Dr. John Delony: How to Break Free from Anxiety! Build A Non-Anxious Life

If we're not careful, anxiety becomes an identity, becomes a label, becomes a way we operate in the world.

If we want to build a non anxious life, there's some core reckonings that we must have with ourselves.

I'll remember this till the day I die. I walked with the family behind closed doors for the last year or so when they first sat down and said, our four year old daughter's been diagnosed with a rare brain cancer and she probably won't be here this time next year. All the way through memorial service, calling me and asking me, we have to pick out a dress she's going to be buried in. How do we pick what songs? Like questions no parent should ever, ever ask. The dad looked at me at the funeral and he said, most people spend their entire life avoiding pain and we weren't given that opportunity and so we had to go straight through it. They held hands and walked straight through the gates of hell.

I'm not even going to compare my life to that in any way because it would be disrespectful. If you can learn how to love your fear just like you would love your wife, love your boyfriend or girlfriend, then that's actually how you achieve mastery through your emotions, is by learning how to love your fear.

It's just an internal alarm system that your body sets off. So when we give it more power and we give it more credence, when we stamp that label on our souls, then it begins to dictate all of our actions. Is that going to be hard? Scary? Yes. But that's me heading straight into the fear. And eventually you become appreciative of the alarm, not scared of it or running from it. The alarms are a good thing, man.

Hey, it's Josh. Before we get into this episode, I have a small yet powerful favor to ask of you. The community has been growing by thousands lately and the bigger the tribe, the bigger names of world class guests we can have on this podcast that I can bring to you from my heart, from my curiosity, so you can have more wellness and wisdom in your life. Would you please be so kind as to hit the subscribe button wherever you're watching or listening to this podcast. It'll allow us to rise naturally in the algorithms based on your 2 second act of generosity by you just tapping that little subscribe button wherever you're viewing or hearing this episode. Thank you so much. It means the world to me and our entire team here at Wellness and Wisdom. Now Enjoy the Podcast. Dr. John, welcome to the podcast, man. Thank you for being here.

Thank you, man. I'm grateful for your a. Your incredible hair, dude. That's something else.

Thank you. Thank you. I gotta give credit to my mom. I got it from my mama.

Oh, I thought your mom was your barber. Okay, so your mom. So you got great hair. And thank you for your hospitality, man. That's a good time.

You're so welcome, man. You know, this. This madness, but also beauty that we're all experiencing on planet Earth right now, specifically in North America, I guess you could say. It's kind of like Oliver Twist in a way. It's like, it's the best of times, it's the worst of times, wherever we choose to focus our attention. I find it really interesting, a man who has reached, at this point, probably billions of eyes and ears. Is it billions, capital B that you've reached?

Probably not, but I'll accept it. Probably not even close, but I'll accept it. I accept that.

From your initial start doing two PhDs, which, by the way, less than like 0.25% of PhDs go for another PhD. So I want to get into that with you. Did you ever. Looking back, it's 2020, but did you ever. When you started in mental health, when working with kids in education, did it ever even freaking occur to you that you'd be on a national syndicate blasting your truth across North America and the world? Like, was that ever a reality for you when you started?

It was the opposite. I actually, I worked for the Things we're Seeing Come True now with AI and with tracking and all that stuff. I was in some meetings back in 2011 and with some of these tech overlords. And I remember coming home and telling my wife, we can never put a picture of our kid on the Internet. We can, like, walking through a bunch of different. Like, I don't want to exist on that. In that world. I don't want to exist. And so, yeah, when I took this job, I had zero social media. None. In fact, the. The media company that I work for, part of the deal is they. They take control of your assets, right? They come get your, like, your name and your. All that kind of stuff. And they came back and they're like, you know how easy it was to get all of your stuff because it. Nobody had claimed it. And I was like, yeah, I told you guys, I don't have it. They're like, we. We knew you said that. We didn'. You. So, dude, I didn't. I didn't want to exist on the Internet at all. And so, yeah, four years later in this madness. No, man, I would never have drawn this up, not even a little bit.

