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- [00:00]
Chris
Doctor John DeLoney, welcome to the show.
- [00:02]
Dr. John DeLoney
My man, Chris, how are you? Thanks for the. Dude. I'm fantastic. I love being back in Texas. I was born and raised, man. It's good. Are you adjusting?
- [00:09]
Chris
I am slowly becoming native. Someone told me that I was allowed to use the word y'all because I've been here for three years now.
- [00:15]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's a huge. That's a huge welcome, Matt.
- [00:18]
Chris
I get the sense that's big, man. I get the sense that it is me being conned into saying the equivalent of the N word for people. And the Texas Tribune is going to catch me hard, ring my way through all a couple of times. So I'm not falling for the psy up. I can't quite get to that. I'm up to sidewalk and trash can. But you're not yet.
- [00:41]
Dr. John DeLoney
What's the alternative to trash can?
- [00:43]
Chris
Rubbish. Rubbish bin.
- [00:44]
Dr. John DeLoney
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You gotta be careful with rubbish bin here.
- [00:47]
Chris
Rubbish bin, yeah. You don't know what that means. Crack that open. Come on, get it in here.
- [00:50]
Dr. John DeLoney
All right.
- [00:50]
Chris
You've been waiting for this.
- [00:51]
Dr. John DeLoney
I've been excited for this moment.
- [00:52]
Chris
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you'll have an unlimited amount going to the office soon.
- [00:55]
Dr. John DeLoney
Well, I appreciate that.
- [00:56]
Chris
Orange sunrise for you.
- [00:57]
Dr. John DeLoney
Excellent. This is my first one. This is my live review.
- [01:03]
Chris
Cherry pop up.
- [01:04]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's outstanding. That's outstanding. Well done, man.
- [01:07]
Chris
Thank you.
- [01:08]
Dr. John DeLoney
Well done.
- [01:09]
Chris
Good, good. Yeah, it's. You're now five IQ points smarter. Ten. That's. Each sip is like set, man.
- [01:14]
Dr. John DeLoney
They light me up like a Christmas tree.
- [01:16]
Chris
Half a standard deviation. All right. I have no idea how I didn't stumble across you and the work that you do because it aligns so much with lots of the things that I'm very interested in. And I really appreciate the way that you are firm but gentle and reassuring. I think when you speak to people, a lot of the conversations around relationships and dating and mental health tend to me to either be so soft as to not have an impact or so brusque and harsh as to cause people to get defensive and for it to feel a little bit more about the host or the. The commentator, the advice giver than it is about the person who has the problem. So, yeah, I think, like, really, really great balance that it's.
- [02:04]
Dr. John DeLoney
I wanted so badly to be the. The human of. Of mental health and of relationships. And early on it was very clear that's not why people want to talk to you. They've never seen a big, tall, loud, tattooed up Texan talked to that mother who just blew her Life up, like, compassionately. And I think in our. In our strange little weird ecosystem that we live in, there's a lot of people that know about stuff, and they've just never sat with hurting people, right? There's a lot of theories and a lot of ideas, but, man, you can hear somebody who's actually sat with somebody who just lost a child, and that's it. There's a different level of compassion, right?
- [02:43]
Chris
What have you learned about how to hold space for somebody that's going through a difficult time? From the. My first ever relationship just broke up with me all the way through to the. I just lost a child, dude, let.
- [02:59]
Dr. John DeLoney
Me tell you this. So my wife, she was a research professor. She quit her job for. She's like, man, it sounds strange, especially for her. I think I want to stay at home and have kids. And that was just like. Like, who are you? What you've done with my wife, it was amazing. We talked through it. It was awesome. And gets pregnant, miscarriage number one, Gets pregnant, miscarriage number two, then miscarriage number three. But it was an ectopic pregnancy, and it ruptured, right? And so she is a really strong, tough, West Texas woman, and she sits in that living room and says, I'm not doing this. It's not happening again. Which, you know, I mean, she almost died in our living room. Well, here's the thing. After miscarriage one, and especially number two, lucky for her, she was married to a guy working on his second PhD. And I was also a crisis God, the word that gives me hemorrhoids expert. And so I would show up in the community to sit with people who had loss, and, dude, I rubbed her nose in my charts and my graphs and my answers, and then this happened. So a close friend of mine who's suffered imaginable, unimaginable loss, I show up with my son, who was 4 at the time. We go to the ER. They're wheeling her back. And when you show up at crisis scenes, it's hard to describe. There can be blood on the wall and bodies, but you make eye contact with other responders, and, you know, the scene's safe. You know, it seems placid. And then there's something we call crazy eyes. You look across and it's like, oh, this scene's still live. Like, there might be a shooter still here, right? And you can see it. And I walked in and I made eye contact with the head of the ob GYN at IT Texas Tech Medical center or not. And I remember holding my son's hand saying, oh, this is it. This last time I see her, they wheel her off. I text somebody to come pick my son up. I go to this little room that's about this big, and a buddy of mine, a West Texas rancher who's a children's author, walks in, hat everything. He's taller than me. He nods. I say nothing. He says nothing. He sits by me 30 minutes, one hour, one and a half hours, two hours. Then the physician busts in the door holding the, like, a iPad thing, and she says, we lost the baby, but your wife's okay. And I exhaled in this rancher who he hadn't spoken other than, hey. He reaches over and grabs my shoe, and I look over at him, and he starts crying. Tears I don't even have yet. But the. The important thing is he said no words, and it didn't matter. And in a culture that we won't shut up, Chris, when your friend has a break. Golly, dude, the last thing they need is all of your theories and answers and, well, oh, my gosh, let's Google. That's. That's catastrophic. They just need to sit there and bring tacos, bring a bottle of wine, or bring whatever you got in the fridge. You know, I mean, and we don't have a culture of presence. We have a culture of answers, of talking. So what I've learned over the years. What do you say to a mother whose kid is dead in that room right there? Nothing. But she'll remember that hug, right? She'll remember that exhale, and that will get her to the next gulp of air. To the next gulp of air, right? There's just no words, man. And so the more I've been sitting with hurting people, I'm finding myself talking less and less and less and less.
- [06:14]
Chris
The most. I mean, it's a beautiful story. And the first time that I ever really started thinking about this was Sean Strickland on Theo Von's podcast a year ago, when Sean has that really bad, bad experience sort of reliving his childhood. And Charlie Hubert from Charisma on Command did this unbelievable breakdown. He's redone it again. He's run it back on his other channel. And it's so beautiful. He just explains, Sean is sort of gripping this bottle. I think he's gripping the bottle with his left hand. He's drinking from it like this. And you can see he's grasping with this left hand. He's actually trying to grip onto something. He's trying to get a hold of security and firmness. And Charlie's breaking down his body language. You can see what Theo does that drops him in and then pulls him out and then back in again. Because Theo kind of. He doesn't make it about him. He does, like, a triple A. I don't want to give any shade on Theo. He literally inspired me to become a better space holder, a better communicator in difficult times. But there's some things that you do that just rip someone out just a little bit, and then they close off and they. Well, you know, like, what does it matter? I'm a big guy. I'm a grown adult. And then he sort of starts to get back into it. Starts to get back into it. And then, you know, the most beautiful thing that Theo says in that entire exchange is he's like, we don't need to talk, man. We can just sit here for a while if you want.
- [07:32]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's it. And that's somebody who only knows that because they've been hurt, too. Right? Like, don't say anything. I'll just sit here with you.
- [07:41]
Chris
Powerful, dude.
- [07:42]
Dr. John DeLoney
What a gift.
- [07:43]
Chris
What else? What else? So shut up. Yeah, one of the first things that you should do when trying to help somebody that's going through stuff. What else?
- [07:51]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, I think that sounds easy in theory, but I think the. What else happens before I have to do my own work, that I believe I'm worthy of the space I'm going to hold with you. Right. So I got to show up. Okay. Most of the people. I say, most of the people who get diagnosed with cancer, who lose a loved one, who lose a pregnancy, etcetera, they'll tell you they found themselves responsible for making sure everybody else was okay. And don't text somebody, how's it going? You really want to know how's it going? Right. And I'm going to text that back to you. Bring food, show up. And I mean, I think it's. It's action. It's action. It's action. It's action. I'm going to go mow your lawn, and I trust you to tell me to stop. I'm gonna keep sending tacos. And you may have 5,000 tacos, and they may go straight to the trash can, but you're gonna. You're gonna know when the fog lifts. You were loved. You were cared. Yeah. You're cared for.
- [08:47]
Chris
Yeah, I. I had a. An incident that opened up something similar. It was my birthday a couple of weeks ago, and I finished recording upstairs, finished this episode, and came down, and Jonathan, who's outside his Dog was walking around like, what the fuck's Jonathan's dog doing here? Oh, he must be here to show us the new merch samples. Cause we're starting to get merch done. And as I walked in, it turned out that there was a surprise birthday like celebration for me. And there was only five people there. All of them worked for me in one form or another or work with me. And it was the middle of the day on a Friday. So who's free at 2pm on a Friday to come and do stuff? It's tiny. And my best friend was getting married the next day and I was his best man here in Texas. So I'm. My head's in a different place. I'm thinking about the speech. You know, I've just finished this episode. I gotta go and work on the speech. I gotta remember the thing that do the joke about the white people. And I come down and there's, you know, five people. And they put a banner up and it said Happy Birthday. And there was a cake and there were. One of the guys was filming it, our videographer Max, was filming it. And I was like, oh, this is really, really beautiful. And then we sat down, we had some cakes, it was all laid out really nicely. Then they sang Happy Birthday to me. And there was this bit. There was this sense as I went down, as you said there, about almost having this odd guilt debt that you want to repay to people because, well, if. If they're doing this just because they love me, then I need to be able to sort of feel that in a way as opposed to there being some sort of value exchange. All of these people in one form or another, work with me, work for me. And that's fine. You know, we're working together, we're building this project, we're doing the whatever thing. And yeah, watching five people sing Happy Birthday to me at 2:30pm on a Friday. I did a live show in London last year to three and a half thousand people. The five people was way more uncomfortable.
- [10:42]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, yeah.
- [10:43]
Chris
Because I was seen by them.
- [10:45]
Dr. John DeLoney
But think of the world we've set up. Dr. Joyner, he's out of Florida State, he writes really eloquently on suicide. Right. One of the, the. The three legs of the stool is of. When you're doing a suicide assessment is perceived burdensomeness. Does that idea.
- [11:03]
Chris
People would be better if I was.
- [11:04]
Dr. John DeLoney
I wasn't here. But look at the world we've built. Like, I'm not going to ask you to take me to the airport. I'll Just Uber. I'm not going to ask you. Can I borrow some eggs and sugar? I'm just gonna, like, instacart or whatever. And I think the meta narrative is my presence is a burden too. And if you guys. It's. It's the air we breathe that everyone. I'm gonna bother people even. And now every relationship we have is transactional. And your experience is. Man, it's very common that you wake up and the only people in your life are on your payroll or on somebody's payroll. Like y'all are on. On the same payroll. And, man, that your body would be failing you if it let you sleep all night because it knows you're lonely. Right.
- [11:47]
Chris
In some ways. I've heard you this. Um. Do you have people in your life that you can talk to that are just your friends that you don't work with? That seems to be a common thread in some of the conversations you speak to. You have some housewife. I've heard you speak to a bunch of these recently. Housewife. Who's. There was one that had insomnia. She kept waking up throughout the night.
- [12:07]
Dr. John DeLoney
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The same thing. Yeah.
- [12:09]
Chris
Said how. How many friends have you got? And you dug real deep. And it turned out she did have. It seemed like she had quite a good social network. But, yes, it does seem we spend so much time at work and we're so obsessed with productivity and moving forward in some way that we don't have friends for the sake of being friends with them. We have friends who are compatriots and soldiers in whatever battle it is that we're fighting against getting our Brazilian Jiu Jitsu purple belt, against becoming better at pickleball, against learning to salsa dance, against learning to do improv, against the job interview, the. The. The promotion, whatever it is. And it's an odd blend. You.
- [12:49]
Dr. John DeLoney
It makes people into a 401k.
- [12:50]
Chris
Is it. Is it your opinion that there is something lesser about friendship with people that you work with too?
- [12:58]
Dr. John DeLoney
No, I. The fear I have is when you don't have Jiu Jitsu and when you don't have. I remember dude training at MMA gym. Dude, that's the most eclectic, wacky group of people that had a shared mission that all got together, selected for a.
- [13:10]
Chris
Group that want to be punched in the face.
- [13:12]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, but there's also, like, a male nurse and guy doesn't have a job at all. And this guy's a dean of students. I mean, it was a random group of people. No, the problem with only having Friends at work is if something ever doesn't work out there, you find yourself on an island in a moment when you need people. And so if you get let go, if you have a problem at work, then you also have a problem everywhere else in your life.
- [13:35]
Chris
But it's the same issue with men who get divorced. Right. The single most predictive lifestyle change for suicide is men who get divorced. The reason being, it seems, women are much better at holding on to their own social networks when they get into a marriage, whereas men supplant their own social networks and they use the wives. That's right. So, you know, the wife has loads of female friends, and the female friends have husbands, and you, as the husband, become friends with the husbands of her.
- [14:04]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's it. That's it, man. And you sit there like, yeah, it's hot. Yeah. Yeah. How's work?
- [14:10]
Chris
Good. The only thing you have in common is the fact that your wife knows their wife. That's it.
- [14:14]
Dr. John DeLoney
And usually that is y'all have kids in the same age, and then when that kid moves up. Yeah. The tether gets pulled on everything.
- [14:22]
Chris
Yeah, yeah. It's that ability to be able to sit with. Oh, well, people actually want to be here for this. There's a degree of discomfort.
- [14:31]
Dr. John DeLoney
Not for this. For you.
- [14:32]
Chris
Yes.
- [14:33]
Dr. John DeLoney
And that's hard to hold.
