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

Summary

Modern Wisdom #991 – Dr. John Delony: The Blueprint for Better Relationships & a Peaceful Life

Date: September 8, 2025
Host: Chris Williamson
Guest: Dr. John Delony

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Chris Williamson sits down with Dr. John Delony, bestselling author, mental health expert, and relationship coach, to delve into the core principles of healthy relationships and the pursuit of a peaceful life. Drawing from practical case studies and their own life experiences, the conversation navigates trust, transparency, marital secrecy vs. privacy, peace as a guiding principle, male and female relational struggles, the impact of children, coping with grief, modern masculinity, and more. The episode is rich with actionable wisdom, personal anecdotes, and engaging banter, offering listeners a relatable and pragmatic “blueprint” for better relationships.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Radical Honesty & Transparency in Relationships

• Device Transparency as a Litmus Test for Trust
  Dr. Delony challenges cultural norms around privacy, suggesting that married couples should willingly share phones, passwords, and social media.

  “If you are married, your spouse should have all of the codes to your phones, email accounts, and social media accounts, and you should have theirs, period. If your spouse isn't trustworthy or safe, you need to head directly into this challenge asap.” (Chris, 00:00)
  “The idea that privacy and secrecy are the same thing, they've been conflated and I think it's madness…if you will create a human with somebody, but you won't give them the code to your phone. I can't think of anything more insane.” (Dr. Delony, 00:24)

• Guardrails & Behavior Regulation
  Mutual transparency acts as a behavioral guardrail, reducing temptations and fostering accountability (03:00).

• Secrets as Fuel for Pathology

  “Every major pathology ends up—secrets fuel that. Right. It's gasoline for pathology.” (Dr. Delony, 00:53)

• Privacy vs. Secrecy
  Differentiating between healthy privacy and harmful secrecy—a nuanced but crucial distinction.

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2. Being ‘All In’: Commitment & Honesty

• Progressive Disclosure
  Trust grows over time via appropriate sharing—a relationship shouldn’t require ‘all in’ vulnerability on day one, but maximum openness should develop.

• Dissonance in Commitment
  Problems arise when one partner is all-in and the other isn’t; they advise people with similar commitment levels to pair together (08:00).

• Self-Honesty and Blame

  “If I want to go fully into this, then I got to go fully in. And if I don't, then I have to own that I didn't want to go fully into that.” (Dr. Delony, 05:56)

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3. Safety as the Cornerstone of Relationship

• Defining Safety
  Safety means being able to express needs and desires without fear of weaponization or ridicule.

  “I can be me and you won't weaponize me against me.” (Dr. Delony, 10:59)

• Curiosity vs. Judgment
  The safe partner meets new/uncomfortable disclosures with curiosity, not weaponization (11:21).

• Safety is Built, Not Assumed
  Constructed piece by piece through everyday actions; violations lead to mistrust and resentment (14:14).

• Compatibility as Meeting Each Other's Safety Needs
  Relationships falter when what one needs for safety fundamentally clashes with what the other can give (15:52).

• Unspoken Expectations & Resentment

  “Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentment.” (Chris, 15:06)

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4. Peace as a North Star

• Financial, Relational, and Professional Peace
  Delony values peace over theoretical maximization—e.g., paying off a mortgage for “a sleep tax” (22:03).

• Complexity vs. Busyness
  Modern life’s challenge is not workload, but complexity—leading to anxiety when there’s no margin (24:40).

• Solving for Peace in Relationships
  Open communication is essential. The willingness to ‘solve for peace’ means saying things that need to be said, not hiding. (21:54)

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5. Masculinity, Worth, and Belonging

• Modern Male Dilemmas
  Men struggle with feeling inadequate, burdensome, and unworthy of love; they desire to “be a net positive” (28:51–29:40).

• The Value of Admiration

  “Begin to practice admiration, even if you got to search for it, man, but it begins to send a message—I like you.” (Dr. Delony, 32:53)

• Men's Emotional Burden
  Many domesticated men feel their homes are “failure factories”—they want to help but feel constantly criticized (31:19).

• Advice for Partners
  Small, genuine acts of appreciation build worth and trust far more effectively than criticism or correction (33:42).

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6. Women's Relational Struggles

• Fulfillment Beyond Achievements
  Many women struggle after ‘ticking all the boxes’ of career, security, marriage, and still feel incomplete (40:09).

• Recurring Questions

  “Are all men scumbags? Is every man out cheating? Is every man filling up his life with video games and pornography?” (Dr. Delony, 40:05)

• The Low Bar for Relationships
  It's rare for women to call in about men’s height or income—it's mostly about emotional availability and commitment (42:40, 44:04).

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7. Infidelity: Definition, Recovery, and Forgiveness

• Broad View of Infidelity
  Infidelity isn't just sexual—it's any major area (money, time, hobbies…) where passion, intimacy, or secrets are channeled away from the relationship (47:10).

• Financial Infidelity
  Hiding assets or refusing to share accounts is a massive trust red flag; sharing bank accounts correlates with marital stability (49:27).

• Forgiveness Must Start with Self
  Betrayed partners must forgive themselves before they can begin to forgive the other (44:53).

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8. Children, Change & Building New Relationships

• Each Stage is a New Marriage

  “When you have baby one, that marriage is over. It’s over… Build a new one.” (Dr. Delony, 58:56)

• Parenting Advice: Presence Over Performance
  Best advice from Jack Black: “Don’t try to make it happy.” If kids are happy, enjoy the moment—avoid overcomplication (57:54).

• Parenting Teenagers: Modern Dangers
  Digital errors now have lifelong consequences; true protection is not viable, and parents need to foster both connection and autonomy (78:45–81:53).

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9. Grief & Real Support

• Grief Requires Witness, Not Solutions True support is presence, not pithy advice—don't say “Let me know if you need anything,” just show up (66:25).

  “Grief demands a witness… It is not found in an answer.” (Dr. Delony, 64:30) “Just showing up. I'm coming over with some tacos.” (Chris, 66:49)

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10. Letting Go of Overachievement & Busyness

• Rest Will Feel Like Stress for the Addicted

  “If busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress.” (Chris, 85:41)

• Letter to Future Self Dr. Delony recommends writing a letter to your future self: “For what?”—making sure your hustle aligns with values and is worth the cost (86:24).

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11. Choosing Well: The Marriage Decision

• The Importance—but Not the Pressure—of the Right Partner Both men agree choosing a spouse is the most impactful decision, but warn against putting the full weight of one’s happiness on a partner (98:27).

• The 'Cathedral' Problem for Older Singles The longer you wait/better you build your life, the harder it can feel to share—but the only way forward is commitment and reprioritization (101:24–104:09).

• Don't Sacrifice the End for the Means

  “Don't sacrifice the thing you want for the thing that's supposed to get it.” (Chris, 104:59)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Secrecy:
  “Secrets fuel [pathology]. It’s gasoline for pathology.” (Dr. Delony, 00:53)

• On All-In Commitment:
  “If I want the benefit of this, I got to go all in. Which means you got to risk getting hurt bad, man.” (Dr. Delony, 06:42)

• On Safety:
  “Safety says I can say what I want, put that on the table, and you'll be curious about it. You won’t hurt me with it.” (Dr. Delony, 10:59)

• On Peace vs. Maximization:
  “It's a sleep tax. I put my head on my pillow knowing nobody can take my house away.” (Dr. Delony, 22:03)

• On Male Worth:
  “I don't know many men who don't want to be a net positive. I just don't know them.” (Dr. Delony, 29:44)

• On Forgiveness After Infidelity:
  “Before you start trying to forgive somebody else, you have to forgive yourself.” (Dr. Delony, 45:41)

• On Parenting:
  “If your kids are happy, get on the floor and have fun… Don't try to make it happy.” (Dr. Delony, 57:54)

• On Grief:
  “Grief demands a witness.” (Dr. Delony, 64:30)

• On Rest and Busyness:
  “If busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress.” (Chris, 85:41)

• On the Core of Relationship:
  “Mary well, tell the truth, and be curious. If you can establish those, then just go do the next right thing.” (Dr. Delony, 96:54)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00 — Device transparency & definitions of privacy/secrecy
• 05:54 — The need to go “all in” and ownership vs. blame
• 10:59 — Defining safety in relationships
• 14:14 — Building safety through everyday actions
• 21:54 — Solving for peace as a life strategy
• 29:44 — Male relational struggles and worth
• 32:53 — Daily admiration and worth-building in relationships
• 40:05 — Women's struggles with fulfillment & relationship narratives
• 44:53 — Infidelity: Forgiveness and its prerequisites
• 47:10 — Broader definitions of infidelity and financial cheating
• 57:54 — Parenting philosophy: “Don’t try to make it happy”
• 66:25 — Grief and the importance of presence, not advice
• 85:41 — Rest as stress for overachievers; learning to slow down
• 98:27 — The marriage decision: pressure, personhood, and partnerships

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Overall Tone

A blend of humor, candor, and empathy runs through the conversation, creating an accessible, grounded, and inspiring exploration of relationships and personal peace. Both speakers employ personal anecdotes, invite vulnerability, and consistently reinforce practicality over perfection.

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Summary Table

| Topic | Key Takeaways | Notable Quotes & Moments | |---------------------|------------------------------------------------------------|-----------------------------------------------------| | Transparency | Openness is essential; secrets erode trust | "Secrets fuel pathology." (0:53) | | Commitment | You must be “all in” at the appropriate stage | "You got to risk getting hurt bad." (6:42) | | Safety | Must be actively built, not assumed | "I can be me and you won't weaponize me..." (10:59) | | Peace vs. Maximizing| Peace is worth more than optimization | “It's a sleep tax...nobody can take my house away.” | | Gendered Struggles | Men: Worth/belonging; Women: Fulfillment/partner's effort | Daily admiration; praise over criticism (32:53) | | Infidelity | Broader than sex; includes secret money, time, hobbies | Forgive self first after betrayal (45:41) | | New Seasons | Each life/child stage needs a “new marriage” | “When you have baby one, that marriage is over.” | | Grief | Just “show up” for grieving people, don’t offer platitudes | “Grief demands a witness.” (64:30) | | Work/Rest Balance | Overachievers find rest stressful; need intentional change | “If busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress.” | | Choosing a Partner | Key life-shaping decision; must carry the “thing” together | “Mary well, tell the truth, and be curious.” |

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For Listeners

Whether you’re single, married, or somewhere in between, this episode provides a comprehensive, deeply human look at the principles, pitfalls, and practices that lead to better relationships and a more peaceful personal life. Dr. Delony’s wisdom grounds the big philosophical themes in practical realities, and Chris’s incisive, empathetic questioning brings out the best in his guest.

Highly recommended for anyone seeking a relationship tune-up or simply striving for more honesty and peace in day-to-day life.

Transcript

[Chris Williamson]

If you are married, your spouse should have all of the codes to your phones, email accounts, and social media accounts, and you should have theirs, period. If your spouse isn't trustworthy or safe, you need to head directly into this challenge asap. You are worthy of safety and peace. If you are hiding things from your spouse. Let today be your independence day. From secret shame and fear, you are worth finally taking a full deep breath. How do people respond to that?

[Dr. John Deloney]

Not well, man.

[Chris Williamson]

Let's go.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Not well, dude. Not well at all. The idea that privacy and secrecy are the same thing, they've been conflated and I think it's madness. I think it's madness if you will create a human with somebody, but you won't give them the code to your phone. I can't think of anything more insane. That's insane.

[Chris Williamson]

There's a lot of dissonance going on there.

[Dr. John Deloney]

It's. Dissonance is like a kind way to say it. It's madness. It's madness.

[Chris Williamson]

That is why.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah, the, the number of folks that call into my show that are like, hey, I. I can't. I'm not gonna give her my phone. And it's like, why? Like, what is on that thing? It's like, well, it's mine. It's like, well, what? So what, what are you hiding? Right? And I think every, every major pathology ends up. Secrets fuel that. Right. It's gasoline for pathology. And so, man, if you can't have a place in your life with the person you write or die with, that you can say, like, can you, can you check out my phone to get this picture off my phone? If that gives. If that causes you pause or worse, if your partner won't do that. Yeah, man, you gotta, you gotta have that conversation, like now. Yeah. Why? Does that sound crazy? Does that sound crazy?

[Chris Williamson]

I don't think so.

[Dr. John Deloney]

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

[Chris Williamson]

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

[Dr. John Deloney]

That's it. That's it.

