Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Dr. John Delony - Best-Selling Author, Podcaster & Mental Health Expert | Building A Non-Anxious Life

Transcript

Dr. John Delony - Best-Selling Author, Podcaster & Mental Health Expert | Building A Non-Anxious Life · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  If you are anxious about something and you avoid it, your body gets exactly what it wanted,
• 0:04
  which is the only way through anxiety, through that alarm system is heading right in the middle of it.
• 0:10
  We've turned every human interaction, taking a bar on some eggs,
• 0:14
  hey, can you give me a ride?
• 0:15
  Hey, can you help me with my yard?
• 0:17
  Everything is transactions, it's tiresome, but I think that for the last 25 or 30 years,
• 0:21
  we've been going into the gym, taking all the weight off the bar,
• 0:24
  and then something, then a bully showed up and we weren't strong enough to fight that bully.
• 0:27
  When the mail comes, when I turn the TV on, when my phone buzzes,
• 0:32
  why does my body go to fight or fly?
• 0:34
  If you're not collapsing once a week, then you're not working very hard.
• 0:37
  You're not pushing it.
• 0:38
  I always operated from a position of laugh.
• 0:41
  If your body knows they could fire me, they can't take food for nine months
• 0:44
  because I'm my own emergency fund, I promise you you will sleep better.
• 0:49
  Welcome to Success Story.
• 0:51
  I'm your host, Scott Clary.
• 0:52
  The Success Story podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network.
• 0:57
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• 1:55
  Dr. John Deloney, thank you so much.
• 2:05
  I really, really appreciate you taking the time.
• 2:07
  I'm excited for this.
• 2:08
  Thanks for inviting me over to your house.
• 2:10
  Yeah, exactly next time.
• 2:12
  Next time when you get yourself out of the woods and come into the city,
• 2:14
  we'll have to do an in-person.
• 2:16
  But I want to keep it very simple just to sort of set the bar as we kick this off.
• 2:22
  I want you to define what anxiety means in your terms and your perspective through your lens.
• 2:29
  Anxiety is just an alarm that your body sounds when it's trying to get your attention,
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  when it's when it has detected rightly or wrongly that you're in a situation or an environment
• 2:40
  that's not safe.
• 2:40
  Ta-da.
• 2:41
  That's it.
• 2:42
  That's all it is.
• 2:44
  So when you say like that, you're saying rightly or wrongly.
• 2:47
  Do you actually believe those that have been listening to some of your stuff?
• 2:50
  And it sounds like more often than not.
• 2:52
  It's rightly ringing that something's wrong.
• 2:56
  And I think that most people probably try and mask it in some capacity.
• 3:02
  But from your interactions, I mean, you've interviewed thousands of people,
• 3:07
  both as a, you know, as a podcast or radio host, even in your job with students,
• 3:11
  you've interviewed tons of students.
• 3:14
  Is the definition you just gave of anxiety is that a common definition?
• 3:18
  Is that how people recognize anxiety or is this like a complete 180?
• 3:21
  Yeah. I mean, most people recognize anxiety as this thing that comes over,
• 3:25
  you're like a blanket, right?
• 3:26
  Or like think of it like a boxer's robe.
• 3:28
  It's a thing that comes upon you like the flu or COVID.
• 3:33
  Or it's something you have, right?
• 3:35
  It becomes a part of you.
• 3:36
  It becomes a label and it's just not true.
• 3:37
  And it's most of the time your body's working perfect.
• 3:40
  And when I say it may or may not be there,
• 3:44
  there is, after a while, I keep trying to get your attention and get your attention
• 3:47
  and get your attention.
• 3:49
  Yeah, man, it will, that alarm system will just start ringing all the time.
• 3:53
  Or here's a common example.
• 3:58
  Dad wasn't a safe guy.
• 4:00
  And so when dad's car drove up the driveway, you knew as a little kid,
• 4:03
  I got to get between dad and mom to keep mom safe.
• 4:07
  Or I think I'm just going to go in my room and shut the door.
• 4:11
  Well, then 20 years later, you get married and your spouse's car comes up the driveway.
• 4:16
  And you just find yourself wrapping up what you're doing and going into the bedroom, shut the door.
• 4:20
  Your nervous system put a GPS pin in that moment.
• 4:23
  And it's starting to quietly sell the alarm and send you into action to begin to protect yourself
• 4:28
  from something that actually in the real world is not threatening.
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  And so most of the time, I think it's right.
• 4:33
  Yeah, you found your body's detected, man.
• 4:35
  You're not safe anymore.
• 4:36
  But sometimes it's trying to keep you safe because it doesn't have to near it.
• 4:40
  So that's tough because then people have to discern
• 4:43
  what's real, what's present danger?
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  What is it actually trying to tell me that I should pay attention to versus
• 4:49
  is there's maybe somebody I should go talk to?
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  Is there some subconscious trauma loop that keeps playing in my brain that I have to address?
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  It isn't actually immediate and urgent that's really going to be something I should address
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  because it's not like I'm worried about running out of money and paying rent next month.
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  It's something that isn't even real.
• 5:12
  So when you look at all the different types of things that impact our anxiety and
• 5:16
  then our hormone levels that probably lead to this and our subconscious and all that.
• 5:20
  Okay, so how do we discern what's real, what's not, how do we deal with different kinds of anxiety?
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  I think you think of it just as you would a smoke detector in your house.
• 5:31
  Like you go towards it.
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  If you're a smoke detector going off in your back of your apartment or back your house,
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  you head towards it to see what it's trying to tell you.
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  And most of us feel that alarm system and we run from it or we
• 5:44
  numb it out or we have the goal is to avoid it.
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  And I just think that's a that's a fault you were to do it.
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  You head towards it.
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  What's your what's my you'll cop like people who hang out with me will often see me.
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  I have a weird tick.
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  I'll make it put my fist in my chest or I will quietly scratch my finger my thumbnail and I'll
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  ask myself what's my body trying to protect me from right now.
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  Oh, the economy sideways.
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  That's cool.
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  Or the the check I thought was going to come isn't coming in this month.
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  It's coming in next month.
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  My body's working perfectly.
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  I'm good, right.
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  And I think the
• 6:22
  maybe I'll say this way, ma'am.
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  If you are anxious about something and you avoid it,
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  your body gets exactly what it wanted, which is that thing to not kill you.
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  It's running on real ancient technology.
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  And so if the stock market makes you uncomfortable, other people make you uncomfortable.
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  If that hard conversation you have to have with that abusive partner is what sound in your
• 6:45
  alarms makes you anxious and you avoid it.
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  Your body got exactly what it wanted and it reinforces that anxiety response.
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  You will be equal or more anxious in the future.
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  The only way through anxiety through that alarm system is heading right in the middle of it.
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  And for most of us, I can't do that by myself.
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  I got to get a group of friends.
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  I have to get a community.
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  I've got to get a therapist.
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  I got to get something to go with me because at least in the short term, I can't hear through
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  those alarms or too loud and need somebody that will walk with me.
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  And we will do it.
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  I phrase it like that.
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  We have a culture that is designed to avoid any sort of discomfort and be you're supposed to do
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  everything all by yourself.
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  And that is a recipe that is the two ingredients that make anxiety what it is today.
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  So how do we as a society?
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  I mean, you use work with study, understand people for a living.
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  I'm sure a lot of it has to do with technology.
• 7:43
  I'm sure a lot of it has to do with the fact, I mean, even post COVID, I'm sure it's gotten
• 7:48
  exponentially worse, lack of human interaction probably didn't help at all.
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  So how do we get here that it's so bad that we think that we have to solve everything on our own
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  that we forgot about community.
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  We forgot about leaning on people and being open and being candid.
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  And I don't know, just being more vulnerable.
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  Because men also, this is not like a specifically male versus female men versus woman problem.
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  But I don't think men historically also have been that vulnerable.
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  I think that traditionally men have been very stoic and figure it out.
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  So it's not like, you know, yeah, but there's a myth there.
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  And the myth is, you're right.
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  I don't think men often had
• 8:35
  sitting a circle and synchombiotic together.
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  But they built homes together and they went hunting together.
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  And they protected in their entire tribe together.
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  And so the old trope that women built community kneecap to kneecap and men build a shoulder to shoulder,
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  I think there's some truth.
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  There's some generalizable truth there.
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  And that's gone.
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  Now I go to work and sit in a cubicle and I email.
• 8:59
  Yeah, all by myself.
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  Or I work from home, all by myself.
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  And our wives stay at home, all by themselves.
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  Or they go to the office and all by like it's it's we've just created the loneliest generation
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  in human history.
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  And I don't think we did it on purpose.
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  I think we have a weird nexus where we got a whole bunch of access to capital.
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  You either have money.
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  My granddad, if he's out of money, he's just out of money.
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  And then when my dad was coming up, they invented this red new,
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  this new technology called a credit card.
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  And now it's just everywhere.
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  And so we've turned every human interaction,
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  Hakenobarosomeggs, hey, can you give me a ride?
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  Hakenobarosomeggs, hey, can you help me with my yard?
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  Everything is transactional.
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  He's hired somebody.
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  Yeah, you don't.
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  You don't want.
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  Yeah, I'm not going to go ask my neighbor for for some eggs.
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  I'll just instacard it.
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  I'm not going to ask my neighbor for a ride.
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  I'll just Uber.
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  And so overnight, we had access to this capital.
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  It's never existed in human history.
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  And we've had the technology to just avoid discomfort.
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  For all of you in history, you will not try to find food.
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  Well, now we just push a button on our phone.
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  And just some dude and skinny jeans on a Fixie shows up
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  and hands us our food, right?
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  Or all of human history are plugged by not enough water,
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  or too much water.
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  Well, now we've got sewer systems
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  and we have bathrooms and toilets in our house, right?
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  So we've solved all these problems
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  and in the meantime,
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  discomfort because it has become the enemy.
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  And so we've created a culture
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  that if it's uncomfortable,
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  it should be avoided and it's wrong.
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  And if you're uncomfortable, you're a victim.
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  Something really wrong is happening to you.
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  Instead of, no, too, we have to seek that, right?
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  So we have no comfort.
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  I mean, we have an allergy to discomfort.
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  We're all by ourselves.
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  And we can solve all those problems with credit.
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  And man, that's just our bodies weren't designed for that.
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  We fill cell phones on top of it.