That's so wild. I think about how challenging it is to get a PhD in any field, specifically your field. There's a lot of nuance there. You have to go through your own personal hero's journey, I'm sure multiple times to even get one PhD. Why two? I mean, that gives me anxiety just to think about it. We're talking about your book in so many ways. The Building a Non Anxious Life, which is amazing. It's in the show notes wherever you all are watching or listening. But man, two PhDs, like, what inside of you was the fire that pushed you that way?

So I've never, I've never been asked this question like this. So I appreciate that. And here's the honest to God answer. And I actually hope this provides clarity and maybe some direction for folks listening. I finished a PhD in higher education, so studying college students and studying how the university system works from the inside out. And one of the things as I wrapped that up, I think it was in 2010, it was very clear the higher ed system would collapse on itself. No ifs, ands, or. But it couldn't keep going. I, of course, am an overreactor. I'm an OCD kid. And so I assume that that collapse would be in 18 to 24 months. It won't be. It'll be in. It'll be a. Have a much longer tail to it. But a. That seed was planted. This, this isn't going to last forever. And I have this. I have this catastrophic fear of being 52 years old and unemployed and looking at my kids and saying, I can't. I don't know how to feed you guys. And so that was one seed that, that I had to start looking for an offering. My master's degree was in education. My. My PhD and my whole work experience was in education. And so if that was to shift in some way, I'd put every line I have in the water in one little pond. And if that pond runs out of water, then my family's in a mess. The second thing was when I started working in education in 2000, and then I started working at University Systems in 2000, I think three and four, the challenges young people were facing and their families were facing. By the time I got to 2010, 2011, it had gone from where do I want to work? And this dot com bubble had just burst. And now's a good time actually to get into tech. And what, what's the world going to look like to my students kept trying to die by suicide. And their families were a complete train wreck. And students were starting to slowly get into fentanyls. Students were slowly starting to challenge their gender norms. Like it. I was watching and I was just, oh, here's the deal. I was over my head. And then the Title 9 stuff came through with sexual assault everywhere. And some of those that scab got peeled back. I'm sitting with these young, a majority young women who'd been assaulted. And I just needed some more tools. And so I went back to get a master's in. In in counseling and Clinical Psych. And they said, hey, it's because of your previous coursework. We can actually get you through quicker if you get another PhD. I turned out to be not really not true.

Doesn't sound like it.

But the first PhD I got because I wanted to have a certificate on the wall. The second one I dedicated my life to because I. People's lives were in the balance, right? And it was a transformative experience that second time around.

It's wild to think about Moore's law and the law of accelerating returns. It's almost like technology is feeding and fueling so many things. One thing I want to jam with you about today is a call you had in your show where a woman said, my stepdaughter thinks she's a fox. Which, let's talk about that later, because that is just a micro of, I think the macro of the Watiko mind virus. Just really negative cloud almost in the collective that I think many of us are feeling, John, on such a deep level. It's like there's never been a greater time to speak truth into the world on platforms like yours and mine. But also, paradoxically, there's also the most darkness and the most light at the same time. Now, whether those esoteric terms resonate with you, I don't know. I'm sure part of it, part of them, they do.

I can get really existential too much. My wife's always saying, okay, I got it, the world's coming to an end, but what can we do right now? So she's always re anchoring me. So that's my bent. I don't think it's is as nefarious as we think it is. I think if you take the. The long tails out, there's idiots at the. At the ends of both spectrums, right? But in the middle, I think you have a group of young people who by design are designed to imagine and feel and explore. And that's amazing. I told this story in that particular call. On any given day I can look out and see my daughter who's in a who admittedly is in a GT program. She got much more of her mom's brain than her dad's. But she'll be out in our back field. We live on some acres outside of Nashville with a sword of some sort and a last night she was listening to the Hobbit and she'll have one of the dogs in some and wearing a princess dress. She literally, dude, is in another planet. She is not with us.