[Chris Williamson]

Whereas now I don't care. I don't. There's nothing on there that I need to be worried about.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

So I, I. What blows my mind is that conflation, that privacy issue, that privacy versus honesty.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Thing.

[Dr. John Deloney]

So people. So my wife's a coach and I work in mental health. Right. So people are flying in all the time to stay at our house for a few days and then. Or we'll go out into the country where I've got a place and people will stay. I'll tell my wife, hey, I'm going out. Someone's coming in. So that's private. But it's not a. I'm not, I'm not saying, like, hey, right, I'm. I'm gonna go run an errand. Right. And so. And she. She has clients. Right. But the idea that, I don't know, I think they're conflated, and I think that's madness. I think it's madness.

[Chris Williamson]

One interesting thing is the openness to give your partner your devices and email accounts and messages and social media and all that sort of stuff actually act a little bit like a guardrail for your behavior as well. You know, like, there's, of course, always stuff that's kind of ambiguous.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Some chick replies to your Instagram story or somebody from your past that is associated with an ex or party or whatever. Like, it's, you know, there's a million ways that this could go. Your behavior with that person can be the beginning of just a little bit. It's a little sort of fissure or a crack. I got a ton of stick for saying that. If guys want to remain loyal to their partner, but they've struggled to keep their dick in their pants in the past, it's a bad idea for them to go out to a nightclub and drink with their friends until three in the morning. And the implication, it was both people didn't like that on one side, the guys didn't like it because it felt controlling, and the girls didn't like it because it sounded like the guys were only loyal due to a lack of options. I'm like, look, if you're a mild version of a guy that likes cocaine but is trying to quit, being in a house with no cocaine is a fucking wonderful solution to that. It's way easier to avoid temptation than it is to resist it. And this, you can be the most loyal guy in the world, but if you're 15 beers deep and the wrong night with the wrong thing and you kind of didn't know what was going on, and this is a terminal, like an existential problem that you found yourself in now, just remove yourself from the situation. Yeah, it's way easier. And it's kind of the same with this, that if you and your partner have this level of honesty, transparency, openness, where you're just sharing each other's social media accounts back, and it's like, hey, can you just see if such and such has Messaged me. It's like, what's this fucking group chat with. Like, it's just nitpicks. Like, yeah, I know, I know. Like, it's the boys. Like, as opposed to, oh, I hope she doesn't open that message on the thing.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Well, and it works in reverse. Like, you establish trust. I've got friends, literally, that we grew up on the same street in. In Houston, in Texas. Same street since we were zero. She doesn't get into those text threads. Like, she. She may see the thread pop up and she knows. Or when I see something, if I grab her phone, get directions somewhere and text threads come from her college roommates, I don't open it. Right? A. Because I have full tr. Be. There's some. There's private things, but they're not secrets. Right? And. And she could. And you know what I mean?

[Chris Williamson]

But like, have you seen that video? It's a girl driving in a car. She's in the passenger seat, and it's captioned below. This guy's presumably saying, can I check your text messages? And she goes, Hands him the phone. She goes, can I look at your social media accounts? Hands him the phone, says, can I look at your chat GPT history? And she throws the phone out.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I. I think it's this. I want to have the benefits of a fully anchored partner, but I don't want to put all of myself on the table. I don't put both feet in that boat, and you can't have one without the other.

[Chris Williamson]

Can you explain that a bit more deeply?

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah. So I want the benefits of being fully seen and fully known and fully celebrated and. But I don't want you to see all of me. And so it's a hedge. And if you've got past traumas, you got past relationship, you got burned, all that, the hedge makes sense. But you can't hope for all of this. Right? It's like, I want to get in great shape, but I just don't want to mess with the diet part. Like, you can do that. You're not going to see the results you want want. And we blame the other person for that. It's like, we're going after food companies now. We're going after the colors in the. In my Skittles or like, I mean, man, we're going down rabbit holes, dude. At the end of the day, if I want to go fully into this, then I got to go fully in. And if I don't, then I have to own that I didn't want to go fully into that.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Dr. John Deloney]

You know what I'm saying? And there is some. There's blame and there's. There's pressure, and. Yeah, I get that. But you have to say, if I want the benefit of this, I got to go all in. Which means you got to risk getting hurt bad, man.

[Chris Williamson]

Because if you are not all in, there's always this thing in the background, always that said, well, you know, I wasn't rejected because that wasn't me. No, it's just 60 me, 90% me. But 10% was on my career. 10% was on my friends, or 10% was on the. That orbiting.

[Dr. John Deloney]

That's not how it goes. It is. 10 is you weren't trustworthy or you were going to use this against me. And so I start to weaponize the same person I'm in the boat with. Right. And when I've got a foot on the side here, I like to poke them. Yeah. Just either get in or don't get in.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, I think that.

[Dr. John Deloney]

And it goes. It goes. By the way, you're nuts. If you meet somebody, you're like, hi, my name's John. Here's all my stuff that makes you psychotic. Right. But once you cross those lines and say, hey, this is for real. We're gonna make a run at this, or we're all in, or you're standing at the.

[Chris Williamson]

Also, you can be all in it at varying levels. Right. You can correct at the very first date. It's like there is a appropriate level of disclosure at each different stage, but you can max out that disclosure as you go along as opposed to purposefully tampering that down.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Right.

[Chris Williamson]

So, yeah, I think that there's people who are all in. In relationships, and I think there's people who aren't. And the people who aren't should get together, and the people who are should get together, and the problems occur when one group dates the other.

[Dr. John Deloney]

That's fantastic. Huh?

[Chris Williamson]

You think?

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah. That's Love island, right? Those who can't, like, just go, go. Y' all stay there.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Yeah. You know I was on Love island, right?

[Dr. John Deloney]

No. No, you weren't. Really?

[Chris Williamson]

I was the first person through the doors of season one. You didn't know this?

[Dr. John Deloney]

No.

[Chris Williamson]

I thought that's where you got the joke from. No, I was the first.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I wish I was that savvy.

[Chris Williamson]

The first person through the doors of season one.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Did you win?

[Chris Williamson]

No. No, I didn't.

[Dr. John Deloney]

How do you win? I've never even seen an episode.

[Chris Williamson]

You. It's like a vote thing toward the end. It's like popularity contest. Public popularity contest toward the end of each couple.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Is it like Big Brother?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, basically it's Couple Big Brother.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Okay. Kind of.

[Chris Williamson]

And 24 hours a day, you're surveilled by cameras and stuff. That was a fucking. That was a real. That was 10 years ago. 10 years ago this summer I was on.

[Dr. John Deloney]

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

[Chris Williamson]

Well, you doubled up.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Well, there we go. Edit this part of the.

[Chris Williamson]

You're right, because the. Even within Love island, you see that there's people in there who are a very small cohort of people and they usually don't stay very long that are actually in there trying to find a.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Life path, and then the rest of.

[Chris Williamson]

Them are just trying to play the game. So I think this would be a great analysis for somebody to do if someone that's watching that's got too much time on their hands. If you can take every couple that finished the show of Love Island UK and us and then track how long. Either how long they stay together or just basically what the attrition rate is. I guess the attrition rate for couples that finished Love island in a couple is over 95%. I think that, like, maybe 1 in 20 couples or less, probably. Probably less than 95, like, would have been able to stick together.

[Dr. John Deloney]

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

[Chris Williamson]

I. I literally can't think of any. Tommy Fury and Molly May were the two. Like, were the. The big.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Tommy Fury, the boxer?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, he. He was on as well. It's an illustrious history in the uk, but they. They separated, but now they're back together. Okay. So I. Hardly a gold standard relationship. Had a kid, kids like 18 months old, separated, got back together. Public break, all this, so. But yeah, I really think there's two cohorts of people. There's people who are all in. In relationships and those that aren't. And the problem occurs when one group dates the other.

[Dr. John Deloney]

If you're dating somebody or if you were or married to somebody and they won't show you their phone, I would head straight to a therapist office because that, to me, is a huge sign. That's a huge sign that there's some. Or maybe not to a therapist's office, but at least sit at a table across from each other and say, we got to put this issue on the table because there's something going on there that that person has to feel safe with.

[Chris Williamson]

You talk to me about safety. What's it mean? Why is it important?

[Dr. John Deloney]

I Don't think you can have a relationship without safety, without trust. But I think safety says I can say what I want. Put that on the table and you'll be curious about it. You won't hurt me with it. Or it means I can say I'm interested in. And it basically says, I can be me and you won't weaponize me against me.

[Chris Williamson]

Give me an example.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I'm a physician and I. I'm not. But let's say I was a physician and my wife gets accustomed to a life. We're living a life as a, as a doctor's house. And I increasingly get frustrated with the HMO system. And I am taking yoga on the weekends. And I'm like, man, I'm gonna get. I'm gonna be a yoga instructor. And one day I come home and say, I think I want to quit medicine and I want to do yoga. Right. Safety would say that person won't instantly say, you know what that's going to cost me? And somebody who is safe would say, tell me more about that. And we might get to a place where I need to go see somebody. I'm not doing well. I don't like the system. I want to start thinking about their careers. But at least it would be met with curiosity, not with instant. I'm going to weaponize this against you. You know what I'm saying? That may be a bad analogy, but it is taking the things that you want. And I'll even go, I don't like to say this in relationships. I'm going to say the things I need and I'm not going to use that against you. Right. One of the things we talked about last, like one of the things. When I'm on the road, I just like my wife to call every once in a while. We just call.

[Chris Williamson]

She did last night. This was the funniest thing. So we're sad. We so fucking, dude. We're sat at dinner and your phone goes. And you look and it was your. Did you red button her or did you just like.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah. Cause she knows I don't answer my phone when I'm in a. At a meal with you. Did you actually.

[Chris Williamson]

You actually red buttoned her?

[Dr. John Deloney]

What does that mean?

[Chris Williamson]

Like you, you canceled the call or do you just let it ring out?

[Dr. John Deloney]

I don't remember.

[Chris Williamson]

I can't remember either. Anyway, I have a thing about.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I try not to touch my phone when I'm at dinner.

[Chris Williamson]

Your phone rings, you see that? It's your wife. This is something that you've asked her to Do. Because you like to know that she is thinking about you to the point where she'll ring you.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

You watched sorry. Come up and then just went back to talk. I thought it was the funniest thing.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I called her right when I got into the car, but it's. But she doesn't say, when I get home. How dare you ask me to call you. All you ever want me to do is reach out. She knows. Hey, that's one way that my husband likes to feel loved when he's on the road. Like, because he gets lost in the sea of travel and whatever. And she doesn't weaponize it against me, however small that might be. Right.

[Chris Williamson]

Why is safety so important?

[Dr. John Deloney]

I mean, that's Maslow's 101, dude. You can't. You can't fully exhale until you're safe. Whether you're, say, physically, whether you're safe professionally, whether you're safe relationally. You can't exhale. I think it's a core human need. Do you agree with that or no?

[Chris Williamson]

Absolutely. Yeah.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I wish I could be more sophisticated. I think that's wired into, like, small tribes of people. Like, I have to know my tribes with me. If your tribe gets up and leaves and you wake up the next morning and they're gone, you know you're not going to live. Right. I think that's wired into us at our core. Core, core.

[Chris Williamson]

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

[Dr. John Deloney]

It's practiced. It's practiced from the. The moment I meet you, will you open the door for me? Are you going to pick up the bill? Are you going to respond when I text back? If I say, hey, I don't like that. Are you going to. When the waiter comes and says, no, we're good. Right? It's. It's. It's built piece by piece by piece. Or, hey, text when you get home. You don't text like that's. That's practicing safety or not practicing safety. And that can beget a conversation. Hey, you didn't text me last time you got home. I can't stand feeling like I'm confined. Like I can't stand. That's when you get to have a conversation about honesty and integrity. I don't like feeling like I have a chore when I get done meeting with somebody. Ooh. I really like when somebody calls. We can have that conversation.

[Chris Williamson]

Something intention, which you need to navigate.

[Dr. John Deloney]

That's exactly right. Otherwise it becomes. Was that Neil Postman quote?

[Chris Williamson]

If I don't say anything oh, unspoken expectations of premeditated resentment.

[Dr. John Deloney]

That's right. If I don't say anything and I feel like I, I feel like I got a chore every time I leave, then I'm gonna start resenting you. Right.