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  And that's just gasoline on a fire.
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  It's everything.
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  It's all this convergence of technology.
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  It's all happening to us, yeah.
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  Easy access to everything of instant overnight satisfaction.
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  And then we have pandemic and isolation mixed into that.
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  Like, it's all, it's all just creating this lonely person.
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  Hear that though that none of those things in isolation were bad.
• 11:21
  I love leather seats.
• 11:23
  I love them.
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  I like, I like tires.
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  I'm glad I don't have wooden wheels on my car.
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  I'm glad all those things exist.
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  I'm got to have an air conditioner.
• 11:30
  I'm glad of running water in my house.
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  All those things are great.
• 11:33
  I think what COVID did for us was this.
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  I don't think COVID was the problem.
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  I think some things didn't happen in COVID were bad.
• 11:39
  But I think that for the last 25 or 30 years,
• 11:42
  we've been going into the gym and taking all the weight off the bar.
• 11:45
  And then something, then a bully showed up.
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  And we weren't strong enough to fight that bully.
• 11:50
  And I think a, maybe I'm being over romanticizing the past.
• 11:55
  But I think five years after World War II,
• 11:58
  Vets came home.
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  COVID hits.
• 11:59
  I think the world has a very different response.
• 12:02
  I think all of us who have been going into air condition gyms
• 12:05
  with no weight on the bar, that's a metaphorical, of course.
• 12:08
  But I just don't think we were very tough.
• 12:10
  I think we didn't know what to do.
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  And we just all freaked out.
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  And we burned our cities to the ground.
• 12:15
  Yeah, I agree completely.
• 12:16
  So discomfort creates community previously in history.
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  And right now we avoid discomfort.
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  We avoid community.
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  This leads to anxiety.
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  We don't know how to fix it.
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  We're all isolated.
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  So, okay, that's, that's a shitty situation.
• 12:34
  There you go.
• 12:34
  It's a pretty shitty, it's a pretty shitty situation.
• 12:37
  All right.
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  So the fix that most people do outside of therapy,
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  which would be a healthy response most likely,
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  they cover it up with drugs or alcohol or work
• 12:50
  or maybe infertility or whatever it is.
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  They cover it up with something.
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  And that's, that's distracting.
• 12:59
  I think that's probably how most people deal with anxiety.
• 13:01
  I mean, I had a friend.
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  It was really messed up.
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  Actually, I haven't seen this person in a long time in New York.
• 13:08
  And to go to bed,
• 13:11
  she put a melatonin in a glass of wine and killed it.
• 13:14
  That's right.
• 13:15
  And I was like, like, dude, that's not, that's not,
• 13:19
  there's so many things wrong with that particular picture.
• 13:23
  But I feel like that's not uncommon.
• 13:25
  Well, this is a very biological, I'm dumbing this down
• 13:32
  below to where it can barely hold water, right?
• 13:35
  But if you're taking medication for the three S's for sex, for sleep,
• 13:42
  or for going number two, like basic, basic biological human functions,
• 13:49
  like 101, if you have to medicate for those,
• 13:53
  I want you to ask yourself about your environment.
• 13:55
  What is your body?
• 13:57
  What wars are your body fighting on a minute-by-minute basis
• 14:00
  that make more biological functions?
• 14:04
  Things that are wired into a nervous system on a different,
• 14:10
  on a different, on a different hard drive, right?
• 14:12
  One of my closest friends I'll plant on Earth is a paraplegic.
• 14:15
  And those systems still work, right?
• 14:18
  Like the other systems still work.
• 14:20
  And so, man, something that powerful, that important,
• 14:24
  that we're having to,
• 14:26
  pharmacologically enhance, we've got to ask a harder question,
• 14:31
  which is not, why am I not, like, how do I sleep?
• 14:33
  How do I sleep?
• 14:34
  No, like, dude, why is your body deciding at 3 a.m.
• 14:37
  every single morning?
• 14:39
  There's got to wake you up, because it has realized it's the only one,
• 14:43
  you're the only person you got.
• 14:44
  You're doing provision and protection, and, and, and, and,
• 14:47
  and it's not designed for it.
• 14:49
  And so, I think those, those pathologies are, they're, they're,
• 14:53
  they're alarms, man, if you can't sleep, ask, what's going on?
• 14:57
  Right?
• 14:58
  Not.
• 14:58
  Yeah.
• 14:59
  How many more meltdowns in Gary, dude?
• 15:01
  That's a scary question.
• 15:02
  Yeah, because when you went back there,
• 15:05
  well, yeah, what does it, what do you do when you say,
• 15:09
  oh, I can't live in New York, right?
• 15:12
  If you think about, we've created a world that our bodies
• 15:14
  were never designed to exist, and what does that mean?
• 15:17
  Like, I can't drive that car because I can't afford it.
• 15:20
  And I might come, like, frontal lobe, right?
• 15:23
  My neocortex might come up with some real elaborate,
• 15:25
  no interest loan for 72 months on a depreciating asset,
• 15:29
  which sounds amazing.
• 15:30
  I can just have it now and just pay it off in six years or five years.
• 15:34
  That's great.
• 15:35
  Your amygdala knows, oh, dude, if you get fired, they take your transportation.
• 15:40
  If you get fired, they take your house.
• 15:41
  If you, like, our bodies know that, even no matter how sophisticated
• 15:45
  our interest rates and our mortgage loan packages are.
• 15:50
  And so I think we have to go back and ask ourselves harder questions,
• 15:54
  which is why is my body continually trying to get my attention?
• 15:59
  When my wife walks in, when the male comes,
• 16:02
  when I turn the TV on, when my phone buzzes,
• 16:05
  why is my body go to fight or flight?
• 16:07
  And that's a much, like you said, I'm glad you asked.
• 16:09
  That's a much harder question.
• 16:11
  Then how do I duct tape over this,
• 16:12
  duct tape over this, and duct tape over that?
• 16:15
  I think our bodies are working really good.
• 16:17
  I think the virus here is the world we've made for ourselves.
• 16:21
  Yeah.
• 16:21
  So I mean, even to take you, and not to put you on this spot,
• 16:26
  but you know, you're an example of,
• 16:29
  you came from a certain kind of lifestyle that was a W-2-9-5.
• 16:34
  And then you pushed yourself into more of like an entrepreneurial
• 16:39
  style of life with the speaking and the books and the radio show.
• 16:42
  And now it's like, there's no limit to the amount of hours you can work.
• 16:45
  Because if you're coming from education,
• 16:48
  like so my mom works in education.
• 16:50
  Obviously she works in science.
• 16:52
  I guess you work as dean of students,
• 16:54
  which is kind of like psychology to a degree.
• 16:57
  It may be just...
• 16:58
  Yeah, and I was a professor too, and it researches on as well.
• 17:02
  But here's my adventure there.
• 17:05
  So it was, I was on call 24-7-365 for about 20 years.
• 17:11
  And it was a W-2.
• 17:12
  So it's an 8-5 plus everything else, right?
• 17:16
  And so that job about killing me,
• 17:18
  like it was just too long to never have a full-night sleep
• 17:21
  or to always have your cell phone underneath your pillow.
• 17:24
  And then I took this job.
• 17:26
  And for the first six months or so,
• 17:29
  it was transcendent.
• 17:30
  I slept all night.
• 17:32
  My heart rate, variability went way up.
• 17:35
  Everything was incredible.
• 17:37
  And then two things happened.
• 17:38
  Number one, my body.
• 17:40
  I told the story I told myself is,
• 17:42
  if you're not collapsing once a week,
• 17:45
  then you're not working very hard.
• 17:48
  You're not pushing it.
• 17:49
  The second thing was, is I'd worked a salary job for 20 years.
• 17:54
  And it didn't matter if I worked 24 hours one day,
• 17:57
  or if I worked 12 hours, I got the same paycheck.
• 18:00
  Well, now I'm in a job where if I just make more money,
• 18:04
  I get more money.
• 18:05
  And so I hit the gas in a way.
• 18:10
  And you've probably seen the interview.
• 18:11
  It ended in a famous show down in my garage with my wife,
• 18:15
  but it was a crash and burn.
• 18:17
  Like, you can't keep running like this.
• 18:20
  And I thought that money would solve all my problems.
• 18:23
  I thought it would solve my self-worth problem.
• 18:26
  That if I have this much money in the bank,
• 18:28
  it's just an obnoxious tail as old as time,
• 18:32
  is I'm going to out-earn, and out-run,
• 18:35
  and out-achieve, and out-certificate my insecurity.
• 18:38
  And it's just like, okay, and it works until it kills you, right?
• 18:42
  And it sucks.
• 18:44
  And here we are.
• 18:45
  So when you're looking at,
• 18:47
  as I didn't even realize that you were on call,
• 18:49
  so there was a different version of stress and anxiety
• 18:51
  in the first season of your career than an equally as,
• 18:55
  potentially unhealthy, although it feels great
• 18:59
  to work more and earn more,
• 19:00
  but equally as unhealthy,
• 19:01
  because there's a whole other problem
• 19:02
  with that entrepreneurial version of anxiety and stress.
• 19:05
  So for those two people,
• 19:07
  those are two very real avatars of people
• 19:09
  that are listening to this show.
• 19:11
  There's the entrepreneur,
• 19:12
  and there's the really hard-working W2,
• 19:14
  maybe not all the time on call, maybe.
• 19:17
  What is the work that you did to figure out
• 19:22
  how to exist in life?
• 19:24
  And what is some work that you wish your W2 version of yourself
• 19:28
  would have done to figure out how to exist
• 19:30
  and operate in a healthy space,
• 19:32
  in a healthy way,
• 19:33
  that maybe now you're doing?
• 19:36
  Matt, I think that question is probably the most important question
• 19:39
  of this century right now.
• 19:41
  And here's the showdown that happened.
• 19:45
  And I'll answer the question,
• 19:47
  because I've had to go back and say,
• 19:48
  ask myself and be pretty reflective.
• 19:50
  I had just was coming off the heels of a number one book,
• 19:56
  and I'd never written a book before,
• 19:57
  and so the fact that it shot up and did what it did was amazing.
• 20:00
  Then I'm finishing this draft of the second one,
• 20:03
  because a publishing team immediately wants to crank out another one, right?
• 20:06
  And now I'm speaking all over the country.