- [14:34]
Chris
James, you spoke about him earlier on the Other half of Newtonic. I fucking love this story. I tell it all the time, but I fucking adore it. He did a load of mushrooms. I won't mention the country in case they're gonna kick him out. Did a load of mushrooms on a rock, and this question came to him, and the question was, do people love you for who you are or for what you do? And, you know, people loving you for what you do feels transactional. It feels flimsy, it feels volatile. And, you know, the subtext is, if I stopped doing what I do, then the love would be taken away from me as well. What we want is people to love us for who we are because it feels grounded and forever. It's attached to our sense of self where our work isn't. And it's rigid. Right. And, you know, I told this story on the pod and someone asked, well, it's an interesting question, but a more interesting question is, do you love you for who you are or for what you do? Because a lot of the time, we want the world to love us for who we are. Meanwhile, we love us for what we do. So you're asking the world to show up for you in A way that you're not prepared to show up for yourself. That's right. You don't love you for who you are, for the fact that you actually care about other people, that you have empathy. That, yeah, sure, it looks a little bit wimpy when you cry at Christmas films, but it's because you've got a soft side to you or because you're really reliable. You know, like. Like genuine good traits that are as timeless as you can be. You, no, no, no, no. You've judged yourself on the last 10 hours of productivity and the fact that you got distracted on YouTube for 30 minutes, despite the fact that you've crushed it. Even if you look at your productivity over the last six months, you've crushed it as well. But no, no, no, you're gonna. You know exactly where your shortcomings lie and the scabs that you can pick at and the scars. And you know exactly what to say to yourself to torture yourself about these things. And you're not a nice friend to you, but you want the world to be a nice friend to you. You want the world to love you for who you are. Meanwhile, you love you for what you do. Yeah, I just thought that was such.
- [16:41]
Dr. John DeLoney
A lovely little No, I think that's cut me off if you've heard me talk about this. It was after book number two comes out. So I grew up in a house. We didn't have a lot, right? And money was electric. It was always a sense of tension. Always, always, always, always. And the book comes out. My wife and I, she was raised by teachers. My dad was a policeman and then he became a minister. So we out of authority. My therapist, when I walked in, I was like, but as a cop and a minister, she was like, getting the lake house, right? It's very happy.
- [17:14]
Chris
We've got lots to work with.
- [17:15]
Dr. John DeLoney
Very happy. But both of us come with not a lot, right? And so then you find yourself in this wild new world, right? Where of abundance don't have psychology for it. I'm downstairs, my family has come and they've been with maybe seven to ten days too long. And they know it, I know it. It's that strange. Like, it'd be good if y'all left. And they're like, would be good if we left. And it's just that awkward. They leave. I've got Covid as they're leaving. And then I'm working out in the gym in my basement. My manager calls and he says, hey, you know those two speaking event gigs we were hoping to Land. You got a second? And the way he called, I was like, ah, man, we didn't get it. He calls and starts yelling into the phone. We got him. And I start yelling because these were the last two, like, transformational financially for me. And I start cheering. I start yelling, yeah. My wife comes downstairs into the basement. She's like, what are you yelling about? And I was like, we got him. I'm going to speak of this thing. And it's like. And she's very stoic. West Texas woman, like, just will withdraw and wait till things are calm. She didn't do that. She came forward this time, and she got this close, which is not how she does conflict. And she said, I'm watching my husband die, and I'm watching him cheer the whole way. And I'm gaunt, I'm exhausted, I'm sweaty, I'm sick. I'm people out, and I'm cheering. And then she said this. She said, the pie piece. The. The pie chart of how much I love you, and the pie piece for how much money you make is full. And then she said, we have enough. And she turned and walked away. And I angrily was like, what the hell's enough? And it was psychology for it. And I didn't understand. What does that mean when someone just says, no, no, no, no. I picked you. The joke in our house is she bought real low on me, right? Like, she bought when the stock was Bitcoin at 5 cents, really low on me. She's like, I picked you. And this is cool. This is awesome, but I picked you. And at part of the exchange, she was like, you can go do your speaking events. I told you when I married you, I would never tell you no, go do it. This is for your ego. This is not for us. And I got hot. But then I have, like, I went straight to the therapist office. But we ended up in this. In this moment. She said, I want you to take your fist and put it in your chest and say the words to me, I love this man. And that was the first time I was like, oh, I'm. I'm over my head. I'm stuck. I couldn't say the word. I couldn't do that act. And in front of another grown woman, I could not say, I love this guy. And then I was like, I got a problem, right? I'm asking the world to give me something that I won't honor myself to give myself. It's tough. It's tough.
- [19:53]
Chris
How did you work through that?
- [19:55]
Dr. John DeLoney
Very, very slowly. Very slowly. Yeah, it's it sounds, it sounds obscene to think I've got to practice, but I have to practice saying, you're a good dad. Yeah, this sounds cheesy. I carry this with me. This is a, like when the thoughts pop in. Like, your kids would be better off if you were at home right now. No, they wouldn't. They're doing great. They're right. It's that negative self talk and just resetting that.
- [20:19]
Chris
So you're. You're doing some CBT homework.
- [20:21]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. My act. Yeah.
- [20:24]
Chris
I've started CBT this year and I. I did twice weekly psychotherapy for a year. Okay.
- [20:31]
Dr. John DeLoney
How was that?
- [20:33]
Chris
Tough. Actually, in retrospect, wasn't so tough at the time. I loved it. My therapist was amazing. It taught me an awful lot about myself. It taught me more about myself than one and a half thousand sessions of meditation and many, many years of journaling. Because somebody else is pointing at the things that you've got that are going on inside of your mind. But it opens an awful lot of loops that it doesn't close because there's no action steps.
- [20:55]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, correct.
- [20:57]
Chris
And maybe for some people who aren't as dopamine norepinephrine as me, that's fine because they can just sit in the story. But if I do that, if I've got open loops, I'm going to try and fix them. And I think that this is. There's lots of different modalities where people can improve their mental health, where people can improve the quality of their life. Your outcomes may vary, as they say, in trading or whatever it is. And I think psychotherapy is really, really useful for learning about yourself, but you need something which is more action focused. So for me, CBT's been fascinating. It's very rewarding. But, dude, it's hard.
- [21:35]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [21:35]
Chris
Because for the people that don't know, cognitive behavioral therapy is basically one hour a week where you speak to a guy and then the remaining. Whatever it is, 163 hours a week where you do homework.
- [21:48]
Dr. John DeLoney
Challenge the thoughts. Yeah.
- [21:49]
Chris
You do homework, he gives you homework. And it's not. I have in. If you looked at the reminders in my phone, you think I was a crazy person. I've got like, punch the bully. It repeats every three hours throughout the day. Journaling, practice. Anyway, it's been really interesting, but talking about.
- [22:06]
Dr. John DeLoney
I didn't find that as useful. I. CBT is obviously, it's the, it's the gold standard. I found the act, the app acceptance of commitment instead of challenging the thoughts so much, just letting them walk by or letting them be that guy at the table that always. You always know that guy. Everybody has that friend and all right, you spoke and I appreciate it. I'm gonna move on. That's interesting and it keeps me from going to war with myself. Otherwise I stay in. I stay in constant conflict with myself and that gets exhausting for me.
- [22:34]
Chris
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- [24:52]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, that's powerful.
- [24:53]
Chris
And that reminds me of what your wife said.
- [24:55]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [24:55]
Chris
You know, like this is all great, but it also throws into harsh contrast why am I doing it? If people love me for who I am, why am I doing what I do?
- [25:07]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah. Well, if you're doing it because you think it's going to feel some way on the back end, that's the tale of all the time, right? That's the great. That's the, the Jim Carrey speech. Right.
- [25:18]
Chris
I wish everyone could become rich and famous. It's not going to fix it.
- [25:21]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah. It's nonsense. And I think the, the alternative that we've got the last 15, 20 years is well, I'm just going to opt out and play video games. And that's a recipe for disaster too. I think we, you know Michael Easter's book the Comfort Christ, which I think is a masterpiece. I think we have a culture that's. That's allergic to discomfort. And so I think that tension is. That's where joy is, that's where meaning is, is I'm enough and I can hold that loosely enough so that I can hit that guy real hard. They, they had a breakdown on ESPN the other day of Alex Piera and his. They talk about how hard he hits that it's otherworldly. And the they had interview with a referee is like he. The sound it makes when he hits another human is different. Right. And I just thought, man, can you imagine being able to do that? But they say it comes from how calm he is. Right. His ab to stay at until he uncorks. And my coach used to always say like dude, you're like a bear. You're like so tense all the time and it takes away. And so I think if men knew, oh, she loves me no matter what. That actually drives that anchor deep into the concrete so you can repel off the edge and Go do something bananas. And it sounds counterintuitive.
- [26:35]
Chris
Yeah. That you don't need to push me. I'll push myself more if I know that I don't need to.
- [26:39]
Dr. John DeLoney
I mean, I'm anchored. Yeah.
- [26:40]
Chris
Yeah. I mean, you know, that's a. A phenomenal piece of advice. And I put that essay out, and perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of girls, women who caught a hold of it or follow me on Instagram, said, well, like, women want this too. And I'm like, yeah, I'm sure they do.
- [26:57]
Dr. John DeLoney
Can I tell you, that drives me crazy. That makes me insane, dude. The every conversation has to be so universal at all times.
- [27:06]
Chris
You've got to equivocate.
- [27:07]
Dr. John DeLoney
God almighty. If I write a note on Instagram to dads, that's.
- [27:12]
Chris
What about moms?
- [27:14]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yes, Moms, too. But I was. I failed as a dad. At this moment, I just write myself a note.
- [27:18]
Chris
You'll notice that it doesn't really happen in the other direction.
- [27:20]
Dr. John DeLoney
God almighty, dude, it's wild. It's wild.
- [27:23]
Chris
I had a conversation with Richard Reeves, sat here.
- [27:25]
Dr. John DeLoney
Gosh, you know what?
- [27:26]
Chris
Richard.
- [27:26]
Dr. John DeLoney
Oh, my gosh, yes. Of Boys and Men.
- [27:28]
Chris
Yeah. So he's great. American Institute of Boys and Men. And it was the second time he'd been on, and we got. We went for, like, three and a half hours. It was phenomenal. Um, and I mentioned I was getting a bit frustrated at the fact that every time I talk about the problems facing boys and men, I need to do this weird social land acknowledgement.
- [27:46]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, yeah, dude.
- [27:48]
Chris
About the fact. Well, we must recognize that there is issues that women have faced, and we have to remember that it's only been a recent time that men have been falling behind. And we must not forget the fact that we've got either sexual assault, blah, blah, blah. And after we've gone through all of that, let's begin to talk about men.
- [28:00]
Dr. John DeLoney
It's the Seinfeld. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
- [28:02]
Chris
Right.
- [28:02]
Dr. John DeLoney
Everything has to have a qualifier.
- [28:03]
Chris
And I'm like, can I say this once at the beginning of my career and never have to say it again? Because it's, you know, part of it's clipping culture that if somebody's able to pull you out of context by not having said the thing? And even if you do, if you say it at the beginning. This happened to me the other day. I said the thing. I said it, and it just got cut off. I'm like, right, well, fuck, I might as well not.
- [28:22]
Dr. John DeLoney
You can't. But what about this what if, as a society, we just chose. I'm gonna think the best of Chris?
- [28:30]
Chris
Well, the problem is, God almighty, we don't like to think the best of people because hypocrisy on the Internet is like catnip, right? Being able to catch somebody out. This was the reason. You remember when Joe got popped for his N word video, which is like five minutes of you hard, actually hard ring your way.
- [28:48]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [28:48]
Chris
A combination of aing and hard ring. Anyway, this video goes live, and Joe's like, yeah, fuck, that looks bad. That's. That's. That's not. That's not good. And the Internet was told by legacy media. This is what this guy is truly like, and this is what it means about him. He's really the secret bigoted, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, transphobic, blah, blah, blah, that we've always known he was. They were saying, this is the tip of the iceberg, and we know that below it is all of this. But the problem was most of the people they were trying to convince are like, I listened to 500 hours of him speaking. You're saying that this is the tip of the iceberg. I've seen the whole iceberg. I know there's nothing down there. Or I have a reliable sense that there isn't anything down there. And that situation kind of taught me what gets sucked in. What. What causes people to get sucked in to this. And the precise thing is a vacuum of information and this speculation. The. The opportunity for people to point a finger and say, ah, see, I got him. I It. I got him.
- [29:53]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [29:54]
Chris
And no, the. The principle of charity is not extended to people on the Internet, but it's.
- [29:58]
Dr. John DeLoney
Not extended to people in our homes. Like the Gottmans say, when you distill all the way down, what makes a great marriage beyond all, like, religion, finance. Are y'all friends? Like, I've got a buddy who lives, what, five hours west of here? His name's John, too. He was Fat John. I was Hyper John. And back in the day, dude would always leave cans out everywhere. Always, always, always, always the single worst text responder in human history. It doesn't matter. A guy cannot respond to a text. It's phenomenal. Not one time have I ever left his house and thought he leaving cans out. What is he trying to say about our friendship? Not one time he doesn't respond. Not one time have I thought, does he. Does he. Does he not love me? What does this mean for us? Not once. He's my friend. That guy stood in front of me and thrown punches on my behalf, literally. He's opened up his house to me for decades. He's my friend, right? And, but I don't give my wife that, what do these towels mean? Right? Or like, like, what is happening in this house? Like, oh, there's a dish in the dishwasher. What is she trying to tell me? Right? And we make this huge character assassination. We just, it's madness. I don't even. So I don't think it, I think what's happening on the Internet is a, is a magnification of what happens in our own homes. We're so unsure of ourselves. We walk around with these glasses on, trying to find where everybody else has holes so we can be like, yep, yep, yep, yep. And that's the way we try to prop ourselves up to say, I, I, I, I've got value too, right? I can get value by burning everybody the ground inside my own house.
- [31:27]
Chris
Our self worth stands on the shoulders of other people's shortcomings.
- [31:30]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's it. That's it. Instead of exhaling, saying, when I walk in the door and there's a pile of towels, good God. What her? What, what, what Must have her day been like, let's pick up the towels. Or when I walk into John's house, I just pick up the cans. But when he finally texts me back, right? Like, hey, what's up? Yeah, I'm happy to hear from him, man. He's one of my best friends. So it's, it's, it's a madness. It's a madness.
- [31:52]
Chris
Speaking about challenges, why do you think people regularly get into relationships with partners that they feel like they need to fix?
- [32:01]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, I think that old, that old adage in, in marriage therapy is true. You marry your unfinished business. I think the, the way I would describe it is your nervous system puts little GPS pins in there when you're a kid. And you're constantly asking, why doesn't that man love me? He's supposed to. And, or why is this shiny little box more important than me? Or why did my mom pick up that bottle of wine and not pick up me? And you constantly are trying to solve that loop. And man, you get older and you want to. Your body repeats what it knows and you go and entrust all that situation again and you do it again. I was just talking to somebody in, in the outside of the grocery store just a minute ago about the same exact thing. Your body just goes in and tries to solve it again and solve it again, and you got to get outside that loop. Otherwise you just repeat it and you repeat it and you repeat it because over time you realize a seven year old's not the problem. Seven year old's never the problem.