Yeah.

And I love that. I want her to imagine and explore and if I go even further, she wants dude. When I was in high school, you know what I tried on in Texas? I was a starter, a two year starter on the varsity team. About 8,000 people, 7,000 came to our games every week. I was high school football. I tried that on. It didn't fit. And then I got into metal and punk rock and I wanted to be punk rock. That didn't fit. And also went to my local church. My dad quit being a cop, became pastor and I want to be super Jesus freak. That didn't fit. And so I was trying on all these different things and that's what young people are supposed to do. That's just adolescent development.

Yeah. Yeah.

And then suddenly we've turned our kids into the epicenter of our homes and everything in our world revolves around our children. And now we've told parents, if your kid is sad, if your kid is uncomfortable, you, parent are failing your children and they're going to grow up to do X, Y and Z and they're probably going to end up dead. And so now you have a group of parents who are terrified to take on their seven year old. The seven year old cannot bear the weight of that responsibility, the weight of a household. And then you end up with these. Hey, please identify. My daughter thinks she's a fox. On any given day, my daughter thinks she's any number of things they're supposed to and go be a fox, put on a tail, put on ears, run around the yard. But when you come into the kitchen table, we're all going to sit down and talk about our day. Right. And you're not going to go to the bathroom in a, in a litter box. You're going to go to the bathroom in the bathroom. Right. So that we need some adult boundaries. And parents I think are so frozen that they don't want to hurt and ruin and destroy their children depending on what narrative you believe that they've just bought into it. I don't think it's because they believe that their kids a fox. I think they believe that if they do something wrong, their kids can end up with some really drastic negative consequences. So everybody's just frozen. And I think you're right. I think it's letting parents know, no, this is madness. This is madness.

Stop.

Stop. And it's both.

And right, like you said, there has to be an anchor of really, like a sovereignty around parenting and a sovereignty around real, true family. So you said it's not as nefarious. I want to go into that a little bit because I'm sure you get a lot of calls that are probably flavored in this way. That's just an egregious example. You know, someone. That's a pretty big one. It's pretty glaring. But. But I'm sure, and I wonder how you feel about this, there is a narrative in mass media, specifically coming from Hollywood, that there is no gender, there's no such thing as a man. Mothers aren't mothers. They're chest feeders. I mean, it's just absolute insanity. It's not something that we need to get stuck in the weeds on. But there is some light that you get to shine from not only a psychotherapy perspective, but the audience you have and just the conversations you hold. This has to come up so much. Can you provide some clarity on what you think the psychology is behind how people fall into this trap in the first place of believing that all these things are real, these narratives are real?

Well, I hold that one, and I'll be honest with you, that one doesn't come near as often as I sat down with our people, the people who work with me and represent me, if you will, to some significant, powerful, conservative media outlets. And their quote was, people don't want to talk about mental health. They don't believe in it. They don't think it's real. They don't talk about emotional health. They don't talk about relational health. And so it's both sides presenting this. If you have a feeling, it's because you're weak and you're a coward and you're a. Or your feeling is the only thing that matters. Whatever you feel is this quote unquote, your truth. And so the world needs to bend to the arc of whatever you feel on a certain day. Both of those narratives are insane. Right? They're both madness.

Yeah.