[Chris Williamson]

So does compatibility in one way between two people look a lot like what you need to feel safe and what I am prepared to do in a relationship, work well together. Because you can imagine a world in which getting a text good night is a really important part when you're apart to make you feel good. That's something you want for the other person that feels massively constricting. And if you just build lots of these things up over time, one person really wants a thing, the other person cannot deliver that without it feeling like a huge sacrifice on their part. Is that what incompatibility is or compatibility?

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah. But I, I still like to distill it down to a choice. Right. Like I get to choose to be inconvenienced and I'm going to text you. Right. Or I like to choose. I, I choose if, if it's that big of a deal, I need to go look in the mirror and ask myself, why do I feel so constricted when this person says, hey, will you just check in? Why do I feel I would need to sit down with my wife if she's like, I just can't call you at 9 o'clock when she goes to bed real early? Like, I just can't call you? Like we would need to have that conversation. Right. Because she'd be choosing to not call. But yeah, that is compound. That's compatibility versus incompatibility. I like that. It is. I'm putting down what I want. Will you choose to do this or not do this?

[Chris Williamson]

Well, I mean, the super compatibility would be something like, this is something that I really want. And the other person going, I love to give that, I absolutely love to give that as opposed to, yeah, but.

[Dr. John Deloney]

But that, but that switches, right? It, I think you have to be careful with the initial feeling of that because you hear about that all the time. Like, we love to do this when we were dating and now that we're married, you don't love to do that. So I think it's continually not saying what I want to do or what I really feel like. I, I, it's, will I serve you?

[Chris Williamson]

That's true. I understand. But there is a degree of how heavy is the weight for somebody to make that choice?

[Dr. John Deloney]

Absolutely.

[Chris Williamson]

It's way easier for somebody to be like flying with a tailwind yeah. Than flying into a headwind.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

With this stuff.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Absolutely. But I want, I want the person on the other end of that to own. Own that. Not to blame. Right.

[Chris Williamson]

What's the difference there? Say that you've got two people who have. One person really wants a thing, the other person really struggles to deliver it without it being a super heavy weight that they have to pick up. It's just not their love language or whatever it might be. How does that.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I think the, I think the, the, the current cultural narrative is everything relationally that makes me uncomfortable. I have to blame you for it, for needing this or wanting this. And all I want people to do is to say, in this relationship, I don't want to. I don't, I don't feel safe doing it. I don't like doing it. I don't want to do it. And I want people to own that instead of lobbing their grenade over the fence.

[Chris Williamson]

What would lobbing the grenade over the fence be?

[Dr. John Deloney]

Coming up with sophisticated dating dynamic articles and posting them in the Times. That might be one. Right. It might be running you down, weaponizing it against you. Right. You always, you always need, need me to call. You always need me to call you to call. Instead of saying, I get so tired at night. I put the kids to bed, I just crash. Like I, I'm choosing that. And then we need to have that hard conversation. Right? And then I can go, she loves me. She's falling asleep at 9 o'. Clock. She's running the whole house with me on the road, I'm a big boy. I'll be all right.

[Chris Williamson]

It's another version of trust.

[Dr. John Deloney]

That's it.

[Chris Williamson]

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

[Dr. John Deloney]

That's it.

[Chris Williamson]

These bits of me that I feel shame around that I'm not prepared to show you. I'm not prepared. I don't feel sufficiently safe for me to be able to say, I get tired after I put the kids to bed.

[Dr. John Deloney]

That's it. That's it. But that's a you, that's me. That's I. I'm putting that on the table versus I'm gonna perpetually blame everybody else for my discomfort. I'm gonna say, I don't like this. I don't feel comfortable with this. Or I've got all these other things and I crash. You can choose to interpret that as I don't love you, but I do. I really do. And then I get to be the big boy on the other side of the table and decide what I wanna do with those feelings, but just by taking ownership of it. Right.

[Chris Williamson]

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[Dr. John Deloney]

I think, I think in two ways. One, if somebody has the courage to put that on the table and the other person hears it and metabolizes it and then I'm going to say chooses to not, it gets degraded in that way. And I think it gets degraded in big ways. Like you, you sleep with somebody else but it gets degraded often little by little by little by little. Or the other way it gets degraded is you don't say anything and right, You, I don't know, your partner comes in on their phone all the time. All the time, all the time. When they set it down and then you take the phones and you put them away, right? And then they go get it. Well, you didn't say hey, it bugs me when you walk in and you're still, you're still carrying your workday on the phone or you're still just swiping and you walk in the door instead of saying that and then Dealing with what happens when you put that on the table. You try to act your way to it, right? And it goes back to that resentment part. But trust is I don't trust myself with you. Or I don't trust, I don't, I'm not safe enough to put this on the table. Or you're going to take this and weaponize it, or you're just going to disregard it. Just messy.

[Chris Williamson]

Is this related to solving for peace?

[Dr. John Deloney]

That's, Yeah. I, I, I don't want to go to bed at night knowing I didn't say a thing. And I need to go to bed at night knowing I said that thing with somebody who wasn't going to weaponize it against me. Dig into the, that's just basic honor and dignity, right?

[Chris Williamson]

Dig into the solving for peace thing.

[Dr. John Deloney]

For me, it's an, it's, it's, it's probably, I'm probably pathological with it because my whole, my whole job is talking.

[Chris Williamson]

With like less regular, highly dysregulated people.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Well, it's that, but it's like, hey, man, I've got seven. Dude, this may be you. I don't know. I've got, it's, it's the Instagram ification of like, finance stuff. I've got 17, like passive income properties that are leveraged. 140, right? And I've got this, and I've got this, and I'm moving this around. And let me put it this way, here's one. I get so much grief for paying off. I think my mortgage was 3.0 maybe. Dude, I just got abused online. What an idiot. You don't know how to do math. Like you, you're such a fool. Right? Because you could have put that in a basic high yield savings account. And it's like, dude, I, I, it's a sleep tax. That's what I call it. Like, I put my head on my pillow knowing nobody can take my house away. And we don't have a psychology for that in this culture. It's all about amplification and it's all on paper money versus they can't take your house, dude. And it just.

[Chris Williamson]

Different people will have different priorities, of course.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah, yeah. And for, for me, it was that, right? Yeah, right.

[Chris Williamson]

Of course. You grew up. It didn't even need to be some childhood ancestral trauma. Simply, I have, I have a story in my mind from somewhere.

[Dr. John Deloney]

That's it.

[Chris Williamson]

Maybe outside and maybe inside that I really want. I know that my dad, my, my mom and dad paid the house off. Maybe in the mid, the mid-50s. And I don't think I've ever seen my dad as proud of something where he said, yeah, mortgage free.

[Dr. John Deloney]

It's mine.

[Chris Williamson]

Totally mortgage. Yeah. And they, there was no expedited bullshit. Like you're paying it off at 40 times the pace that you're supposed to. Normally this was chugging away on a 25 year old chip and chips and some shit like that. And then they get to the end of it and yeah, it's, it's solving.

[Dr. John Deloney]

For peace relationally, solving for peace financially, it's solving for, for peace professionally. Right. Like man, the, the number of folks I work with that are just, they're just melting. And I always want to ask like, for what, man? Like, what do you. For what? Like, well, you know, like, like most. I, I tried to be cute with Jordan Peterson one time. I was like, nobody can answer that question for what? And he, he clapped back in, in the right way. He was, he said of course, that's the hardest question to answer. Cyclock for what? What do you want? And yeah, I think it took me, it's taken me a long time to get there, but for me in my house, man, I want peace. And then we'll go from there.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I, I think that a good part of this is explained by this wonderful quote I had. So I had Adam Lane Smith on. Have you seen him?

[Dr. John Deloney]

Oh yeah, yeah, I know Adam.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. So Adam I think would be another one for the, the attachment guy. Round, round table. Fucking super crazy bullshit stuff. He just had this wonderful fucking insight around complexity. So he said that your life is. Your issue in life is not that it's too busy, but that it's too complex. Your system is built for hard work, not for complexity. And his argument is that you can deal with any workload as long as it's sufficiently simple and linear enough. And I kind of get the sense with the peace versus War thing too that if there is a really, really heavy weight, but there's just one of them or two of them probably super easy. That's why you got two hands. Thank you.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Or if there's a purpose for it. Right. You'll carry it forever if there's a purpose for it. But complexity, yeah, that's the old Taleb was somebody. I told you I got obsessed with to lab when it came to complex systems. And instead of dealing with reality, we just makes it more complex. We make it more complex and we duct tape and n. At another, you know, we, we jack up this side and shove a brick under it and it just means that when the thing does fall, which all complex systems do, will just have fall higher to fall.

[Chris Williamson]

Right, I've got a good story about this. So I ruptured my Achilles.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Oh no.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gnarly. I.

[Dr. John Deloney]

How long did it put you out?

[Chris Williamson]

Full 12 months. That was actually five years ago. That's interesting. I did love Island 10 years ago and the halfway point between then and now to the day was the day that I ruptured my Achilles. So that's an interesting arc. Playing cricket, rupture my Achilles. And this weekend I didn't think, you know, this is during COVID It was a brief interlude where the number had come down and everyone was able to go outside and I was playing sport. I go into the hospital, they do the diagnosis on it. They say you need to come back in 13 days. We're going to open you up and stitch it back together. By the way, there's some painkillers. Go fuck off. I'd driven my car to the cricket ground after that I needed to go and collect a TV that I'd ordered to the supermarket so that I could put it in the new rental property I just brought ready for the IKEA furniture builder guy to come in the next morning, open this stuff up. Because on the Monday it was the viewing day. Oh it was the first day of photos and then people were moving in three days later. And if I didn't this huge cathedral sized deck of cards that I'd built. And one thing you remember when the ever given, you know, that huge Suez max size tanker got stuck in the Suez Canal.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Oh yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

It was there for six days or something. And the entire global supply chain is so finely tuned that one tanker for six days in one canal is able to ruin the entire billions and billions of dollars of. They're probably still dealing with the repercussions of that in small ways now four years later. Yeah, that was what my life was like. And that's what my life is always, always like. I always think if one thing, if one spanner gets thrown in the works, there is no wiggle room in the system. And in some ways that allows you to maximize your time. And that's really. It's thrilling.

[Dr. John Deloney]

That's it.

[Chris Williamson]

Squeezing everything out. We're addicts.

[Dr. John Deloney]

We're addicts to thrill. Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

But when comes. And like you, I didn't. I left foot because I had an automatic car. Thankfully it was my right foot that went. I left foot drove home from the.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Hospital, put everybody on the road at risk. Right, Right. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Correct. Correct. Correct.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Wild.

[Dr. John Deloney]

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

[Chris Williamson]

Okay.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Financial margin, relational margin, home margin. But we have such an allergy to boredom. We have such an allergy to peace. It's an allergy.

[Chris Williamson]

What are the most common issues that men call you about? What do you wish more women knew about how men operated?

[Dr. John Deloney]

If I had to summarize the male dilemma, it's like, what did. What did. What did I do? And why don't people like me, from my elementary school teachers to my parents, to my doctors, to my schools, to my dating prospects to my, my collegiate education, to my employers, like, to the, to the media at large, like, what did I. I don't know why everybody doesn't like me. That's probably the most common question I get. Why doesn't my wife like me? What is it about me in here that's so inherently wrong? And there's a litany of. Of reasons why you don't do this. You're to this, you fill in the blank. But that's the ultimate question is why.

[Chris Williamson]

Don'T people like me belonging.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Now, it's worth, man. It's worth. It's that question of worth. I don't know many men, and I don't, I don't live in the red pills. Fear. Right. Or the whatever. But like, I don't know many men who don't want to be a net positive. I just don't know them. They just get the message at a very early age. Hey, quit wiggling in class or something wrong with your brain. Hey, don't say that so loud. Hey, don't be so aggressive. Don't be so running around. Don't be so. Don't be so you. And ultimately, that message, it becomes part of your nervous system, which you walk into every situation. Like, I'm a. I am a. I'm a burden on this room. I'm a burden on this family. I'm a burden on this workplace. I'm a burden on this culture. And we're at, we're. We're at the tail end of a world where men can say, okay, I'll just, I'll. I'll opt out. And then now we're blaming you for opting out. Right? And so it, It's, It's a privilege to be able to opt out. That. That's quickly coming to an end. But, yeah, there's this idea that I don't Want to cause everybody around me all this pain, I'll just step out. And that's not a, that's not a good solution either. But, but think about that worth question. I'm not worth going to the gym. I'm not worth going to see a therapist. I'm not worth going back to school to get more education, to get a new job. I'm not worth any of these other. The efforts it's going to take to go do something better, to go be something different. I, I'll just be quiet.