- [32:54]
Chris
Well, I suppose you can become enchanted by a person that you're attached to.
- [32:59]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [33:00]
Chris
Which fills a literal void inside of you. And when this is a primary caretaker, this is good. But when this is an inappropriate partner, it's not so you're used to. I think a lot of the time, if you grow up around difficult adults, children can't change or get rid of their caregivers. So they just learn to cope.
- [33:20]
Dr. John DeLoney
They learn to solve it.
- [33:21]
Chris
Yeah. They learn to hold on to long enough in the hopes that maybe the person will take mercy on them and change. If you're five, you don't have a passport, you don't know how to leave the house. So you become. If you were not cared for in the way that you should as a child, you learned to become unusually good at surviving on a meager diet of.
- [33:46]
Dr. John DeLoney
Love, or you learned to sing and dance and get it right.
- [33:50]
Chris
I've got to perform.
- [33:51]
Dr. John DeLoney
I remember one of the coolest things about going back to grad school as an old man is I had to do a practicum again. And I was working with this brilliant man named psychologist named Dr. Michael Gomez. And I remember we were sitting with these kids that had some pretty remarkable trauma. And one of the kids was making straight A's. And during a debrief, I said this. He's like, all right, who's. Who's gonna struggle here? Where do we go? And I said, this one's gonna be okay. And I said, why? And he goes, well, he's performing well, he's doing grades. He's making great grades. And he said something that has rattled me since. He said, straight A's can be a trauma response too, John. And you can burn a building down. You will be. Kids will find a way to be seen, or they'll find a way to hide. They'll find a way to stay safe, and they'll nuzzle up against you. So I. I think kids are always trying to solve. And yeah, there's some that have to survive on just sips of oxygen right through a straw, but others will be really good on that T ball field band, because that makes my dad exhale.
- [34:49]
Chris
Well, I mean, that's why when we look at, you know, the highest performers in business and, and content creation, output and the world of sports and all the rest of it, for the most part, what you should look at these people with. Is pity, not envy.
- [35:04]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [35:05]
Chris
You think what has happened to this person to cause them to need to do that to themselves? That's not for me to say that all high performers don't have. Some don't have a good balance of you desire for more and running away from past trauma and all the rest of the stuff. Many do, but most don't. Most are doing it because they need validation from the world because they didn't get it when they were a kid.
- [35:26]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah. I remember watching that ESPN documentary with Michael Jordan and there's that scene where he's smoking the cigar in the hotel room and he looks at the camera and he said, you don't want this life. And he can't go to the bathroom downstairs. Like there's just full of people.
- [35:40]
Chris
Right.
- [35:40]
Dr. John DeLoney
And I remember it cuts to a scene of the banners and the rafters. And again, I'm sitting there on my couch in my small little house and I just remember looking at all that saying, for what? Like for six pieces of cloth? For glory. Like, for what? Right.
- [35:56]
Chris
It's a weird realization, though, especially when it comes to high performance, because we assume that if we had what they had, we would feel fulfilled. And the reason that they're not fulfilled is because they're ungrateful, not because the fulfillment is hollow.
- [36:09]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's exactly right.
- [36:10]
Chris
The issue is with them, not with the thing that they've been given, the fuel.
- [36:13]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's right.
- [36:14]
Chris
Yeah. I think.
- [36:14]
Dr. John DeLoney
And dude, I'm doing the same thing. Like the moment my first book went number one, I was in a meeting two weeks later be like, all right, what's the next one? Right. I got right on it, man. And it's. It is, dude. It just taps in, man.
- [36:27]
Chris
We both do need act. But yeah, I think, you know, there's a lot of different insights on the. The dating somebody, that's a problem thing. I think the. There's an allure of somebody who doesn't love us back. There's an allure of someone, but the.
- [36:39]
Dr. John DeLoney
Allure is a question, why? Can I solve this? Can I solve this? Can I solve this? Of course.
- [36:43]
Chris
Because a lot of us like fixing problems because we. But.
- [36:46]
Dr. John DeLoney
But we also export our value to somebody else.
- [36:50]
Chris
Oh, yeah, Right.
- [36:51]
Dr. John DeLoney
And if this person doesn't like me, can I morph and change and transform so that. That I can become likable?
- [36:57]
Chris
If we can convince someone who doesn't seem to like us all the time to care, maybe that means that we're worth it.
- [37:03]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's right.
- [37:03]
Chris
Right.
- [37:04]
Dr. John DeLoney
We Solved the problem.
- [37:05]
Chris
Of course, if we can fix them as well, maybe it means that we're fixable too. Like in their mistreatment of us, we see reflected the same level of mistreatment that we give ourselves.
- [37:16]
Dr. John DeLoney
Right, Right.
- [37:17]
Chris
Like, I actually always did think that I wasn't worthy of right.
- [37:21]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [37:22]
Chris
Now it's being given to me. And if I can redeem this person externally, maybe it means that I can fix what it is that I've proven to myself internally as well. I think. You know, the weirdest element of this that I was thinking about was variable schedule, reward. So the way that slot machines.
- [37:42]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [37:42]
Chris
And just that when you see someone that's in a crazy relationship, turbulent, it's hot and it's cold and it's all the rest of it, you think, what the, is like, what are the both of these people getting from this relationship? And I get the sense that there's, you don't know what you're going to wake up to today. Like, if you don't know what you're going to wake up to today, that might be really painful, but there's just a very, very ancient bit of your brain that loves it. Yeah, exactly. Dopamine's a hell of a drug.
- [38:13]
Dr. John DeLoney
Well, and we've, I actually came to her book through you. Louise Perry's book.
- [38:20]
Chris
She did Nominal. She was on again this week.
- [38:21]
Dr. John DeLoney
There's a quote in that book that has just bounced around inside my head. It's haunted me, but it's about, have we solved for so many existential issues that plagued humanity forever that we're simply, we're bored to death?
- [38:34]
Chris
Oh, I, this is the exact Maslow's hierarchy of needs thing.
- [38:38]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, but see, I, I, I have a man, I have an unsubstantiated hypothesis about you and that the Maslow's hierarchy we can talk about.
- [38:46]
Chris
Right.
- [38:46]
Dr. John DeLoney
But I think, I think we're, I think we're bored to death. I think our brains are cooking because we've got food at the touch of a button. We got water in every room in our house. We've, we've got these problem solved. And then it's got. We need that slot machine man. And we'll get it from that guy.
- [39:04]
Chris
You know, the idea of concept creep, where as a, as the incident of something like, let's say racism becomes less and less over time, the definition of racism expands.
- [39:16]
Dr. John DeLoney
Okay.
- [39:17]
Chris
The level of racism stays the same, but what constitutes racism has changed in order to keep the level the same because the actual incidents have reduced in the same way as I think climate related deaths have decreased by 50 times. It's like 98 drop in the last hundred years. Let's say something like that. 168,000 people get lifted out of poverty every single day. So we've had to redefine what climate crisis means. And that's not to say that there isn't a fucking problem with the climate. There are, of course, but. Yeah. When it comes to, in your life, if you're the sort of person who is used to fixing problems and you don't have many problems anymore, you'll begin inventing them. You will begin finding them in places where they don't need to be. Not because you are a good problem finder, but because you are addicted to solving problems.
- [40:05]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah. Yeah. And my identity is found and I solve problems and I will manufacture them and I will create them and I will seek them out and my wife will often, she'll, she'll gently pat the table or pat my leg when I get off into. And then in Syria, we're right here. We're in Nashville. We're in Nashville. And it's such a, such a, like. Okay, yeah, I can solve this one today.
- [40:28]
Chris
Thank you.
- [40:28]
Dr. John DeLoney
I can be nicer to my daughter right now.
- [40:30]
Chris
Yeah. I think on the difficult partners thing, if you don't have a full tank of self love, how dare you deny the love of somebody else even if it's tricky or filled with poisonous ingredients. You know what I mean?
- [40:48]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [40:48]
Chris
Like I have. Well, I, I don't think of myself that highly and this person isn't treating me that highly either.
- [40:56]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [40:56]
Chris
But they're treating me.
- [40:57]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah. And it sounds like a cliche thing that I'm always. Nobody's going to exercise. Nobody's going to go through the pain of, of any sort of life change or any sort of relationship change if at the end of the day you don't think you're worth the change. Right. And so it's easy to keep going out and seeking these, these nonsensical lack of reality like truths that exist in our world now because I don't even think I'm worth doing the hard work to. Right. It's, it's. Dave Ramsey's built an empire on living less than you make. And it's like, that's insane. Right? It's madness. That's just math, dude. Right. But we create all these other alternate realities to make ourselves go because I don't even think I'm worth the hard, the hard math.
- [41:40]
Chris
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- [42:37]
Dr. John DeLoney
There you go.
- [42:38]
Chris
And, and that's the problem. Yeah. Because this is why you see people who are consistently in the same sorts of relationships.
- [42:49]
Dr. John DeLoney
It's intellectual cutting. Yeah. It's intellectual self harm.
- [42:52]
Chris
Oh, right. Yeah.
- [42:53]
Dr. John DeLoney
Not worth it.
- [42:54]
Chris
Yeah. I've gotta whip myself into submission.
- [42:59]
Dr. John DeLoney
I want to ask you, can I, can we pontificate?
- [43:01]
Chris
Fire away.
- [43:03]
Dr. John DeLoney
I've been wrestling with Maslow's hierarchy. Once you get above physiology and love, I don't know that this idea of esteem and self actualization can coexist on top of these things. I think they are interwoven.
- [43:20]
Chris
Okay.
- [43:21]
Dr. John DeLoney
And I think that we may have given ourselves an illusion that you, you, you become actualized as you're choosing to love every day despite hard things and how to forgive. And you find esteem by consistently being part of safety and consistently being part of a community and coming back in when you get separated. And this idea that they're separate and somehow we're all going to become this little lighthouse on a hill. I just don't think that. I think we're at the end of self actualization. This, this notion that we can somehow be set, be all. Be little lighthouses on a hill. I don't think that's how we're wired and designed.
- [43:57]
Chris
I certainly think it's more difficult in the modern world because let's face it, the safety needs, the basic needs, the survival needs, like you're, they're, they're looked after. You don't have to do anything for them.
- [44:09]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [44:09]
Chris
So all of those needs now, for instance, good example, you're not going to starve. Most people listening to this podcast, I would like to think aren't going to starve. But that doesn't mean that someone is going to cook a meal and put it on your dinner table. Right. So there's a difference between having food in the house so that the people around you don't starve.
- [44:28]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yep.
- [44:29]
Chris
And serving them through something which they still need.
- [44:32]
Dr. John DeLoney
Exactly, yes.
- [44:33]
Chris
Is that what you're talking. It's sort of a relationship between the two.
- [44:36]
Dr. John DeLoney
Well, I think implied, especially in the modern world is. And again, I don't know what Maslow was thinking, but there's absent participation in these bottom rungs. There's an expectation that they're gonna exist for us so that I can get to the more important stuff of sitting in a room and thinking about how great I am.
- [44:54]
Chris
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [44:54]
Dr. John DeLoney
Or Whole Foods.
- [44:56]
Chris
Whole Foods has got that sorted. The police have got safety sorted.
- [44:58]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, yeah. So. So the world owes me these things. The world owes me love. The world owes me these things so that I can get to the more important stuff which is on top. And I think that's false. I think the more important stuff I will find out. I'll become actualized through a constant lifetime of love.
- [45:16]
Chris
Well, there's definitely an element that anyone going through an existential crisis, anyone asking themselves, am I really enacting my logos forward? Is this my highest contribution to the world? Yeah. Is in a position of ultimate luxury.
- [45:31]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's it.
- [45:32]
Chris
Because the only chance that you have to ask yourself that question, but it diminishes the.
- [45:36]
Dr. John DeLoney
The mom who day in and day out and day in and day out and day in and day out, that's self actualization.
- [45:40]
Chris
Dude, I want to make moms great again.
- [45:43]
Dr. John DeLoney
Or the dad who dude doesn't do the job that we do. They he goes up and down 5th and 6th street collecting trash day after day after day, year after year after year. You don't do that. And then hopefully you can get some self actualization on the side. You're going to look back and say, this city operated because I was a part of it. That's self actualization. Right. It's not this, this place you go to this destination that you're removed from these other things. They're tightly integrated.
- [46:10]
Chris
Yeah. That's interesting. You know, I mean, how many people do you know that have reached some degree of success? I. Two people that I Think of Tucker Max and Ryan Holiday, both of whom live in opposite directions out here from Austin to people who. Big businesses, very successful authors, well known, renowned money opportunities, blah, blah, blah. Essentially retired to do the thing that they used to do full time, part time and to hammer fence posts in full time, huh? Ranching and wrangling and fucking hoeing the ground and fixing fence posts and the sheeps got stuck and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, well, why? It's because chopping wood and carrying water actually gives you a sense of satisfaction that it's hard to find elsewhere. But I got a. I've been thinking an awful lot about where people take joy and satisfaction from in their work. And for people who maybe have a little bit of agency or self determination to the sort of work that they do. So you need to be a business owner, but they can maybe contribute to how the teams are put together. Maybe part of a small business or a startup or maybe they are, you know, independent contractor or something like that. And I've been thinking a lot about bands and the way that bands, they have to work very hard, but it's a very enjoyable career. And performing and concerts rank as some of the highest happiness pursuits that you can do. Like huge, huge, huge studies that look at anything that's collective effervescence, especially if you're performing, but also if you're experiencing. You have to presume that if you're performing, you also get the benefit of experiencing clothes at the same time. And I was thinking like, okay, so what is it that they're doing that's keeping them going when they're, you know, 50 dates deep into this big long tour and they're in Japan and they're sleep deprived, blah, blah, blah. And I think a big part of it is having other people to share the successes with.
- [47:56]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [47:57]
Chris
To be able to. I don't just mean like coming home to your wife and her going, no, I think good for you, honey, or whatever it might be, but a good thing happens and you have someone that you can go, ah, that's fucking sick. You know what I mean? Like, and it wasn't your wife in that moment, but it was your manager.
