soon as when when that happens Culture by Culture by culture um EST Perell has talked about that a lot like his cultures as as it begins to balance out women are out man they leave because they can I heard in a conversation between I think it was you and Jordan Peterson that women initiate the divorces because they're more likely to respond to negative stimuli they're more likely to you know talk about the the negativity to to bring that to discussion or whatever where whereas guys are more so just like ah you know whatever doesn't matter a futility right and and I think that's a lack of tools it's a la lack of skills um um again for all human history men didn't have to be good at relationship there was no such thing as no fault divorce it just was right and so I didn't have to learn this thing and no one had to listen to her talk about the things that were burning up inside of her it just was and now all of a sudden men are being tasked with hey youall have to learn some new skills man it's a new time I don't want to roll back um women's contribution to the workforce and education all these important places but that means men have to learn new skills and men have to learn to say don't just say the words it is what it is that's not a good answer or I guess whatever she no learn to say out loud here's what scares me here's what I want here's something I need say those things out loud that's bravery and courage not just oh whatever dude see I heard that that women initiate more divorces on average and I think it's so it's almost like 50/50 but it's like slightly skewed for the women in response to things the guys are doing and so that could be like maybe the guy is cheating on her or maybe the guy is abusive or maybe this or that so the guy's not initiating the divorce but he is culpable for the divorce happening if that makes sense maybe maybe I mean it doesn't I mean again it goes back to they're initiating because they can now right and for all human history they couldn't right that wasn't a part of the deal why do people cheat in relationships how can you prevent your partner from cheating on you Graham has a very interesting story about this we were having this discussion right before the podcast do you want to say yeah yeah I'll say so I was cheated on in a in a prior relationship but I told Jack I don't see that as being like 100% her fault I honestly think it was 50/50 tell me about that like I could have been a better partner um we broke up initially because I said you know I I think we had dated for like almost a year and I think I went to her and I said I don't think you're the person I want to get married to and obviously that was a huge shock and so we broke up but then we got back together afterwards and I thought well you know what like we did get along great and let's just see how it goes but I think that that broke it so much that when she did it like it wasn't a surprise to me if that makes sense so that's why I kind of think I yeah it's it's a 50/50 all lean on EST Perell this is kind of her world but her explanation of a sense of aliveness or walking death if you will um and it I I'll walk you through how she got to it and I love how she got to it and it resonates a lot with me she kept seeing over and over what you would call Great marriages married they raising kids they buried parents together they like she she held the house down while he went to law school and now he's holding the fort down while she's going back to med school like they did life together and then one of them steps out right and it was often not because I didn't love you and it was often not because our marriage wasn't going great or going I wouldn't say great going really good it was this sense that that I'm not I'm dead inside I'm Al I'm not alive anymore it's this slow quiet life of desperation and then somebody at work thinks your jokes are hilarious and you feel that flame reignite just a little bit um somebody writes you back that was an amazing email keep those coming and you start crafting your emails kind of with her in mind or him in mind right and it's just a slow you know that you've heard that old you just turn the wheel one degree and it turns all the way around suddenly somebody else makes you feel a little bit more alive and so this stepping out of the marriage is about feeling alive again and so um your an like can we repair can we find spark again and are we committed um I like what she says you practice safety when you're dating are they going to answer the phone are they going to show up when they said they were going to show up is this person how they respond when they get someone cuts him off in traffic does he freak out and smash the steering wheel or does he exhale and kind of laugh a little bit you're practicing safety and safety can't it it can but it's hard to coincide with desire right it's that tension I'm really attracted to this person I'm all over them I'm emotional but we're practicing safety once you establish safety that that Aros that eroticism goes away and so how do you practice desire over 5 10 20 30 years it becomes H we got along that's cool let's give it a shot I mean that doesn't sound erotic that doesn't sound like this desire that sounds like you're here I'm here let's go get something to eat right but that's why I think theot not all the time but in a lot of time I think both parties usually have some responsibility and usually I think cheating is in response to Something in the relationships that's that's not working and I I would say ultimately it's one or both of us have agreed this is just the way this is going to be and we're not talking through Seasons we're not talking through what's coming up we're not talking about how can I love you today we're not talking about we're talking about I just got got to do this and I got to do this and you become great co-managers you become great co- podcasters right and you stop saying like why do we even get into this in the first place and what is it about you that I just love and um here's something recently I did and I don't think you all know that I did this going back to what Dr Lidle said every year my wife and I now do a strategic plan for our marriage and we talk about our finances and we talk about love and we talk about how we're raising our kids and we talk about all these goals that we had how' we do this year um I spent some time in personal reflection and I went huh if you would ask me what are the two most important things in your life I would say my wife and my two children and I would say my faith and then you would say how much money have you spent over the years on Mental Health stuff and I would say probably 150 to $170,000 including all my schooling and everything and I haven't spent a penny on the other stuff and I was like man so I hired a theology Professor from a local University and we meet once a week and he's giving me a core I said I want you to design a course called Faith 101 for a semester for me I want you to go all the way back to zero and I want to be able to tell my 14-year-old in very simplistic terms here's why I believe what I believe and then I asked my wife I want a syllabus from you she's an old professor and I said I don't know what podcast you listen to regularly I don't know what songs you're listening to all the time in your headphones I don't know what books you're reading that you really spark I want you to make me a syllabus and she said this may be the most vulnerable scary thing you've asked me to do cuz what if you don't like me at the end I was like I may think your books are terrible but I'll like you and so I'm committed this year to read these books that she outlined I want to get to know my wife not just like where do you want to eat tonight or what color of your eyes I want to know here's what's been bringing you mystery and joy and laughter and fun even if I disagree with it I think that's a great entry point that's fascinating I heard on some podcast you may know your kid likes reading a lot and you don't like reading and they read these like boring fiction things that you're not interested in whatsoever you feel some sort of a disconnection with your kid you can go and you can what seems to be a waste of time and spend hours reading this book that they're so fascinated in and then surprise them with a question about the book that only a reader would know and this like reposter that that connection yeah so me and my son go back and forth and it's tough sometimes when I get this really weird science fictiony something or other and I don't really understand dinosaurs and lasers or whatever and I made him read the Comfort crisis he finished Jonathan Hyatt's book before I did he grabbed the anxious generation and I was like okay tell me all about it and he goes just what you've been telling me for years I you can't have a cell phone I mean he just kind of rattled it off but um he doesn't even know what he's absorbing but more than that he is absorbing my dad values me with his time my Dad read this book too and I I love that that interaction on the topic of keeping relationships going for an extended period of time you talk about cultivating desire and safety so like those are two things that you juxtapose with one another you say kind of crassly but also honestly it's like you go to the most safe person in your entire life it's like no one wants to kiss their mom no one want like make out with their mom even though that's kind of like a horrific sight and the fact that we're all kind of like mildly throwing up in our stomachs thinking about that it's because they're the safest possible person and they're kind of like it's lied on a spectrum how can you make sure that you continue to balance desire as you keep a relationship going because safety will usually be there if you spent enough time with someone but how can you practice desire I think people have to get to a place where they say out loud here's what I want and I hear the phrase a lot my husband needs sex and anytime somebody needs something energetically