[Chris Williamson]

No one try.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Why, why would I try? I'm not even worth the effort. And every time I like, I think many domesticated men, I don't know if you can say that their homes are a failure factory. Right. I want to help. Well, that's not how you do that. You need to do it like this and you need to do it like that. I remember a conversation with my wife, like, about helping. And it occurred to me, oh, here's the, the, the underlying problem is I sleep just fine with a dish, with a, with a sink full of dishes. Like, I'll do the dishes when we're all out of dishes. And so she can count. Like, I did the dishes five times this week. You did them once. And then she can rightfully say, I'm doing so much more work around here. And I could say, oh, I didn't know that. It didn't occur to me that work needed to be done. So we have to do the alignment stuff up, up front. But if I'm walking around all the time, I can feel when I'm burden in my house, when I'm in the way, right? And then I start to imagine them in the way everywhere. And so if we're looking at masculinity as an illness or if we're looking at men's problems as an illness, then at least be compassionate enough to treat it that way. Right? You and I were talking last night, like, men won't share their emotions. Now there's a whole new thing. Like, men are too emotional. We're the only ones who have to care. Like, at some point, man, people just are going to say, I'm out, I'm out. And it's. That will be the. That would be a. Not a good result.

[Chris Williamson]

What would your advice be to women on how they can make their partners feel more worthy.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Man, It's a trope as old as time. But it's Berne Brown that says what you go looking for in the world, you're sure to find. And I love the way she says that. Find one thing on a day to day basis. Dude, I made an app for that. Just a day to day practice. Find one thing that you can see. Like, hey, I really see how hard you're working last night. Thank you for that. Or you came to bed at 10 instead of 2:00am like, man, I. You feel lighter today. Like, find one thing. Begin to practice admiration, even if you got to search for it, man, but it begins to send a message. I like you. I like you. Sometimes it's as gentle as just putting your hand on somebody's arm right when you're driving instead of, hey, look, there's a, there's red light. Look out, stop, slow down, we gotta go left. Why aren't you going left? Turn the radio down. Just a gentle like, man. Or a hand behind your neck, man. Just something that says, I'm glad you're here. I think we over dramatize. It's so small. It can be so small. Or thinking, that's not how I would have emptied the dishwasher, but he's a good man, you know what I mean? Or I can see thank you for that. Or that's not where the, the, the, the drying rack goes. Or that's not how you pack those kids lunches. Or at this particular school, that school's nut free and this one's not. And you put the granola bar in the. Man, I'm so glad he's making lunches. And then when I'm, I've exhaled, I can say quick reminder, just, you know what I mean? But it's just, I don't know, it's just, it's just saying, hey, I appreciate you. I appreciate you. And then having the courage to say, here's, here's a better way, or here's another way.

[Chris Williamson]

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[Dr. John Deloney]

Well, I, I think there's a, there's another arc to it. I have to see you and I can't see you through the lens that is my life. And I think true relationship is I'm taking off the glasses that I see the world and I'm going to see you and then I'm. That's going to allow me to practice knowing you. And if you will, if you will see and know that person and then tell the truth. Because I think you can weaponize truth. Also, like I feel, I feel you are telling the truth is. Let's just get there culturally, that'd be awesome, right? If we could just be honest with each other. But relationally, I have to see not the wet towels on the floor. I have to see her and then I have to have know her and know she did not put those towels there as a stab to the patriarchy. Like what must have her day been like? I'm think of those towels. You know what I mean? Because if you came and stayed at my house for two weeks and you left towels on the floor, I just pick them up because we're friends. Like I'll just pick them up. And I'd be like, ah, Chris, dude, pick up your towels. And I just. But because she's my romantic partner, it has to be this big existential, dramatic.

[Chris Williamson]

How much of it's compounding as well that this is building up over time. This is the towel.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah, you're right. It goes back to telling the Trishes.

[Chris Williamson]

Last week, the thing the week before and it's unspoken expectations.

[Dr. John Deloney]

And also just pick up the towels, man. You know what I mean?

[Chris Williamson]

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

[Dr. John Deloney]

But you're always setting the tone.

[Chris Williamson]

But how do you have some sort of a breakwater if you've got a mountain sized amount of unspoken expectations, words that haven't been said, premeditated resentments that you need to somehow get out and you go, okay, you had this conversation with your wife. This is a breakwater. We need to move forward, build something.

[Dr. John Deloney]

This marriage is over.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Dr. John Deloney]

You build a new one. Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

What does that look like? Someone says, I feel like this is the sort of relationship that I want inside of the relationship that I'm in, but it's not the relationship we have. And there is a big backlog of stuff that neither of us have said to each other.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

How does someone navigate that?

[Dr. John Deloney]

They. I think you start by writing down all the eyes, all the stuff that I brought to that mountain. Because it's really easy to go to that mountain and be like, you've been doing this, you've been doing this. I'm going to sit down and say, I've become a person that I don't like inside of my own marriage, inside of my own long term relationship, and I want to work with you to build something new. And then you have to hope so that they're willing to put their stuff on the table too, instead of weaponizing what you just put on the table. That's a, that's a tough, scary place to be. But I think the reality is they're.

[Chris Williamson]

Going to say, well, you remember when you told me that you did this thing, like that's a thing. Right.

[Dr. John Deloney]

But here's the thing. That marriage is over. That relationship's over. When you get that mountain back, when you have that moment, it has, we have to, it has to be different. That thing's got a period at the end of it. And so you may let it run out of gas until the, the volcano explodes. It's going to explode. Right. So I can do it now with I. And you can weaponize the eye. And then we're going to end up in a, in a divorce court somewhere. Or we can just let it do its thing. But it's, it's, it's there now. And so you might as well be a person of integrity while the thing's happening.

[Chris Williamson]

What about the opposite? What should men know about how women operate? What are the things that women are calling in and saying to you most frequently?

[Dr. John Deloney]

Some of my women colleagues disagree with me on this. Um, and so I'll, I'll caveat this with that. But I think women were sold the bill of goods also. And the question that pops into my head is, why won't he change? But I Think the deeper question is I did all of these things that they said and why don't I feel better about me or my world or my. The life I've constructed for myself and.

[Chris Williamson]

What are the most common things that they have done that have not borne.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I waited this many years to have kids. I waited till I was financially secure. I waited till I had a career. I waited until I was on my own two feet. I got this level of success or the opposite. I went all in on this relationship at a very young age. I went fully all in. I think the meta message has been if you will do these things or the trad wife thing or the full CEO thing, whichever one it is, that somehow you're going to feel complete on the other end of the steel. And that feeling is elusive. It just keeps moving. And so there's a, there's a partner in your life and it's constantly. You just need to. You just need to. You just need to. But really the thing is I'm desperately seeking this feeling that this is going to be okay. This rooted sense of anchored in. And it's, it's a constant, constant, constant. The other one is, honestly, is, are. Are all men scumbags? Is every man out cheating? Is every man filling up his life with video games and pornography? Is every man. And it's been. It's, it's harder and harder to defend when you look at the data and. But it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a recursive problem. Right. I don't feel like I have any worth. I don't. My home is a failure factory.

[Chris Williamson]

He's porn and video games. Don't reject me.

[Dr. John Deloney]

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

[Chris Williamson]

Dude, that sucks. It sucks to hear and it must be rough to the least popular opinion for a guy to give on the Internet with a mostly male audience is it must be tough for a woman to navigate dating at the moment because guys see all of the ways that it's way easier for women than it is for men. But the thing that I would say to guys that this is a huge, huge like blue ocean for them for is you have somebody that's been in counseling for like fucking forever and does a call in show with millions and millions of people that watch it. And this is one of the biggest problems. Look at how low the bar is.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Dude. I Tell my son that.

[Chris Williamson]

Look how low the bar is.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I tell him all the time, you can. You can have it all.

[Chris Williamson]

It really is not. I get it. You watch enough, like, content on YouTube and you can think that because you're five, six, or because you're not earning six figures or because you're whatever, hey, that's. Those are some real things. And there's some challenges out there. But Jesus, fuck. Like, how many women are calling in and saying, you know what the problem is? These guys just don't earn enough. These guys just don't do this, that, and the other. It's like, I don't know if he's going to.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I've gotten that question zero times. There's just too many short men out there. I've never got that.

[Chris Williamson]

To caveat this. How many women do you think are calling in and saying, this guy doesn't commit or isn't romantic enough or isn't whatever as a way to hide the more base, shallow. He's not tall enough. He doesn't earn enough.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Maybe, maybe. And I've been called naive before. I like to just take people at their word. Like, if you're calling in and we can get to his. Not what you're really calling. But yeah, man, I like to just, maybe, Maybe. Yeah, maybe. And I do get like, hey, my. The husband's gained 150 pounds over the last few years. But as you dig into that, it's almost always, I'm watching my husband die in front of me, right? And that's. That's usually the question, like, how do I keep my. I'm watching him die and I can't be a part of this anymore. And yes, he's not attractive anymore. And yes, he walks around his whitey tidies and he's. It's like, it's not a pretty sight. But the deeper question is, I'm watching. I'm becoming someone I don't want to be because that guy at work thinks my jokes are hilarious and I'm starting to think up jokes all day so that maybe that guy, like, I'm becoming somebody I don't want to be because I'm watching the person I love wither away underneath me and I don't. I don't know how to prop them up.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow. Yeah. The bar is set so low, dude.

[Dr. John Deloney]

It is.

[Chris Williamson]

It's.

[Dr. John Deloney]

But, but you know what? I think that's an important thing. The dating apps have screwed up every, like, no question about all that. It's a train wreck. But personally, I've never had somebody call and say, there's just too many short men out there. I've not had anybody call and say, this person doesn't make this much money. I haven't. I haven't got that call. And maybe it's. Maybe it's veiled and. And people are being whatever. But most of the time, it's. I'm with somebody. Why won't they. Can they just stop cheating? Can they just plug back in? How do I let them know that they're worth something?

[Chris Williamson]

I hear you speak to so many people about when or how they should forgive their partner after an affair. Is that even a question that has an answer?

[Dr. John Deloney]

You know, this has come up a ton recently.

[Chris Williamson]

It's endemic. Yeah.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

I love watching your show.

[Dr. John Deloney]

But I tell you what, man. The. The place I always have people start is you got to forgive yourself. Because almost every time either they'd created a world where they were so blindsided that there was a part of them way down that knew, I don't know, everything going on in this house, or it's the opposite. I didn't listen in my gut. And I knew they were spending too much time with so and so I knew they were hiding their phone. I knew that these. I had a sense that. And most people that experience infidelity go through a period of, I can't trust myself. I can't. Because I ignored myself or I didn't even see it coming. And so before you start trying to offer. Before you start trying to forgive somebody else, you have to forgive yourself.

[Chris Williamson]

That's a huge hurdle to get over. It's a massive hurdle because you've got to forgive two people.

[Dr. John Deloney]

The sidewalk you walk on no longer exists.

[Chris Williamson]

There's only two people in this relationship, and you have to forgive both of them.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And you have to give. Forgive yourself first.

[Dr. John Deloney]

You got to start with you first. And it's not as though you did anything wrong. Like, that's not what the forgiveness is. But forgiveness is about reestablishing trust. I gotta learn to trust myself again. And then I gotta ask myself, okay, what must be true for me to re. Establish trust with you? And that's a tough. That's a tough thing, because then you have to ask, well, what if. What if he or she says no? And that's a scary proposition to find yourself. But I've also seen people experience infidelity and go on to have. Build something amazing and new. And it's just. Are y' all willing to put in the work?

[Chris Williamson]

What do you think's the proportion of the.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I don't know. I honestly don't know. Because I don't know. Then it's. Gosh, this is a horrific example that just popped into my mind. I remember when my wife and I, when she had our first miscarriage, I found myself part of a secret club that I didn't know existed. People came out of the woodwork to be like, yeah, us too. Us two, us too. And so infidelities often work the same way that I don't know how much of it goes unreported that wouldn't fill out a survey or wouldn't.

[Chris Williamson]

You know, what are some of the ways that you see infidelity showing up that isn't just about sexual. You got a broader definition of infidelity than most people?