• 20:09
  And speaking for me is at the time,
• 20:13
  because the show hadn't exploded yet,
• 20:14
  but that was where I made a vast majority of my money.
• 20:17
  And then the show started to take off.
• 20:19
  And I'm sick.
• 20:21
  I think I had COVID,
• 20:22
  but I'm sick.
• 20:24
  My family had just left after a week of
• 20:27
  Christmas at my house,
• 20:28
  which it was one of those Christmas.
• 20:29
  It just didn't go well.
• 20:30
  Nobody really wanted to be there.
• 20:31
  It was just kind of awkward.
• 20:34
  We've had some amazing ones.
• 20:34
  This show wasn't the one that was cold.
• 20:36
  We couldn't do anything.
• 20:38
  And I'm down in the gym working out,
• 20:40
  because I've made my part of my self identity,
• 20:44
  is I have to look a certain way.
• 20:46
  Doesn't matter how old I am, how tired I am,
• 20:48
  I have to keep doing this,
• 20:49
  because you got to step into a fluke gym.
• 20:51
  And I'm sick.
• 20:52
  I'm working out.
• 20:53
  And my manager calls and says,
• 20:55
  hey, I got these two new speaking gigs.
• 20:57
  And I start screaming.
• 20:59
  It was shapeshifter money for my family.
• 21:01
  And by the way,
• 21:02
  my dad was a cop.
• 21:03
  My dad, my wife's parents were school teachers.
• 21:06
  So we didn't come from anything.
• 21:07
  So all of this is a wild roller coaster that we're on now.
• 21:11
  And I'm screaming and hollering,
• 21:13
  like cheering so much so that my wife comes down the stairs
• 21:16
  into the basement and she's laughing.
• 21:18
  She's like, what are you doing?
• 21:20
  And I told her, I got this and I got this.
• 21:22
  And she met me in the middle.
• 21:24
  And you have to know her.
• 21:26
  She's very quiet.
• 21:27
  And she does not confrontational in that way.
• 21:30
  And she came and got real close to me and said,
• 21:32
  I'm watching my husband die.
• 21:35
  And I'm watching him cheer every step of the way.
• 21:38
  And it ended with her saying,
• 21:42
  John, in the pie chart of how much I love you,
• 21:45
  that pie piece that is how much money you make is full.
• 21:48
  Anything else you make from this point forward,
• 21:50
  I told you I would never tell you no.
• 21:51
  So go do whatever you want to do.
• 21:53
  But you cannot say it's for me and for these kids.
• 21:56
  This is for your ego.
• 21:58
  And here is the answer to your question.
• 22:00
  I think that is super important for all of us,
• 22:02
  especially entrepreneurs.
• 22:05
  She turned and looked at me.
• 22:06
  She was walking away.
• 22:07
  She said, John, we have enough.
• 22:10
  And then she walked away.
• 22:12
  And dude, I was so pissed.
• 22:15
  And then as I got through the anger,
• 22:17
  which if the anger was me covering up grief, right?
• 22:20
  That's how I was trying to defend my ego is to get mad.
• 22:23
  But I did not have a psychology for the word enough.
• 22:26
  I didn't know what that meant because they'd either been on call 247.
• 22:29
  My whole thing is enough.
• 22:31
  You just do it until the job was done or this kid might die.
• 22:33
  Right?
• 22:33
  You got to keep just do what you got to do.
• 22:35
  And so when I meet with healthcare professionals or attorneys
• 22:38
  or first responders, that's their world.
• 22:40
  They get a paycheck.
• 22:41
  Doesn't matter.
• 22:41
  And they just got to keep showing up.
• 22:43
  Because if they don't, somebody's going to get hurt.
• 22:44
  The other side of it was like, I didn't have a psychology for enough.
• 22:50
  I always operated from a position of lack.
• 22:52
  And so in a weird way, I am busier right now than I was then.
• 22:59
  And my marriage could not be better.
• 23:02
  My relationship with my two young kids could not be better.
• 23:05
  But it's because my wife and I sat down at the beginning of it.
• 23:08
  We sit down at the beginning of every season now.
• 23:10
  And we say, what is enough for this season?
• 23:13
  What's it going to look like?
• 23:14
  You got a book coming out.
• 23:15
  You're going to be on the road.
• 23:16
  Okay, here's what must be true.
• 23:18
  Relationally for our marriage.
• 23:19
  Here's what must be true for your interaction with the kids.
• 23:22
  So here, that means you're going to have to get up earlier.
• 23:24
  Because I'm going to take my kids to school in a few days a week.
• 23:27
  Because that's where the only time I'm going to have to connect with them.
• 23:29
  We're going to go to breakfast.
• 23:30
  And that means I'm going to have to alter my workouts for the next four months.
• 23:33
  Right?
• 23:33
  I can't do it all.
• 23:34
  But it's answering that question.
• 23:36
  What's enough and not forever.
• 23:38
  But what's enough in the season?
• 23:39
  I think entrepreneurs have, it's a cancer.
• 23:42
  Because you get five million in revenue.
• 23:44
  And immediately your friends go to go, what are you going to go to 10?
• 23:49
  Or your next question is, all right, when's the next book coming?
• 23:51
  Or when's the next sale?
• 23:52
  Or when's the next deal?
• 23:53
  And a $10 million business is a radically different business
• 23:57
  than a $5 million business.
• 23:58
  And that might not be you.
• 24:00
  And if you make five million dollars,
• 24:02
  you have won the cosmic lottery.
• 24:03
  You won.
• 24:05
  But it's not in this in the entrepreneur world.
• 24:07
  It's going to get 25.
• 24:09
  You're going to get to 100.
• 24:10
  And it never stops.
• 24:12
  And so asking yourself, okay, we have enough.
• 24:15
  Do we want to go do something else?
• 24:16
  And what's that going to cost us to go do that?
• 24:18
  I just call it the cancer of enough, man.
• 24:20
  Dude, I don't think anybody has that conversation with themselves.
• 24:24
  I speak to a lot of entrepreneurs.
• 24:26
  Speak to a lot of entrepreneurs.
• 24:27
  And I see so many burned relationships, burned out people, sick people, unhealthy people.
• 24:34
  And it's sad because they realize it when they, when they sell.
• 24:39
  When they, when they achieve what everyone would dream to achieve as an entrepreneur,
• 24:43
  they sell their business for 20 million, 30 million, 40 million, 50 million.
• 24:47
  Plus, wife is gone.
• 24:50
  Health is down the shitter.
• 24:51
  Then they start working out.
• 24:52
  Then they, their kids don't want to, the kids don't want to talk to.
• 24:55
  Yeah.
• 24:55
  Yeah.
• 24:56
  Like in, in, yeah.
• 24:58
  This is, this is, this is, can be unpopular.
• 25:01
  But I remember watching that amazing documentary on Michael Jordan,
• 25:05
  that ESPN put out.
• 25:07
  I forgot the name, but it was, it was incredible, it was incredibly well done.
• 25:10
  But there's a scene halfway through that series where Michael Jordan is sitting on a couch
• 25:14
  inside of his hotel room and he looks at the camera.
• 25:17
  He's all by himself and he can't go to the bathroom in the lobby because he's going to get mobbed.
• 25:22
  And he looked at that camera and he says, you don't want my life.
• 25:24
  And he just signed like some $90 million deal, which back then was a $80 billion, whatever.
• 25:29
  Wars.
• 25:30
  But I remember, I kept thinking as I watched that documentary, the greatest player of all time.
• 25:36
  There were six pieces of cloth hung from that gym, right?
• 25:41
  Those six world championship banners.
• 25:44
  And as I watched that thing more and more, I kept asking myself, what?
• 25:49
  For what?
• 25:51
  You know, there's your kids and your family and your life and your ability to move around.
• 25:56
  Every human that's with you is on a payroll.
• 25:58
  I give no close friends who just think of you with laughter,
• 26:01
  enjoy, and warmth.
• 26:03
  Nobody, when they have something cool to share,
• 26:04
  thinks of you to call like, for what?
• 26:07
  And I, that's a sensational example, right?
• 26:10
  The greatest basketball player of all time.
• 26:11
  But the picture was sometimes to be the greatest, it cost you everything.
• 26:16
  And I always want people to ask like, just know the count the cost, man.
• 26:19
  Go do it if you want to do it.
• 26:20
  But it's going to cost you your soul and you're going to get that $20 million deposit.
• 26:26
  And dude, I remember that when my first book hit number one, I called my mom,
• 26:30
  I called my wife.
• 26:32
  Dave Ramsey called me, was cheering and screaming into the phone.
• 26:35
  And then I went back to the hotel room and I had nobody to call.
• 26:40
  And it's one of the loneliest like, like, now what?
• 26:43
  Right?
• 26:43
  And so I just want entrepreneurs to ask that like, for what?
• 26:46
  What am I, what am I about to miss X, Y, and Z4?
• 26:50
  And it might be worth it, dude.
• 26:51
  It might be worth it.
• 26:51
  I miss a lot of stuff because it's an end game that I'm playing.
• 26:54
  But for what?
• 26:56
  For what?
• 26:57
  When your wife asked you, or told you, rather, you know, we have enough,
• 27:03
  this is not for me, this is not for us, this is not for the kids.
• 27:08
  So then how do you now set, how do you now set objectives?
• 27:12
  And what's your new north star?
• 27:14
  Because that's a tough pill to swallow.
• 27:16
  You realize that everything you're doing is now for your ego.
• 27:20
  If you, if you believe what she said, if you consider what she said to be true,
• 27:23
  and curious if you think that...
• 27:25
  She was 100% right?
• 27:27
  100% OK.
• 27:28
  So how do you go into the next meeting, the next week, and set an objective when you know
• 27:34
  that it's just for yourself?
• 27:36
  Because now I solve the first goal, the first variable I'm solving for is peace.
• 27:47
  That's it.
• 27:48
  What will bring me peace in the next six months?
• 27:51
  And sometimes that's going through halacious times, right?
• 27:55
  Navy SEALs train really hard, so they can have long seasons of peace, right?
• 28:01
  And so solving for peace doesn't mean you cash out.
• 28:03
  Solving for peace means I'm going to be on the road for five months.
• 28:06
  I'm going to be home three nights a week and speaking
• 28:08
  and doubt doing stuff the other four nights a week.
• 28:12
  So that, right?
• 28:14
  And so I'm always solving for peace.