- [48:11]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's right, right.
- [48:12]
Chris
You on the phone to your manager, your manager's there screaming down the phone because you're both on a journey together.
- [48:17]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's right.
- [48:18]
Chris
If you'd done your own bookings, who would you have screamed to?
- [48:21]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, I would have put my fist and been like, cool.
- [48:23]
Chris
And I've forgotten about it. Right. Got this memory that's Right. You wouldn't have remembered it if it was on your own.
- [48:27]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's right.
- [48:28]
Chris
You wouldn't have remembered it.
- [48:29]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah. And then having my wife walk up at one of those events, she surprised me, walked up with a microphone and said, I'm so proud of you. I'll remember. That's the day I died. Right. I remember that today I died. Yeah. Because it meant something. It was a shared experience and kind of like stand up comedy. I've become obsessed over the last few years, man. Just obsessed. I live around the corner from a club in Nashville and I kind of go too much. I love it. But that and music that's got a pretty tight feedback loop to it.
- [48:51]
Chris
Exactly. Well, I mean, you have immediate response from the audience.
- [48:55]
Dr. John DeLoney
It's one of the last bastions of human connection.
- [48:57]
Chris
Yeah. You play a good note, they make a noise. You tell a good joke, they make a noise. It's very quick. So, yeah, I think just one thing that's come to me. Although the Internet and remote working have afforded everybody the opportunity to step back and to. You know, I can work from anywhere, man. You know, I can be on the top of a mountain. I can determine my own working schedule. I don't need anybody else. I just need a laptop and an Internet connection. I'm good. That's great. But it siloed you off from being able to do the thing that you actually wanted to do, which was enjoy the fucking process of doing the work. Some people are just looking to earn in pounds and spend in pesos and they have whatever, like fulfillment that occurs outside of their job. Fine. But if you want to get some fulfillment from your job, I don't think that you can solo Sigma male lone ranger entrepreneur it in Bali. Because who. When you nail this next client on a sales call for like the biggest deal you've ever. Oh, my God. Like Hewlett Packard are going to use our software. Dude, you just made 20 grand, right? You just made 20 grand. Oh, it's just me that made 20 grand. Who am I gonna celebrate with? And I'm fired up, kind of, but I'm not that fired up because the whole. The whole reason that you want to win something is so that you can go with other people.
- [50:14]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's the Wolf of Wall Street DiCaprio's character. It looks like he's. He's addicted to the deal. I don't think he was. I think he was addicted to the room. CHEERING yeah. You know what I mean? To that celebration. And the deal gets you that, right?
- [50:29]
Chris
Yes, yes. So that becomes the proxy and all the money is, is just the number that you get to like shout in the air with everybody else.
- [50:35]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's it. That's it. And the awe and the. Oh my gosh, how'd you do that? That's amazing.
- [50:39]
Chris
So a perfect example of this. I'm gonna go and do it looks like it's the first time I'm talking about it. I'm gonna go and do a tour around America and Canada.
- [50:46]
Dr. John DeLoney
Outstanding.
- [50:46]
Chris
Later this year.
- [50:47]
Dr. John DeLoney
Come to Nashville, please.
- [50:48]
Chris
It's booked.
- [50:49]
Dr. John DeLoney
Is it?
- [50:50]
Chris
Oh yeah.
- [50:50]
Dr. John DeLoney
Outstanding.
- [50:51]
Chris
So as a part of that I'm going to get to. I don't need a warmup, right? It's two hours of me talking on stage. I'm going to take a warm up because I want someone to finish the show with and fucking high five. And it might be Zach, my ex housemate who plays guitar. It might be James Smith from Australia. It might be somebody I might get, you know, guests to come and do warm up. But I want someone there with me so that I don't go back to the hotel on my own and think about how good or how bad it was, bro, you know what I mean? Like I've got friends who are DJs, dude. I've got friends DJing looks from the outside like the most dialed life in the world. Let me tell you. It is on the come up before you've got your tour manager with you, before you've got an opener with you, before you've got like a structure around you. It's kind of a bit like hell, you're playing until three in the morning. If you've got back to back gigs. I have a friend who did played a gig on a Monday in Argentina, Buenos Aires something. And the next time he got to sleep in a bed was Saturday. So it was Monday to Saturday and he played four gigs over five time zones of whatever it was. And he ended up basically having like a small psychotic break. Talked about it on the podcast years ago now and he came to in a supermarket, sat on the floor and he had laid around him one of every different type of hair product. He'd been scooping it up and putting it on his head because he realized his hair was shit, grabbed a floret of broccoli 48 dishwasher tablets, walked out like you had a full like you know, part, part psychotic break. You think, huh, that doesn't sound fun. But from the outside, oh my God, he's living his dream. He gets to play his music around the world like Careful what you wish.
- [52:31]
Dr. John DeLoney
Comes at a cost, man. Yeah.
- [52:32]
Chris
Especially on your own.
- [52:33]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah. There's always, there's always a trade. There's always a trade.
- [52:37]
Chris
Talking about, I guess, the next step. People get into relationships with those that they feel like they need to fix. Why do people stay in relationships even if they're not being fulfilled?
- [52:53]
Dr. John DeLoney
Talk to me about fulfillment. And I think sometimes that's the model you have. I think sometimes I'm not worth my needs being fulfilled. Sometimes I don't even know what that would feel like if my needs were fulfilled. And so kind of you talked about earlier. I'm just going to keep expanding what my needs need to be because my need is actually seeing you how high you can jump and it just keeps expanding, expanding. But I think for most of us, we don't have a model of what it looks like. Our moms and dads, if you look at the demographics across, like there was only one parent in the house or they were co managers of the house and even like each other, right? And I've got no picture of what someone who actually loves me and is connected with me and quote, unquote, needs. And by the way, I've been struggling lately and love to get your thoughts on this. I've been struggling with the idea of needs because I think needs have turned modern relationships into a very parasitic relationship. And I think beneath that, a more vulnerable, scary question to ask is what I want. And I think it's easy if I lob a need grenade at you. I need you to do these things. This, this, this and this versus man. I really want you to X, Y and Z. Because one of those I kind of take out the I need this. And if you don't do this, then, then you're not performing or I really want you. Do you want me to do you see me?
- [54:12]
Chris
Oh, that's lovely.
- [54:13]
Dr. John DeLoney
And so I think most of us are so terrified at asking the want question of ourselves and of our partner that we cast it all as needs, right?
- [54:22]
Chris
Because the want can be denied, but the need can't. Almost want should, could be denied, but the need should not.
- [54:29]
Dr. John DeLoney
If you deny my needs, you're an ass. If you deny my wants because you might not want, that's different. One of the most common questions I get from married men is I just want her. I, I just want more sex, right? I want more sex, I want better sex, etc, but they come at it with I need more sex. But if you need something, then it goes on the chore list along with the diapers. And the this and I got to.
- [54:51]
Chris
Clean the kitchen, which is unbelievably sex.
- [54:53]
Dr. John DeLoney
I'll get you off and then I'm going to go. I'm going to go to bed. Right. A way more terrifying question for a modern male is to a wife with two kids and it's exhausting. And you're both working full time. I want you. Do you want me? And if you don't, we need to have that conversation. What would. What would desire look like? That's a scarier conversation, man. And there are basic needs. So I don't want to throw out the baby at the bathwater, but I think most of this comes down to wants. And that's terrifying.
- [55:20]
Chris
That's an awesome reframe. That's really good. Yeah. I think in the process of defining our wants and risking the potential for somebody to be unprepared to fulfill them for us, we feel less than.
- [55:38]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah. Or we don't have a psychology for being wrong. I think you've talked about this on another show that I listened to before I went to college. I went to this very well meaning Texas church camp and they took us 18 year old guys in a room and they're like, the world's gonna destroy you. So write down right now what your non negotiables for your life partner will be. Write them down right now because they're going to get watered down and the edges rubbed off. It's going to be bad.
- [56:09]
Chris
Oh, okay. So you were sort of at this purest.
- [56:11]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah. Before the world soils you.
- [56:13]
Chris
Right.
- [56:14]
Dr. John DeLoney
Right down.
- [56:14]
Chris
Actually what you're really going to want.
- [56:16]
Dr. John DeLoney
You're 10 on a ghost. I'm 26 years with the same person, the same woman. And I think she had two of the 10 and one of them was be a pretty girl. Right. Like be a beautiful woman. And so it's what. When I say I want something so often my managers, that's his job is to be like, you don't want that. Like I really want this, you don't want that. Right. And we don't have a psychology for being wrong. We just are so led around the nose by our feelings. I feel, I feel, I feel, I feel. And man, I can get what I want when I cast it in the form of a need and you have to meet it.
- [56:50]
Chris
That's fascinating. I suppose as well, you know, it goes back to what do you think you deserve? And if we don't have a. We don't have.
- [56:59]
Dr. John DeLoney
We don't have a man. If you had to fight and scratch and claw and sing and dance in a third grade math class to get your mom to look you in the eye, you don't think you're worthy of a want, you know what I mean? If you had to sing and dance on a soccer field for your dad to pat you on the back, no eye contact, of course, but just patch on the back, you don't think. You, you, you don't. You're not worthy of wanting anything. Everything has to be a need.
- [57:25]
Chris
Well, also, what was the model of needs and wants and desires being requested and fulfilled in the household? Because, you know, a lot of the generation that are growing up now and are asking themselves these questions, their parents, they didn't have that sort of communication education. You know, there wasn't podcasts and fucking Arthur Brooks and all of this stuff to help everybody through. So you go, okay, well, what was the model of how to communicate the things? Well, what about, like passive aggression?
- [57:55]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's it.
- [57:55]
Chris
What about shadow sentences? What about not requesting what you need and then getting bitter about the fact that you never got it?
- [58:01]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, we were cast in movies we didn't even know we were in, and we got in trouble for not not knowing the lines.
- [58:06]
Chris
Right?
- [58:07]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, yeah.
- [58:07]
Chris
You didn't attend a party, you weren't invited. Yes.
- [58:10]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then how dare you not not show up?
- [58:13]
Chris
Yep.
- [58:13]
Dr. John DeLoney
Right?
- [58:13]
Chris
Yeah, yep. And you don't know. So, yeah, I think the sense of, what, what are you worth? What are you worth? What, what, what should you get out of this? And do you even know what it is that you're asking for? Like, have you got an idea of it? And I guess, okay, moving one step forward from this, if somebody feels convinced that they should leave a relationship, but they're struggling to accumulate the bravery to be able to sort of pull the pin, maybe they've got close a few times and they've bailed out, what would you say to sort of motivate that person who deep down knows that it's the right thing to do, but as of yet, just the courage kind of hasn't come to them?
- [58:59]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's a great question. I think, I think there's a practical aspect to this, and then I think there's a relational aspect to this. If there's a very real. The data is pretty clear that, you know, more women file for divorce, but women's net worth often plummets. Right. And so there's a very real economic consequence. So if you're married to somebody, if you're living with somebody, and, you know, I got to get out of this thing, there's a very real math problem you have to solve. And that's unfortunate and it's scary, and the social services are pretty tough. But there's a very real question.
- [59:31]
Chris
I suppose the, the equivalent would be the same for men, but in reverse. Paying alimony.
- [59:35]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think there's a, there's a math problem there. Not to say stay together for the math. Right. That's. I haven't. I've seen that bumper sticker. But there's a very real reality to this. The other side of it is, I know for most of us, when emotions are a sign, especially strong emotions are a sign that your body's trying to protect you. And when your body's trying to protect you, you're not thinking. And so for me, it's been very important to have a couple of men in my life that I outsource some of these things to let sit down with you, make sure I'm seeing this thing clearly. Because here's what I'm feeling. And it's been more than once in my life when I sit down with a few of my old 30 or plus ride or die buddies, and I'm like, she's doing this and this and this. And they're like, have you looked in a mirror, man? And they're able to see something, right? No. No warrior goes into battle without eyes in the sky. And so I think I often are in our, in our lone ranger cowboy world we live in, man, it's, you got to know all this, but I'll do this by yourself. And so I'm constantly telling people, dude, go get a cup of coffee with somebody and just exhale. They tell them what's going on. And they may say, hey, there's a common thing on my show. Someone will call and be like, my sex life screwed up. We have only had sex twice last year. It's a disaster. It's falling apart. And then 10 minutes into the conversation, it's like, well, we have a five year old, a three year old, a one year old, and she's pregnant. I'm like, bro, hang up the phone and call me back. Like, you're all, you'll have survival sex. Y'all are figuring this thing out like, you're not broke and it's okay, right? But that's just. You just need somebody to sit with you. But when it comes to courage and bravery, I think at some point we have to head into the discomfort. I mean, that's all that, that's all Judd Brewer stuff on anxiety, but you got to head into it the thing that you're scared about and anxious about.
- [61:13]
Chris
We'll get back to talking to John in just one minute. But first, I need to tell you about function. Staying on top of your health requires more than just an annual physical, which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year that track over a hundred biomarkers and monitor for early signs of thousands of diseases. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more than you get from an annual physical. You receive insights from a team of expert physicians who provide detail, written clinician summaries of their observations and formed consultations for any critical findings. Getting these lab tests, tests done would usually cost thousands, but with function, it's only $500. And right now, you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and bypass their waitlist by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com modernwisdom that's functionhealth.com modernwisdom yeah, I think some of the questions I've asked friends about when they've been on the fence, unsure, scared about being alone, about losing this attachment. You know, one of the things is how much of your life is thinking about this breakup taking up, like, what other productive or peaceful or mindful thoughts is this taking the space of? How often are you not present at dinner or not present at work or, you know, trying to meditate or train in the gym or do any of the things that usually bring you joy and you're not thinking about where you are?
- [62:42]
Dr. John DeLoney
And that's one of my. When someone says, hey, should I break up with them? I'm thinking about this. This. I always say, absolutely, you should break up with them. And I just watch. And if they're, if their shoulders drop, if their face drops, that may be the right move.
- [62:55]
Chris
Yeah, because they've gotten something like.
- [62:57]
Dr. John DeLoney
No, no, no.
- [62:57]
Chris
Yeah. They've got a sense of relief from. From that being on the other side. They're just asking you for permission.
- [63:02]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's right.
- [63:02]
Chris
They're just asking you for permission. There's this great. You know Rick Hanson, he wrote Hardwiring Happiness. Dude, unreal.
- [63:09]
Dr. John DeLoney
Okay.