[Dr. John Deloney]

I think I do. Yeah. I. It's the place where you go to hide from the life that you've co created with somebody. So I think you can cheat on somebody with money. I think you cheat on somebody with a golf course. I think you can cheat on with somebody with work. It be, who's your mistress? All right. Where are you putting your passion and your time and your efforts and your energy? And if your work isn't a means to an end that supports this thing you're co creating with somebody else, as far as I'm concerned, that's infidelity. If I hide from my family or from my romantic partner on a golf course or on a fishing boat, that's infidelity. I am, I am taking my vitality and I'm channeling it elsewhere to avoid this. And that's different. Like, I like to go to punk rock shows, dude. I like to, like, I don't know, I live over in the comedy club by my house. I have passion about those things, but I'm not hiding from my family. They're hobbies, they're, they're. They enrich me so that every year where I work, they, they throw a big battle of the bands. It's in Nashville. Like everybody goes to Nashville to make it in the music industry. Then they'll have to get real jobs at some point. So every year they, they throw a big battle the bands. One year I had a book coming out. I was on the road and so I was going to skip it. And my wife said this, she said, I get a better version of you when you're playing music with your friends. And so it's not a matter of hiding. Not doing hobbies, not, not that. But if you're hiding from if you're numbing out with. I think, I think infidelity is easily distilled down into intercourse with somebody else. And I think that's too narrow of a view. It's just, it's escape.

[Chris Williamson]

What about financial infidelity?

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah, that's the way people, that's, that's the way people control their, their partners in a major way or the way they, they hide money. Yeah, it's devastating.

[Chris Williamson]

How common is that?

[Dr. John Deloney]

No, it's extremely common. But it goes back to the thing you asked me at the very beginning, like, with. If I won't share your codes, man. The, the other way I get beat up on the Internet all the time by the, by the Internet warriors is saying, dude, if you're married, share a checking account like that, just.

[Chris Williamson]

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

[Dr. John Deloney]

It's madness.

[Chris Williamson]

It's. I think it's like multiples of likelihood difference and there'll be some selection effect that. There will be some.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Of course, of course. But, but, but seriously, again, going back, if I don't. If we will share DNA, but we.

[Chris Williamson]

Won'T share bank account or our social.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Media, you make 65 grand and I make 75 grand. We won't share that. And we have to say like, well, that's mine again, it goes all the way back to trust and safety. And if I feel like I have to say, no, no, no, that's mine, we need to put that on the table and have that conversation.

[Chris Williamson]

Tell you one of the patterns that I learned from your show, which I now use in my day to day life.

[Dr. John Deloney]

And oh, I can't wait to hear this.

[Chris Williamson]

It is. I saw you do this. I think I saw you do this twice separately. And I was like, that seems like a pattern. I'm just gonna start maybe mentioning this if I see this come up people partway through a relationship where one partner lightly floats the suggestion of starting to open things up just a little bit.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Open things up with another partner.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Okay, so we're still, you know, like we've been together for however long and I just think, you know, like, wouldn't it be the number of times that that person has already been in an extramarital extra partner and they're now trying to retroactively create conditions to make the thing that they did when you hadn't agreed it agreeable so that they can continue it in future? And I've pattern matched that. I'm not kidding. I've pattern matched that. Incorrect, correctly, like 100% of the time. And it's come back into land. Someone said such and such things happened, and, you know, sort of suggesting this.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Like, it's already happened.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm going to tell you.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm going to tell you something that you're really not going to want to hear. And I'm probably wrong inside. I'm like, I'm right. John said I'm right. And it's. It's happened a few times now, and each time I've been correct.

[Dr. John Deloney]

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

[Chris Williamson]

No. We need someone new.

[Dr. John Deloney]

And. But again, if I. If I. Man, if I need to go sleep with somebody else to save this.

[Chris Williamson]

It does sound insane. It does sound.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I was with someone recently. They're. They're a. A comedian there in Nashville. And he said, I've accidentally become a Dave Ramsey apologist. Like, all these young comedians now are coming up, like, how do you do this? And he said, if you're trying to make art and you owe somebody money, you'll never make the art you were meant to make, because you're always going to have to ask yourself, will this joke. The one that would be the one right over the line, what will my boss think? Or what will. Like, I've got. I got a hedge. And he asked me, like, my thoughts on the death stuff. And I was like, hey, if we are arguing on earth, like, spend less than you make. We're. I'm. I'm probably not the guy to argue with you because the ma. Like, it's just such a basic. If you think sleeping with her will solve your intimate relationship with the. Like, it's just the. The. The math doesn't work. And I think we have so many intellectual gymnastics nowadays that we can. We can justify anything. But I think going back to simplicity. Peace. All for peace, man. It's just all for peace. And I. I honestly don't know why we can't do that, other than. I mean, there's the psychology of. Of conspiracy theories. There's the psychology of complexity. I just don't think we have a psychology for boredom or. Lane says we step over $100 bills to pick up pennies. Like, man, just mostly eat healthy and exercise and then worry about red number 40 and like, whatever. Like, do that later. You know what I mean? It's just. It's a strange place we found ourselves, and I think it's a luxury.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, we spoke about this.

[Dr. John Deloney]

It's a luxury.

[Chris Williamson]

We spoke about this. Over dinner last night that there isn't a particularly good meta in the world for reinjecting excitement, and there is one for increasing peace that you say, we need more commitment, we need more loyalty, we need more downtime, more regulation. You should be, you know, nervous systems should be in align all this stuff. But it's much scarier to say, I'm bored in this. This is too mundane. Because it sounds an awful lot. It's perilously close to I want more novelty, which is straying eyes lingering on somebody else extramarital stuff.

[Dr. John Deloney]

But. But that's because we've made every. And we may have talked about this the last time, but we've made every sexual encounter. The Super Bowl. We've made every. Everything has to be this eruption. And it's insane. Right? Like, you got to see the. Like, in my world, you got to see the relief when I tell a parents who have two kids under the age of three, like, hey, you're. You're going to have 13 minutes to get this done. And they'll look at each other and be like. Like, nobody talks about survival sex with a young couple.

[Chris Williamson]

Survival sex.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Dude, we got 13 minutes between that nap and this feeding. Are you in? Right? That's. That's. That's in no movie. That's in no TV show. In fact, they'll tell you if that's what it's reduced to, then your marriage is probably run its course. This relationship's probably over.

[Chris Williamson]

As opposed to just a practical reality.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yes, just traffic in reality, man. Traffic.

[Chris Williamson]

Your air traffic control.

[Dr. John Deloney]

And, and by the way, you can create novelty in this funny little moment. We can create play and laughter and silliness, and you want to give this a shot? All right, we got six minutes left. Are you in like you can while you're on vacation with your family at a. At a. At a cheap hotel while they're asleep, y' all can try to figure it out in the hotel bathroom that you can barely turn around. And like, that is tiny way that you can inject novelty and fun and play. And that next morning when your kid's like, I want pancakes, and you just cut eyes across the hotel room at your spouse and you're like, like, that becomes. That becomes good, man. It's. It's. That's. That's the good stuff. And if you try to make the fireworks show bigger every time, I just think that's a. That's a. That's how you end up overdosing, man.

[Chris Williamson]

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[Dr. John Deloney]

I may have told you this. The greatest parenting advice I ever heard in my life was from Jack Black, which is, no, you haven't told me this. When he said this, I was like, that's it. That's all of my graduate school distilled into one sentence. Don't try to make it happy. Get out of here. Like. And the story he went on to tell was. And again, I'm gonna bastardize it, but his son was playing in the mud with a stick or something and he was like, I'm. That's not my kid. Like. And. And you end up six, six hours later, sugared up, exhausted, fried. You spent 300 on a thing and then you went to this. It's like, man, I should have just gotten a hose out and sat in the mud and Got another stick. And that's stuff he's going to tell at his funeral. Remember that time, dad, you rolled me around in the mud versus yet another. So, man, if your kids are happy, get on the floor and have fun. And then the other thing is, you have to be intentional about your relationship, and it just shifts, man, and that's okay. It's a season. It's winter, man. It's cold. Put on coat. Like, we don't stand out in the. Out in the street here in December. And just.

[Chris Williamson]

What's the shift?

[Dr. John Deloney]

Curse the sky. You got any responsibilities? I heard I had a grad school colleague once that he had four kids. And I was in. Man, that was maybe two or three years into marriage, and it was rocky, it was tough. And I was like, I don't know how you do this. And he said this. It's just a different kind of awesome. And he goes, you know when you first meet somebody and you're like, cannot sleep, and it's amazing. That's awesome. And then you kind of get real serious together and you'll start. Get like, that's awesome. Because you get kids voice. Just a different kind of awesome. He's like, you can't just, you know, swipe off the kitchen table and just get after it, like at 4 in the afternoon, like you used to be able to because you got kids running around. It's a different kind of awesome. And also, you don't know what it's like to see your. Your middle school kid run across the finish line and just feel kind of big, right? Or I watched my daughter, she's nine, out at a. At a lemonade stand on a Saturday, dude. It was hot. And I was like, man, drive by and buy some. You know what I mean? I was like, rooting for. From the. You know what I mean? My neighbor texted him, like, dude, go like, I'll reimburse you, bro. And he's like, no, we got this. But it's like, I want her to succeed. It's like. It's a different kind of awesome, but it's trying to drag that old relationship, that old freedom, the old excitement into this present thing. That's what kills folks, man. So that when you have baby one, that marriage is over. It's over. Awesome. Build a new one. When my wife got pregnant, I was like, okay, I got nine months till I get my wife back. And then when Hank was born, I was like, all right, so it's. Maybe it's gonna be nine more after this, like in a year. Then Slowly. It took me for. It took me 15 years to realize that marriage was over and it was awesome. And now we get to build a new one with a kid involved.

[Chris Williamson]

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

[Dr. John Deloney]

It's that kind of awesome. It's finite. Yeah. And if you are constantly comparing it to this and this, it's. It's like, like if I have a. I'm not going to measure from here to the end of that wall in gallons. Those are both valid measurements. It's just the wrong measure. And so that time we were together, before we had kids and before they took all our money and our time and our bodies and our exhaustion, it was amazing. And now we're going to measure this new time in our life in gallons. And we're going to measure this one in meters. We're going to measure this time in our life in, in hours. Right. Those are all good measurements. You just got to use the right measurement for the right season.

[Chris Williamson]

You mentioned before about instinct versus rationality. Gut or head or heart. How do you come to think about making decisions in a relationship when it comes to gut versus head? How do you sort of stress test each of these?

[Dr. John Deloney]

I've just come to learn with this is n equals 1 here. I get over emotional about things and I make very emotional decisions. And so I've got a few people in my life, both professionally and long term buddies, long term men in my life that I will sit down with and say, here's what I'm experiencing and here's what I'm seeing. Here's what I'm about to do. And I, I mean, I wish I had a better way, better answer for you, but I outsource that because I'm not a reliable. I'm not a reliable person in the thick of it. And I just learned that about myself. I make up really remarkable stories about why somebody else is. My fundamental attribution errors is brutal. Dude. The stories I make up are extraordinary. About the dude in the square Kia that like, cut me off. The story I make up about that guy dude. It's, it's, it's an abomination. So I outsource it because I'm not a good judge of it. And I think anyone who says go with all your feelings or go with all fact, both of them are. Those are pathologies on either side of the bell curve. How do you handle it?

[Chris Williamson]

I tend to be too head dominant.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Okay.

[Chris Williamson]

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

[Dr. John Deloney]

Is that a learned response? Has your gut led you astray or was listening to you, how you feel about stuff, Not. Not attending, encouraged. Okay.

[Chris Williamson]

So everything would be sort of controlled. Very important to have a measured response. Hypervigilance, that kind of thing. So, yeah, learning to actually trust instincts and to know how. What's an appropriate threshold for something that Isn't your rational brain to be screaming to go do this thing or to not do this thing? Well, that's pretty loud. But is it loud enough? And that's where it comes back to the trust thing, like self trust. It's a very interesting situation to get into. I wonder how much of that is borne out. I think a lot of my friends have this too, that we're all trying to now listen to the fleeting thoughts that are coming up from our gut as opposed to the really loud, sophisticated ones that are coming down from our head. Because my adult awakening was built around Farnum street blog and mental models and Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger and Taleb and Robert Greene and so much. And Peterson. And so much of this is dictating top down, like rote learning. The ways to operate that are trying to compensate for the fact that you never actually allowed that to emerge in the first place. But that's just more top down. Right, right, right, right down now in a. In the right direction. Hopefully it's one that's a little bit more aligned.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Gotcha.