that's a Eternal response like my kids need food my kids need clothing and so if I'm married to somebody and I get home I've worked a full day and my kids need this and this and this and then my husband needs this and this it goes on a checklist as a thing a series of things to do but if I get home and my husband wants me my husband desires me and I get home and my wife desires me that's another ball game and so I always want to keep from slipping into that you're my mom role going back to boundaries going back to intentionality man the number of calls I get on my show and I'm like dude you're your husband's mom he's he's a child for you and she's like oh my God yeah of course you don't have sex with your kid right how do you differentiate that when let's say they have a traditional relationship where the husband goes and work the wife cleans the house cooks the food isn't aren't those just motherly Tendencies to begin with even though that's maybe more of a traditional gender role it's a maternal energy to care right to to take care of the home right um and again this is overly generalized everybody chill it's cool but like um yes it's a maternal energy right and but there's a nurturing and then there is desire right there is like this is my role here at the house you go out and kill the animal and bring it home I will cook it and prepare it right we lump all that into make sex a chore right instead of making it way that we come together and connect and we've also turned sex into every sexual encounter has to be a Super Bowl and when you're with somebody for a long time you're going to have a bunch of like that was was it was good it was fine we connected it was it was awesome it was it was and then you'll have ones that are like that was a disaster right and if you're together on the same team and you're building something for the future you're able to laugh you're able to roll off be like what happened there and then some are going to be spectacular but I think we're so feelings driven like that was a b it was a wild night or wasn't that great of a night what happened right but going back to what you said like it goes back to the intentionality here's these I got to get these tasks done I got to get these tasks done above those and beneath those I see you and I desire you I want you versus I got another task on that list for you right is that ring true yeah but I guess why would why are so many men undesirable what do what do they do to make themselves undesirable I think for many women uh the man in their house is just another just another mouth to feed Richard Reeves writes on this great in his book of boys and men it's a masterpiece that men have cashed out they've cashed out man um a lot of the traditional jobs are gone a lot of the traditional roles are shifting and changing they found themselves without skills and that's why the Andrew Tates of the world are so popular because it's it gives somebody something to be angry at and to point and to flex on instead of saying okay I need to learn some new skills but I think largely men have been told you're the problem for everything in the world your jobs are slowly going away you're not going to college you're not get guys aren't getting educated they these programs don't work for men and they're just kind of quitting and so I think going back to your original divorce and economic like women are like dude I'm I'm I'm I'm either out literally I'm going to file or I'm out like this is whatever just another mouth in the house that's fascinating I think it was you that mentioned this or maybe it was someone else they said you ask like a man what his ideal day looks like barring maybe he having kids or something like that and he just wants to sit on the couch and eat potato chips and watch the game you know what I mean like if you leave men to their own devices and provide them with everything that's what they just want to I feel like the reason for that is because it's so opposite of what a lot of guys do on a daily basis which is go and work a job they really don't like they're spending a lot of energy at that it could be physically demanding so what's the opposite of that that they don't get to do often which is watch TV lay on the couch be uninterrupted and eat potato chips I feel like if you do that then it might look different but there's also like addictions like you can get to video games and other things that are just so enticing that you just to do it all the time because you don't have these other responsibilities due to lack of skill or something like that but you I think what you just said is super key is we just give the first part of that equation that you laid out there as a given it just is you just go work a crappy job that you hate that you don't want to be there at and we just say that's the way that is and I I just whole heartly reject that I think we create lives to where that's the only way we can keep our Lexus in the driveway and our ex house and Y yada yada so I have to go do this thing that's killing me and the only way I can balance the Teeter Totter of my life is I go such a miserable path for most of the day that I just smash the other side of that teeter totter and I do nothing which by the way if always sounds good nobody feels better after doing nothing you don't ever have nine hours on on the couch watching TV eating potato chips and just getting up and being like that was awesome right no you feel worse and then you realize oh I got to do this thing I'm late on this thing I should have got this reported and the whole Loop starts again it's not settling for a and it's not it's just rejecting the whole equation to wrap up the conversation about cultivating desire and long-term relationships there was something that you've quoted a lot of books I'm going to quote a book that I read in stumbling on happiness which is the way that you can cultivate desire or make something good is two ways scarcity and Novelty so for example let's say one guy goes and he deploys and then he comes back after 6 months that first time seeing your wife again is going to be amazing there's going to be so much desire and happiness and joy but if you're with your wife 8 hours a day every single day seeing them again maybe after going coming back from like a one day Tri it's just not very exciting right and then the other one novelty is like you can have you know a right balance of of scarcity or whatever but if you do the same thing every single time you're not going to be learning and adapting and growing with your wife it's very hard to do the same thing it becomes stale to continue to date after you get married is a very important I think it was you that actually said that it's like a lot of people they date then they get married and they stop dating the game's over right it's kind of like getting to the major leagues people think if I can just get to the major leagues just get to the major leagues and they don't realize no when you get there like this is when the game starts right or you guys like if we could just get to 500,000 subscriptions it's when you get to 500,000 then you start getting different guests and then the scrutiny gets bigger and then the comments get like it like oh this gets heavier right I also think that you have to be careful about not making marriage about what I get it's about what we are building and scarcity and Novelty are ways to add excitement and energy and fun into a thing but there's also long periods of just showing up and and like there's times when you go to the gym and your trainer's like um dude we're doing something totally different today and you're like oh my gosh and he puts you through it and you actually do it and you like get done and you feel all jacked up and then you're super sore the next to it's awesome you can't do that every time you go some period sometimes for months sometimes for years I just got to go to the gym right and you're just going through it and going through it and going through it and in our culture we tend to in those periods relationally like oh it must be dead or there's no spark left or right and I think it's a balance of both and if you're constantly adding novelty and spice and Spark some point that The house's going to catch on fire that's a lot of spark right and if you just let the whole thing go out you end up what we were talking about earlier like I just feel dead in my own house so I think it's finding this balance and all that balance starts with me do you have a weekly get together with your spouse just to say how we doing like let's talk through our budget this week let's talk through like how can I love you this week who's taking the kids to school like what does that look like what does what does your week look like now I've got seven different podcasts plus my own show plus I'm co-hosting this other show I'm going to be wiped out how can I love you this week this is going to be a week like for like probably less Romance I'm going be exhausted when I get home can we just hug and watch a show can we just sit by each other and read books awesome then the following week I'm going have hardly nothing I'm going to come home jonesing for a connection game on right it's that to me is the intentionality and then you can repel off the side and be like cool I'll add some novelty I'll add some spark I'll add some SK we we'll do some of those fun thingses that make sense it all stems from are we going to be intentional about this and that just sucks because that's not how Hollywood builds marriages now why do so many people say that marriage is hard cuz it is what's hard about it we're selfish beings man and we think we have pictures of what marriage was going to I I think I used to think it was we had a picture of what marriage was going to look like I don't think that anymore I think we thought marriage was going to feel a certain way same as making a million dollars I think we all thought it was going to feel a certain way I remember one of the top 10 or 15 moments of my life was when the driving in a black