- [63:10]
Chris
Imagine CBT meets Dharma, Wisdom meets mindfulness meets neuroscience. It's a Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson. He's got a phenomenal, phenomenal podcast with his son, Forrest Hansen. I think it's called Being well. And he dropped this quote that said, wisdom is choosing a Greater happiness over a lesser happiness. And I think, you know, a lot of the time we assume that change is only ever going to make things worse, even though when we look back, almost all changes have made things better.
- [63:46]
Dr. John DeLoney
But we don't fear change. We fear loss.
- [63:49]
Chris
True. Yeah. But that's uncertainty. We don't necessarily feel loss. We fear uncertainty.
- [63:53]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's right.
- [63:54]
Chris
Right. Because losing an abusive partner isn't. You're not fearing that. You're fearing the uncertainty of what it would be like to be without them. You know, we have two needs as humans. We have an exploration need and we have a security need. Yeah, right.
- [64:06]
Dr. John DeLoney
Their intention.
- [64:06]
Chris
Right, Correct.
- [64:07]
Dr. John DeLoney
Novelty. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [64:09]
Chris
Novelty. Safety. You need to go out and get some berries. You need to go to a new bush because this one's empty. But also there's a risk of going there because there might be a line behind it. It might kill you. I think one of the things that's really useful is to try and have faith that you are the sort of person who can handle change well. Like, just to think about that as an ideal, like, it makes a world inside of your mind where you don't need to fear things adjusting because change has happened in the past and you seem to deal with it quite well, then change is going to happen in the future. You're probably going to deal with that. So why not this one? Like, why not back yourself to be able to be the sort of person who can deal with change? Well, like, you've got this. You're flexible and you're okay in different situations. And. Yeah, you know, unfortunately, a lot of the people who have the opportunity to choose partners, to not just have to settle for the first thing that happens to, you know, have different life opportunities to move away from that. They are probably quite hard workers. And the problem with being a hard worker is that you have to have a pain tolerance. And if your pain tolerance is quite high, that means that your pain tolerance for emotional deprivation is quite high, which means that you'll stick about in a relationship that isn't serving you for a very, very long time.
- [65:28]
Dr. John DeLoney
Just keep going and going and going and going, because that's what we do.
- [65:32]
Chris
Yeah, you're used to putting your nose against the grindstone and things being tough and coming out the other side and going, I wasn't that happy, but I got through it.
- [65:40]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, I got.
- [65:41]
Chris
Because in the past, in other areas of life, in the gym or in diet or in building a meditation habit or in business or in skill acquisition, you have learned to Associate delayed gratification. You're basically marshmallow testing your way through, through life. Right? Over and over again. And you go, well, look, there's certain things that you just kind of need to embrace the suck.
- [66:03]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yes.
- [66:04]
Chris
And on the other side of which there will be maybe not happiness, but meaning and fulfillment and well being and perhaps downstream from that you get some like fun and enjoyment and happiness and blah, blah. But probably not in your relationship. Right. I don't think anybody's going to congratulate you on your deathbed for saying he suffered in silence sense. You know what I mean?
- [66:22]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah. Except that I don't know that. I mean it takes two to tango, right? But I think that meek makes suffering the, the inevitable outcome. And I remember when my wife and I were sitting across the table, like the message I sent to her because we weren't speaking was no, no, no crying, no fighting, no screaming. And this was self directed. I'm the emotional one. We gotta, we gotta say, are we still doing this? This is it. Like because the marriage we've had up till now is over. Like, are we gonna keep doing this? And. But I remember that conversation when we both came to the realization we have both mutually chosen a miserable marriage. And the beauty is we can choose a not miserable one. And I think that agency of choice has been taken away by a culture of disempowerment. So I think the idea of like it's either bail or suffer in silence, I think that's a, that is, I don't think it's that binary. I think you can also both be like, dude, we chose suck and I chose. I, I did something, whoever you may be, I, I stepped out on the marriage. I, I gambled a bunch of money away. Like I did an extra bad thing. If you want to frame it like that, we can both choose something different. And that to me is a, it's not on the table anymore. But if you look past, the same thing happens relationally. Those who stick it out and they choose something different choose something magnanimous, which is very on Romeo and Juliet, right? You're supposed to just be star crossed lovers. It's stupid, it's nonsense. You choose it and you keep choosing it and you keep choosing it, man. You see people who've been through hell and they're on the other side. That's the goofy guys that have real short shorts on and no business wearing that short of shorts at the beach. And they don't care. Right? Because that's because she loves him. Yeah, right. And it's It's a different kind of. It's a. It's a different kind of depth to that love.
- [68:16]
Chris
I've heard you say before about how the time, I think this is with your conversation with Arthur Brooks, the time when you want to pull away the most is the time when you're supposed to lean in.
- [68:28]
Dr. John DeLoney
I did it last night with my daughter. She 9 years old, man. She's got a supernatural ability. She knows where every single hidden button buttons I didn't even know I had. She just knows. And she screaming and hollering and yelling and doing her nine year old stuff and started to walk away and I literally went downstairs to head out the door with the dog to go for a walk and I stopped. This is that moment. That's when Arthur Brooks is ringing in my head and you turn around, you walk back in and I went and climbed into bed with her and my wife's reading a book and I just climbed. She shoves me out of the way. I move and. And then within 30 seconds you hear her breathing different. And then she reaches over and grabs your hand. And that's what dads do. Emotionally immature children run off. Dads go right through it.
- [69:19]
Chris
Like, yeah, you had a child on child war that's about to begin.
- [69:22]
Dr. John DeLoney
It's my innocence, right?
- [69:27]
Chris
Dude, was it who?
- [69:28]
Dr. John DeLoney
Ah, it may have been. It may have been Salda Stefano that I called recently and was like, hey, I meant having a disagreement with my 14 year old. And he just started dying laughing because I was gonna stop you right there. And I was like, what am I, what am I doing? And I was like, I'll call you. No, it was Lane Norton. I call him. I was like, hey, I'm arguing. My 14 year old. He goes, how about I just stop you right there? And I was like, what do I do? Right? Yeah, I use for a living. It happens. Yeah, right.
- [69:51]
Chris
That's funny.
- [69:52]
Dr. John DeLoney
And then you roll it off and you move on. Right.
- [69:54]
Chris
You know, one final thing that I heard that I thought was such a great rubric for. How do you know if you've sort of really given this as good of a shot as you can in a relationship before you decide to pull the pen? It was, you know, that you've made a serious effort by comparing the level of effort that you've put in to the people that you admire and the level of effort that they bring to something before they decide to quit. Like, just think about that, Think about how much effort the people that you admire, the friends around you, people in your life. The people you look up to think about how much effort they put into something before they go, like, it's time to stop trying to grow roses in this parking lot. I think that gives you confidence in your view that it's time to move on. She'd go, any other reasonable person would have said, this is too much. Even the best of the reasonable people, which are the people, presumably that I admire because I think what everybody wants to hear when they've got a really existential disagreement in a relationship is, you know what, man, you're not crazy.
- [70:58]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, that's it.
- [71:00]
Chris
You're not crazy for thinking that. And you go, that's it. Oh my God. Because I was wracked with so much self doubt and I thought this was me being petty. I thought this was me. And a lot of the times it is, right? And you need to know, that's why you gotta have fucking language.
- [71:15]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's right.
- [71:17]
Chris
But I thought it was me being petty. I thought it was me being juvenile. I thought I was being rash. And someone goes, you're not crazy. You're not crazy for feeling like that. I think that's completely an acceptable position to hold. Fuck. Well, what do I do now? I actually have a firm. Because you get stuck in. Are my desires legitimate? Should I be able to. Is it okay to want what I want? And if you've had a life of marshmallow testing your way through things, you have learned to not want what you want.
- [71:54]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's it.
- [71:54]
Chris
You've learned to put off the things that you want in place of doing something that's harder or more boring.
- [72:00]
Dr. John DeLoney
I think the illusion, though, is it's going to feel a certain way, right? When, if I get what I want, that suddenly it's going to extrinsically fill that gap. Oh yeah, in my chest. And I think when you. I remember telling my counselor recently, my therapist recently, I just want to feel what I know. And that was a heavy sentence that I'd never said before. But it's like, I know these things to be true, but I want to be able to feel them here, right? And that becomes the word getting from here to here.
- [72:32]
Chris
And that's a lot of, a lot of people, especially now, you know, how do you say physiologically decapitated from the neck down? I love that, you know, they just exist. And, you know, this is me speaking to me as I desperately try to get more embodied with stuff. But. But, dude, feeling feelings is really fucking hard. I went on a journey over the last year of trying to do it Speaking to Conan Beaton, speaking to every different expert that I could find to talk about. Okay, so what does it mean to tap into your emotions? What does it mean to feel feelings? You know, Joe Hudson, familiar with him Art of Accomplishment, going on a seven day retreat the back end of September with him called Groundbreakers. And they've got clinical studies showing that it moves neuroticism longitudinally, nudges neuroticism in the direction that you want it to. It makes a bunch of other personality changes. But he was like, it's like Navy SEAL hell week for your emotions, so don't book anything for the next week. And I'm really excited. I'm gonna get daunted as I get closer to it. But yeah, man, it's one of the most interesting questions. Talking about wants is what do you want to want? I adore that question. It's an essay by Kyle Eschenroder from years ago. His website has now been taken over by like a Ukrainian porn thing. You know, someone's got ahold of the WordPress logins and they've changed his website, but I downloaded the PDF so I revisit it pretty regularly. And yeah, the question of what do you want to want? You know, because your desires define the path of least resistance that your life is going to take. And a lot of the time, people, your desire unpack that. So the things that you want, your desires, will pull you in a direction that is the easiest for you to go.
- [74:24]
Dr. John DeLoney
Even if. Even if that is very difficult.
- [74:26]
Chris
Even if it's very difficult. Yeah, of course.
- [74:28]
Dr. John DeLoney
Okay.
- [74:28]
Chris
And even if it is painful, even if it's toxic, even if it's malignant to the world at large, the things that you want. It's the old. The man who loves to walk will work.
- [74:39]
Dr. John DeLoney
There you go.
- [74:40]
Chris
Yeah. The man who is forced to walk or whatever.
- [74:42]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [74:43]
Chris
Your desires define the path of least resistance.
- [74:46]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [74:46]
Chris
Inside of your life.
- [74:47]
Dr. John DeLoney
Okay.
- [74:48]
Chris
So what you want to do is align the things that you want with the things that you want to want.
- [74:55]
Dr. John DeLoney
Okay.
- [74:55]
Chris
Because if you don't ever step in and ask yourself what you actually want to want, you end up having your desires defined for you by the worst parts of yourself.
- [75:03]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's exactly right.
- [75:04]
Chris
By society at large and by the way that you've dealt with past traumas and by the paths of least resistance and all of this stuff, it all comes together. And then if you're not careful, you end up in a place not only that you don't want to be, but that you didn't even Mean to get to.
- [75:19]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yes. And it doesn't solve the problem you thought you were trying to solve, because.
- [75:23]
Chris
What you wanted was not what you wanted to want.
- [75:25]
Dr. John DeLoney
So my wife's way of asking that question. We were sitting at that table, was one hand on the table, like, how do you want this house to feel when you walk in every day? And, dude, I vomited. I was like, dude, I want you to want that I'm here. I want you to be happy that I'm here. I want my daughter to come running at me like she had a daddy, daddy, daddy, with like a. Like a inside of a wrapping paper roll. I'm always in this sword fight with her that I don't even know him. Right. I want my son making fart noise like, I want the house to feel warm. She's like, okay, then you can't bring that last meeting in here, and you got to work out. And you and I both know when you eat like this and this and this, we get the downstream grumpy dad three days later, and it became a very. But it became that. How do you want this place to feel when you walk in the room?
- [76:10]
Chris
What a great question.
- [76:11]
Dr. John DeLoney
And let's reverse engineer.
- [76:12]
Chris
Who the. Your wife.
- [76:14]
Dr. John DeLoney
She's Yoda, dude. Yeah, she's a Yoda. Absolutely. She's just a wise.
- [76:20]
Chris
Still, I didn't realize that you were the relationally retarded one.
- [76:23]
Dr. John DeLoney
Oh, are you kidding me? Yeah.
- [76:25]
Chris
The guy that's got the calling show is the one that actually doesn't know anything.
- [76:28]
Dr. John DeLoney
But she never would have been at a punk rock mosh pit if it wasn't for me. So there you go.
- [76:32]
Chris
Very important.
- [76:33]
Dr. John DeLoney
We each bring our pieces to the relationship.
- [76:36]
Chris
Yeah. Okay. Taking one step forward. What is your advice for how people can better move on from breakups? They've got this.
- [76:44]
Dr. John DeLoney
Gosh, that's a great question.
- [76:45]
Chris
Rumination. They're struggling. Checking the social media. Everything reminds them of them. I'm never gonna find anybody as good. How do people move on from relationships?
- [76:56]
Dr. John DeLoney
We've got a allergy to grief in our culture. Like, that's a natural process. We used to.
- [77:01]
Chris
We.
- [77:02]
Dr. John DeLoney
We used to have a room in the house called the parlor where the body would. Would rest for two to three to four days before it was buried. And now we outsource that, and we call it the living room. I think it was. It was a Southern living that declared it in the early 1900s. Like, it's no longer the parlor. It's now the living room. Right. But we've just plucked grief out of our lives. Just this reality that things don't always work out. And we had a collective group of people. You sat in the home with a dead relative. Right? Right. That's just a part of the grieving process. And the body's got ways that you begin to breathe again. And somebody shows up with food and somebody shows up with food, and somebody shows up with food and. Right. It's like being at the beach and it feels like you're drowning, but you stand up and the water's just only three feet deep. Right? And we've just. So if you leave a long term relationship, dude, the number of students that would come into my office and be like, hey, I, I'm depressed. My dad just, just moved out on my mom. And I always like, maybe you're clinically depressed, but I bet you're sad. And they didn't have a psychology for that. Like, we don't do that. That's a thing we solve. We solve for sad. Like, no, man, that's a basic human emotion. Let's just be sad. Like, your family broke up, your dad left, let's sit in that. And so if you lose an important relationship, man, your, your body's working right. If it wants you just to stand on the covers for a while, your body's working right. If you don't want to go out, your body's working right. If you don't, like, if you're like wondering, am I lovable? That's not something to be solved, man. That's something to just sit with. And if you don't have people in your life, man, your body's going to spin out on you, dude, because it knows it can't carry that burden alone. That's. It is, we have to have, we have to have a place for grief, for being sad. And I think in our current world, the only way to do it is to be what, what looks radical, right? I'm going to block people, I'm going to delete people. I'm going to take my phone off. I'm going to have a group of people that are going to come to my house every, every night for two weeks. I'm going to play stupid board games, something stupid, right? Or whatever. I'm going to give myself permission to not go out for a month because I'm tired. I just feel dry. Like, man, that's just, that's called just honoring the system, man. You know what I mean? It's honor the system because you're going to duct tape over that thing in counseling we, we say it's called call it leakage. It'll find a way out. And it usually finds a way out at a real. On an inopportune time. Or you can honor it and invite somebody to sit in there with you.