And so I think the truth is, most of us land in the middle. We know everybody, we Know, we know. I remember sitting back at some of these national conferences, these national mental health conferences, and people being like, hey, we want to love every single person who walks in one of our client offices, no question. But are we for real? Are we for real right now? Like, I'm a woman, right? And it was this very, like, clear, yeah, like we've just kind of the, the, the, the, we've jumped the shark. And at the same time, I want to be able to tell that six year old little boy who grew up in Texas, you're not crazy just because you got hit in the head with something and your dad yelled at you, quit crying, you big. It didn't hurt. And he says, no, no, that did hurt, dad. But I want to, I want to be like him because he's big and strong. And so for the rest of my life, I'm going to outsource any feeling I have to a group to a mob. And that's how you end up 25 and looking around going, okay, who am I supposed to hate? Oh, them. Okay, I'll hate them. Right? You outsour feelings your whole life. And so I think all of it's madness. And I think it's a. I. And I also believe this with all my guts. I think 95 of the people sit inside the bell curve. They're just like, dude, I, I was at an event that Malcolm Gladwell, I was speaking at event, and Jordan was there, but Malcolm Gladwell's there. And Malcolm said something powerful. He said, if before we had any sort of debates on issues, if we would first pull out a piece of paper and write down real quick all the things we agreed on, that list would be a thousand. You want your kids to be safe? Yes. You want to be able to go to school and go to church without getting shot up? Yes. Do we believe in this? Do we believe in this? Do we want to be able to buy a home? Yes. Do we want to be able to do all these things? We all agree on that. And then there'd be three or four things that we want to go to war over. But if we anchored into this thing first, dude, then you can just. Man, it's like UFC fighters, man. They all 99 times out of 100, they hug after the fight. They both know we're just trying to feed our families. This is our job. And I love the phrase, one of my buddies who's a pro fighter says, I want to put a hurting on somebody. I don't want to hurt anybody. Right. I don't want them to die. But I want to win, right? I want to get paid. And so all of that. That's. That's all of us. That's all of us, man. And as. As for me, I'm kind of done. I'm kind of done going to war. I want to sit and help hurting people, man.

I went through such an emotional reconciliation and ladder during the whole lockdown Covid stuff. And that was actually the burge of your book, right? You were going through your own personal journey. That's the. The origin essentially, of the book. I mean, not to mention you two PhDs stacked on top. But the anxiety that you were feeling was so real. And I loved how you shared so eloquently and just personable. I think why people resonate with you, John, is yes, you have this academic bolus of intelligence, but yet you're real. You say, hey, bro, hey, dude, let's talk. Let's get real. And I think that's so much more trustable. It's so much more trustable than somebody who speaks with perfection and says all the right things in the most perfect way. You're just not as put together as a lot of the other people. And I say that actually as a compliment. Like, you have tattoos. You're just authentically yourself. That's why I think people are resonating with the book. Do you feel like the rock and roll grunge that you went through when you were, I guess, in a part of high school, that. That flavored kind of your authentic vibe, and I think that's why people resonate with you as people brought that up to you before the rock and roll, the. The grunge. I think you even played. I've seen you play instruments on stages. And I don't know if you say I'm a pretty.

I'm a pretty amazing guitarist. I'm pretty amazing guitarist. I'm actually not great at all, but I love it still. Yeah, I still play to this day, if I'm super honest. I still have. Am friends with three of the four, and one of them passed away. So three of the four kids that I grew up on the same street that growing up when I was a kid growing and two of them didn't go to college, one of them went to college, and the week after he graduated was hit by a semi. His frat brother ran a stop sign. He was hit by a car. He's a paraplegic. And those are my three closest buddies that I've known. Like, you don't have very many choice Chances in life to have 40 year friendships. That's what those guys are. And so, bro, if I start walking in, talking pretentious to my brothers, dude, it won't be a pretty day. And so I can. Like, I used to have a reputation for being multilingual, but I only spoke English. Like, I can put on a suit and I wore a suit and tie for 20 years and it covered up my tattoos. But I can sit and talk with president and I can run spreadsheets with a cfo. But yeah, when at the end of the day this last month, I saw Circle Jerks and Bad Religion and Descendants and Social D in the same month, man. Like, I still love being at old punk shows. And so, like, that's where my heart is. That's where I love. And those kids, those kids. My boss, and he's become a great friend. Dave Ramsey says by design, this company, we're not going to sit at the cool kid table. Those kids have enough. They've got enough. We're going to sit with the single moms, we're going to sit with the truck drivers who might read one book a year, make it a book that they can read and understand and feel like you're talking with them, not Adam. And that pervades the culture of this company. And so that's who, that's. Those are my people, dude. I grew up with cops. I grew up with. I mean, that's just, that's my world. And so it'd be, it would be false to talk highbrow with people. Right? I think. Or at people. I think people want to be talked with and not at.