SUV with the head of publishing handed me his cell phone in the back of the car we were going to a book signing and Dave Ramsey's on the phone yelling you're number one and I was like what and he's like you did it you're number one and he's going woo and I was like yeah thank you for your help you you did this man he's like no no just whole thing hung up the phone and I was like yeah dude I called my mom I called my wife I went to a book signing and because um I'm a part of that giant Ramy organization there was a line out the door and we were so a and then I got to my hotel room and the door shuts and then you go take a shower and you're like number one right and I I had this fan I I don't I didn't know what I thought but I thought it would just feel different and I thought a million dollars just shows up in your checking account I thought there was like the number one book fairy just drops a million dollars in your account and then you get the next day and you're like back at line in Southwest waiting in the TSA line and your life just keeps going I think we do that with having a kid I think we do that with our jobs we do that with our when I hit Milestone X we think it's going to feel a certain way and it doesn't so you think people are going into marriages feeling like they're going to be different it's that it's the curse of the Renee ziler Tom Cruz like you complete me I think I'm finally going to be whole and then you realize like all great counselors will tell you all great psychologists will tell you that wherever you go you go with you right you get married and you have this wild wedding and you have a great honeymoon and you get home and then it's Monday morning you got back to work and you're back in the same car change though if people just didn't have that expectation because I feel like everyone says or you hear a lot of people say marriage is hard but you never hear people say friendships are hard so what's the big difference between maintaining a friendship and maintaining a friendship with your wife or husband because I don't think we have when I'm with my buddies I don't have this expectation that I'm going to be complete in some way I know Todd I know John and I know they vote differently than me and I know we have different economic thoughts and we get together and argue and we both like to watch the fights and we both love each other's kids and we both love our wives and I've done life with those guys I don't have an expectation of it's going to feel it a certain way when it comes to marriage like no it needs to feel I need to feel like I'm a king I need to feel like I'm great I need to feel like I'm complete I need to feel like I'm whole I need to feel like I'm safe often somebody else can't give you that and so you go through this this illusion it's a happily ever after they never tell you we never ask the question what happens after you win but that sounds like two people who are incomplete in their lives get together thinking the marriage is going to solve something and it doesn't versus two people who are just complete on their own coming together do you think that that's a difference no cuz I think that person would be coming saying oh nothing's going to change and it all changes too right I I I think people aren't honest about I thought it was going to feel differently cool what's the biggest change about getting married gr's getting married getting married this year okay and I I question how that's going to change the relationship if that makes sense because I feel like you know everything we're going to continue to work just as hard as we have we're going to continue to have ups and downs I've never considered it hard there's absolutely times you're frustrated angry sad whatever but I would never say it's hard and so I'm curious what a marriage would do differently in that situation I think it's um hey you're probably more differentiated than most right you you're more thoughtful and think through very logically all these different emotions I think where it gets hard is um you get a call that your mom's very sick and she's got 48 hours and your wife I'm making something up completely okay your wife has heard you talk about you and your mom don't have a great relationship and then you get a call that your mom's sick and she's got maybe 48 hours and you say I've got to finish this interview and suddenly your wife thinks that's your mom and you think well I've told you we're not close like we have been a stranged for a long time and then she starts to ask who is this man I married is he going to leave me right and so suddenly those kind of things will happen over and over and over and over again and um it happened through Co it really split up a lot of folks because the government said do one thing and you might know your spouse was kind of anti-government like they was ranting about whatever or your spouse was super compliant like whatever the speed limit is they describe the speed limit but suddenly like I didn't know you right so those things happen and that's that that's where it gets hard or you'll say something in a moment when you won't realize your wife was reaching out to you for something she might carry the label wife differently than she carries the label girlfriend or you the first time someone's like oh this is my husband you might go I'm H right like it all of it just shifts and changes and at the same time it doesn't feel like we think it's going to so I I think it's all a matter of coming back and saying month one this feels exactly the same cool you too yeah it feels exactly the same that's not they really kind of anti-climatic awesome same team same team what's our budget look like this week how can I love you this week and it's continuing to come back to that well over and over and over it's like going to the gym MH so that you look up 25 years from now and you can still bend down and pick up your niece and nephew so what are the things that couples could do to ensure that they stay together a decide we're going to stay together I wish there was something more sexy and like five steps to I have to decide this will never end and come hell high water we're going to figure this out and the second one I think is intentionality I don't know intentionality as a psychological practice I know is as a physical practice we get together once a week I won't call you if I'm going to spend more than x Dollar on a thing I bought a red light therapy the other day and I called my wife and said at this point we don't need to call each other but I said I'd like to buy something that's obnoxiously expensive and it's a health and wellness Gadget that may or may not work what you get um it was just a ju um like a big red light therapy thing that I can sit and meditate in front of she was like oh jeez sure but it was we budgeted for it was planned and all that but how much was it even I was 1,00 bucks at this point in our marriage we don't need to make that call um but that's just part of our rhythm right and I never want to get out of the rhythm of we're touching touching base touching home base touching home base what what scares you the most about getting married honestly my biggest fears are not really relationship based like my biggest fear is not and I've been like totally upfront with Macy about this too but like not being able to pursue dreams and passions not being able to express myself and not being happy in what I'm doing day today like those are my biggest fears and so I was telling her like and we've had so many great discussions too about like what we expect from a relationship and this and that but my thing is you know I don't want to ever have to feel like I'm held back from pursuing something and my things are usually like hobbies and work are the two things that I get a lot of joy and fulfillment from and when I get really into something it's just like it's all I want to do and so that might be the aquarium like it's never going to be like oh I want to go out with all the buddies and stay out 3:00 for me it's like hey if I have this really cool hobby like I just want to be able to do that and like hey if I'm on this cool project I want to be able to focus on this like that to me brings me a lot of Joy uh that's my biggest fear is not being able to have those things but that's with or without a relationship that's just me on you know on my own I think that's one of the reasons why I was like always just saving so much money because for me I want to have those options to be able to do the things that I really enjoy whatever exactly so it's less about like a relationship thing and more about like how could I design this lifestyle where I'm able to pursue the things that really make me happy and fulfilled and again it's all work and hobbies really sure is there a chance that fully committing and going all into another person like this fills the Gap that maybe a hobby was filling I've been 100% committed like that that's how I feel like I'm not going to get I can't possibly get more committed than I am now like I'm 100% in okay and I'm going to stay 100% in so it's it's it's hard for me to say that I would be like more committed getting married I'm like I'm going to be just as committed I would challenge you to leave space for the opposite effect that maybe now I can do something I've never been able to do is just to share some of this with somebody and it will magnify my Joy or love for it I thought I was into let me think to save it this way I thought playing guitar I've got guitars collect them I love it I love picking up a song on the internet and trying to learn to play in fact this year I started one of my goals and I didn't do it I was supposed to do it last year didn't do it supposed to do this year it's not going great but I want to will learn the 10 my 10 favorite Weedle DD 80s metal hair guitar solos and now that YouTube's out you can just play byplay step by step note by note all of them and that's awesome I like sitting in my basement I have a room where I write and do all my stuff and play