- [79:28]
Chris
How can you tell if you've got leakage? What sort of. What are the most typical forms of leakage?
- [79:32]
Dr. John DeLoney
Oh, rage. Saying the words. If they would just. And I don't even care what the. I don't even care who and what you're talking about. If they would just.
- [79:41]
Chris
The guy in the car next to you.
- [79:42]
Dr. John DeLoney
Doesn't even matter. If they would just. Yeah. If you start making up imaginary stories about people like the I hear from most folks across the country that happens in the shower. You start having imaginary conversations with people that you'll never have in real life. If I see Chris again, dude, I'm gonna tell that dude, you're never gonna do that. It's your body just trying to spin up. Brene Brown calls it dress roasting tragedy. When you are just constantly in a loop of planning the next sword fight that you're gonna just do the super move at the end, man. And your body doesn't know the difference, man. So it goes to war in the shower. You ever done that? You step out and you come out of your bedroom and your partner's in there and you're mad. They have no idea and they're just eating right. You're like, how can you just stop?
- [80:25]
Chris
15 minute argument with you, dude.
- [80:27]
Dr. John DeLoney
And I, by the way, I crushed you in that argument.
- [80:29]
Chris
Yeah.
- [80:29]
Dr. John DeLoney
Insane. Yeah. Or you see your boss the next day after a night of like, I'm gonna tell. You're not gonna tell him anything. Right? So I. It's when you go into solution solving mode of rage, fighting, running, hiding. Like, man, we broke up. We had plans. I'm gonna sit here. Hey, this is gonna be weird. Will you come over to my house? Let's bring tacos. And I'm not gonna talk to you because it's gonna be weird. So I'm just gonna say we're gonna play video games, right? You can watch a stupid game with me. I'm going to a show. I bought two tickets. We're going to show. No asking me about so and so. But we're just gonna go. You're too old to be mosh pitting John. I know we're. And it's, it's just honoring. You're supposed to be sad. You're supposed to be sad. Then if you wake up 90 days later and it becomes you're skipping work, you need to call somebody, right? That's when it becomes a pathology. You gotta, you gotta call somebody.
- [81:22]
Chris
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- [82:32]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah man, what a great book.
- [82:34]
Chris
The that there's a carve out in the DSM for grief around depression.
- [82:40]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah. Which to me undermines the whole. Dude, don't get me started on dsm. But that's a whole other thing.
- [82:44]
Chris
It makes sense to me though that if you were to say I feel depressed, my dad died yesterday, or I broke up with my girlfriend yesterday, you all that. Okay. The emotion might be that of depression. Right. So the symptoms are correct, but the diagnosis that's caused the symptoms or the cause of the symptoms seems to not fit.
- [83:09]
Dr. John DeLoney
It's completely irrelevant. Yeah. All diagnosis is in the DSM was a cluster, a symptom of clusters. I mean a cluster of symptoms.
- [83:16]
Chris
Right.
- [83:16]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's it. But it's totally devoid of context.
- [83:19]
Chris
The point being you should be sleep.
- [83:22]
Dr. John DeLoney
Not sleeping or you should be sleeping all day. You should not be able to control your thoughts or have Just fog of. In your head.
- [83:27]
Chris
Correct.
- [83:27]
Dr. John DeLoney
All those things are right. Your dad died. There's not a. There's not a. It's David Kessler, who I think is the world's foremost guru on grief. He says it's like a fingerprint, man. Everybody looks different. And that's why. Trying to solve it.
- [83:40]
Chris
I spoke to human about this years ago, first ever episode that we did. And I was talking about getting over breakups, and he said that it's the exact same circuits as grief.
- [83:48]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's exactly right. As death.
- [83:50]
Chris
The problem is that they're still alive.
- [83:51]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [83:52]
Chris
And you can be in touch with them. You can resurrect this dead person. So imagine that a person that you felt the closest to died, but you had a button that could resurrect them. And it happens to be in WhatsApp.
- [84:05]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [84:06]
Chris
And there is always this sort of rumination, this potential, this. So I think, you know, that's why it sounds cheesy.
- [84:13]
Dr. John DeLoney
But I always recommend somebody have a ceremony.
- [84:15]
Chris
Okay.
- [84:16]
Dr. John DeLoney
Like a funeral. Yeah. And. And that can be like Sex in the City. Like this big Lord. It doesn't have to be that, but it is. I love. Kessler also says grief demands a witness. Can't grieve by yourself. Just biochemically. You can't do it by yourself. You gotta have other people. And so I'm gonna sit with you, and we're gonna burn the letter, we're gonna write the mean. Whatever the mean thing is. But when we wake up tomorrow, probably a little bit hungover, a little bit exhausted, there's gonna be a period at the end of that sentence, and I'm just gonna be sad because I'm gonna reach to grab my phone to call her, and she's not. I'm not calling her. I'm gonna pick up my phone. Send me no text.
- [84:49]
Chris
That's so interesting. The ceremony.
- [84:50]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah. You have to. But you have to give your body a period at the end of that sentence. And we just rob ourselves of it. We just go to the next. Go to the next. Go to next. Swipe right, swipe right. And we gotta exhale. You're not broken. I love that. That circuitry that gets reused was. Was really eye opening for me. It's a loss. It's a loss. It happens a lot with parents, too. When you become 35 and you're like, hey, that was abuse. And they're like, you coming for Christmas? And you're like, I don't know, man. You know what I mean? That one's a tough One. It happened a lot during. During. Me too. Where.
- [85:28]
Chris
Huh. That wasn't. That wasn't so dialed that he touched me like that.
- [85:32]
Dr. John DeLoney
Well, it was like. Well, it's like, he's a great dad. We have three kids. He's a good provider, good husband. We have a great time. Hey, I think that was rape back in college. What do I do now? Right?
- [85:44]
Chris
God.
- [85:45]
Dr. John DeLoney
And it's a. Yeah, you're talking about like a real psychological train wreck, man. That's tough. And those were hard things to navigate.
- [85:53]
Chris
I mean, fuck that. This is one of the challenges, I suppose, of doing inner work, of doing any kind of introspection that you start turning over these rocks or looking, I'm gonna open these doors inside of this house I've lived in my entire life. And then you realize that every so often you open one and there's a fucking demon hiding in there, covered in.
- [86:13]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, well. And I. I wonder if we. Man, we can go down a whole rabbit hole in this. That's prefer another show. I. I remember my high school metal band. We played at this event at the end of our senior year called. It's called Mike Stock. It was an old skating rink. And Chris to say that we crushed it, bro. I'm talking legend. Any record exec on planet Earth would have signed us that day. It was legend. Crushed it. I went to college with my head held high. The band kind of dissolved. Then, like my sophomore year, college, I'm at home back in Houston with my family. Somebody calls, right, Bro. We found a VHS of the record of the show. Somebody had a. One of those big box vhs. Did we pile around the tv? Yo, it was not good. It was so bad, dude. I forgot the words. It was a disaster. It was not good. I forgot. Somebody broke a string. And it got me thinking. Evolutionarily, like my body created a story for that moment. And me going back, this technology that has never existed, those old photo albums that have never existed for all of human history. I don't know if that's. That's super good for us. And it's magnified now with kids who are like, mom, take a picture, mom, let me see. Can I see the video of me? The thing I just did? That sort of recursive world, man. We're. We're just. We're playing roulette with our nervous system.
- [87:43]
Chris
Strange, right?
- [87:43]
Dr. John DeLoney
Because in one, we're not designed to see that stuff.
- [87:46]
Chris
Yeah, but as you just mentioned, in one way, sometimes we don't want to remember the shit that happened.
- [87:51]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's exactly Right. There's a protective measure to it, Correct?
- [87:54]
Chris
Yeah. The psychological immune system, as it's known. Adam Masriani has this thing where he says the closest thing to an equation in psychology is tragedy plus time equals comedy. And yeah, something that's atrocious, that happened a while ago can actually be funny.
- [88:12]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's what healing is, right? That my body doesn't go to war again. It doesn't act as though it's happening again, let's say. But you experienced it with your psychoanalysis, right? It opens a bunch of loops, man. And now it's like, oh, I got a whole bunch of other work to do now.
- [88:25]
Chris
Yeah. And I think a couple of the things that happened there. Stan Tatkin, your Brain on Love, best, best book on attachment that I've ever listened to. Only exists as an audiobook to your Brain on Love by Stan Tatkin. Outstanding.
- [88:38]
Dr. John DeLoney
Okay.
- [88:39]
Chris
And he talks about how memories get moved from short term memory to long term memory. And sometimes they sit in both. And if you've got them sitting in both, that's really, really dangerous because the short term memory is. This is still salient and I need to keep a hold of it. The situation keeps on feeding it and feeding it and feeding it. And yeah, what you want to do is clear that shit out. So he has two really great bits of advice for relationships. He doesn't want stuff to get into long term memory. So he says you have an incident that occurs with your partner, a triggering event of some kind. And he says your goal should be, you need to be able to do this in less than about two minutes. So you need to plan and you need to talk about how you do this. Something happens, your partner sort of jibs you at the dinner table and it really sort of sets you off. You're in front of someone that you're trying to get a promotion from or somebody you respect or just a friend or a family member or something, and your partner does something that really, really gets to you. You need to be able to, as quickly as possible, in less than about two minutes, go to one side and say, hey, look, like that thing that just happened. And the partner needs to be able to at least bring you back down. They don't need to fix it. It's like, look, we can talk about this properly later on. I just wanted to tell you how much I love you. I'm really sorry that I didn't mean to do that to just like. Yeah, because the longer that you leave, that is it. Unspoken expectations are premeditated. Resentment.
- [90:01]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's it.
- [90:01]
Chris
Yeah. And that gets ported over into long term memory and that's going to stick. About the other problem that you have is when, as you know from cbt, which is that. What's that eye tracking thing that they do?
- [90:10]
Dr. John DeLoney
Emdr.
- [90:10]
Chris
Yeah.
- [90:11]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yes.
- [90:11]
Chris
What are you doing with that? You're trying to move things that are already too locked into short term memory. Your body still thinks that they're long term memory, but they're in short term. They're trying to get it out of short term memory and push it across it. Because you're not going to be able to get rid of long term memory anymore. So you have two choices. Cut it off so it doesn't go at all. But then sometimes it's gone and it's still here in short term memory. So you need to get rid of it from that too. So you've got EMDR for the stuff that's stuck about for too long. And basically as far as I can tell, if when you think about a memory, an uncomfortable memory, traumatic thing that happened in your past, if it still creates an emotional response inside of you, your heart rate rises, you get hot, you get flustered, it makes you feel agitated. If you see it from a first person perspective.
- [90:53]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [90:53]
Chris
If you're watching it through your own eyes as opposed to sort of watching it from above and behind. If you can still sort of hear the sounds very viscerally. All of this suggests that it's still in short term memory. And I'm gonna guess there's like a million ways.
- [91:07]
Dr. John DeLoney
Dude, I love that Ethan Cross talks about a great way to get out of loops is to talk to yourself in the third person.
- [91:13]
Chris
Yes. That's the reason you want, right?
- [91:14]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, it's fantastic. Like.
- [91:15]
Chris
Yep.
- [91:16]
Dr. John DeLoney
Hey John, we're all right.
- [91:18]
Chris
What are you going to do about this?
- [91:18]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [91:19]
Chris
Instead John, you.
- [91:20]
Dr. John DeLoney
What am I? What am I? What am I? What am I? All right, John, you messed up. John, you should go tell her you're sorry. Y. I need to tell her I'm sorry and man, we're off to. To protection.
- [91:28]
Chris
Your ability to argue with yourself is impressive. What would you say? You know, maybe someone's listening and hey, fuck. I think that thing that happened in my. In earlier on in my life, I think that was like kind of messed up and. Huh. I haven't really dealt with that thing and I think it's still playing in my mind a bit. Where do people start with processing bad events like that?
- [91:50]
Dr. John DeLoney
If it's a traumatic event, if it's I think I was raped. I think I was assaulted. I think I was abused. And I always think it's good to start with somebody. Yeah, it's always good to put on the table. And, man, it can be really tough doing it with the person who, like, going to your parent or to your partner who may have done the thing, because they're gonna instantly have to defend themselves. And, man, that. That cascade is. Is messy. So that's when you get a trusted friend or a. Or a counselor just to say, hey, this happened. Going back to what you said earlier. Am I crazy? And someone might say, yeah, a good friend will say, yeah, you're kind of crazy. It's not a big deal. Or just. I sat with a counselor recently, and she was like, no, that's a big. That's a big one.
- [92:29]
Chris
What about.
- [92:30]
Dr. John DeLoney
It's a big deal.
- [92:30]
Chris
What about something which is not quite. If that's a. A nine or a ten, Right? What about. What about stuff? That's fives.
- [92:36]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's. Write it down and exhale. And there's something. I think. I think there's something transcendent about getting out of your body and looking at it on a piece of paper, like, descriptively.
- [92:46]
Chris
What are you doing? Are you. Are you reliving it? Are you allowing yourself to feel the emotions of it?
- [92:49]
Dr. John DeLoney
I think initially I want to know, and I want to be able to write it down and say, my fifth grader has really been pissing me off lately. Right? And then you can exhale and say, does a fifth grader have the ability to piss you off? Because if so, you're really dysregulated adult. Right? And you can have that conversation if it is. I'm feeling like I want to hit my fifth grader. Like, I'm feeling this need. I just want to punch him through a wall. Go talk to somebody, because you're hurt somebody. Right? So some of that is. And then, gosh, what's the guy. He did all the great work on journaling. I mean, there is something really profound about 15 to 20 minutes of sitting in it and writing. I. I haven't seen a lot of success with people doing that by themselves, doing it with somebody else.