Agreed. My brother lives in Thornhill, North Tennessee. You love the vibe out there in Tennessee. Do you do lectures and do you have in person events in Tennessee that you host that you speak at?

Well, I mean, yeah, it's kind of a, it's a, it's, it's a lot of hat switching. So it goes from, I did an exec 2 hour executive coaching scene with an executive team this morning. I saw Knocked Loose last Wednesday and got my head knocked off in a mosh pit. I'm way too old for that now. Those kids are getting bananas. They're awesome. And then, yeah, I'll speak at the Tennessee Counseling association meeting as, as a, as a key, like with my fellow nerds. And so, yeah, I speak all over the place, all over the country. Was just in Dallas and then I'll be in Los Angeles, all over the place. But yeah, I do speak a lot. And it just depends on, on the audience, whether it's a few. A few months ago I on a. I spoke to 300 LDS women in Utah and then I got on a plane and flew and met Jocko and a group of 2,000 construction workers on the beach in Virginia. And then we did a keynote. So it's all over the place. But the message resonates, which is, I know you're hurting and I know you want something different and you don't have a picture of what that even looks like because your dad didn't show up, your mom didn't show up. And let's sit down together and pass a drink or pass the nachos. Let's figure this thing out. Everybody's in that place right now.

I've been there so many times in life. It wasn't until I had a connection to God where I, I didn't contemplate suicide, but it was 2014 and really the origin of this podcast, gosh, man, it's been almost 10 years. I can't believe it. Freaking millions and millions of downloads. And I'm like, I don't care about being famous, but I do care about the truth and I do care about being as integrity based as possible. And I think that a lot of our success, and I know yours, has probably come from anxiety and pain and depression and these emotions that many of us feel, but yet we don't have the faculty to process them effectively. You talk about it as chaos. So in the book there's six core sections, six choices for less chaos. I think it's fundamental to life as a human. We just have chaos at times. We, we go through those because that's the way that our creator designed it. That's actually how we grow. But you said something that hit me in the heart so deeply. You said, winning won't make you well.

Yeah.

And that is for entrepreneurs. Myself, you know, I'm a very hard charging person at times. I think a lot of people that have that maybe a type personality can relate to, you know, pushing their demons in the closet and hoping they'll go away, but they come out and they come out with interest. And this phrase, winning won't make you well. When you said that, it was just like something that maybe was written in Egyptian times, stamped in a hieroglyphic. It's like that could be timeless wisdom that everybody could, could take hold of. Winning won't make you well. What exactly do you mean by that?