• 28:17
  And then I will solve for accomplishments and then I'll solve for money
• 28:22
  and then I'll solve for the other things.
• 28:24
  Dude, get your second house, get your third house, buy that farm in that town,
• 28:28
  and like, do that stuff.
• 28:31
  But have it be for a purpose, right?
• 28:34
  And as long as I'm solving for peace,
• 28:38
  I'll have chaotic seasons, but they're going to be intentional.
• 28:42
  And otherwise you're trying to find peace amidst chaos.
• 28:47
  And the alcohol works really well.
• 28:51
  Yeah, I was going to say this is, this Xanax works well,
• 28:54
  sleeping with somebody else, brings you peace for a second,
• 28:58
  and then it destroys everything.
• 28:59
  It just adds more chaos to the fire, right?
• 29:01
  And so let's solve for peace.
• 29:02
  And let's reverse engineer our lives that way.
• 29:06
  I love it.
• 29:07
  I just, I'm listening to this story and I love that, you know,
• 29:11
  you're writing a book for other people and you teach for other people,
• 29:15
  but you're also teaching yourself.
• 29:17
  I'm living it, yeah.
• 29:18
  Talking to me assumption, I made me assumption,
• 29:19
  but I think like everything that you put out into the world,
• 29:22
  this is how I operate.
• 29:23
  When I tweet something or when I put out a post,
• 29:26
  like, yeah, maybe people think it's cool.
• 29:27
  They retweet it and I'm like, bro,
• 29:30
  just talk to myself.
• 29:31
  That was a note to myself that I should be learning.
• 29:33
  Yes, yes.
• 29:34
  I mean, anytime I write like a, never yell at your kids again,
• 29:38
  that's a note to myself, right?
• 29:40
  That's not me lecturing y'all.
• 29:41
  That's me, you know, here's the other,
• 29:43
  here's the, how that story ended.
• 29:45
  I left, I went and checked into a hotel for about 10 days,
• 29:48
  seven to 10 days, I'm around.
• 29:49
  It was over a week and I started the book over again
• 29:53
  because I realized in that moment,
• 29:56
  I was not living the principles of the book.
• 29:59
  I was right.
• 29:59
  I was lecturing people and so I left and I went
• 30:02
  and sat in a hotel surrounded by a bunch of gummy candies
• 30:05
  and I pulled up a seat at the bar and said,
• 30:09
  hey, me too, let's figure this thing out.
• 30:11
  And I was, it made it for a totally different experience
• 30:14
  because I wasn't living the things I was lecturing America about.
• 30:17
  And I'd created a very, very anxious home.
• 30:20
  And my wife and my kids and I, we all deserve more than.
• 30:24
  So anxiety in that particular instance
• 30:28
  before you fixed and solved and sort of took a fresh perspective
• 30:33
  on what you were writing and what you were teaching
• 30:35
  and what you were, you know, putting down to the world,
• 30:37
  anxiety was very much tied to your identity, right?
• 30:39
  It was all tied to who you are
• 30:42
  and the culmination of your life and your work.
• 30:46
  So if you were going to, and I think that maybe one of the first things
• 30:50
  that people can do outside of just taking a good hard look at themselves
• 30:53
  is find a way to remove the stress and the anxiety from their identity.
• 30:58
  So don't feel like this is who they are.
• 31:00
  This is just a part of their life
• 31:02
  that hopefully they can eventually work through and fix.
• 31:06
  Outside of removing yourself,
• 31:09
  going to the hotel, posting up at the bar,
• 31:12
  getting some gummy worms or whatever, and writing your book,
• 31:15
  how did you start to remove the negative portions of anxiety
• 31:19
  and stress that were included in your being
• 31:22
  from your identity so you could operate as a person
• 31:25
  who can now try and fix it?
• 31:26
  Does that make sense?
• 31:27
  Yeah, it sounds like semantics,
• 31:30
  but I didn't try to remove anxiety.
• 31:33
  I tried to be honest about what my body was trying to tell me.
• 31:37
  My body was trying to tell me you've got to rest.
• 31:40
  My body is trying to tell me you've got to reconnect with your wife.
• 31:44
  Y'all are now running parallel lives in the same house.
• 31:48
  You've got to repair your relationship with your kids.
• 31:51
  So it was, the anxiety was right.
• 31:54
  My body was working great.
• 31:56
  It was me asking, okay, what are the things
• 32:00
  and where are the fires in my house?
• 32:01
  I need to put out some of this, the alarms will quit ringing.
• 32:04
  If I deal with the fires, the alarms take care of themselves,
• 32:06
  and I don't want to live in a house
• 32:09
  so that alarms, by the way,
• 32:11
  the goal is into removing anxiety from your body.
• 32:14
  You can do that pharmacologically,
• 32:15
  and it'll kill you.
• 32:16
  Your house will burn down.
• 32:18
  I want those alarms to go off.
• 32:20
  I just have to know that when they go off,
• 32:22
  it's my body trying, as Wendy Suzuki says,
• 32:24
  Dr. Suzuki, she says, anxiety's a friend.
• 32:26
  It's just getting your tension, dude,
• 32:28
  and I want it to get my tension,
• 32:30
  so I can go address the issue that it thinks is at hand.
• 32:36
  So then, when you even look at the name of the book
• 32:39
  is a non-ancient life.
• 32:41
  So actually, that's not even what you're trying to achieve.
• 32:45
  The result will be anxiety not impacting you to the same degree,
• 32:50
  but ultimately, it's about understanding where it comes from.
• 32:55
  So follow the path, man.
• 32:57
  And if you do these things on a regular basis,
• 33:00
  of course you're going to have trials,
• 33:01
  you're going to tribulations,
• 33:02
  your mom's going to get cancer,
• 33:03
  your wife might cheat on,
• 33:04
  like things will happen in your life,
• 33:06
  but your body will always know you're in the dry receipt.
• 33:10
  And it is not,
• 33:11
  doesn't have to sell in the alarms,
• 33:12
  because it can handle things if you've got margin,
• 33:15
  if you've got a foundation bill.
• 33:17
  Success story is part of the HubSpot podcast network.
• 33:20
  In the network, there are other incredible podcasts,
• 33:22
  like the Opt Authority hosted by Natalie Gingrich.
• 33:25
  Every week on the Opt Authority,
• 33:27
  Natalie discovers actionable strategies
• 33:29
  to move your business forward
• 33:30
  and transformational stories of powerhouse business owners
• 33:34
  who value operations.
• 33:35
  You can't ignore backend pieces that have to work together
• 33:38
  and flow smoothly in order to build a brand,
• 33:41
  grow a movement, or disrupt an industry.
• 33:43
  If the operation side of your business is a mess,
• 33:46
  putting out fires will always take priority,
• 33:48
  leaving no room for creative innovation,
• 33:51
  visibility, or networking with powerhouse peers
• 33:54
  or even wannabe powerhouse peers.
• 33:55
  You gotta get your house in order,
• 33:58
  and to do that, you have to listen
• 33:59
  to the Opt Authority wherever you get your podcast.
• 34:02
  So I love frameworks and you built one
• 34:05
  that is pretty powerful.
• 34:06
  So there's six choices.
• 34:08
  Explain to me what these choices are solving for.
• 34:11
  So now you've sort of figured out
• 34:12
  that you're not getting rid of anxiety.
• 34:15
  It's a signal, listen to the signal.
• 34:17
  So these six choices that you've built a book around
• 34:20
  and you've written about and you speak about,
• 34:23
  obviously reality, connection, freedom, mindfulness,
• 34:25
  health and healing and belief.
• 34:27
  So can you give me an understanding of how these,
• 34:31
  I mean, those are just words to me.
• 34:33
  How do they impact me?
• 34:34
  How do I apply them?
• 34:35
  What's the routine?
• 34:36
  What's the playbook?
• 34:37
  What's the framework so that these will at least
• 34:39
  help me start to move in the right direction?
• 34:41
  So I think by labeling them choices,
• 34:45
  the initial, when I send the draft out to a few of my friends
• 34:48
  who are in the, you know, academic nerds
• 34:51
  or clinical professions or whatever,
• 34:53
  and their initial pushback was,
• 34:55
  nobody chooses to be anxious.
• 34:56
  I said, you're right, we don't,
• 34:58
  but we do choose lives or we get thrown into lives
• 35:01
  and our body sounds the alarm, right?
• 35:02
  We do light fires and then the alarms go off.
• 35:05
  And so I tried to take all the neuroscience
• 35:07
  and all the yada, yada, yada,
• 35:09
  a partition of paratry and to still it down to
• 35:11
  what are the six most common things
• 35:14
  that our bodies sell me alarm on?
• 35:16
  And that's that path, right?
• 35:19
  And so for most of us, a few of these,
• 35:22
  if I told you, hey, man, you gotta start exercise.
• 35:25
  For me, that's easy.
• 35:26
  I feel good.
• 35:27
  I've been exercising my whole life. I love it.
• 35:29
  If you tell me I gotta go sit with a doctor
• 35:31
  and do blood work every year and hate me with doctors,
• 35:34
  but okay, I'll do that.
• 35:37
  If you tell me I gotta deal with my childhood trauma,
• 35:39
  you can go to hell, I'm not doing that, right?
• 35:41
  I'm good, I will flex through it
• 35:43
  and look how much money I made, right?
• 35:45
  And so, or if you tell me to be mindful,
• 35:48
  it may be that your power is in your anger,
• 35:50
  in your rage, in your witty, sarcastic responses,
• 35:53
  or the way you drive up on the bumper
• 35:55
  of somebody when they cut you off.
• 35:56
  That's where you feel powerful.
• 35:58
  And so when I tell you,
• 35:59
  it's not out.
• 36:01
  That guy cuts you off, take your foot off
• 36:02
  the accelerator for a second.
• 36:03
  What in the past?
• 36:05
  Going about your day, you might say there's,
• 36:08
  I can't do that.
• 36:09
  So most of the time people work through this path
• 36:11
  and a couple of these are real easy,
• 36:13
  a couple of them are challenging
• 36:14
  and a couple of them feel like a nightmare.
• 36:17
  And I would suggest you both start where it's easy
• 36:20
  and then you head right into the nightmare part.
• 36:22
  Why are you so resistant to paying off everything you own?
• 36:25
  I don't care about your interest rates,
• 36:26
  I don't care about net worth,
• 36:27
  I don't care about any of that crap.