- [93:33]
Chris
So what do you. How do you journal with somebody else?
- [93:37]
Dr. John DeLoney
Oh, I do that now with a guy named Luke LeFever. Like, you. Like, they give you prompts, and then they have you think through it, and they have you exhale for a bit, and they have you write 10 minutes free.
- [93:46]
Chris
So this is like guided journaling. It's not like You're. You're not sitting with another.
- [93:51]
Dr. John DeLoney
No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.
- [93:53]
Chris
Oh, that's cool. And what's that called?
- [93:55]
Dr. John DeLoney
It's just a. That's just a thing he does. But he called.
- [93:58]
Chris
Who's he?
- [93:58]
Dr. John DeLoney
His name's Luke LeFever.
- [93:59]
Chris
Okay.
- [93:59]
Dr. John DeLoney
He's out of nowhere.
- [94:00]
Chris
It's an online course.
- [94:01]
Dr. John DeLoney
He's out of Nashville. Yeah. Yeah, but he's a. That always. He's always pushed journaling and pushed journaling and pushed journaling. And I always kind of rolled my eyes, like, I'm a grown man. I don't need a diary. Right. And I knew the. I knew the. The therapeutic literature about, like, write down the stuff that's good. But what I got really sophisticated at was writing down my injustices, writing down my gratitudes, and writing down my things I need to do to fix it. And all of that was neck up, correct.
- [94:27]
Chris
And no point.
- [94:28]
Dr. John DeLoney
It's all.
- [94:28]
Chris
Next up, tapping into emotions.
- [94:29]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [94:30]
Chris
So there's a. I mean, that's awesome. And is there a name of his course? Do you know?
- [94:34]
Dr. John DeLoney
I don't. I can send it to you.
- [94:36]
Chris
Cool.
- [94:37]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah. But it's excellent.
- [94:38]
Chris
Yeah. So Rick is really, really good with this as well. Rick Hansen from Hardwiring Happiness. And what he has is the heal framework. So have enrich, absorb, and then optionally link at the end. So have a good experience. So a good opportunity right now might be the fact it's the first time I've met John in like. Like, I'm really enjoying this. And, yeah, I feel competent, and that's really fucking nice. This is my. This is my job. This is my life.
- [95:05]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, we're at work right now. Yeah. Yeah.
- [95:06]
Chris
Millions of people that get to listen to this, and I really hope it's helping them. And fuck, that's awesome. So have a good experience. You need to notice it. Right. So you need a degree of mindfulness. So you need to be able to see, have the experience, and notice it. So then you have enrich, which is sort of. I'm allowing it to sort of fill a little bit, and you're sitting with it for as long as possible. 30 seconds to a minute is really good. And then you have absorb. And absorb is. Imagine the experience sinking down and becoming a part of you. So I think that's a little bit more embodied. Right. So you've got, oh, this is nice. And I'm kind of up here and I'm enriched. I'm sort of feeling. It's expanding and, oh, I'm sort of sitting in it and then absorb. It's like sinking down into me and that's becoming a part of me. And I think you can do this. I mentioned before, and I did for a very long time, like 10 six month journals in a row, basically with like minimal breaks in between it for the end of my twenties until a couple of years ago. But a lot of it just ended up being homework. It's like admin.
- [96:00]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's it.
- [96:00]
Chris
And I'm like, I'm just paying. Fucking. In retrospect, I thought I was doing the thing and I can't. I shouldn't shout at a previous version of me who did the thing he thought he was supposed to be doing. Yeah, but I was largely just like filing stuff. Whereas now, and this is half Tony Robbins, half Rick Hansen, I've dispensed with most of the other stuff from journaling on a morning and just three things that you're grateful for, but as opposed to just writing them down, like take one minute for each thing and just really. So I had a call with my best friend. The guy whose best man I was at his wedding had a call with him yesterday for like 45 minutes. And I was like, I fucking love Zach. Like, he always listens. He's always got awesome advice. He's in a good mood all the time. He's really receptive. He's so fun. Like, he really cares. He really cares about me. That's so nice. And you like, like allowing that sense. I think. Fuck. That took a minute to do. What was the other one? The. The fresh air this morning just smelled awesome. Like coming through the window in front of my bedroom. Smells so good. Like, it's really, really refreshing. What was the other one? I developed bravery and courage to overcome difficult things. And I wouldn't have done that previously. Think about how proud of yourself you are that you've done this stuff. Like three. Really. One of them was literally the fucking wind. But so. And I just, you know, I finished that and I was like, I only had three minutes before the gym in any case. I was like, that was so fucking nice. What a lovely way to start a morning. And yeah, I get the sense that a lot of journaling done badly kind of ends up being like a highlighter girl from school who has a very well organized ring binder of what she was doing that day.
- [97:40]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah. For me it becomes like a weekly report for a business.
- [97:42]
Chris
Correct.
- [97:43]
Dr. John DeLoney
What did I do? Yeah. What was my. What was my up or down? Yeah. Yeah, that's a P. L. That's exactly right. A buddy of mine's going to a retreat right now. And his wife reached out and said, hey, would you. The retreat director asked for a few of his closest friends to write a letter. And I don't know what he'll get from that letter, but I tell you what it was. It really was transformative for me. It was so much so that my 14 year old comes bebopping in just, you know, in his underwear and like, hey, dad, like I said, hey, I want you to read this. I'm gonna read this to you out loud. This is me. This is a letter I'm writing to my friend. I him. To hear what his dad. That his dad's got adult male friends like this. And it was cool for him to hear that. And at the end he was like, cool, dad, like. And, you know, and okay, I just have to hope it's downloading somewhere. But it was like now they had this big spiritual moment and he's like, all right, dad.
- [98:30]
Chris
Yeah, yeah, kind of.
- [98:31]
Dr. John DeLoney
He's upside down on my, on that little teeter thing, just hanging there. But man, it. It lifted my spirits to know I got a friend that good. I got a friend that good, man. And so maybe, maybe that's an important exercise, but it takes you back, right? He's the guy I called. My wife went into labor. I don't know what to do, man. He's the guy who I called when I thought I was going to get let go from a job. He's the guy I called before the very first parent I had to tell their kid died. I called him because I'd heard him do it before. And I was like, I want to make sure I'm doing this right. And he said, you're doing it right. Don't ever call me again. You got this, right? And that kind of blessed that everyone wants from their dad, right? And so it was it. But. But it took me back to those moments. Just, you're. You're remembering those moments and man. But that was me writing him a note, right?
- [99:14]
Chris
Yeah, yeah. I mean, what's it like for him to. But in some ways, you know, being selfless is one of the most selfish things you can do, right? Because you get all of the positive sense of that. But yeah, I, you know, male normative alexithymia. Like, it's so common now among men to not feel feelings that it's got a fucking name.
- [99:34]
Dr. John DeLoney
And yeah, it's like that's like spray painting your. Your dashboard. Like, that doesn't make you Tough on your cool Texas pickup truck just spray painted black. I don't need these gauges. What a. That's dumb. You're out of gas and get a rack. Yeah, right. And also if you are drive constantly looking at your dashboard, you're gonna crash too, right? Gosh, man. I just don't, I don't, I don't get. Then you're in this world more than me. I, I just, I don't understand the, the tribal disassociation from reality. It's just so strange. Look, it's bananas. I think it's bananas.
- [100:10]
Chris
I think that there is a big cohort of people in the world who need David Goggins screaming in their face to go harder. And that may be.
- [100:18]
Dr. John DeLoney
Do they need that or is it pornography? Cause I wonder from that perhaps there's.
- [100:23]
Chris
Some sort of like, is it so.
- [100:25]
Dr. John DeLoney
Like insanely sensational that it becomes. You get what I'm saying?
- [100:28]
Chris
Yeah, I do understand. I, I get the sense that most people that listen to shows like this are type A people with a Type B problem. They're hard charging, insecure overachievers that need to learn to chill out.
- [100:46]
Dr. John DeLoney
Gotcha.
- [100:47]
Chris
And, and play video games. But there is a really big cohort of type B people with a type A problem who are, are too lazy, not sufficiently disciplined. They don't have upward mobility, they don't have a sense of agency. They don't feel like they have control over their life. And the problem is that people that have got type A, Type A people with type B problems like, oh my God, sorry, you've just got too much discipline. Like you keep winning the marshmallow test all the time. No one's going to give you sympathy for this and, but they'll see your.
- [101:16]
Dr. John DeLoney
Heart attack from space.
- [101:17]
Chris
Oh, of course.
- [101:17]
Dr. John DeLoney
Right.
- [101:18]
Chris
But it sounds like if you are a David Goggins y, like hard charging, pick yourself up. You don't need to fucking worry about how you feel. Just keep on going. Guy. That sounds like every underdog movie that you've ever heard. Because every underdog movie has a dude down on his luck who needs to sort himself out by getting disciplined. And there's an old Japanese guy who teaches him how to do kung fu and he gets a girl and everything's great. Right? There are no movies about how to log out of Slack at 6pm or learn to spend a day under a tree, right? Because that sounds opulent and bourgeois and privileged and a champagne problem. It's like, dude, just, just chill out. No one gets told to just work Harder. Well, you need instruction to work harder. You don't need instruction to just chill out. Because the assumption is that chill is the set point and work is the. The aberration. But that's not the case for a lot of people. That's not the case a lot of people.
- [102:16]
Dr. John DeLoney
Great frame, dude.
- [102:17]
Chris
Yeah. Type A people, Type B problems. Type B people, type A problem. Happens.
- [102:21]
Dr. John DeLoney
Huh? That's a fantastic frame. I've always thought that the way the Internet has taken Gaga's message and spit it out, it makes it look like a running Rocky 4 montage.
- [102:31]
Chris
Correct. But it's actually happening at all. Like in real time.
- [102:34]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, but it's happening in his life. But everybody likes Rocky. You would not have liked that. Worked out. It was cold, man. Like, you don't want to stuck it out, but it looks cool. The music.
- [102:43]
Chris
Everyone wants to feel like if things go badly for me, I can get myself back to where I wanted to be.
- [102:49]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's right.
- [102:50]
Chris
Right?
- [102:50]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah. Yeah, dude.
- [102:52]
Chris
As opposed to, if everything's going right for me, I need to learn to chill out. But you're right. I mean, you will see.
- [102:59]
Dr. John DeLoney
A few years ago, I joined a. Like, just a local. You got to be kidding me. Like, church league, basketball. And my knees were like, no, bro, we had a deal.
- [103:09]
Chris
I'm going to stop.
- [103:10]
Dr. John DeLoney
And yeah, that was two surgeries worth, man. But. But like, we had a contract. But I was like, no, no, I can be 19 again.
- [103:16]
Chris
The I can't do the most common. I used to be a college athlete and I'm about to give myself like a double fucking tendinopathy. Oh, is basketball by far? By far. So I played cricket until I was 20, 21. I got my grades reduced to get into the university I got into because I was going to go and play at a high level for them. I'd done everything. It was my entire life, throughout my childhood. And I stopped playing for a decade and a bit. And then Covid came along and I was like, I should play cricket again. And the first game back, I snapped my Achilles. And that was 12 months of rehab and three and a half months in a boot and a surgery, the first major surgery I've ever had. And I learned a lesson I already knew. One of my friends snapped every cfo, every CL in his knee. All of the Cls went, Tom Segura managed to snap his knee and his arm in the same move. Playing basketball, it's like, guys, look, if you used to be fit and you're now 40 pounds heavier, don't than you Used to be. And you've not conditioned anything. And the only running that you do is to, like, you know, avoid the rain going from the car to the house. Don't try basketball because you're gonna fuck something up.
- [104:36]
Dr. John DeLoney
But we do it with everything. We do it with drugs. We do it relationships.
- [104:39]
Chris
Oh, yeah.
- [104:39]
Dr. John DeLoney
Like if people who abstain from cocaine.
- [104:42]
Chris
Oh, I'm gonna fucking run this back. Watch me.
- [104:44]
Dr. John DeLoney
I'm gonna. I'm gonna start where I ended.
- [104:46]
Chris
Yeah, exactly.
- [104:46]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah, yeah.
- [104:47]
Chris
This is. It's essentially like I press pause on a video game and the, like, Sniffer 1000 video game. And then I'm gonna immediately re. Begin. You're going to the gym, taking a break. Everybody knows knows.
- [104:59]
Dr. John DeLoney
Or marriage. Right. You get out of divorce and you try to date at the level of the marriage. You just left. Like, what are you doing, man?
- [105:04]
Chris
Yeah, no, it's not gonna happen. Dude, you're awesome. Absolutely awesome. And I can't wait to have you back on. And today was so much fun. And where should people go they want to keep.
- [105:15]
Dr. John DeLoney
Hey, before we kick off, can I ask you a question? You got time? No.
- [105:17]
Chris
Make some time. As long as you want.
- [105:18]
Dr. John DeLoney
I got two questions for you. Okay. So your ability over the last few years to you dig in at the. What I would seriously call the doctoral level at evolutionary psychology. Tell me about that. Like, I'm just thinking of you as one of my grad students. Like, it's been phenomenal to watch.
- [105:36]
Chris
Thank you. I don't know. I guess.
- [105:39]
Dr. John DeLoney
And that's not me blowing smoke because I'm. I'll bait and switch here in a second, but I'm gonna, like. Tell me about that.
- [105:44]
Chris
I got interested in it toward the back end of 20. 20, 21. I really started thinking about mating dynamics. And I think it's so fundamental to how the world works. You know, survival and reproduction. Okay, Survival thing has been sorted by medicine. So let's talk about reproduction. And reproduction is mating dynamics. And I just really fell in love with understanding, I guess, the nuts and bolts of how human attraction works, about how mate values work, about mate guarding, jealousy, male parental investment, all of this stuff. And. And I kind of got welcomed with open arms by the EP world, which I was very fortunate about. You know, people like Rob henderson, William Costello, Dr. David Buss, you know, Dr. Robert Ploman, even though he's behavioral genetics, all of that world of unspeakable fucking, like, totally cancelable academics really were very kind to me, and I don't think anyone had fully stepped into the world of episode at the level that this show was at and is at now. I don't think anyone really opened it up and I think that it's very interesting. I think that, you know, fundamentally my question is why are we the way that we are? That's, you know, I'm trying to understand myself and the world around me and I think that EP gives us a really wonderful look into it. And then you can look at human behavioral ecology, you can look at evolutionary biology. But I just found it so compelling that I didn't stop. And then I spoke at hbess. I spoke at the Human Behavioral Evolutionary Society in Palm Springs. I was part of a symposium there. I'm about to get my first whatever it is, citation authorship on a study.