guitar I love doing that it can't compare to jamming with a band right with a group of people in a room making music and so I can get that apprehension like I'm afraid I'm going to have to do husband stuff and it's going to take away from aquarium time the other other side of that might be maybe aquarium time may be become amazing it may become connected time maybe she gets her own aquarium or she starts acting we we do the so who knows right but it can be both both and it could be an optimism for I'm always haunted and inspired by that old beray brown quote whatever you go looking for in the world you're sure to find I always want to think to myself as a way to shift how the the lens the glasses I'm wearing to see the world not where's my time time being taken from but where can this accelerate and make this thing more pleasurable and more exciting and more joyful if that makes sense it does just a frame for experiencing the world okay but good on you man that's good it's good that you even know that out loud and you're way ahead of the curve but you said those things out loud you said them out loud most people would just keep them quiet get married and then get frustrated and then not say anything and then resent I think both of us are like so committed to making it work that we like looked up all these statistics on saying like all right you get married at this age you're less like to divorce you have like this you're less likely to like all of these things that statistically we know we could like you know dwindle some of this down and then work on a lot of things ahead of time to like know what we're getting into and that's the big Capital ey intentional right yeah and you'all have done it in your own weird statistically driven nerdy way but y'all have been highly intentional together so good for you that's awesome something that I've always had trouble with navigating because he'll come to me and ask me question what should I do in this situation with with my my f say what should I do in this situation how should I respond to this and it's really hard because I would respond completely differently than he would respond give me example so for example like I unfortunately or fortunately there you know I'm I could be potentially more combative in in conversation so for example like I will contend an idea that I do not agree with whereas he will be a little bit more avoidant like he just doesn't care about you know the other person not seeing that he's right enough to you know to push that and to be like hey here here's why I'm right or whatever he doesn't care enough he'll just be like whatever I just want to avoid this I always thought it's like fundamentally it just seems like you're planting a very bad seed you know what I mean this can come up in the future but after years of talking to him about it it's like been the biggest wakeup call to me like news flash everyone's different you know and for him maybe he genuinely doesn't care and for me that's been like the hardest pill to swallow when I'm trying to navigate how to help him out with something is the fact that like I just think like Fally this is how human nature is this is how I am this is how I expect other people to be but in actuality maybe he genuinely is just like you know I guess my response to that is I tend to see the big picture and I'm like how's everything going overall is this a big deal no do we have a difference on this yes can I convince her no can she convince me no so it's fine but like in the big picture control you control let's move on kind of yeah it's like hey overall we have a great life we're happy together we want to be together we're not no one's leaving right like this little thing it doesn't matter and we could blow it up into something big but it really it's so insignificant in the grand scheme of things that I just kind of think it doesn't make a difference in my life and I would say going full circle this is why that very beginning conversation's important this is the root of why mental health practitioners don't tell people well here's what you should do because some people are like I wouldn't let anybody talk to me that way and some people people are like it don't matter and so there is a an important part of therapy is finding out well what does matter to you and is that serving you well right and so you all just approach problems differently um that's good it's good that you know that about yourself and more importantly that you're honest about your partner like this is these are the things that get me fired up and these are the things that these are the hills all die on do you have more Hills that you'll die on than him or much fewer probably much fewer yeah I think that overall if everything is good I'm happy and so if there's like little tiny things it just doesn't doesn't get to me there's there's little things that'll get to me short term but you give it like a day and I've just moved on to something else I'm not just talking about like relationship problems I'm just talking like a little work thing you know i' come to Jackal hey this happened blah blah blah and it's really annoying but then like a day later I'm like hey you know what that's stupid it doesn't matter not a big deal how do you address uncomfortable ICS with your partners for example directly go right through them I don't like that you've been gaining weight for example not finding your partner attractive you know how so you say just straight up because I because no it I um I like the wisdom don't ever use the word you in a in that type of conversation I'm struggling with being attracted to you right now I'm worried about your health that is different than you did this because when soon as you say you I have to build a wall to protect myself you just came swinging I got to block I got to block your punches if I say I'm struggling with this which is the real truth here I'm worried about you which is the real truth here that's an invitation it might be a scary hard uncomfortable invitation but anytime somebody goes you've been acting great man you're Off to the Races now they have to defend themselves versus I feel like I'm not being heard in this house like that's me right and now let's have that conversation it's fascinating you talk about the difference between invitation and commands and you said it would be a gift to me if you did the dishes rather than I don't like that you don't do the dishes after you eat your food which is just a funny way of phrasing it and it is fortunate unfortunate I air more on the side I feel like in my gut that it's unfortunate that you have to play a game but you know to have conversations but it's not a game it's hospitality does that make sense it's it's it is we have such an individualistic culture everything is about me and so if I want a thing it all begins with you have to make my thing happen I don't think it's I don't I don't see as much as a game it's just a it's just a new language we had a divorce lawyer on James Sexton who was fantastic he gave a great example he said that you uh reward good behavior that you want to see more of and so in that case of the dishes you could say something like I absolutely love it when you do the dishes and afterward we have all this time and sharing like the benefit instead of I don't like it when you don't do something I like this when you do this and this makes me happy and excited and all these great things and that rewarding good behavior does a lot better than shaming bad behavior or by bad behavior I mean something you just don't like well I it's it's one's an invitation one's kind yeah one is um I really feel loved when XY and Z yeah who's not going to lean into that right I want I want to do that more what questions should you ask to your partner before you decide to get married I'm talking about faith and finances I think those are important conversations how do we solve problems because there is going to be an evitable conflict how do we come to the table I think you need have conversations about kids even though all of that's going to change right you have no idea how what that journey is going to look like and I'm not saying everyone has to have the same Faith what I'm saying is we need to have a set of anchored values right I often will just distinguish between values and beliefs I want my values anchored in for the Delon is one of our values us is um we believe in God we believe in something bigger than us what does that belief look like that has moved all over the place and I want my beliefs to change that's why I sit with theologians that's why I read books I want my beliefs to be all over the place and I want my wife to be somebody I can go and say I think I believe this right now and that's not challenging that anchor right that value one of our values is curiosity that means we're always allowed to ask hard questions in our marriage about anything right about politics about religion anything like that and it also means we don't land on the same place a lot one of our core values in our family is not we will agree on everything all the time that's a that's a recipe for disaster but one of our core values is curiosity ask anything man and I'll still love you even though I think you are a goofball on this particular topic right um but I think a good place to start is family and uh discussion of Faith practice what does that look like for you none okay what does that look like kids and finances what did U I'm interested to know what sexon had to say I think it was just very like what are expectations of the relationship what are your roles what are my roles how are we going to do finances uh who what what families are we going to see for the holidays I think it's just a lot of the very practical questions like the everyday boundaries yeah you know who's going to take care of the kids in this situation who's going to do I think it was uh religion I think was a big one how do we how do we celebrate or practice religion a lot of those questions that I think any like premarital counseling would