Do you remember the ESPN documentary, Michael Jordan that six? It was an amazing documentary of the Chicago Bulls and, and Jordan. And then I forgot the name of it, but it was a. It was a masterpiece. It was such a great series. And they talk about the greatness of Michael Jordan and how he outworked everybody. And he was really tough to be a teammate with because he demanded such excellence and all these things. There's a scene in maybe the third or fourth episode where he's just signed this 90 million dollar contract, which 20 years ago was a jillion. I mean, a cosmic amount of money, right? And he's laying in a hotel and he can't go out in the lobby and go to the bathroom. He has nobody in this giant hotel suite. And he looks at the camera and says, you do not want to be me. And then they went on to get the sixth championship. And I'll never forget, I was laying there on the couch watching this thing and it. And it was just n at me. And they went up and showed the six pieces of cloth hanging from the rafters in Chicago Bulls arena. And these two words kept going through my mind over and over and over. For what? For what? Now that dude's got $5 billion. He's got multiple family members, kids he has only surrounded by people who is on his payroll. He's roundly known as somebody that no one wants to hang out with. Like, and I keep going back to for what? For what? And that's an extreme example, right? That's the greatest basketball player of all time. And if you want to get your name in a trophy case, that's cool. For most of us, we want our kids to be happy that we just drove up in the driveway. We want our spouse to their shoulders to drop and them to kind of get a smile in the corner of their mouth when we walk in the house. Not. Not tense up. And that's what I'm aiming for. That's the for what? Right? And so if you make $5 million, that's amazing. What did that cost you? And you immediately go, all right, how do we make this 10? What is that going to cost you? Because that's a different cost analysis than get into the five. It's a different ball game to go get 10. And we all think, I'm gonna go to the next level. Well, here's the deal. The dudes on the next level don't just concede their spot. They will fight you trying to come up that ladder, right? And they'll kick you in the mouth and they'll twitch and alter their business. So I keep going back to for what Now If I talk to Dave Ramsey, he is pathological about the single mom driving down the road that sees a billboard and says, I've got to get out of this abusive marriage. My husband keeps hitting me. I'm out, I'm out, I'm out. But I know it's going to cost me. I don't have a place to live. And I look up and see financial freedom. And he goes, and she says, I'm calling that number, dude. You want to see a guy? That call better be answered with, with compassion and dignity and respect. And those resources better be in stock and ready to go. But it's, it's an obsession with that mom driving down the road. And so that's the. For what right? Or some people have it about their faith, or some people have it. Like we were just talking off air. Our buddies at Mind Pump are so sick of watching people come in a gym who hate themselves and get some crappy trainer who then piles shame and guilt in just heaps of ash on the back of these people and takes their money and they get no results. And they got so sick of it. That's there for what right? And you like, find your why. This is deeper than find your why. This is for what right? And yeah, at the end of the day, if you want to cross the finish line and your kids don't know you and your spouse, you're on spouse three and all, that's fine, but it came at a cost. And we'll golf clap you and look at your net worth. But I always come back to this one was one idea. The answer to the question, what are you worth? Is never a number. Never a number. The question, I mean, the answer to the question what are you worth? Is who do you love and who loves you, period? I don't care how you vote, I don't care what you do for a living. Who do you love and who loves you? If you can't answer those questions, you are not winning. I don't give a crap how much money or influence or power you think you have. And so going back to winning won't make you. Well, I always, I just was meeting with a group of executives last week and one guy's sitting with his wife and it was, it was mayor, it was couples, and he's 50 something years old, he's cashed out and he can't take his foot off the gas. And I could watch, I just stared there and looked at his wife and she's watching their golden years that she's been waiting for for the 20s and 30s and 40s when he missed holidays and late nights and all this stuff, miss kid stuff. For this magic moment I looked at him and said, dude, for what? He goes, I have to win. I said, for what? Right? And I think that's the question that most of us avoid most of our lives. The for what question.

So good. Yeah, I heard from someone, I wish I could quote them, but you know, the real success is when you get older. Do your kids want to hang out with you? Do they actually want to spend time with you? That's the biggest reward. Because what are we doing all this for anyways, John? For what? Why am I doing any of this? Why do I want to reach millions of people? It sure is hell ain't to have my face on a billboard so I can feel better about myself. It's so I can help people liberate themselves. That is my for what? I know what it's like to be completely disempowered. To be a slave to my own mind. To be a slave, which you talk about in the book, to anxiety. Anxiety drove my life. It's what caused me to have porn addiction for 20 plus years. The only path out of that was through it. Through a connection to a higher power. Through a connection to myself, actually. The learning how to love myself. I came from East County, San Diego, which is not in the 90s and early 2000s, the best place for spiritual growth and development, you know. And my parents did the best they could, John, as we all do with the level of consciousness we have. But it's so fascinating how if we want to build a non anxious life, there's some core reckonings that we must have with ourselves about how we've been projecting that anxiety on other people and making our anxiety their problem. I really want you to speak to that. The projection aspect is huge. We've explored this with Judd Brewer and I want to get your take on this. Why do we project?

That's like saying, all right, so we got some good basketball lessons for Michael Jordan. Let's see what you so judge the goat and Judd is the anxiety.