- [107:27]
Dr. John DeLoney
Congratulations man.
- [107:28]
Chris
So this is going to be cool. I'm going to do this with Candice Blake and Mackin Murphy. About. I have a theory that, that people who are in shape will be more threatened by potential O than people who are out of shape.
- [107:41]
Dr. John DeLoney
Absolutely.
- [107:41]
Chris
Despite the fact that people who are out of shape would be having their like true selves denied as the fat acceptance movement falls away. You know, Lizzo's like in good, like moderately all right shape now. I don't know whether you've seen it. She's lost like it must be over £100. So she looks very different. But the reason being that if you are someone who's quote unquote in shape, I'm aware that Ozempic doesn't make you in shape, it just makes you skinny. But if you're someone who's in shape, your fitness signal is being derogated, attacked by this person. Being able to get an easy route to something that you had to use willpower to do and you're going to see that as a threat. And yeah, I've, I've moved a little bit. My, my. I'm still super interested in EP and if anyone's bringing out a new book and I just had Bill Von Hippel on he, he's fant, I guess evolutionary anthropology technically. So I'm still balls deep in it. Just did a great conversation with. Who the fuck did Matt Ridley about? It's like birds, birds, sex and Darwin or something which is all about sexual selection. That was yesterday. I love it and I'm super interested. I'm now moving a little bit more neuroscience. Emotions, feeling, feelings. I really adore the neuroscience stuff but.
- [108:57]
Dr. John DeLoney
So what is has. Can you point to something that EP has given you in terms of. It's a self serving question. Like if you Exhale and say, okay, here's what this has given me in my day to day life over the last four years of just swan diving into this because your grasp of it is profound. What is the insight and the knowledge given you?
- [109:26]
Chris
I think understanding that all, even the most mindful person in the world, even you at your most peaceful, you have a sense that you are the author of your own desires, of your own needs, of your own wants, of your own actions. But realizing that you are basically a vehicle for your genesis. And understanding the myriad of different ways that they pull a bait and switch on you. And just realizing how little you're in the driver's seat has been oddly reassuring in a way, because it makes you feel less alone, because you understand that you're not personally cursed by this thing. Perfect example. Here's one good example. So basically, your pathologies are not some unique idiosyncratic issue that only you deal with. They're endemic and they're a part of being a human. That would be like kind of, I.
- [110:21]
Dr. John DeLoney
Guess, or they're not character logical.
- [110:22]
Chris
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, perfect example of this. Dr. David Buss writes a book, and in it he talks about how there is a part of the male brain which is rewarded with pleasure for looking at things that just look sexual. He talks about how guys will happily look at a pair of rocks that look like boobs.
- [110:42]
Dr. John DeLoney
Right, right.
- [110:42]
Chris
And you go, okay, it is inherently rewarding for guys to look at stuff that looks sexual. And he got this letter from a man who said, I just wanted to let you know that your book saved my marriage. Because I was looking at other women and I was finding them attractive, even though I wasn't going to go and do anything. And I thought that there was something wrong with my relationship. I thought that there was something that, that was an indication that my marriage was broken because I found other women attractive. I wasn't going to cheat on my partner and I love her to death, but I saw other women as attractive. And your book taught me that. Yeah, you're a guy. You're gonna see other women that are attractive, as attractive. And you have a system that's inbuilt in you that you do not have control over. And that, okay, so when I don't eat for a while, I get hungry sense. But for every, you know, behavior, for a lot of things, it just makes me feel like, oh, I'm, you know, the, the things that I struggle with aren't some personal deficiency.
- [111:39]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [111:40]
Chris
They are just part and parcel of you being you, huh?
- [111:45]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's fantastic. I'll have to think about that. I like that a lot. That's good. One more question and you can say, I don't want to talk about this. And that's fine. I've been wrestling with the weight. And so when I think of not weight physically, but weight of the jobs we have, and when I go back to like an EP mindset, there's no way. And you're at like, X's and X's above where I'm at. There's no way we've got the cognitive or the physical wiring to hold this. Right, right. And so I'm wondering if things like anxiousness or depressive symptoms or a need, there's just kind of a path. There's a path. I'm watching people, like, head down spiritual paths. I'm watching folks wrestle with autoimmune disorder. Like, I'm wondering how much of this is. There's, there's. There's a huckster on every corner saying, here's why you feel this way. Here's why you feel this way. Here's why you feel this way. I'm wondering if there's not something on the squat bar. There's just so much weight. And I don't have a. I don't have a. It's just a hypothesis. I'm wrestling with that. At some point, everybody, every physical, embodied body has a different program for how do we, like, some people shake, some people just throw the bar off, some people try to do it anyway, and they, you know, they blow their knees out. If there's something in Chris's body that's saying this thing's gotten really heavy.
- [113:20]
Chris
Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah.
- [113:23]
Dr. John DeLoney
Perhaps your, Your discussion. The. The one podcast I just picked up was you had a really eloquent discussion, and I know you don't like talking about it, but I was really captivated by the. Just wrestling with.
- [113:33]
Chris
Yeah.
- [113:34]
Dr. John DeLoney
The weight of somebody going to war with their body. Going to war with them. Right.
- [113:38]
Chris
Yeah. I mean, look, it's been a rough 12 months physically for me. America is a fantastic country, but it tries to kill everybody that enters it.
- [113:48]
Dr. John DeLoney
But that way it could sell you a cure.
- [113:49]
Chris
That's.
- [113:50]
Dr. John DeLoney
Yeah.
- [113:51]
Chris
The food, the water, the air, the building materials, everything. The cars, the fucking everything. And perhaps, I mean, look, someone asked me a question about.
- [114:02]
Dr. John DeLoney
And this is self serving too, because I got my own stuff. Not that.
- [114:05]
Chris
But look, here's the way. Here's the way to look at it. Most people are stuck. Most people that are hard charging, are stuck somewhere on the spectrum between guilt and overwhelm. Right. It's like, choose your direction, Western man, because if you've got that type A energy, you are going to continue to want to do stuff. You're gonna want to drive harder, more, more, more. I just did the number one bestseller, but let's look over the shoulder of it as I'm receiving it, correct to ask what's next? And, you know, I. In some ways, this is very early because I'm still in it. Right. I haven't fixed it. And if you haven't fixed the thing, you can't fully feel sort of appreciation for it. But trying to find some of the silver linings. One of the things it's really done is it's taught me the value of a slower pace, slower pace of life, taking pleasure in simpler things. Because when your capacity gets restricted, and this is for anybody that's going through health problems, it brings you back to a much more sort of pure sense of yourself. You're not able to use bravado or momentum or distraction in the same way that you would previously. It's like stripped back, Right. You really see.
- [115:21]
Dr. John DeLoney
Or a YouTube milestone. Doesn't matter when you can't breathe. Right? Yeah.
- [115:25]
Chris
See, you see who you are underneath in many ways, and I think it reminds you of the stuff that really, really doesn't matter. Because if you can't do all of the things, you have to do a few of the things, and presumably the few things you choose to do are much more important. So my. My feeling around this is I do not want to look back on a life or a career of miserable successes. I don't want. And this is where, you know, I love Hormozi. He's a fantastic friend, but he is a one in a couple of hundred million constitution. And I don't think that most people are built to work like he is. And that's where. If I had two. If I had an angel and a demon sat on either shoulder, the angel would be Chris Bumstead, and the demon would be Alex Hormosi. Chris would be saying, you should just chill out and, you know, eat some chicken with your friends. And Alex should be saying, like, don't listen to your feelings. Stop being such a pussy. And I'm way more in the sebum energy than I am in the hormosy energy at the moment. And I think you can switch between the two.
- [116:31]
Dr. John DeLoney
Sure. Or seasonally, right?
- [116:33]
Chris
Yeah. Yeah. But I just get the sense that if you want to enjoy presumably, the reason that you want success and you want to work hard is so that you can find some sort of enjoyment at the end of it. And you have to be careful not to sacrifice the thing you want, which is joy and happiness, for the thing that's supposed to get it right, which is success. Like, you're literally cutting off at the knees the opportunity for you to enjoy things along the way because you're so concerned about getting the thing that gets you what you want.
- [117:02]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's it. That's it.
- [117:03]
Chris
You. The reason that you wrote the book was to enjoy something. During the process of writing it, you were thinking about whether it was going to be successful. During the promotion of it, you were thinking about whether it was going to be successful. And during the success of it, you were thinking about whether the next one would be successful. You go, at no point have you arrived. It's like running toward a mirage. Every step you take toward the horizon, the horizon moves one further step away from you. And yeah, the only fucking way to win any game is to stop, first off, stop moving the goalposts. Because if every time you try and fucking kick the ball toward it and it goes about to cross the line and then you, like, move the goal another hundred yards back, well, that's not going to work. So I'm very much in my. At least trying to embrace my sort of slower, more considered energy, really, like, really, really hard, trying to not take the same levels of satisfaction and dopamine from, like, chaotic busyness. You know, what you should be trying to do is move your life toward an outcome that you want. And you have proxies for that. Because, like, the outcome that I want, like, a good life, real amorphous. So you have stuff like, I go to the gym every day and I make sure that I speak to my wife and I have a project that I care about, about. And all of those are broken down into subcomponents, right? I lift the weights in this sort of a manner, and we have these kinds of conversations at this sort of a cadence. I have to answer slack and I have to do emails and so on and so forth. But don't mistake the little steps that you're supposed to take to get somewhere for the thing that you're supposed to be doing. And you need to regularly be reassessing is the thing that I'm doing, moving me toward my goal. Because when you start on a journey, a lot of the time you need to be answering every email and checking slack all the time. And you need to be like chaos. Go, go, go, go, go. Like super Adderall mode. And then a little bit later you think, well, I kind of don't need to do that quite so much. Maybe you're part of a team now in the organization that you're in, or maybe it's your own business and you've got some people that can actually do that on your behalf. You go, your entire reason for doing this was to not have to do things you don't want to do anymore. You are at the stage where you don't have to do things you don't want to do anymore. And you are addicted to still doing them because they gave you such a sense of completion and you have existential angst if you're not busy every single day. Yeah, you. You look at your calendar as a judge of your self worth. If your calendar is stacked, how can you be a piece of shit? I can't be useless. Look how many people need me. Look at all of the people that need me. If I wasn't here, what would they do? What would all of these. Just reaching out to check calls.
- [119:37]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's why Americans won't take vacations right there.
- [119:40]
Chris
Oh, because they feel like they always need to be on the grind. Is it not because they're all poor and they don't get any maternity leave?
- [119:45]
Dr. John DeLoney
Well, there's definitely structural issues also. No, there's. There's not a psychology for, what if I'm not needed? It's not restful. There's a pastor in Nashville that says, if busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress. You can't. It's like being off coke for a week.
- [120:03]
Chris
A beautiful equivalent of that is the ancient Greek word for work is translated as not at leisure. So the Greeks saw leisure as the set point and work as an aberration.
- [120:15]
Dr. John DeLoney
Oh, wow.
- [120:16]
Chris
Now in the modern world, we see work as the set point and leisure as an aberration. So we've turned it upside down. And just to go back to the, you know, the how are you dealing with? Like, is it pressure of doing all of the stuff, causing stuff to arise in your body, perhaps? And, you know, it's too late to fucking turn it around now. So I'm just doing my best. I'm doing. It's a realization, you know, I said to who the fuck was I talking to about this? I can't remember who I was talking to. I do know. I do know who I was talking to. CEO of one of the companies that I work with. And he's about to Have a kid. And he was saying, hey man, I like, my drive's dropping a bit. I was like, you do know your wife's eight months pregnant? Like, yeah. And I was like, well, you know the science on this. Testosterone drops in men when they get into a relationship. It drops again when they get, when the wife gets pregnant, they're about to give birth. Like, you know that that's your kid. Like you're, you're ready for this to happen. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, can we just for a second imagine that you might have had an aneurysm in five years time and that this has saved you from it? Because we don't know, we don't know what was coming down the pipe. Can we imagine just for a second that this gives you a new, more nurturing approach to being able to run your business, which actually stop some impending catastrophe that would have happened if you'd gone more hard charging. Just don't know where it's going to end up. And to, for the first time in today's conversation to talk about faith. George Janko refers to periods where people are struggling. And he says, every man knows God when he's at his lowest. And I think about that going back to a more sort of stripped back version of you sort of remembering, okay, I don't have momentum, I don't have ego, I don't have bravado. I don't have the charisma, I don't have the charm. My stories are less compelling and my aura is less energizing and all the rest of it. All right, what's left? Like, who am I deep down?
- [122:01]
Dr. John DeLoney
Who am I now?
- [122:02]
Chris
Yeah, yeah. What are my values and my virtues when I'm not quite as flamboyant as I usually am? And do people still like me and do I still like me? And I think again, it's still early days, but I think I like me a lot more now than I did before. I had to fight a ton of health problems because it's reminded me that sort of the person that's underneath all of that stuff. When I have to go to bed at 8pm every night and when I'm tired all the time and when my mood's not right and when I need to rely on people more, I like, I think that's like, I think that's a good person. So. And I don't think that I would have realized that or I don't think I would have known that if it hadn't happened.
- [122:42]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's fantastic. Or that Chris is. Chris is a guy worth taking care of. Chris is a guy worth feeling. Good. Yeah.
- [122:49]
Chris
I think I like me.
- [122:50]
Dr. John DeLoney
That's fantastic, man. What a gift. Thanks for sharing that with us, man.
- [122:53]
Chris
I appreciate it. It's awesome, dude. I can't wait to bring you back on.
- [122:56]
Dr. John DeLoney
Appreciate you, man.
- [122:56]
Chris
You're fucking great. Where should people go? They want to check out all of the stuff you do.
- [123:00]
Dr. John DeLoney
I've got, I co host the Ramsey show with Dave Ramsey talking about money. And then I got my Dr. John DeLoney show. It's calling, it's like old Dr. Laura show. Like people call in mental health and marriage problems and we've, we get them, get them solved. It's awesome, right?
- [123:14]
Chris
It's like everyone should go and subscribe, dude. Until next time. Appreciate you.
- [123:17]
Dr. John DeLoney
Thank you, brother.