Encompass would dig into yeah mild change of topic here but do you think gender roles in relationships exist and if so do they exist for a reason I do um I think they've shifted dramatically and we haven't been completely honest about how dramatic that shift has been there can be a masculine in a feminine role right there are times I take on a feminine role in my house right there's times I'm gone and my wife will take on a more masculine role she'll she'll have to deal with accountability and correction of our kids right and there's times when she's gone on I'm a safe place and so I think that energy will shift and move I think for again as we talked earlier for most of human history guys had bigger muscles and so they did different things and women had smaller muscles and did different things and now our economy has shifted to where most of the money is made with our heads and most of the muscle things have been replaced with robots and so you have an economy that has grown to scale here that is rewarding people who go to college and can sit it a desk and type and think and solve problem as a team and you've got a very individualistic I do these these tasks I shovel coal I fix cars I do things and those jobs are gone right and so I think there's a shift that's happened dramatic shift that's happened and now the roles are a mess I think they're a mess and we don't have a way to talk about them inside of our house the most important thing for me inside homes is that people talk about roles like as you mentioned earlier like who is going to be responsible for X Y and Z and I think H I care less about what these societal bell curve kind of roles are and what did y'all two agree in your home what's this going to look like and if that role becomes a burden or if somebody's not upholding their role that y'all talked about how are youall going to come back and repair that how you going to come back to the table and say I'm not okay that's way more important to me than the bigger more instructive ones what do you think about that answer I like the answer and I I think the suggesting the importance of roles is something that's incredibly important I think I don't want to properly um give this idea to somebody but I think it was Ben Shapiro that said what do they write on your Tombstone it's your roles it's like Father you know a great son uh let's say a loving husband and those are the things that people spend so little time focusing on there you go yeah but that's your role that's what they're writing on your Tombstone that's what's actually important and I think really people figuring out what their roles are and how they can be that role the best in the best possible way is very important so for you two both of you as of now aren't married don't have kids knowing they're not going to write world's greatest YouTuber on your Tombstone they might maybe they might they might Mr PE probably has that's right that's right but I hope they don't right does that motivate you to do something to inject some sort of action into your lives or is that something to just go I see it as eh because I feel like I'm I'm dead anyway at that point so as long as it made a positive impact I don't care okay um I'm more concerned about like what could I do now that has a a bigger impact than just me okay and I like to think that the podcast is a way of doing that okay excellent what do you think yeah the idea of a legacy obviously is somewhat important okay I don't think that it's the most important thing for example the reason why I was saying that the role thing on the tombstone is not because then everyone sees that and like oh this is awesome this guy must have been a great husband or whatever but it's to challenge your beliefs of how you're spending your time currently that's right more so in that category than you know being proud of your legacy when you're you know your brain isn't working H very very cool when do you make a decision for someone else if ever for example you're in a toxic relationship you're with your friends and maybe one of them wants to continues talking to this girl but you know it's bad for him and it's like yo like like I don't want to be that guy to tell you to break up but you have to trust me as your you know what I mean like really forcing your ideology on them versus kind of letting them figure it out for themselves how do you delineate between that I don't see that as forcing an ideology as much as I'm trying to push you out of the way of a truck I would much rather somebody push me out of the way of a truck and I get all scraped up and the truck wasn't going to hit me then them not try to push me out and it does right and so my friends know deloney over loves all right I'll call you and say dude how's your marriage you all okay everything cool um and then when it comes time to like have a hard like you need to not be with that person I'm going to go back to I don't use the word you there I'm going to go back and say every red flag in my life is going off right now I'm worried about you all right and I'm not going to lob a grenade at you because then you got to defend yourself um if I think you're going to hurt yourself or take your life then I'm going to interject myself in that situation but when it comes to like a relationship a marriage a faith practice or whatever I'll say here's how this is impacting me and that's that's sometimes scarier than just to say like you shouldn't be doing this it's easy to throw grenades are you happy I happiness is not a metric that I care a whole lot about why is that cuz it's cocaine and fireworks and cotton candy it's just a byproduct of a of a it's a it's a sparkle along a well-lived life you don't think that happiness is kind of like the anxiety where it's it's an alarm that's telling you that things are great that things are working no cuz I can be happy just hammering a bag of gummy candy that's really bad for me and so that's happiness is a dangerous dangerous light to follow what about Joy or something more deep Joy is joy is the path right you can youall probably heard me talk about this my one of the most important stories things I ever saw was my granddad was 93 and um he he passed away he was a World War II vet raised four amazing kids my dad my aunts and uncles at his funeral we're at the burial at the at the gravide and these guys are out there playing taps with the with you know everyone's going to get a rose and put on the casket and my son was really little and he escaped and he got out of my grass and he ran over and then climbed up on the casket and got one of the roses and put it on top cuz he just saw everyone else doing that and he wanted to participate and it was this really rad four generation my son is the only deloney male like he's it right he's the last of last of the line and it was all of us were there there's nothing happy about that moment at all but it was right my granddad was 93 years old left an amazing Legacy defended his country was a great man was like active in his church for 50 years it was right that was there's a deep joy in seeing that Legacy connect in that beautiful moment nobody's happy there right and so I think Joy is this underneath are we on the right path right I'm not happy at the gym most of the time I'm not happy being exhausted and being sore and like um occasionally I'm happy in there but if I waited to be happy to go to the gym I would never go right but man feeling good and pushing myself hard early in the morning late at night that's joyful so it sounds like it's more of a stability and just an overall higher vibration to put it into terms that maybe almost a lower vibration you think when I say like vibration okay now I see what you're saying vibration it's a root system yeah it's not it's not a piece of fruit the fruit comes once a month I mean for a month out of it out of a year 11 months there's no fruit but that root system vibration in a positive way yeah okay in stumbling on happiness they talk about Dan Gilbert right yeah yeah how different people have different levels of happiness so for example uh think I'm a 10 out of 10 right but let's say we actually plot that out on a graph and I'm a six out of 10 how can you know if you're truly if you feel Joy you can convince yourself of anything I can convince myself I'm happy you can convince yourself you're angry right but what are you actually and how do you know what you are what if you live your entire life actually just being a six but you think you're a seven and you just didn't know it could get better then who cares I think that's been some of the Empire Building that's going on globally where people move in and try to tell other people no you AR AR living right we have a better way for you to live do it like us and I think that happens all over the world and you realize um I've talked to some some uh military folks who were like what are we doing like we took a perfectly happy group of people living very differently than I'm going to live but they're perfectly happy and we said no no no this is how you have to do it now we've created a mess right and so I think the the notion of like what if what I think that can be a haunting question I tend to the the driver from me is peace that was the driver of that whole book like can I put my head on my pillow and just fall asleep can I just drink a cup of coffee with my wife in the morning can I walk out walk into my home and feel warmth instead of here we go again for me the barometer is peace it's not am I at a seven of Happiness a 10 of happiness cuz that's just going to it's just going to be a stock ticker it's just going to go up and down depending on whether I've got diarrhea that day right or what I ate for dinner that night before or how good my hair looks I mean it's all that stuff is just and I think we get so because we can kind of like the same with people who are so obsessed with Market ticks every two or three minutes they make themselves insane and because we have such fine-tuned microscopes for looking at those things we miss macro