[Chris Williamson]

But it's still not just allowing yourself to sit with. I. I don't think this is working. Or I think that that's a really fucking good idea.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Okay, so let me try out a hypothesis. I think we do not have a. A cultural psychology. We don't have a roadmap for grief. And grief is a communal experience, and we've extracted all of that. The great David Kessler, I think he's just the grief guru, but says that grief demands a witness. And I don't think we have a witness anymore. And so we. We distill grief into sad, and then we go on and try to solve sad and we pathologize sad, But I don't think we have a cultural. I don't. I. I struggle with. Just like I went all in on this thing and didn't work, and I'm supposed to want to stay under my covers for a few days and not crush and grind it, and I'm supposed to Just want to mainline whatever fat or sugary or salty substances are. Like. There's some basic biological mechanisms for dealing with grief. We used to have a parlor in our house that was the. And we changed it to the living room, but they had a parlor where they held bodies until we outsourced that to funeral professionals. Right. Like, we have no ability to sit with. This ended. And I think that's. That's unhealthy.

[Chris Williamson]

What do people want to hear? Situation like that. There's been a loss. Nothing large or small.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Presence. That's my lived experience. Sitting with people who have lost children, which I can't think of a worse. A worse loss. Makes me wonder how. Like, how AI is going to take over everything. There's a biology to presence, and it is not found in an answer. It is found in a guy coming and sitting by you and bringing half a casserole or a bag of Taco Bell and a couple of drinks. Like, I'll be here. And anybody who tries to come up with a bunch. There's. There's. In the. In the grief world, there's a whole bunch of things to not say. There's.

[Chris Williamson]

What are the things to not say?

[Dr. John Deloney]

God needed another angel. Everything happens for a reason. Like nonsense like that.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay.

[Dr. John Deloney]

It's just like a knife in your soul. Right. But just. I'm coming over. Or the worst. The worst. Text, Let me know if you need anything. Well, my kid died. I need a whole lot. Right. Which I'm gonna put the burden on you to let me know how I can take care of you. Right. It's. I'm just coming closer.

[Chris Williamson]

Just showing. I'm coming over with some tacos.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I'm coming over and I'll sit here. We may throw all those tacos away. I'll be right here. And there's something. It's. It's biology. It's presence. Yeah. Which is like, hey, me and my wife are going through a rough time. I'm coming over. Dude. I don't have any answers for you. I'll listen to you. Right. And that's being comfortable enough. I. In this new job, I've just decided I'm gonna stop trying to answer questions I'm not asked. I'll just. I'll just be here. You know what I mean? Which I've had to wrestle with because my purpose was always, like, giving an answer. Nah. Not my purposes. I'll show up. I'll come.

[Chris Williamson]

There's a kind of A bit of a narcissism in that too. I'm Aware that it's a lovely thing to do. You're there for your friend. But there is a little bit of a narcissism because it centralizes you as the helper in the person's situation, as.

[Dr. John Deloney]

A presence or as with words when.

[Chris Williamson]

You'Re coming up with a solution. I know that this is your problem, but allow me, I will step down from on high and allow me to.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Bestow it uses a hurting person. They become a Xanax for you. I'm uncomfortable with your loss. Ask anybody who's been diagnosed with cancer. They spend most of their energy making sure the people around them are okay. Well, and that's madness, right? Because now I'm uncomfortable because I'm staring at.

[Chris Williamson]

My discomfort is making you uncomfortable. I'm sorry. I'll fix it.

[Dr. John Deloney]

That's right. Yeah. Like, hey, I just got diagnosed with cancer. I'll be right over. It's gonna sit here.

[Chris Williamson]

I just got diagnosed with cancer. Sorry.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah. Let me know if I can do anything. So cool. I just gave you a chore. Now that you got this, this terrible diagnosis, I'll give you a chore to make me feel better.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah. So if, man, if I can tell anybody if somebody's hurting, just show up. Or if someone says, hey, I need to go grab something to eat, I'll be there. Right? And I just learned that from a group of west Texas, like, no therapists, man. It was just West Texas guys that I saw almost come to blows over. Who's gonna pick up a check. It's like, oh, that's what friendship looks like. Like, not like, bro, you venmo me 425 for that. No, dude, I got it, I got it. We'll figure it out later. There's just something about that, man. And I think even, you know, talk about, like, Perkins has written, but, like, but again, all that's all for peace, man. It's all for peace.

[Chris Williamson]

The big difference between an abundance mindset and the scarcity mindset. I don't think you need to get into Rhonda Byrne the secret Woo energy attraction territory to just kind of understand that going through life assuming that things will go okay is just a better way to exist. Bill Burr's got this wonderful bit where he says things are going to be fine. And even if things aren't going to be fine, is it not better to assume that things are going to be fine and if they're not, you'll deal with it when the time comes?

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah, that's Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman's. Research partner had that great line, like, being pessimistic is stupid, because if it comes true, you experience it twice. I love that. Yeah, man. Let's just assume it's going to work out. I'm going to do the best I possibly can. And if it doesn't, if, like, we. If we get hit by a meteorite, we'll deal with that then. Yeah, but I'm going to. We're going to plow ahead as though. But I think we trying to hedge grief because we don't know what to do if it actually comes true because.

[Chris Williamson]

It'S such an overwhelming emotion.

[Dr. John Deloney]

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

[Chris Williamson]

And the people that we do call, we feel like we need to manage their.

[Dr. John Deloney]

We end up having to take care of them.

[Chris Williamson]

Sorry that I'm a burden.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Right. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

There's a great piece in the Kardashians that Charlie Hooper broke down, which was one of the girls has gone through a breakup, and the mum is there and they're talking, and the mum says the line, I really need you to get over this. And it's. Charlie explains it perfectly. And he's like, that literally says, your discomfort is making me uncomfortable. I need you to sort yourself so that I can be okay.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I don't have time for your discomfort. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, that's tough.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

As a kid, to feel that is rough.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah. But I think parents, like, sometimes going back to what you said about your buddies having young kids, never lie to your kids. A buddy of mine, and here's what I mean by that, not just on big stuff. A buddy of mine, he had a neighbor whose boat fell off the trailer. And so he called all these neighborhood guys to come over and help put the boat back on the trailer. And he had a young son, maybe seven or eight, and he's like, come on over. We're gonna go do something. All these guys help. 3, 2. And they got the boat back on the trailer, and they did all stuff on the way home. He said, man, we helped that guy out. And he said, daddy, I didn't do anything. And already he knew, like, I just lied to my kid. Like, I was using the proverbial we. And I kept moving him out of the way. Hold on, back up, back up. We're gonna pick this thing up. And so don't lie to your kids, man. If they come in seventh place, don't say, great job. Or don't say, man, you did so good. You got seventh place. Your kid knows you're lying. Say man, that really stinks. You gave it your all and you got seventh place. Or if they didn't give it your all, you can ask them like, do you feel good about your performance on that one? But it's telling your kids the truth. But it's man, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

In other news, this episode is brought to you by Momentous. If your sleep's not dialed, taking ages to nod off, you're waking up at random times and feeling groggy in the morning. Momentous Sleep packs. How did I miss? Both of those are here to help. They're not your typical knock you out supplement overloaded with melatonin. Just the most evidence based ingredients at perfect doses to help you fall asleep more quickly, stay asleep throughout the night, and wake up feeling more rested and revitalized in the morning. Which is why I take these things every single night and why I trust Momentous with my life or at least with my sleep. Because they make the highest quality supplements on the planet. What you read on the label swats in the product and absolutely nothing else. And if you're still unsure, they've got a 30 day money back guarantee so you can buy it completely risk free, use it and if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally. Right now you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com ModernWisdom using the code ModernWisdom a checkout that's L I V E m o m E-N-T-O-Us.com ModernWisdom and Modern Wisdom A Checkout how often do you see relationships where there hasn't been that sort of honest, open transparency between the partners be fixed or made worse by the presence of kids? Because I imagine that there must be some couples that have a child and it just galvanizes in them this oh, we have a project like we need to get really, really serious now. But the question of do you think you had kids and started being truthful or you started being truthful and then had kids? To me it, it seems more likely that the increased difficulty of having kids around is just going to make that problem.

[Dr. John Deloney]

No, I mean, I think there's always a temptation to make the person in front of you feel good. And yeah, I don't know. That's a great question. I don't know. But I know that every stage along the way at least in my kid. I have a 15 year old who's a sophomore in high school and I have a. My daughter's nine, she's in fourth grade. Every stage has been a. There's been some sort of GPS pin in my wifi that's gone off. That's all tethers all the way back. High school was not a great time for my wife. I peaked at 18. It's been downhill ever since, man. High school is the greatest time of my life. I was a Texas high school football player. Like, it was, it was, it was. I loved all of high school. And so as my son was heading into his freshman year, everything about me was like, this is it, man.

[Chris Williamson]

And championship.

[Dr. John Deloney]

This is good. Yeah. I was gonna live vicariously. It's like, dude, if you just. I was Uncle Rico, man. Like, if you just work even harder. And for her it was just get small, get small, get small. And so I think that happens at every stage along the way.

[Chris Williamson]

I didn't know what it so interesting.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I didn't know what. I didn't know when I had a kid. And it made me feel super inept. And I have, I have a script for when I feel inept, which is put your head down and go work more. Which then took me away from my house more, which made me harder to be around because I knew my house was. Every time I showed up, I didn't do the diaper right. I didn't do the time right. So it just started this thing. So it's just now we know enough to know, hey, we're getting ready for college. And this. The, the starting to already, the, the. The schools are already circling, all right? The sharks are circling. What college you to go to. If you don't know your major, you're going to. You're going to be a failure. All that. That wasn't a good time for me. That was a great time for her. Right. And so we, I now know that. So now we can sit down and have that conversation. Like, man, this makes me uncomfortable. Like I can't wa make. Which brings us back to the table. But that's a great question.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't know how much healing gets done through raising kids. Like revisiting, reparenting yourself, seeing the patterns that you imagining what you were like at that age. Because not that many people have gone and done their inner child work or their narrative therapy or their internal family systems or whatever and have pieced together the arc of wow, that's what it was like to be seven and me. And I wonder how many.

[Dr. John Deloney]

It's made me wake. More compassionate for my parents. And at the same time, way, I was just with my sister this morning and I've got an anger too that I didn't know was there. And so. Yeah, I don't know.

[Chris Williamson]

It made you more compassionate for yourself.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

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

[Dr. John Deloney]

Like, oh, dad was going through stuff that wasn't me. I was dying. Yeah. It's made me a lot more compassionate with myself. I was 16, man. I didn't know. You know what I mean? Like, I was being a 16 year old and I got a lot of compassion for that kid. Yeah. A lot more compassion. And then I think the challenge for me is how do I extend that compassion yet also know that my son lives in a world now that the world doesn't have any compassion for that he can. He could text something that makes him unemployable forever now. Right. I had the privilege of being a 16 year old and he doesn't have that. And so there's a different level of oversight that makes me more nervous. But I'm confident that every generation of parent has some sort of. It wasn't when I was. It wasn't when I'm sure. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

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

[Dr. John Deloney]

Right, right, right. Which is. I mean, at some point I sat down with him the other day and I was like, hey, there's. We're at a stage now where there's certain things you can get into that I. I can't stop. I can't. I mean, I literally can't. And you're gonna have to make some decisions at 16 that I didn't have to make until I was older about what I want in my head, what I want to experience, what I want to see. He's in a world where the wrong Adderall at the wrong party, it'll kill him.

[Chris Williamson]

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

[Dr. John Deloney]

I saw that the other day. Fentanyl thing with a young boy on.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, this was. This is a kind of like a. A lineup, I guess, of. There must be 30 people, 40 people, young, old, men, women, and sentinel kills.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

On that. Presumably some of them will have been, you know, maybe treading the line a little bit more closely than others. But definitely in that lineup they'll have been someone that just. Oh, I'll just take a little sniff at this or whatever.

[Dr. John Deloney]

And that's it. Right. Or it was A. It was a. Like, it was a Navy SEAL esque adventure to find a playboy when I was a kid. And he's got his own. And even we're pretty. I'm pretty much a Luddite. I was born the wrong century. My wife says, but every human he interacts with has a phone, right? With.

[Chris Williamson]

You went phone free with your kid, right?