• 36:30
  If your body knows they could fire me
• 36:32
  and they can't take my house and they can't take my car
• 36:35
  and they can't take food for nine months
• 36:36
  because I'm my own emergency fund,
• 36:38
  I promise you you will sleep better.
• 36:40
  I promise you you will be able to deal
• 36:42
  with things in your marriage differently.
• 36:44
  Then if you, I've got a mortgage
• 36:46
  and I'm taking this, I took a heat lockout
• 36:47
  and I'm investing it over here
• 36:49
  and then I rob and hood it,
• 36:50
  your body's gonna be screaming at you 24-7.
• 36:53
  You're not safe, you're not safe,
• 36:54
  you're not safe, you're not safe, you can take the house.
• 36:56
  And so that's the point, that's the path
• 36:59
  and it's like brushing your teeth
• 37:01
  and putting on the other end every day.
• 37:03
  Have I called a friend today?
• 37:04
  Did I stop for 30 seconds and look my wife in the eye
• 37:07
  until I love her?
• 37:09
  Did I connect with my kids?
• 37:11
  Did I exercise today?
• 37:12
  Do I really need that bag of gummy candies, right?
• 37:16
  Do I need to make an appointment with the counselor?
• 37:17
  Just checking in with yourself.
• 37:19
  And we're gonna make that a part of our life.
• 37:21
  And then it would take a few hours
• 37:23
  that the beginning takes about five minutes.
• 37:25
  I sat on the airplane yesterday
• 37:26
  and pretty spun up, I've been traveling like crazy
• 37:29
  and I pulled out, I do try to get some cooler
• 37:32
  I asked Jaco when we were doing an event
• 37:33
  and I was like, hey, I need like a cool, there's not one.
• 37:36
  It's just a diary, it's just a journal
• 37:38
  but I just go through it real quick, man.
• 37:39
  What is your body trying to get your attention about?
• 37:41
  Well, dude, I ended up with like two and a half pages
• 37:43
  like, oh, my life's crazy right now.
• 37:46
  Of course, I'm anxious.
• 37:47
  And so I'm not going to wore my body anymore, man.
• 37:50
  I'm just gonna figure it out.
• 37:50
  And then I'm gonna take the next thing I can control.
• 37:53
  One of the most, I actually, I'll ask you
• 37:56
  and then I'll have my own opinion.
• 37:58
  But I'm curious which one you think
• 38:00
  out of these six people have the hardest time with?
• 38:04
  Because I have my own thesis
• 38:05
  but I wanna hear, you know, you've done the work.
• 38:08
  So yeah, what do you feel like?
• 38:09
  I'm globally speaking.
• 38:14
  What I would call those who follow the religion of theory,
• 38:21
  they struggle with the choosing freedom part,
• 38:25
  the clutter and the calendar and the boundaries
• 38:29
  and the finances.
• 38:30
  Just because there is, like, I'm not gonna pay off
• 38:33
  my 3% mortgage because I'm making 4% in the market.
• 38:37
  Like, they try to make it a math problem
• 38:39
  and it's not, anxiety's not a math problem.
• 38:42
  I would say the two biggest challenges are connection
• 38:46
  and like you gotta have community.
• 38:49
  I think it's hard for people to do these days.
• 38:51
  I think choosing health and healing,
• 38:53
  if you look at the obesity statistics is very, very hard.
• 38:56
  And I think choosing belief is a nightmare
• 38:58
  for most people in the 21st century.
• 39:01
  I was gonna pick beliefs because I love the thought.
• 39:05
  And first of all, you know,
• 39:08
  you can get into a conversation about God
• 39:10
  and how we live in a Godless society
• 39:11
  and God is a whole bunch of different things
• 39:13
  to different people.
• 39:14
  But I love the concept of, if you do not believe
• 39:17
  in an institutionalized or formalized religion, Christianity,
• 39:22
  Judaism, Islam, Pica, Eastern religion, Hinduism, Buddha's,
• 39:27
  if you don't believe in something that's formalized,
• 39:29
  you have a God, you just may not be aware of what it is.
• 39:33
  It could be work, it could be porn,
• 39:35
  it could be women, it could be drugs,
• 39:38
  it could be drinking, it could be,
• 39:40
  it could be something that you think is healthy,
• 39:42
  but you definitely worship it.
• 39:44
  And worshiping anything is not, that's not great.
• 39:48
  Well, that's that beautiful David Foster Wallace.
• 39:52
  Yeah, cool, like, as an atheist,
• 39:55
  he was like, we are made to worship
• 39:56
  and you will worship something.
• 39:58
  And if you worship beauty, you will never be beautiful enough.
• 40:01
  You'll always see every wrinkle.
• 40:02
  And if you worship money,
• 40:04
  there will always be somebody with a nicer car, bigger house.
• 40:06
  Like, you will worship something.
• 40:09
  And so the question is, what are you gonna worship?
• 40:12
  I think it's probably more dangerous to,
• 40:14
  and unless it doesn't matter if you're religious or not,
• 40:16
  like, it doesn't, doesn't mean anything to me,
• 40:19
  it doesn't change who you are as a person,
• 40:20
  but if you do not believe in formalized or institutionalized
• 40:23
  religion, then I think that you are not aware
• 40:26
  of what you worship and you're not aware
• 40:28
  of the ideology you subscribe to.
• 40:31
  Well, and you don't realize,
• 40:34
  I think we intellectualized that,
• 40:36
  I don't think you realize that your nervous system knows
• 40:38
  you are anchored into the fact that you have no wrinkles.
• 40:42
  And now you're taking, you've moved from facials to Botox,
• 40:46
  and I even from Botox to Surgery,
• 40:47
  and I even from Surgery to, like,
• 40:49
  the path doesn't end, but your body knows
• 40:51
  we are anchored into something that can't hold.
• 40:53
  The center can't hold.
• 40:55
  And I'm a Christian guy, like, my family is as Christian,
• 40:57
  like, that's our, that's our gang,
• 41:00
  but the approach in this chapter was very much anthropological
• 41:04
  and evolutionary psychology.
• 41:07
  For all of human history,
• 41:09
  people have walked outside of their tent
• 41:11
  and fall into the ground and look to the sky
• 41:13
  and said, dear God or God, please reign,
• 41:16
  or my family will die.
• 41:18
  And then in the last 150 years, we've gotten so arrogant,
• 41:21
  and we think that we are the center of the universe.
• 41:25
  And I think we're all realizing right now,
• 41:29
  we burn the last of our institutions down during COVID,
• 41:33
  education and government and any sort of religious narrative
• 41:36
  that bound us together.
• 41:38
  And I think we have become a completely untethered humanity.
• 41:43
  And we were never designed to float around like balloons,
• 41:45
  and I think our bodies are screaming at us
• 41:47
  to reconnect, reconnect.
• 41:49
  And right now, the only connection we have is a culture,
• 41:52
  the only unifying factor we have as a culture
• 41:55
  is who we hate together.
• 41:57
  We have no unifying, hey, we're all going this way together.
• 42:01
  And so you have to believe in something bigger than yourself.
• 42:04
  I've got atheists friends who fully understand
• 42:08
  and believe, it's not a matter of belief,
• 42:11
  but just they are truly intertwined with, I am born
• 42:15
  and I will live and I will die
• 42:18
  and I will become part of the soil.
• 42:19
  And that tree will, like they get to
• 42:21
  they are part of something bigger than themselves.
• 42:24
  And there are people all over the planet
• 42:27
  who are plugged into different systems.
• 42:28
  The point is you have to have something bigger
• 42:31
  than yourself that you're plugged into,
• 42:33
  or your body won't let you rest, it can't.
• 42:36
  What's the healthy thing to plug into for the person
• 42:40
  that is quote unquote secular?
• 42:43
  Maybe even an atheist that hasn't even given it
• 42:45
  that much thought.
• 42:46
  The concept of I am born, I die, you know,
• 42:50
  I decompose, I get turned into a tree,
• 42:53
  that's even like a level further than some people
• 42:56
  who are secular who just don't think they just do.
• 42:59
  They don't even think about it.
• 43:01
  So what do you follow?
• 43:03
  A less sexy word or it's almost like a culturally
• 43:08
  inappropriate word for plugging into something
• 43:12
  bigger than yourself, the word is submission.
• 43:15
  And our entire culture is wrapped around it.
• 43:17
  We don't submit, we don't tap, we don't quit.
• 43:20
  And what I am telling folks is at some point,
• 43:23
  you will take a knee, whether it's before cancer,
• 43:26
  whether it's before your spouse dying,
• 43:28
  before your kid, I've sat with too many people in my career
• 43:32
  whose kid has passed away in the next room over.
• 43:34
  There will come a moment or multiple moments
• 43:36
  when you will be humbled.
• 43:38
  That's why AA is so powerful.
• 43:40
  I cannot control this, it is bigger than me.
• 43:44
  I'm turning this over to something bigger.
• 43:46
  SA is the same way, gamblers, anonymous is the same way
• 43:49
  you have to submit.
• 43:50
  And so for the atheist out there, for the person
• 43:52
  who's just trying to grind and earn and go snap into
• 43:55
  Slim Jim and is thinking the next certificate,
• 43:58
  the next car is gonna bring them that anchored in peace,
• 44:03
  submit that your map is not gonna end in a destination
• 44:07
  that you wanna show up in.
• 44:09
  And then you have to reverse engineer
• 44:11
  what a submission look like for you.
• 44:12
  But you have to look at some point,
• 44:14
  you will look to the sky and say,
• 44:18
  I can't, please help.
• 44:19
  And I think that's the moment.
• 44:22
  And that's where Jesus feels that for my family, for me,
• 44:25
  and like I say, everybody's filled,
• 44:26
  it fills it with different places,
• 44:27
  but it's that moment of submission.
• 44:30
  This is not, I can't carry this anymore,
• 44:32
  because submission would be the first step
• 44:34
  in the self-awareness, because if you can't submit,
• 44:37
  then why would you look inside?
• 44:38
  If you can't submit and think that something's bigger
• 44:40
  than you would, then why would you think
• 44:42
  that something's wrong with you, right?
• 44:43
  Well, I think people know something's wrong.
• 44:46
  They just know there's a solution out there.
• 44:48
  There's a pill for that, there's a drink for that.
• 44:49
  There's a new Netflix series for that.