Trends right you can't see the solar system with a microscope I'm way more worried about the solar system than I am these little bitty Tik toks I want to see the trend right you talk a lot about the pathology of discomfort and comfort uh and about anti fragility what does that mean to you and how do you see this as a plague that's affecting people and how they can use this knowledge to better improve themselves one of the most important books I ever read was antifragile by theb and um he has another book out called Skin In the game which may be the most important book I've read in a decade and I was with Michael Easter last night the author of The Comfort crisis but this idea that in pursuit of a more comfortable less stressful less painful life we accidentally created a world where our bodies just fall apart right and our psychology falls apart um we literally have everything now you can turn your air conditioner on and off your your your fake climate inside your home on your cell phone and you can push another button food would just show up here you can push another button water would just show up at the right we have all everything and we are as bananas as we've ever been and so reverse engineering that we've created a world where we go into the weight room and everyone's taking all the weight off the bar and we're wondering why nobody's getting any stronger I think what everyone's beginning to slowly realize is strength happens after the discomfort right so find the most uncomfortable path to where you're going what does that mean um yeah you don't have to get a PhD to know about counseling anymore you can read a bunch of books I challenge you to go five years with a group of people that are going to challenge you and get pissed at you you're going to have to write papers for all these different professors which means you going have to learn to speak all these different languages you're going to get frustrated you're going to get rejected you're going to in papers that get rejected it's going to be hard and when you walk out you're going to really know the stuff not just here but you're going to know it here you're going to have to have seen clients and have multiple people watching you see clients and somebody contradicts the other all that's iron sharpens iron it's a refinement process and so um I think we have so many easy paths um and I have made it a point I want to I want to take more difficult path if I can do you think people create problems though because their life is so great I just last night had dinner and one of the people at the dinner she said I'm been in Vegas for 15 years and I said um what brought you to Vegas and her response was I'm from Cuba I'm in Vegas because I was fleeing communism and we all laughed and I said that's maybe the best answer I've ever got from that question but I then asked does it drive you crazy being here sometimes and listening to the complaints people have and she said you have no idea how hard it is to hear people talk about how great the world I ran from is and have never experienced it and that was her sentiment y'all are creating things to get upset about um globally I mean like everybody no there's real trauma real evil we all know that but she said systemic yeah y we're we're inventing things to get mad about seems like it's a part of human nature to require adversity of sorts and if you aren't suffering from a roof over your head or you know feeding your family or something like that then you're just going to naturally in your mind uh create adversity well we we we left the weight room and we left the farms and we even left the factories and we moved into the classroom and so all of our sparring is intellectual and so we don't box anymore in PE class we intellectually Spar and now we have allowed words to hurt us I even let me get I'd love to get y'all's wisdom on this um I said something on my Show recently and I don't even remember what it was but somebody wrote in the comments um how how dare you shame me like that and my first impulse was I don't have the power to shame you I'm just a clown in Nashville like running my mouth on a podcast I don't I don't have that power to speak into your soul unless you open the door and let me in there do yall is that right maybe I'm wrong on that what was the context I to agree with you um I know I can shame my son cuz there's a power hierarchy my boss can shame me there's a power differential right but when it's two people sitting at a table and I say I think that shirt's stupid you have a choice are you going to care what I had to say about that shirt or no I can say man you letting your kids have a cell phone is ridiculous you're going to melt their brains you have a choice as to like I think Del is a [ __ ] right pass the salsa or no I'm going to let that worm its way into my soul that was an important conversation I had it I remember here's here's the sto here's the story and then I'd love to get y''s feedback because of my crisis background they let me into the counseling PhD program it was like the faculty had to vote on it because I didn't come from a traditional path I didn't have a masters in counseling so I came from the outside I already had another PhD in education and I had this Cris experience and they said okay you got to take these courses but we'll let you into the program what that made for for me was a really interesting dynamic because we had all these mental health professionals who were trained they're amazing therapists they were doing work in the communities already and then you had me and so they would we would somebody would ask a question and I would be like that's a stupid counselor answer I don't buy it or they would all look at me and go how do you not know that that's basic Humanity right so it made for a good Dynamic well I just started my practicum seeing actual clients and I was stunned at how intimate those moments how intimate those sessions were and how fast they got intimate people were hurting and they were just so ready to Lance that boil and say this is what's happening and I was like whoa we're just going it right and so again I'm a newbie figuring this stuff out and my professor came in and gave a case study and here was the case study you see somebody for six months and one day they walk in and they just say you suck I did your little exercise on how to ask for a raise and I got in trouble I did your other little stupid exercise with my girlfriend and she left me I've given you $3500 my life is still terrible you suck and I just you know it's in in the our program we were all sitting in like our desks were in a circle was a small group and a little cohort and I go oh that' kill me and my professor pointed and goes why and I was like dude that's those sessions are intimate that would destroy me if I'm working with someone for 6 months and they just walked in they're like you are terrible at this and another um one of my colleagues she's an amazing brilliant woman she said oh John they don't get that I like what do you mean they don't get that she said John they don't get that and I was like oh is that one of your little counselor things and she said no you get to choose who hurts your feelings she said people can take away your livelihood they can take away your life but you choose who hurts you and so if you're somebody on the street lobs something at you nice hair nice face what I get to with I don't whatever I'm not going to accept that yeah now it makes sense I do agree with you and so I'm wondering I can hurt my son cuz he's looking to me as a sponge right my boss can hurt me there's a power hierarchy there um an abusive husband can hurt a wife with words right and and vice versa but on the whole do I have that power to shame you guys I think fundamentally if you just look at data and this is me just suggesting data um people obviously will be products of their environment people will be shamed if they feel like you shamed them now is that your fault and is that their responsibility to respond to that stimulus in that particular way I think it is people's responsibility to carry themselves however they they deem worthy right so in the The Four Agreements people's behavior is not a reflection of whatever stimulus you put on them but of themselves that's like one of the agreements that you're supposed to make with yourself and I think like you said with your kid as you're younger and maybe more impressionable and you haven't like I don't know transcended that thought pattern or whatever for lack for a better term then yeah like people are going to be like that but ideally you always shoot you aim to you know be um impervious to stuff like that and to be responsible for the way that you feel and I think also preaching that uh is more loving than preaching something like oh yeah you will be a product of your environment I think that as I'm hearing you say that and I'm processing out loud here it can't H happen in a vacuum you can't get your feelings hurt by what I said unless I've also communicated to you it's your job to find out what you believe and what you value and what you think about yourself and if you do the work to root yourself into something then somebody like me comes on and goes nice hair you can go my hair looks good I'm I'm good you know what I mean and it does by the way but you're rooted in something it's got to happen in a context right the problem is you can become dogmatic without even thinking you're being dogmatic there you go you know and you're just living your own life uh and you know you can't blame you for doing this right like you didn't you were unaware that this could possibly have an effect on someone else is it your responsib probably not right but eventually you you find the best way to go and maybe you'll learn eventually right that if this is actually truly the case that you should accompany that with this idea of figure it out for yourself and you know learn and try to transcend and be impervious to other people's thoughts y y y so that goes back to the discomfort