[Dr. John Deloney]

We're not phone free, but I'm. I'm.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm pretty dumb.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Pretty dark ages. Yeah. We've taken everything off of it.

[Chris Williamson]

It took a while to get even. Dumb phone.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. His parents are nerds. So my son had to give us a. I'll tell you all this. He had. He had to. When he was. When he was 14, over Christmas break in eighth grade. He actually. He had a great point that paused me. He said, at least when you were a kid, because we're no. No cell phones at all. And we lived out in the country. And he said, at least when you were a kid, there was a phone on the wall with one of those little squiggly cords and you got to call your friends. And he said, I'm getting left out of everything. No birthdays, no nothing. And I said, that's. You're actually right. And so we. He had to draft the first round of the contract. And then me and my wife. It was basically like Shark Tank with me and my wife.

[Chris Williamson]

You're so Dave Ramsey code.

[Dr. John Deloney]

It was fun.

[Chris Williamson]

It is unbelievable how Dave Ramsey coded. You are how.

[Dr. John Deloney]

So you've drawn it.

[Chris Williamson]

You had to draw up this con. Did he have to do a presentation? Did he do it?

[Dr. John Deloney]

Oh, he absolutely did. But that's because we're academics. That's where we got it from.

[Chris Williamson]

Like, you have to.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Oh, his. Both of his parents are nerds. But like, I want to talk through now what happens when this. If this thing goes sideways. But it was good. Like. And yeah, we've slowly mean. He's about to be 16. He's about to be driving through. Down the highway in Nashville.

[Chris Williamson]

So driving. But still not texting.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I mean, you can text now. Yeah, he can text. Yeah, you can. But. But it's that like, hey, the. The wrong text thread and it's over, man. It's over. And so. And I know that because, Dude, I spent 20 years with screenshot text messages and Snapchats and whatsapps getting during sexual assault investigations enduring this. And all of a sudden, man, like, dude, I just. I've just experienced it on the other side of that thing, man. It scares me for him. But I have to sit down with 16 year old and say, man, at some point you have to make some choices and I'll do the best I can, but to love you through it and always sit here with you.

[Chris Williamson]

There isn't really a good archetype for the danger of a young person making a digital error.

[Dr. John Deloney]

There's not, you know, because full protectionism isn't helpful. Because they're gonna walk out and just get. It's like showing up. It's like showing up to like town square your first time, like at midnight. It's just so much. Right. That will, that will be the day he walks out of the house. So you can't do that to your kid. But also, man, that Sean Ryan says that great quote about you're not, you're not giving your kid access to the world. You're giving the world access to your kid. And I think that's, there's some, there's some truth to that. When you hand your kid a smartphone, tell them, walk out the door, best of luck to you, make good choices. You just gave the world access to your child. And they're better than, than all of us. There's too much money and experts, and now it's. Now it's not even real people, man.

[Chris Williamson]

It's an unfair fight.

[Dr. John Deloney]

It's a way unfair fight. And if you're an adult, fine, take on an unfair fight if you want to. If you're at the bar and you want to fight all four of those dudes, I mean, you get to live with the consequences. I can't. You can't put a child in that. It's just not fair. It's not fair.

[Chris Williamson]

What do you. As you've got to the stage now, son's 16, soon will be 18, some sort of college thing. What. How does that make you reflect on the upbringing of a kid and kind of the arc of being a parent? I suppose I remember when I moved out, I was 18 and I went to university and I didn't realize that, you know, the most amount of time I was probably gonna spend back in that house in any one go was five days over Christmas for the rest of my life.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And you just, you're just fired up. I just wanted to go. I couldn't be bothered. The fact that I didn't have a clothes horse or that there wasn't a fucking iron, like ready, I was like, I don't care. I'm not gonna iron my clothes in any. You know, it doesn't matter. I just Want to go. I want to go, go, go. This is so exciting. I'm going to move to a big city. I'm going to go to university. I'm going to make new friends. I'm going to be living on my own. It's going to be so. And that's. Yeah, you're not there to regulate your parents feeling like this huge deceleration is about to happen in their life.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I'm having to work really hard not to. Not to pre mourn him being gone. My wife had a great.

[Chris Williamson]

Ruining the remaining time that you do have with him thinking about, this is the last one.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah, man, just got to be with it and I've got to be ready to grieve on the other end of it. There's a, there's a shift that happens when a kid's 24, 25, and when you. It's actually much earlier than that. But when a kid leaves your payroll, you can't tell them what to do anymore. You, your parent shifts to an encourager. Right. Or, you know, and so what I want to do now is to model A. You need to know this. Not intellectually, but you need to know this in your chest. You can always come back home. And if you find yourself over your head, you can always come back home. And the fun for me and my wife is let's make this a place they want to call home. And that when they're thinking, man, let's go to. Let's go see mom and dad. And that's. I don't know if that's even possible, but that's a fun thing to try to put out into the universe. And also, man, you gotta go have adventures. And I'll say this, I don't know many kids, in fact, I know very few, if any, that are foaming at the mouth to get their license like my son is. That's a thing that's gone away. Like when, when I was a kid, like, turning 16 was like, give me my car key so I get out of here. But I have to believe that constricting so much time on social media or video games or just creating a digital bubble in our home. And he can't wait to get out, which means he can't wait to go to college. And he's already done the math. He's like, man, I need to be at least this far from you at university because it'll be too easy to come home and I need to go out and learn. And I hate that, but I love it. Right? I don't I don't, I want him to come home every weekend, but I don't. I want him to go out and have adventures because that's how you learn, man. That's how you end up in a whole other continent with a whole. With a job didn't exist when you were at university. Right, right. That's how, that's how that happens.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Dude. When I did a. I did two business degrees and neither of them had social media and no one talked about nothing. The year that I went to university, 2006 was the year that Facebook became available in the UK. If you had a university email address, that was.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah, you had to have a university email address. And I remember when my grandpa friend requested me, it was like, and we're out. Like, I'm off this thing. Yeah, I'm out, I'm out, I'm out.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, get me back in my.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Remember you had to have an edu.edu.

[Chris Williamson]

Address ac.uk for the UK and yeah, five years at university and nothing about social media. So, yeah, we still don't have a good way of communicating that to people that are way younger. I mean, you don't know how to use social media. We don't know how to mediate our own use. I use my phone too much. So. Do you.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah, I have it on a separate phone. Yeah, that's the only way I can do it.

[Chris Williamson]

Cocaine, phone and ale.

[Dr. John Deloney]

That's right.

[Chris Williamson]

George Mac solution.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I've never heard of that.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, just going back to something that I think was really important, that if busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress for the people who are like hard charging, type A insecure overachievers. What is your advice for someone learning to sort of let go of that chaos a little bit and deriving a better sense of well being from somewhere outside of that. How have you done it yourself? Because you're someone that kind of lives for the chaos and when faced with a problem defaults to the same thing I do, which I'll just grip the bar harder. Just rip this sucker off.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I'll hit that, dude. Yeah, yeah. It's all. Solve it. Yeah, yeah, that's why I did there. An important exercise for me was writing a letter to myself ten years from now and it was that for what? So you're here and you got this thing and that was an important exhale.

[Chris Williamson]

Can you elaborate on that?

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah, I had given myself a number that I had to be making in a salary by the age of. I think it was 35. Was my big one. And when I blew through that and I felt more insecure than ever and more exposed, it was sitting down and having an honest conversation with my 45 year old self. Like, and it goes back to for what? Like what is this going to have for us, right? And so I think when you start decoupling yourself from how busy you are as a, as a, an identity, you just have to know it's going to be painful. Being bored is going to feel like, feel painful and that's okay. And not being productive in every moment, it's going to feel like you're losing something. Resting is going to feel silly. Calling a friend just to see what's up is going to feel awkward. And it's letting yourself know, is that worthwhile pursuit?

[Chris Williamson]

Why not just keep pressuring it?

[Dr. John Deloney]

You can, but for what? I mean, for what? I mean, how much higher in the hills do you need to move, man? That goes back to solving for peace. If you want to solve for roi, you can, you can do that. And my problem is I like working. It's a fun thing for me. And so even the busyness is I, I enjoy it. I enjoy finding the next project and, and always text. I was texting my manager earlier like, hey, what about this and this? And he's like, okay, man, like, it's always like, what's the next thing? I like that. I don't think it comes from a pathological place or an insecurity. I just like it. But it's just known if you're redlining a red line in a red line, it's like, man, we talked last night, you're like, hey, how's your sleep? It's like, ah, geez, man, I don't wanna, I don't want to fix it.

[Chris Williamson]

Don't bring up the ass.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I don't want to fix testosterone with sleep, man. I want it to like be a supplement. It's like, do you sleep? And so you can. Or let me ask you, like write, write your letter to your 45 year old self. What would you tell them?

[Chris Williamson]

I don't understand. So with that, I don't understand how that exercise works. You're, I'm now 37, writing it to my 47.

[Dr. John Deloney]

I'm doing these things now for the life you're gonna have at 45, at 47.

[Chris Williamson]

That's interesting. I'd say I'm working really hard at letting go of the coping mechanisms that I used to hide a lot of the senses of insufficiency that I had for a very long Time that if I can make myself sufficiently impressive or statusful or charming or enigmatic or aloof, right in distance, in absence.

[Dr. John Deloney]

And that's a good one. That's one of my favorites.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh yeah. I'm working really, really hard to not appear like I'm working. I'm working really, really hard to not be present.

[Dr. John Deloney]

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

[Chris Williamson]

Red sneaker effect.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, a lot of it. A lot of it's that I really hope. I really hope that I look back in 10 years time and go, fuck. Like, I'm so glad of the work that that guy put in.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And this is, you know, I'm chirping on this a lot at the moment. This entire podcast is a thinly veiled autobiography. Do like, the whole thing is, the whole body of work is just what am I thinking about at the moment? What do I care about? What's important to me? And I'm fortunate that even though I'm a pretty weird guy, but I face questions that a significant cohort of people do as well. And what that means is that if there's something that I'm thinking about or struggling with, a non insignificant number of other people are also thinking about it or struggling with it too. And it means that if I just pursue my own instincts and follow sort of what to me feels like a challenge or something that I'm interested in, in the tailwind behind me are all of these other people that are also. Oh my God, never really. No one's ever asked that thing before this. Mel Robbins, a good example. Some of my favorite conversations that people have is when another person reveals something in them that you thought was a unique curse that only you have. And it's happened hundreds of times, slightly less so recently, maybe just because I've listened to a lot of other people talking. So I've picked up a lot of the low hanging fruit, but one of them was Mel Robbins, and I can't remember who she was speaking to. A couple of years ago, I was researching for a guest and Mel's talking. She says, throughout my entire life, I always had this sense that someone was mad at me. Somebody was, I'd done something wrong and someone was mad. I always just felt like I had to sort of be on tenterhooks a little bit and someone was going to find out whatever it was that I'd done that was wrong. I was in the wrong. That was like a bad girl. And I paused it and put it down. It's like, holy fuck. Let this just put a word to a thing that I'd never named, identified, even knew existed, didn't know that even if I'd known those things, didn't know that it wasn't just some weird, you know, random pathology that only my unique constitution has managed to create. Oh, this is some idiosyncrasy of just me. And to hear, oh, fuck, somebody else is like that. Yeah, that's, that's. It's the most. It's the reason that I'm continuing to try and lean into talking about relating about emotions, talking about how people feel when. When stuff comes up. Because so much of what we're doing is just trying to manage our emotional state. And one of the most reassuring things I think that you can hear as a human is, yeah, man.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah, me too.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, me too.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Okay, so think about 10 years from now to 47 year old careers. So 10 years ago you were a contestant on a. On a. On a game show.

[Chris Williamson]

Dating show.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Dating show. Yeah. I guess it wasn't the prices, right?

[Chris Williamson]

Huh.

[Dr. John Deloney]

So let's assume podcasting doesn't exist. My wife found letters from her grandfather while he was off fighting Nazis to her grandmother, who kept the dairy farm in. In eastern New Mexico going while he was gone. It's a treasure trove of letters, romantic letters. Here's what's going on. Letters, the whole thing. And she's taken to making sure. I remember her saying, like, I gotta make sure our kids know these letters. Like, know that. And so no matter what technology exists 10 years from now, what a great, like, amazing gift you'll have be able to give to your kids is a library of.

[Chris Williamson]

This is where I was at then.