• 44:52
  There's another woman who they can swipe right
• 44:53
  and there's a man in the cubicle over there.
• 44:56
  That's not their husband, right?
• 44:57
  They keep going, and going, and going, and going.
• 45:01
  But I think deep down, yeah, and that's a,
• 45:03
  does this book's a book about reflection, man?
• 45:06
  Like reverse engine in your life.
• 45:08
  I love how Peter Tia talks about medicine 3.0.
• 45:11
  Like we're really good at solving medical problems,
• 45:15
  but what if we worked really hard on pushing out
• 45:17
  how long it takes you to actually get
• 45:19
  one of those medical problems?
• 45:20
  That's hell, right?
• 45:22
  And so, man, we're really good at plan
• 45:24
  to whack them all with anxiety symptoms
• 45:26
  with all kinds of pharmacological agents
• 45:28
  and different hacks and sleep stuff and temperature.
• 45:33
  Like we can hack our way at all kinds of things.
• 45:36
  But dude, what if you just got into the middle of that
• 45:38
  and said, what if my body just fell asleep at night
• 45:41
  because I was tired?
• 45:42
  And what if I drink coffee in the morning
• 45:43
  because I wanted it not because I have to?
• 45:45
  And what if when me and my wife got sideways,
• 45:49
  I knew she loved me and I'd go anywhere
• 45:50
  and I could say, hey, here's what it's going through my head.
• 45:54
  That's just a peaceful way to live.
• 45:56
  Or in the book I wrote about, my cousin brought,
• 45:58
  while I'm finishing the book, he just died, right?
• 46:00
  Just freak, just died.
• 46:02
  And peace was not that my family's gonna live forever.
• 46:08
  Peace was, for 15 years, my wife and I had worked really hard
• 46:11
  to not owe anybody any money.
• 46:13
  And we're not super rich.
• 46:15
  We just worked real hard.
• 46:16
  We do have corollas and old F-150.
• 46:18
  Like we just drove junky, old cars
• 46:20
  and we bought smaller houses.
• 46:21
  And so peace was not that people
• 46:25
  aren't gonna experience tragedy.
• 46:26
  Peace was, dude, we just got a couple of Southwest flights
• 46:30
  in a hotel and I was able to go
• 46:32
  and I had the privilege of being real real sad.
• 46:35
  That's what peace was, right?
• 46:36
  And grief is right and sadness is right.
• 46:38
  But there wasn't angst.
• 46:39
  How are we gonna do this?
• 46:41
  We have to borrow this.
• 46:42
  We're gonna have to call a friend
• 46:43
  and see if we can borrow his credit card.
• 46:45
  And I have to, that wasn't peace.
• 46:46
  Peace was, I could show up and just breathe.
• 46:49
  You know, there's a concept called,
• 46:53
  you know this concept you speak about it,
• 46:55
  but being anti-fragile.
• 46:57
  Yeah, and the greatest books of our time.
• 47:00
  I love it, but do you think that people misinterpret
• 47:06
  what anti-fragile means?
• 47:08
  In the sense that you will overcome adversity at all costs,
• 47:12
  you'll push through, you won't listen to signals,
• 47:14
  you will become impervious to the outside world
• 47:19
  and you will win in spite of everyone else.
• 47:23
  Is that what more people consider to be anti-fragile
• 47:27
  than what they should actually consider to be anti-fragile?
• 47:31
  Well, yeah, because I mean,
• 47:32
  till now it's so clear and I don't know
• 47:33
  how our culture twisted it up.
• 47:36
  It's just like hustle culture, right?
• 47:37
  Like, yeah, dude, it's like,
• 47:39
  it's like the message on cocaine and red bull,
• 47:41
  and it just missed the whole point.
• 47:43
  The whole point of being anti-fragile is being insanely
• 47:49
  conservative and safe in certain areas.
• 47:52
  So that you can be kind of reckless in other areas
• 47:56
  and if the reckless pays off, you win exponentially.
• 48:00
  And if everything collapses, you actually get stronger
• 48:04
  because you're so rooted, you're so anchored.
• 48:07
  So what does anti-fragile look in my life?
• 48:09
  I will over, over invest in my marriage.
• 48:14
  Insanely over invest in my marriage.
• 48:16
  I don't spend money without talking to my wife about it.
• 48:18
  My wife and I make plans.
• 48:20
  We talk about my book schedule.
• 48:22
  We talk about my speaking schedule together
• 48:24
  and people call me a simp and they'll say you're stupid,
• 48:26
  you're an idiot, whatever, fine.
• 48:28
  I will over invest in not in glorifying my children
• 48:32
  because they're not the center of my household.
• 48:34
  But I want my kids to know that dad's house, mom's house
• 48:39
  is always the safest place you can come.
• 48:42
  You can always come home.
• 48:43
  And they need to feel that in their nervous system,
• 48:45
  not just be lip service.
• 48:46
  So I over invest in that area and by over investing
• 48:50
  in those areas, I over invest in exercise,
• 48:52
  take care of my body, I over invest in therapy
• 48:54
  so I can have a clear head.
• 48:56
  So that I can repel off the side and be like,
• 49:00
  let's write a third number one book in three consecutive.
• 49:03
  Let's go on a speaking tour and not stuff.
• 49:05
  Let's do this many more shows
• 49:07
  because now I can go out there and I'm playing
• 49:09
  on house money because the things that matter,
• 49:12
  my wife, my kids, my family, finances,
• 49:15
  I can't, you cannot take my house away from me
• 49:17
  because it's mine now.
• 49:18
  That allows me to play on Vegas money and dude,
• 49:21
  now we're gonna go have a good time.
• 49:22
  And if I lose Vegas money, that sucks, right?
• 49:25
  But you can't take my house.
• 49:27
  And most of us don't realize we're playing on borrowed money
• 49:31
  when I'm playing on house money.
• 49:32
  And so yeah, we miss, yeah, we're so there.
• 49:36
  And you're a mid-dillon knows it.
• 49:38
  And so yeah, anti-fragile is,
• 49:42
  I'm not gonna do anything that if this goes wrong,
• 49:45
  I lose it.
• 49:46
  That's one of the cornerstones of anti-fragile, right?
• 49:50
  You know what, we missed that.
• 49:52
  We totally missed it.
• 49:53
  And then, you know, you just mentioned something
• 49:55
  that was just like a light ball for me said,
• 49:57
  I invest in my family, I invest in my wife,
• 50:00
  I communicate everything we're doing.
• 50:02
  People call me a simp.
• 50:04
  There is a totally counter-culture of not respecting
• 50:11
  and not over-investing and being this isolated,
• 50:15
  this island of a person.
• 50:16
  And that's what leads to the people thinking that,
• 50:20
  if you're catering to a woman or your wife
• 50:23
  or your partner, it's ridiculous.
• 50:26
  And I just wanna understand,
• 50:28
  if you have any opinion on how we got to the point
• 50:30
  where trying to pursue a super strong, healthy marriage,
• 50:35
  over-investing, clear communication
• 50:37
  and all the things that are so great,
• 50:40
  why is that looked at as a negative thing?
• 50:43
  It's hard and it's vulnerable
• 50:47
  and somewhere along the way, because here's the deal.
• 50:49
  Every day, Esther Pearl talks about this,
• 50:51
  every relationship is a risk,
• 50:53
  every minute of a relationship is a risk.
• 50:55
  I'll care if you met somebody 30 minutes ago
• 50:57
  or you've been married for 40 years,
• 50:59
  you still wake up every day and say,
• 51:01
  this is me, do you still love me?
• 51:03
  And modern men are such freaking cowards
• 51:08
  that they avoid that confrontation
• 51:12
  and they go borrow a bunch of money to get shiny cars
• 51:15
  and they juice up and get big muscles
• 51:18
  and they go get their hair done perfectly
• 51:20
  and they get waxed up perfectly
• 51:21
  and they get their shirts and jeans tailored
• 51:24
  to avoid looking across the table from somebody
• 51:29
  or looking at the person asleep in the bed next to you
• 51:32
  and saying, this is all of me, do you still love me?
• 51:36
  And we are such cowards, such cowards.
• 51:40
  And I mean, go look at the Hollywood movies,
• 51:43
  go look at 300, go look at those Spartan movies,
• 51:48
  those dudes were locked in to their family system
• 51:54
  and that's what allowed them to go train like maniacs
• 51:57
  and then go out for two or three or four years
• 52:00
  or whatever, so they get, they're so locked into their tribe,
• 52:05
  their system.
• 52:06
  And now do we have these pseudo systems?
• 52:08
  You can get a bunch of red pill bros on the internet
• 52:12
  and that's what I was thinking.
• 52:13
  You think it all bound up, dude, you don't know those dudes,
• 52:17
  you know what I mean?
• 52:18
  Like you don't know those dudes
• 52:19
  and it's when you hang out with real,
• 52:21
  like I trained him in May for a long time
• 52:23
  and so those dudes went pro,
• 52:25
  it's when you hang out with pro fighters.
• 52:26
  You know who they are, by and large,
• 52:29
  it's the nicest guys in the room all the time
• 52:32
  because they have nothing to prove.
• 52:34
  There's, when you hang out, there's always idiots everywhere
• 52:37
  but when you hang out with guys that have insane, insane,
• 52:41
  multiple, multiple comma, net worth,
• 52:44
  they're the loveliest guy they're hilarious.
• 52:46
  It's like I had nothing to prove,
• 52:48
  they have nothing to prove.
• 52:50
  It's that middle ground that dude
• 52:51
  who's totally fragile, completely alone
• 52:54
  and thinks he's watched a lot of John Wick movies
• 52:57
  and watched a lot of YouTube videos
• 52:59
  and takes jujitsu classes
• 53:01
  and he thinks he's got the world figured out.
• 53:03
  There was a good grief, dude.
• 53:06
  I'm losing her name.
• 53:08
  I think she was out of the University of Houston.
• 53:10
  She's a researcher that basically said
• 53:11
  if there's a system, systematic societal breakdown,
• 53:16
  if everything, you know, it all goes down, bro.
• 53:20
  The single greatest hedge against it all coming down
• 53:23
  is not a 50 cow in your backyard.
• 53:26
  The single greatest hedge to everything falling apart
• 53:30
  is having an extraordinary ironclad relationship
• 53:32
  with your neighbors.