question I think if you default to curiosity over judgment so if youall two say something and I instantly feel bad or feel like shame then I can lash at y'all and judge you shamers or I can be curious to what my body just respond like that I think a lot of it is is taking criticism um or shame from people that you would ask for advice from and that was a I I forget where I heard that but it's like uh when it comes to like any constructive criticism like don't take it from the people who you wouldn't ask for that and so it just it it cell phone question right like if you have a problem with me text me and if you don't have my number then I don't care what you have yeah pretty much because I think a lot of people throw their own thoughts at something but if you wouldn't ask that or or trust their judgment in particular you probably shouldn't be taking their advice or their and also yeah and I I the layer to that is I I remember I mean I worked at the University for at different universities forever surrounded by brilliant people and I would say hey what do you think about this and that question to a academician to a thinker is here's what I think and they can write you a paper on it they like here's the 10 studies and here's the this and I remember asking a buddy of mine hey what do you think about XY andz and he's like told me told me told me here's what I think I think this and then his kids come running in I don't remember what it was but like what do you think about sugar and it's like this this this the kids like have you know a Capri Sun and a candy bar and I'm like wait a minute so I realized I was asking the wrong question so I just started saying like what do you do you let your kids have sugar and if they're like yeah on occasion that's all I need to know all right what do you actually do so instead of like what do you think about the bond market right now I ask you like hey what have you done with your money in light of the bond market that's what you you really believe right that's what you think sure I think promoting curiosity rather than like you know the gut response to something is just an amazing again some people could be great at giving advice and it's correct but really bad at implementing it themselves and I think sometimes when people are removed from the situation they could give really great advice even though they themselves don't follow it give me an example of that I I I just don't people who a relationship advice is the cliche one I guess so because you're so removed from it that you could give great advice but like still have a crappy relationship but like hey the advice is pretty good and see I would challenge the advice though maybe I would challenge that advice I don't know any specific examples but I'm just trying to like throw yeah something I I much rather look at somebody's life okay like showing up here seeing how you carry yourself seeing how um like meeting you and coming into your home validates the parts of you have seen on your show right it it it almost begins to complete a picture sure and so that paints you as a trustworthy person if I got here and you were like your house was like sketchy and you didn't like you're like dude we're just we're this is all ruse man like got some money I'm actually not neurotic at all ha can I brought 10 bucks for Uber right like um I would ask like are you the guy that should be teaching America how to deal with their money right I would that would be a question I would have right um or yall all have had interview like interviews with people or met people that are talking about mindset and and joy and kindness and they're jerks to deal with right and so you begin to think like man you're the right are you the right person to be carrying this message because I always want to see it's an old it's an old uh religious tenant an old scriptural tenant but you'll know by the fruit man you can say I'm a this kind of tree this is this kind of tree I'm this kind of tree let's see the fruit and see what kind of tree that is to maybe hopefully pardon you of any of that I don't I don't think that should bother you by the way what's that whatever the comment that that person it didn't but it sparked a and that's great you I think it was you that said this or someone else don't want to credit you poor I'll takeit but it was it was when someone says something mean to you or or something that could be potentially like offensive or something like that instead of going you go yeah yeah I think that was you instead of going you go and I think that's a amazing thing to teach yeah and I have to do that with the Positive stuff too MH because I think it's too easy to get over inflated man you crush this is the best report I've ever seen in this boardroom to go I mean I me you know you know what I'm saying um like it's the best book I've ever read this book changed the best I it's not right it's it's it's good I'm proud of it and I'm not ashamed to put my face on it there's some great books out there right so I think it's it's holding both of those curiously one question I've always loved and I've finally been able to frame it in a way I think is really interesting are white lies ever okay so for example if a barista asks you how are you doing today and your mom just passed away and you're not doing well what do you say me personally I would say today's a really rough day and I would offer this person a scaffold so that they don't feel responsible for holding me up so if I went to get coffee and I'm headed to talk about my mom's funeral cuz she just passed and the person's like how's your day going I would say today's a really rough gnarly day and I'm super grateful you're here to get me this coffee because I've just relieved you of now suddenly you have to prop me up and fix right cuz we're we're relational beings right I don't think White lives are ever wise I just and I get it there's a social lubricant they make they they can lower conflict especially short term um I just think it's much more instructive to um have the conversation you want to have I don't remember where the quote came from but conflict deferred is conflict Amplified especially in those around the more you just no it's cool man do all the good inness yeah great the more that goes on the greater that pressure builds that it will eventually erupt but what if in the pursuit of saying hey do I look good in this dress they just want to compliment you know how much of that is simply just they're looking for a little encouragement and even if the dress doesn't look good you don't want to be the one Hey listen I hate the dress you know how do you contend with that just trying to play Devil's Advocate yeah I I mean with those that I care about um or that I trust to care about me man I hope you love me enough to be like don't wear that shirt on stage and I'll ask my wife am I okay to wear this t-shirt and she'll say it's too small not an ugly way in a thank God somebody told me way right um and so I think the greatest compliment I can give you is I love you enough to tell you the truth and if you're just looking for like do I look beautiful and you have to ask for that then I'm letting you down I'm not honoring you so if that's what needs she should get that before she asked for that's fair something that's trending right now is at what level should parents accept their child's quirkiness and uniqueness versus apply corrective Behavior so for example let's say your kid's like a furry right and it's like okay so I understand you're quirky and you're unique and you should love your kid for what makes them different I mean that is you know what is them essentially what differ they differentiates them from everyone else let's say they have a unique sexual interest that you disagree with or they're in the furries or whatever yeah at what point do you stop supporting that and you apply corrective Behavior so let's take like the furry for example right versus like atherion right so like a furry is somebody who as my again these definitions shift and so I apologize if I don't get it get them right um who likes to pretend right to be a raccoon a bear whatever a fox an etherion is somebody who will say no no no I am I am this right I identify as this is who I am I want my kid and I've talked about this I talked about this on my show I want my daughter to have a wild imagination that's how kids process how the world works that's how they become victorious in these stories they tell about themselves that's how they process trauma kids speak in play I want that that's why play therapy is how people do counseling with kids you want that wild imagination and then what and then what it's when you allow your child to to disregard the social context with which they live in letting them become um the epicenter of your home meaning we're not going to let you go play soccer because you have to walk on two feet and they won't let you crawl around on the on the field we can't go to that restaurant anymore because they won't let you sit on the table and eat from a like a dog bowl or a cat like whatever that's when it becomes destructive with your kid and so I think there has to be some sort I don't know another way to say this but some sort of rational adult in the room to say dude I want my kids especially when they're young I want my kids to dress up I want my kids to run around I want them to have wild imaginations and when my kids gets to high school like I did I played dress up I dressed up like I was this cool punk rock heavy metal guy and then also like I would dress up like I was cool youth group guy and then I got to college and I grew my hair along and I tried to dress like panta cuz I like yeah and then I shaved my hair all off and I tried to be all prop we're all trying on different things and I think that's fine and good but has to happen in a social context I can't show up and be like I'm a metal guy and then show up to church with a like a profane t-shirt on then I'm stepping outside of the bounds right the only way I can tell you is you got