[Dr. John Deloney]

This is the arc of. Of your dad going from this guy to this guy. This is our human experience. I can think of no greater gift.

[Chris Williamson]

That is. That is cool. Yeah, I. I would like to think that at least this podcast will become part of that. You know, it's done in the third person a lot of the time. But so many of the things that I'm talking about is. Oh, that was a question that the dad or granddad was asking at that point.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Man.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Dr. John Deloney]

How cool is that?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, it is. It's fun. You always do. We always get toward the end of one of these episodes and then you fucking turn it around. Okay. Come on. What else is there? I'm sure that you've got other stuff.

[Dr. John Deloney]

No, I'M just fascinated. But it goes like a 47 year old Chris could put his head on the pillow that to me, like, how fast can I go to sleep? That's, that's, that's my metric for software. Peace. Yeah. And I don't know why that's such a. You, you have a better grasp of psychology theories than I do. I don't know why that's, that's so hard these days. I don't know why that's such a foreign concept.

[Chris Williamson]

That's a good question. I wonder as well, how many people, for how many people that's a priority. I get the sense for some, for someone like you, and certainly for somebody like me. I know that that is something that I need. I know it's something, it's when I feel my happiest is when things are, yeah, peace. But that can be peace in the midst of chaos.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Of course it can.

[Chris Williamson]

It can't be peace in the midst of war. Right. The difference between lots of things are happening and it's all high pressure and I have uncertainty and unpredictability and ambivalence and ambiguity and I really do not know who's got my back and who does it. That's not good.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Right.

[Chris Williamson]

But I have lots of fights on lots of fronts and I'm prepared to go for all of them. And this is exciting and enthusing and.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Safety and autonomy, man.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. John Deloney]

If I'm anchored in, I can repel off the side and just go be crazy, man. And I get to repel war. Feels like I'm getting shoved into it.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's out of your control.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

But I think enoughness is a big part of that. You know, this like you said before, this sense that you're enough as you are, you don't necessarily need to perform, you don't need to show up in any other way. You can be as whatever you are to me and I'll just be here and I'll just sit and I'll just listen.

[Dr. John Deloney]

And I think the, the, the hard part of that algorithm is when you establish that it allows you to go further and more powerfully than you could have ever imagined. And I think that's, that's the hard part is trying to. Is if we've been sold that if you hack around that then you can get that thing that you want and it's like, nah, man, if you can establish I'm worth the work that I'm about to put in on this thing, then you can Go if you can go forever. If you're chasing worth, you can't. Your body eventually says I quit, I'm out.

[Chris Williamson]

Interesting to think people that you see that are very successful and in committed long term relationships, how much of. In a different universe, if somebody had chose a partner that was worse for them or better than better for them than this one, how divergent would those two worlds have been? You know, how much is the person that you are directly due to the fact that you chose?

[Dr. John Deloney]

1,000%.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. You know, if you'd chosen somebody who was, let's say that you chose 100 and you could have chosen a 50, a 0 or a minus 50, minus 100. But what did those different worlds look like? You know, how, how resilient are you to this and how much of this is totally contingent on the fact that you had somebody that was a rocket ship that you were able to be refueled off?

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think that's the wisest, like Mary. Well, and tell the truth and be curious like if you can establish those and then just go do the next right thing. Man.

[Chris Williamson]

I had this thought, I'm going to bring it up with Scott Galloway the next time I sit down with him. He keeps having, he's got super famous for this same. The most important decision that you make in your life, it's not going to be where you work, it's not going to be where you live, it's going to be the person that you marry. Charlie Munger's got the same thing. The most important decision that you make in your life is your spouse, etc. Etc. And I understand why that's a talking point that people are pushing because people fall backward into relationships. They're not intentional about this stuff. They don't try and cultivate a practice of honesty, they don't deal with their unspoken expectations, they don't all of these things. I do wonder though whether it is putting even more undue pressure on people. And this is the problem of a one size fits all piece of advice for a very broad audience that some people. It's the same thing with some of the sort of post me too messaging around how guys should behave with women. Some of the messaging, lots of the messaging says basically don't be pushy. The problem is the men who really need to be told don't be pushy won't take that to heart. They're just going to plow through it. And the guys who really need to be encouraged are going to really, really embody it right you know, so well.

[Dr. John Deloney]

And the other side of it, the number of Texas women who are like, I just want a guy who. Right. So it's. I get the one size fits all. I think the challenge to that, to the statement is we take that the. The most important person is. Is the person you marry. Right. Which I for. I believe that. But I think we dump it on a person, not on the thing, not on the marriage. And so I need. I force this other person to carry it all instead of saying, hey, can you and I carry this thing? And I think that's a different. Totally different perspectives, you know what I'm saying? Otherwise, you're going to give somebody a burden no human can carry. Like the, you know, Brad, stuff that says, like Wilcox says, like a good or great marriage, everything in your life, roi this way. And a not great or bad marriage, everything, like, unrois the other way. Right. It's like a. It's like a d? Roi. But if I put that on a human being, man, nobody can carry that. But if I say, hey, you and me, can we pull this thing together, man, those two horses can pull more together than they can individually. I like that. But it does put a lot of pressure on it. Okay, so somebody who's 37 and not married, it's easy for me to run my mouth about this. I got married when I was 24. Right. I was a child. And so tell me about the nature of that pressure.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, it's. It's certainly palpable, especially if you take it to heart and if you want. If you think, well, what's the sort of relationship? What's the sort of future that I want to have? What's the sort of marriage and family that I want to have? And I have a bunch of guys. There is no good archetype for this, but I have a bunch of guy friends who are unbelievably eligible. Like. Like some of the most eligible men. Maybe. Maybe at least one of the most eligible men in America.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Oof. Is he over 6 foot, though? That's where.

[Chris Williamson]

Yes.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Until a kid.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, true. And many, many, many figures. Anna. He just wants a family. Like, you just can't wait to be a dad. But the fact that he has waited a little while is. Is making the pressure mount. And you see this in women that have built up a career. There's a good example with a lamp that Louise Perry taught me about where if you're moving into a new house and you need to buy a lamp, it's a piece of piss. You've got nothing else in the house. There's a lamp that'll work. And you build the house around the lamp. If you've done the opposite and you've built this very elaborate internal decor, you need to find the perfect lamp right that. That comes in at this time. And it's one of the unseen costs that people who wait longer pay, both guys and girls. You know, if you wait until you're in your 30s or your late 30s or your 40s or your 50s, before you finally decide to settle down your life, you have more preferences. You have greater complexity. You have this sense that you know what you like and what you want and what you deserve and how this should. And it's more hard. It's more difficult to find.

[Dr. John Deloney]

So that's a. Can I pull that thread for a second? That essentially turns another person into the remaining puzzle piece for your puzzle. Instead of being. I had fewer things to dump out. My puzzle was jaggedy and small and trashy. So when we were like, hey, we have to build a new puzzle together, that it was easy. I didn't own anything. I was right. It just means there's more at stake for you to swipe the table.

[Chris Williamson]

It feels like there's more at stake because you've spent all of this time building it up. You spent all of this time creating this life that is yours.

[Dr. John Deloney]

But it goes back to. For why.

[Chris Williamson]

Correct. Ultimately, if all of this was basically you in a holding pattern waiting, and this is, what are you doing? Are you trying to create a life and a partnership and a family? That is the thing. Or is it just the side dish to your career? And there is a big cohort of people for whom they, you know, the family thing is just the thing that they do. Like, that's. It's. It's what people do. Right? It's not their alchemy. It's. It's not their zenith, the reason for being there, of their contribution to this world. Right? And again, the problem occurs when somebody from group one gets into a relationship with somebody from group two. That I want this thing to be everything. And we can build our lives around this. But, yeah, if you've spent a long time constructing a very elaborate cathedral, this wonderful orchestral life that's got these moving parts and it's all perfectly put together, and it feels like you're giving away more. Even if the end goal that you need to get to is the thing that you wanted all along, even if all you did was be in a holding pattern waiting for this thing to start you feel the deceleration. You feel the. Imagine this. Somebody's got a really big bank account and they need to give away 50% of their net worth in order to be able to do a thing. If your bank account's got 10 million in, it's way easier than if it's got $10.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Of course.

[Chris Williamson]

Right? Like, if you've got $10. Sorry, it's way harder if you've got. Than if you've got $10. If you've got $10 and you just give away five bucks, like, well, fucking like it's five bucks, what does that matter? Even if it's 50% of my. Well. But if you've got this huge bank account, you feel the amount that you've got to withdraw more. It's a bigger overall number.

[Dr. John Deloney]

So what would feeling that feeling and then going, doing the next right thing look like in real life?

[Chris Williamson]

Commitment. I think a reprioritization of this is that period of my life's over. Right.

[Dr. John Deloney]

As you said, it's a different kind of awesome.

[Chris Williamson]

It's a different kind of awesome.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

I had an awesome where I lived for me.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Huh.

[Chris Williamson]

But eventually you just kind of get bored of yourself. And it's a choice between a familiar kind of awesome and an unfamiliar kind of awesome. And some people are not prepared to trade the former for the latter because they just don't know. They don't know what it is people are. We're not good with uncertainty, good with unpredictability.

[Dr. John Deloney]

It's fascinating that the things that we evolved to do to prove worthiness to a mate are the things that end.

[Chris Williamson]

Up trapping the getting in the way of doing the thing. Yeah, the thing that you want.

[Dr. John Deloney]

The peacock feathers are now, like, in front of our face, and we can't even see the mate.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. The thing that you want is being sacrificed for the thing which is supposed to get the thing that you want. Yeah. I was supposed to be successful so that I could find a mate so that I could start a family. And the reason that I can't start a family is because I'm so busy working. Yeah, exactly. To try and find a mate. Yeah. Yeah, dude, the bar stools. I mean that when you see. Don't sacrifice the thing you want for the thing that's supposed to get it. It is. It is a universal rule. Don't sacrifice happiness in order to achieve success, so that when you're finally sufficiently successful, you can allow yourself to be happy. Like so many people do, that people sacrifice freedom in order to be wealthy. Right. They. They think, well, if I turn to a life of crime, I can be wealthy. And it's like, why do you want to be wealthy? Well, so I can be free. You go, if you get caught, you're in jail. You're sacrificing the thing you want for the thing that's supposed to get the thing that you want. And it just appears everywhere. And it's a misunderstanding of means and ends, and you've got them the wrong way around. You keep confusing the. I'll just keep saving. I'll just keep saving. I'll just keep working. I'll just keep building. And you go for what?

[Dr. John Deloney]

That's it. But how much of that is a fear of. Of. Man, this is such a. An abused word. How much of that is a fear of being vulnerable? Because I can control all of these other things, but when it comes to building a life with somebody else, I can only. I can only control me in that boat 100%.

[Chris Williamson]

So much of it is about control. Like, the reason that people commit to careers over relationships is that a career can't leave them.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Ah.

[Chris Williamson]

And another person can.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Hmm.

[Chris Williamson]

I think that's why you're 95% in on the relationship.

[Dr. John Deloney]

But you can't see my text.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. And I'm not. I'm not prepared to let go of that bit of the career. Because if I do that and you leave, I have no hedge. I have nowhere to hide. I haven't got anything. That's just for me. That's just for me. It's my. My little secret. It's my little thing. It's not for you. It's the side account that you don't know about.

[Dr. John Deloney]

And I guess the hard part is you can't know how extraordinary the other side of that is without when you're all in on our. That you can't know until you risk it all or you risk getting hurt really badly.

[Chris Williamson]

Dr. John Deloney. Dude. You're awesome, dude.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Thanks for being my friend, dude.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, thank you too.

[Dr. John Deloney]

And, man, can I just. Can I plug Nutonic? Yeah. Yeah. You don't even pay me. It's a. It's a laser, man. This has become my. So once a week, I. We have to do ads. It's. You know. And you've done that. Like, I get to do ads. Let's say it that way. And you have to read them, read them, read them. Utonic, man. It's my laser beam.

[Chris Williamson]

Good.

[Dr. John Deloney]

It takes my chaotic mind and says you can work for one focused hours.

[Chris Williamson]

Awesome. John Deloney, everyone should go and check out your show, your books, everything. You're awesome.

[Dr. John Deloney]

Appreciate you, man.

[Chris Williamson]

And you if you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out. And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful, and entertaining that I've ever found, fiction and nonfiction. And there's real life stories, and there's a description about why I like it. And there's links to go and buy it. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.