• 53:34
  So you want to be countercultural and anti-fragile,
• 53:37
  gets to know the people in your neighborhood,
• 53:39
  gets to know the people who live above you and below.
• 53:41
  You be the guy that knows,
• 53:43
  ham and go pick up his medicine for him
• 53:45
  because he's an elderly guy at Walgreens
• 53:48
  and it all comes down.
• 53:49
  He's gonna be the guy with soup, right?
• 53:51
  He's gonna be the guy that will let you have
• 53:53
  some of his water.
• 53:54
  And it's just, it's too easy to avoid
• 53:58
  that scary age old question.
• 54:00
  Am I enough, and do you love me?
• 54:02
  And so we've created this whole proxy world
• 54:04
  on the internet that says you can avoid that completely.
• 54:07
  Well, it seems like what we experience
• 54:09
  is we experience higher divorce rates than ever.
• 54:13
  And this, and, you know, I don't want to go on too many tangents
• 54:16
  because these are all very, you know, complex topics.
• 54:18
  I don't want to oversimplify them,
• 54:20
  but I think a lot of it does come down
• 54:22
  to a lot of the things that we've been speaking about today.
• 54:24
  So higher divorce rates, maybe a little bit of the death
• 54:27
  of the nuclear family.
• 54:28
  And then this weird red pill counterculture that you see
• 54:33
  and these people, you know, young men that don't date
• 54:38
  or don't have sexual partners.
• 54:40
  And it's all, and then there's a whole other side
• 54:42
  of the spectrum, which is also strange and weird
• 54:46
  and too much woke and too far left and too far right.
• 54:51
  Extremes on both sides.
• 54:52
  I'm a Canadian, so I did not realize the extremes
• 54:56
  that you even see in US culture
• 54:58
  till you come down here, exceptional extremes.
• 55:01
  They go back to what it goes back to what we were seeing earlier
• 55:03
  about we have an allergy to discomfort.
• 55:08
  And we are now led around by our feelings.
• 55:10
  And if I'm quote unquote not stealing it
• 55:13
  in my marriage right now, we say stupid things like,
• 55:17
  well, I guess this marriage just ran its course.
• 55:20
  Like, no, you quit.
• 55:21
  And you can quit.
• 55:22
  You can do that all you want, but it doesn't just stop.
• 55:25
  Right.
• 55:26
  If you are led around like you have a nose ring
• 55:31
  and you're led around like a bull by your feelings,
• 55:35
  your life's gonna be a disaster
• 55:37
  because there's seasons when work is just boring.
• 55:39
  There's seasons of parenting.
• 55:41
  It's miserable.
• 55:42
  It's just boring.
• 55:43
  There's seasons of marriage that are not fireworks
• 55:46
  and super bull ads.
• 55:47
  It's just boring.
• 55:48
  It's just day in and day out and sex is boring
• 55:51
  and the making dinner and cleaning up is boring.
• 55:55
  It's just boring and it's still right, you know what I mean?
• 55:59
  And so we just have an allergy to discomfort
• 56:03
  and we don't know how to then say, hey partner,
• 56:06
  I'm struggling with feeling alive.
• 56:11
  Can we build something new?
• 56:12
  It's like, yep, we can't.
• 56:14
  I remember when my wife got pregnant with Hank,
• 56:18
  we had had several years of infertility,
• 56:20
  it was messy and then my wife got pregnant
• 56:21
  with my first son or my only son, my first kid.
• 56:25
  And I remember about three or four months in,
• 56:29
  I was like, okay, like in nine months, I get my life back
• 56:35
  and then Hank was born and I was like, all right,
• 56:38
  it's probably longer than that.
• 56:39
  So like in nine more months or a year,
• 56:41
  then I'm gonna get my life back.
• 56:43
  That life where I could just go out to eat
• 56:45
  whenever we could go out to eat whenever we wanted,
• 56:46
  we could make out whenever we wanted,
• 56:47
  we just had extra money to burn.
• 56:50
  And it wasn't until my son was three or four
• 56:54
  that I realized, oh, that life is over now.
• 56:57
  And now the two choices I have are to be miserable
• 57:01
  to just that quiet life of desperation and cash out,
• 57:03
  watch a lot of TV, stop working out, stop investing
• 57:06
  in my marriage or I get to build something completely new
• 57:09
  and we've never been married with a kid.
• 57:11
  So now we've got to build a new marriage.
• 57:13
  And now I have two kids and now I've got a kid
• 57:15
  going into high school.
• 57:16
  Now I'm never been married, not a high school kid.
• 57:18
  So now me and my wife this summer are gonna build a new marriage
• 57:20
  and now it's the most exciting fun thing I get to do.
• 57:23
  Because we get to re-ask all those fun questions,
• 57:25
  like what are you into?
• 57:26
  What are you reading?
• 57:27
  What are you thinking about?
• 57:28
  Do you need space, less space, more space?
• 57:30
  All the things are amazing and exciting and fun
• 57:33
  and they interject life back into your world
• 57:36
  and you don't have to hide from all the scary stuff.
• 57:39
  You get to jump right in the middle of it.
• 57:40
  And it's all on the other side of hard work.
• 57:42
  It's all, all.
• 57:43
  Yeah.
• 57:44
  Yeah.
• 57:45
  Man, you've got, it's like you've found a secret list
• 57:48
  of all Deloney soap boxes, man.
• 57:50
  But that's awesome.
• 57:51
  No, I just, I, listen, you're a great role model
• 57:54
  and I just love like just like unpacking how you think
• 57:57
  through life because, you know, candidly,
• 58:00
  what I just refer to,
• 58:01
  I don't see a lot of great role models anymore.
• 58:04
  I don't, it's sad.
• 58:06
  It seems like the people that we follow,
• 58:09
  I put in air quotes, the role models are just,
• 58:12
  the loudest saying the most phrasey outlandish shit.
• 58:16
  And I don't think that's how most people are,
• 58:18
  but I think that that's who we find on the internet
• 58:22
  and because we're so isolated
• 58:24
  and we don't have good community ties
• 58:26
  and we don't have groups that we hang out with on our day to day
• 58:29
  and we clock in the work and we go home and we're depressed
• 58:31
  and we feel like our partner or our boyfriend
• 58:34
  or girlfriend or husband or wife
• 58:35
  isn't even on our team anymore.
• 58:37
  When we clocked out five years ago,
• 58:39
  you know, who do we, who do we follow?
• 58:42
  Well, we follow the person on our feed
• 58:44
  as opposed to somebody who actually put in the work
• 58:47
  and tried to build something good.
• 58:48
  So you just, you just nailed America right there.
• 58:51
  Man, well done, well done.
• 58:52
  Hey, but here's where I'm super hopeful.
• 58:55
  Yeah, I think that the tide is turning in a profound way.
• 59:02
  People have realized we're there, we're here now
• 59:05
  and people have realized we can choose something different
• 59:09
  and that's what makes me super optimistic.
• 59:13
  I was the dean of students at some undergraduate,
• 59:15
  graduate schools and then I took a job
• 59:18
  as the dean of students at a law school
• 59:20
  and there was three of us in the country at the time
• 59:22
  that were dean of students at law schools
• 59:25
  that were not attorneys and they brought me in.
• 59:27
  So it's very rare that somebody has this job
• 59:29
  and they brought me in just to help deal
• 59:31
  with the mental and emotional challenges
• 59:33
  that law students experience
• 59:35
  in such a trying educational environment.
• 59:38
  And I remember it was about the first three or four months
• 59:41
  and I kept coming home every day
• 59:43
  just complaining to my wife over and over.
• 59:45
  And her PhD is in curriculum instruction.
• 59:46
  So she, her academic career was training teachers.
• 59:50
  And so I'd come home and complain and come home and complain.
• 59:53
  These students don't have to write emails,
• 59:54
  they don't have to talk, they don't have to help people
• 59:55
  in the eye, I was just whining all the time.
• 59:57
  And one day she said, hey, I was thinking,
• 1:00:00
  you should quit and I was like, what?
• 1:00:02
  And she goes, yeah, clearly all these students
• 1:00:05
  are just too stupid for you.
• 1:00:07
  You should quit.
• 1:00:08
  And I looked at her and she goes, or they hired you
• 1:00:12
  to teach them, maybe you could teach them.
• 1:00:15
  And it really became a, oh yeah, that's my job.
• 1:00:18
  And so we've got the most anxious, insane culture
• 1:00:22
  that's ever existed.
• 1:00:23
  Okay, like I'm not gonna be in my head against the wall.
• 1:00:25
  Let's start offering, here's what this looks like,
• 1:00:27
  here's what this feels like, here's a path here.
• 1:00:30
  And let's awkwardly, weirdly go practice this.
• 1:00:35
  And I'm confident that over the next 10, 15 years,
• 1:00:38
  as the world changes in some ways,
• 1:00:40
  and some ways doesn't change at all,
• 1:00:43
  that there is gonna be some radical,
• 1:00:45
  I'm just gonna move the Kansas man.
• 1:00:47
  Like, you know what I mean?
• 1:00:49
  I'm gonna go fishing, my company's at 10 million,
• 1:00:52
  year over year, I'm good.
• 1:00:55
  Like I'm whole or I'm gonna sell my company
• 1:00:58
  and then I'm gonna go to work for a small startup over here.
• 1:01:01
  Like I think there's gonna be a positive move
• 1:01:07
  because people are just done with it.
• 1:01:09
  I agree.
• 1:01:09
  And you know, the point about your wife is checking,
• 1:01:14
  you're complaining and sort of opening your eyes.
• 1:01:17
  I think this is another thing that not enough people
• 1:01:20
  really understand like the power of a good partner
• 1:01:24
  that you are vulnerable with.
• 1:01:25
  I'll tell you something just a very quick story,
• 1:01:28
  your story reminded me of a little bit about my girlfriend
• 1:01:32
  soon to be fiancee, soon to be wife,
• 1:01:33
  been together for a long time.
• 1:01:34
  Yeah, get it.
• 1:01:36
  Yes.
• 1:01:36
  But you know, I've gone through so many different jobs,
• 1:01:41
  careers, businesses, just things while we've been together.
• 1:01:45
  It hasn't been 20 years, been five years enough time
• 1:01:48
  to go through different versions of my life.