He is the goat. He is the goat. I wonder your take on this though.

I think it comes again back to the. The non nefarious. I think we started solving for comfort. You've probably met with Michael Easter, one of my good buddies. Like he wrote the Comfort Crisis and if you haven't, you got to get him on the show. He's amazing. Okay, but okay, I think we started solving for comfort. Like why ride A horse. So we can get there in 25 of the time in this cool thing called a car. Well, why have wooden wheels? And we could have rubber wheels and put shocks on this thing. And we don't all get there with back problems. Right? We've been solving for comfort at a pace that far outpaced our body's ability to shift. And so over time, we have solved these problems that have plagued humanity for all human history. You and I can just push a button on our phones and phone and food would show up. While we're talking to each other, you and I are having a conversation. We're in different states, right. It's madness. And we've run out of things. And again, I'm speaking globally. Of course there's poverty. Of course there's really gnarly things. We both know that. But on the whole, we've run out of things to be uncomfortable about. And so it shifted into this world of ideas and feelings. And now it's not just okay to like, when I was going to college, being uncomfortable was the freaking point. Why in the world would I pay a hundred grand to have somebody just regurgitate what I already think I believe and feel like I needed a group of people to challenge my beliefs, to help me grow, scaffold me so I could grow further and higher, rethink things, reconcrete things, shatter concrete and rebuild. That was the point. And now people don't go to a certain college because those professors believe different than me. We've completely dumped it on its head. And in the process, I've now have a group of. Of young people the last 10 years who've been trained. If you are uncomfortable, that's a matter of violence. And so the world's job is to not ever make you uncomfortable. Well, dude, that's cute. And comfortable. In times of when. Of times of plenty. Right. In times of. Of peace. That's all good. Everybody quitting their jobs and going to start, you know, move to five acres out in the woods to start the little hobby farms is all cool until last night here in Tennessee when tornadoes ripped through here and all the trees were down. And I was out this morning as the sun was coming up, moving logs out of the, like so the, the, the neighborhood wouldn't flood. Right. With my. I mean, it's, It's a different ball game when things get sideways.

Yeah.

And so I don't think we got here on, on purpose. I think we've just naturally become accustomed to never being uncomfortable, never being challenged. And now all Of a sudden, we've had 10 or 15 or 20 years of walking into the weight room and somebody takes the weight off the bar and we lift that bar, and now all of a sudden, we need strength, and we don't have it because we've been going to the gym and there's been no resistance at all. And that's just not how the world works. And Judd, I got this, actually, from him. If we're not careful, anxiety becomes an identity, becomes a label. It becomes a way we operate in the world, and it begins to direct us. As you mentioned, I don't go out because I got social anxiety. I don't. I don't date because I've got this type of. I'm not going to take this job because I've got this thing. As though anxiety is. It's a. It's like covet. It's like a thing you get catch. Or the flu. It's a thing you get catch. It's not. It's just an internal alarm system that your body sets off, right? And so when we give it more power and we give it more credence, when we stamp that label on our souls, man, it begins to dictate all of our actions. We find ourselves in these safe little bubbles in our room with our phones, and that's a dangerous, dangerous, dark place.

To be right now, especially for men. I talked about my upbringing in East County, San Diego, and I don't know about your upbringing. I wonder how that flavored, you know, specifically your relationship with your parents, your dad, and maybe even your early colleagues. Was there a shedding, a coming home to vulnerability with yourself? Because no matter if it's Brene Brown or anybody in this field, it's really about, can I take an exhale and be vulnerable in the moments that matter the most? That's actually where the growth is. Did you have some shedding in your early career around your own vulnerability?