to have a rational adult in the room to say we're walking into a restaurant take off your mask and take off your tail and we're going to stand up where do you balance that to prevent your from getting bullied like let's just say they love this shirt they wearing and they it's their favorite shirt and they're proud of the shirt but you know if they wear that shirt to school they're going to get picked on but you also want them to you know be themselves and you want them to feel comfortable to you know that there's going to be adversity in the world I went through that with my with my son and um I ended up fracturing our relationship more than I helped and like just to provide some context at the high school I went to our football coaches would is a Texas High School Football it's all the stories are true they would pull our hair down and if it came past our eyebrows we got s home like it was like hair couldn't touch your I mean it was this is me I'm not that old right this isn't a long 100 years ago this is my childhood right um if you dyed your hair that you're out I mean you're just out and that wasn't off the teen you're out of the school and I went to a 4,000 student High School it wasn't a little bitty Podunk place it was a giant public school and so things have shifted really fast and my son in entered Middle School I've got some scars from middle school things I still remember that kids said to me and so every day don't wear those pants fix your shirt turn your shirt around what about you going you got your socks have to it never stopped and I found myself picking and picking and picking and picking and I remember the day that I said hey um I'm going to turn you over to the Middle School wolves you're my son and I love you I'm going to stop talking about your clothes man if we go to church I'm going to ask you to put on a nice pair of pants and a nice shirt if we go to a funeral if we go to a restaurant with your grandparents I'm going to ask you to fill in the blank and that's me teaching him time and place and I think as a culture we've just thrown time and place out the window we just it's it's oppressive it's rude it's it's not it there is such thing called time and place um and so but I quit and to my dismay his friends just say well that's just him like he wears different sized socks and they roll with it and they ended up being much more accepting and compassionate and loving and they poke on them right and vice versa I I'm just not going to die on that Hill um I will be there if someone's going to hurt my kid right if my kid was really into something and they're going to get beat up about it or they're going to get bullied about it um I want to be honest about that conversation I do think we've hit the pendulum so far trying to eradicate the world of bullies which I that's great but in the process we've stopped teaching kids how to respond when they do interact with a bully we've just said hey y'all sit over there y'all can't handle this we'll go clear the deck for you because people in my generation were bullied so bad and so we tried to rid the world of bullies there's always going to be that guy and there always going to be people who are squashing on kids and so we have to do our best to rid the world of the bullies and also we have to do our best to sit and that discomfort with our kid and be like man I'm sorry they made fun of your favorite shirt that breaks my heart that really breaks my heart right I'm going to sit with you in that not be like I'm gonna call the right because when when you jump in to try to rescue your kid like that you're teaching them you can't you're not strong enough you're you're too weak you're always going to be weak I'll fight this for you and there's some battles I got to fight for my kids right but some of them the more important thing is I'm going to sit with you and say I'm so sorry that breaks my heart where do you know how to fight those battles it's messy it's messy yeah when it comes to violence when it comes to physical violence I'm going to be pretty out front like I've seen those Tik Tok videos where the father shows up at the house is recording it's like you know your son did this to and the comments are all praising the father father like yeah go dad go Dad um you know It's Tricky I had to go to a couple houses as a kid my dad took me and it was for me to apologize and so that was the right thing to do and that's those things they still haunt me that I would that I was ugly to kids when I was young right I hate that I hate that and it happened and I think that was right I've been on the that end of that phone call another parent calling saying hey I think this thing happened let's talk about that I think that's great and that's fine that's how adults should talk to one another where it crosses the line that's somehow like I'm going to go Macho up and I that's a strange Dynamic right um and also have to I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth here schools just let crap go now man and I used to there used to be some I remember my dad saying I'm just going to call Coach because I know coach will right I know there you'll pay for this at some point right pay for this it's that's something dramatic but I'll just let Coach know this happened all that coach know you didn't turn those assignments in he'll he'll take care of it right and there was a little bit that's that's gone now that's gone and so I do understand if nobody's defending your kid if You' have called to school and called to school and called to school and they're like well you know we're not going to do anything I get getting to the point where I'm going to knock on your door and say hey what's up it's when it turns into theater that um that's when people get hurt what worries you the most about your kids growing up today they're growing up in a time of Highly highly disregulated adults the adults in their lives have gone crazy and the adults in their lives are raged out anxious frustrated depressed um glued to screens and we have pulled the pillars out of every one of our kids' lives they now believe after Co doctors are trying to kill you and your teachers are trying to kill you either because they made you wear masks they didn't make you wear mask and your churches are just political messes now which they are your politicians are trying to kill you and so we've given our kids this how you going to grow up in that um a buddy of mine he's a a psychologist he calls it hopes sickness kids growing up today think they're going to be dead in 35 years years or so what what do they do with that right what do you do with that and so that that freaks me the most out um I heard this recently and it really touched a nerve with me um it was a clip of a man from a stage and he said I don't want to hear another person say kids these days have changed cuz they haven't it's the adults that have changed and that's true and how do you prepare your children for that they have to have an unshakable anchor that come what may you can always come home and there's not a thing you can do and that's why I hesitate with that question a little bit there's not a thing you can do there's not a line you can cross that you can't that I won't love you you may be unsafe and I you can't be in this house but I still love you we'll figure that out right um but I think it's letting him know and not through words but it's through showing up and showing up and showing up and giving them a model of here's what a regulated adult looks like here's how you tip well and take care of a waitress here's how you love somebody that you're in disagreement with here's what happens when Mom and Dad get in a big disagree and how they come back together and repair I want my kids to have a picture of that so when it happens in their relationships they've got a model for it right what if people don't have that then your next adventure is to go find mentors that you trust you got to find adults that goes all the way full circle with when someone says therapist for kids or there's too many therapists and they shouldn't be going there's some truth to that and also okay what do they do now if you pull the last thread they got sometimes a counselor at school is the only person who will talk to them the only person who will process their emotions with them the only safe person I got and it's not ideal be awesome if they had a mom and a dad or they had parents who were sitting at home they don't right they don't all right John final question of the podcast ready go for it where do you get your black shirts from and is every black shirt exactly the same oo that's a great question I am 99.9% sure this is a package of black t-shirts from Walmart and no I don't think they're all the same but hopefully my answer tells you I'm not super concerned about I wear them because they just it's one thing I remember reading about you know some tech guy somebody did it and I just thought a mentor of mine um we talked about earlier the guy who was a monk he he just dressed in all black and he had some spiritual reasons why he did it and I still don't know why he never would disclose that but I just remember that argument about it's simple it just makes things easier and I thought man I got a pretty chaotic mind that can spin up anything for any reason it just simplifies my life and I appreciate you what brain I let me see you got a oh all right let me lean up uh good fell so that's Target Target all right we just love this good fellow it's Target know yeah you know me I like my I was feeling a little bit bougie this time so I got him nice all right John thank you so much for coming on the ice coffee hour really appreciate it if there's anything else you want to say guys get his book all of his links Down Below in the description just thank you for your hospitality man you're welcome thank for coming on y'all don't get to see that like y'all are two kind guys and yall are so prepared and professional it's awesome it's just refreshing it's pretty thanks John appreciate it till next time cool