• 1:01:50
  And she pointed something out,
• 1:01:51
  because every time I'd be doing something,
• 1:01:53
  I'd be complaining about, oh, you know,
• 1:01:55
  co-founders, it's shit, can't get their stuff together,
• 1:01:58
  like I really can't stand this,
• 1:01:59
  I want to do something else or like this job sucks,
• 1:02:02
  like I can't stand it, I want to quit,
• 1:02:03
  like why am I here?
• 1:02:04
  Anyway, every time I say it, she's like,
• 1:02:07
  okay, then do something else.
• 1:02:08
  Like I don't care, like good, I trust you,
• 1:02:10
  your smile figure it out.
• 1:02:11
  But every time she's like, just so you know,
• 1:02:14
  I keep track of everything that you've done
• 1:02:16
  and nothing has ever been good in your mind,
• 1:02:18
  nothing's ever been good and look at
• 1:02:20
  what has actually ended up happening
• 1:02:22
  and it's been quite good.
• 1:02:23
  And she's like, so when you're in it,
• 1:02:25
  you as a person cannot see the positive
• 1:02:28
  and all you do is complain and wind
• 1:02:29
  and it works out in spite of that.
• 1:02:31
  So I always trust you to move on to the next thing
• 1:02:33
  but know that you have to remove yourself
• 1:02:36
  from the shit that you're dealing with right now.
• 1:02:38
  And I know it sounds so simple
• 1:02:40
  and I consider myself a, I'm not a nine-stime
• 1:02:43
  but I'm not an idiot either.
• 1:02:44
  And in the moment when you're doing the thing,
• 1:02:47
  it is very hard for you to take an objective look
• 1:02:50
  at what's going on and having whether or not it's a partner,
• 1:02:54
  whether or not it's a friend
• 1:02:55
  you can truly call a friend that isn't just around
• 1:02:58
  because I don't know because you're cool
• 1:03:02
  or you're rich or whatever,
• 1:03:05
  like it's a true friend that has been with you
• 1:03:06
  through thick and thin for, you know, since high school.
• 1:03:10
  Whatever that person is, vulnerability,
• 1:03:12
  it's a superpower because it reframes
• 1:03:15
  how you look at problems.
• 1:03:17
  And all of a sudden when you look at problems
• 1:03:20
  in a non-objective way or you check back in
• 1:03:23
  with somebody with a different view of your reality,
• 1:03:25
  it's like your decision making gets better,
• 1:03:27
  your energy levels, your cortisol reduces,
• 1:03:29
  your sleep gets better, it will physically
• 1:03:32
  like literally save your life.
• 1:03:34
  Because if you didn't have that person
• 1:03:36
  and you do that for 10 years
• 1:03:37
  and it's non-stop my life and everything is breaking,
• 1:03:40
  you're gonna have a hard attack.
• 1:03:42
  While you're not gonna be very healthy.
• 1:03:43
  That's beautiful, man.
• 1:03:47
  I hope everybody listen to your show,
• 1:03:49
  kicks that message with them.
• 1:03:51
  It, like dude, when you get stressed
• 1:03:54
  or you're in the middle of it,
• 1:03:55
  your body is in fight or flight.
• 1:03:58
  And you're, you cannot think when you're like that.
• 1:04:01
  And so I'm like you, I outsource things
• 1:04:04
  because I get emotional.
• 1:04:06
  And what, when I get emotional,
• 1:04:07
  that's what makes me good at my job.
• 1:04:09
  But it makes me a terrible seeing things
• 1:04:13
  as they really are in the moment guy, right?
• 1:04:16
  And so I have to have people in my life.
• 1:04:19
  When I, somebody cut and paste something
• 1:04:22
  on social media once.
• 1:04:23
  And again, I'm new to this whole social thing.
• 1:04:25
  It's just kind of taken on, it's wild.
• 1:04:29
  But somebody wrote a really awful thing back to me.
• 1:04:33
  And I was still new to it and I was like,
• 1:04:35
  man, what I do to this guy?
• 1:04:37
  Well, I cut and pasted it and I reposted it.
• 1:04:40
  And I, I'm not gonna lie, dude.
• 1:04:42
  My comeback was probably the one of the funniest jokes
• 1:04:44
  I've ever told in my life.
• 1:04:45
  Like I laughed out loud at my own joke.
• 1:04:47
  That's how funny.
• 1:04:49
  And I get this call from my buddy, Kevin,
• 1:04:52
  who is the CEO of a lawn care company in Texas.
• 1:04:55
  He's about 10 years older than me
• 1:04:56
  and you can hear his laugh across the country.
• 1:04:58
  He's just one of those moisturists.
• 1:05:00
  It's one of those laughs.
• 1:05:01
  You just start laughing when you hear it.
• 1:05:02
  You don't even know what the joke is.
• 1:05:04
  I pick up the phone.
• 1:05:05
  It's 10 minutes after I post this thing.
• 1:05:07
  He is dying laughing.
• 1:05:10
  And I start laughing, you know, like, like what?
• 1:05:12
  What are you calling for?
• 1:05:13
  He can't catch his breath.
• 1:05:14
  And he finally is like, oh my gosh,
• 1:05:15
  that thing you just posted is so funny.
• 1:05:17
  I was like, I know, it's amazing.
• 1:05:19
  And he goes, oh, he finally catches his breath.
• 1:05:21
  And he goes, oh man, hey, take that down.
• 1:05:25
  And I was like, what are you talking about?
• 1:05:27
  And he goes, take that down.
• 1:05:29
  And I got kind of indignant.
• 1:05:31
  I was like, dude, that's funny.
• 1:05:32
  And he goes, that was super funny.
• 1:05:34
  Take that down.
• 1:05:36
  And I go, why?
• 1:05:37
  And he said, the world doesn't need another ass.
• 1:05:41
  And number two, that's not you.
• 1:05:43
  That is you pretending to be some like, yeah,
• 1:05:47
  like he's like, that's not you.
• 1:05:48
  That's not who you want to be in the world, man.
• 1:05:51
  And I was so mad and he was so right.
• 1:05:54
  You know what I mean?
• 1:05:54
  And so I have to have people like that in my life
• 1:05:57
  that will, yeah, that was funny.
• 1:05:58
  And we're not gonna do that.
• 1:06:00
  Or there is a couple of chapters in this book.
• 1:06:02
  At least these, I get it.
• 1:06:04
  The all the information is correct
• 1:06:06
  and it's probably important.
• 1:06:07
  Takes away from the story you're telling here.
• 1:06:09
  And so we're gonna cut them.
• 1:06:11
  But I trust you, right?
• 1:06:13
  Or my wife says, we have enough, man.
• 1:06:15
  I don't believe, I don't feel it in my body,
• 1:06:17
  but I trust her.
• 1:06:18
  And so that will get me until I can get calm again.
• 1:06:21
  And then I can look at the numbers
• 1:06:22
  and we can make some different decisions.
• 1:06:23
  So I think outsourcing emotions and feelings
• 1:06:28
  is really, really an undervalued proposition,
• 1:06:31
  especially for entrepreneurs who are going at it alone.
• 1:06:35
  You gotta have people in your life.
• 1:06:37
  Yeah.
• 1:06:38
  Okay, one last thing that I love to do,
• 1:06:43
  I mean, your life has evolved as since you've written this book.
• 1:06:48
  What's one thing that you thought of
• 1:06:52
  has happened to you?
• 1:06:53
  You've learned since you wrote the book
• 1:06:56
  that you would have liked to have included in it.
• 1:06:58
  That winning won't make you well.
• 1:07:05
  Whatever success you have, you go with you.
• 1:07:09
  And so until you deal with you and make peace with you,
• 1:07:15
  make peace with 15-year-old you,
• 1:07:17
  make peace with 20-year-old you,
• 1:07:20
  make peace with the things your mom and dad did or didn't do,
• 1:07:26
  you can't, you cannot run it.
• 1:07:28
  And I wish I'd been more clear about that.
• 1:07:31
  I knew that intellectually.
• 1:07:32
  I didn't know that in reality,
• 1:07:35
  until I experienced it on the back end of this.
• 1:07:38
  And so I wish I had included that.
• 1:07:39
  That winning, whatever you define as winning,
• 1:07:42
  selling your company,
• 1:07:43
  making another comma in your top line,
• 1:07:46
  getting another comma in your bottom,
• 1:07:48
  none of that will heal you.
• 1:07:50
  Winning won't make you well.
• 1:07:52
  I love it.
• 1:07:53
  All right, where are people gonna reach out?
• 1:07:55
  Where do you wanna send people?
• 1:07:56
  Man, after and only after they listen to your show,
• 1:08:00
  you can come over, I have a call-in show,
• 1:08:01
  like Old Frazier Crane, Dr. Phil of it.
• 1:08:04
  People call in and we just handle their situation live.
• 1:08:08
  The Dr. John DeLone show, you can get on YouTube
• 1:08:10
  and anywhere you get podcasted.
• 1:08:11
  And then you can go to johndeLone.com for all my books
• 1:08:14
  and books, you're in all the stores and everything.
• 1:08:17
  You can get those amazing.
• 1:08:18
  Yeah, I'll put all the,
• 1:08:19
  any links you want to send them over.
• 1:08:20
  I'll put them in the show notes.
• 1:08:22
  I think I have most of the links anyways already.
• 1:08:24
  But last thing, you know,
• 1:08:26
  you've got through a ton of different seasons in your life.
• 1:08:29
  Looking back, what would be one thing
• 1:08:31
  you tell your 20 year old self?
• 1:08:33
  Wisdom is not intellectual, slow down.
• 1:08:36
  You can read every book, you can listen every podcast.
• 1:08:39
  But until you've been in a room
• 1:08:41
  where 10 people just got fired,
• 1:08:42
  until you've been in a room where you can read about death,
• 1:08:45
  until you've told the mom, your son has died.
• 1:08:49
  You can read about divorce,
• 1:08:50
  but until you're holding a woman
• 1:08:52
  whose husband just packed up in the loft
• 1:08:53
  and she can't stand up because she's weak, that's wisdom.
• 1:08:56
  And so I'll tell my 20 year old self, chill out, chill out.
• 1:09:00
  What yourself in more situations
• 1:09:01
  where you can actually experience these things,
• 1:09:03
  stop just trying to hack it and read your way around it,
• 1:09:06
  get in the middle of it.
• 1:09:07
  So that means you've got to work hard.
• 1:09:09
  But I was just slow down, chill out.