Oh, man. My great grandfather died when my grandfather was 10. My grandfather was a World War II vet who fought Nazis, who raised my dad, who was a homicide detective slash hostage negotiator. When this. When someone's going to jump off a building or had a bomb, they called my old man. And he'd come in there and sit with him and talk them out. Yet there's not a lot of warm and fuzzy in those worlds, right? And so, yeah, I mean, I was raised, you suck it up, you don't show it, you work hard, and those aren't bad things. But they're not bad things. In context, they're devastating. When your wife is sitting across the table from me saying, you don't know me, me. And I'm saying, we'll put it in a spreadsheet. Let's figure it out. And she's like, no, no, you don't know me. And I can't be married like this anymore, because I'm not a. I'm not a car engine to be fixed. I am a person to be with. And by the way, I'm smarter than you. You just won't shut up enough. Right? So, yeah, dude, I've had. I've had 20 years of having to learn a new way to operate in the world. And here's what's really powerful I have seen in my own life. Not intentionally. I'm not that smart. I didn't know about this. This world I was entering into. All I know how to do is tell the truth. And so the number of people who have reached out personally about that book you're holding and said, I can't believe you told these stories. I can't believe how open and vulnerable you were. I didn't know enough to know that we're supposed to keep those things secret, because I do know that secrets will kill you. And so I think what people are so desperate for right now is someone to sit with them and go, yeah, dude, me too, right? Me too. Not. Well, you know what you should do, right? Those days are over. The influencer days are over. We need people who have been there and who also know what they're talking about and have walked with a whole bunch of other people. Will you sit with me, too? Right? That's where we're at right now. And so. Dude, I'm. I'll shut up, man. You're punching all my soapbox buttons, man. That's awesome. I love it.

Well, listen, I mean, the podcast is wellness and wisdom. I don't think we can have wisdom unless we're vulnerable enough to share our life experience. Right? So. So one thing I've loved so much in your work, and you've said this a lot, and so, you know, you've heard this again, but maybe my audience is hearing this for the first time. You said, when our body senses and signals that we're lonely, I think loneliness is really just disconnection from the emotion that we're experiencing, because if we were really vulnerable, we'd reach out to a friend. That's a whole different skill set. You said science has shown that it's actually more detrimental on a physiological level to Our system than smoking cigarettes when we're lonely. I mean, that just rocks my world. Blows my mind. Everybody knows, all the doctors say, every medical professional says cigarettes will kill you. But loneliness has almost the same frequency to the nervous system.

Oh, I think it's. I think it's worse. I think it's worth. How so? Because I think there's some case to be made. Not with cigarettes, of course. There's some case to be made about the neuroprotective benefits of nicotine. Not. Cannot be said for loneliness. Right. I think we bought into this. There's a great quote and I forget who it is. And it's kind of guided our. Our lives. I think therefore I am. Right. That's the ancient quote. And then the other one is a man. I forgot off top of my head, dude. I'm sorry. It was a long, long night last night with tornadoes. The gist of the quote is most of the angst in our world is because a man can't sit lonely by himself. They can't sit. And strangely, I wholeheartedly reject that. I think if I look around, we have sat with ourselves long enough. We are design, we are tribal creatures, period. And I think the reproductive, the reproducibility epidemic and psychological research, if your listeners, you probably have talked about this, but these studies that, these cornerstone studies that have guided principles, have guided policy, have guided our culture, they can't be reproduced. And so either the original researchers doctored the data, they made it up, or what I think is going on. There is some nefarious players. There always is in every field. But what I really think is going on is you can't pull an entity out of something that was designed to be. You can't study peanut butter and tell me about the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And when you pull a person out and you study the individual by themselves and do a randomized control study on this particular person and they are absent from their tribe, you're gonna get false data because that's not what we were designed to be. We're designed to be in community. And so that John Cacioppo has a book called Loneliness. Everyone should stop what they're doing and read that book. He's passed away. But he provides causal links to everything from Alzheimer's to cardiovascular disease to any number hormonal dysregulation, any number of things to the body recognizing. You don't have anyone watching your. Your front, your sides. You don't have anyone taking care of the kids. You don't have anyone getting Food you don't have anyone protecting, you know, if anyone scouting, it's all on you. And if that's the case, dude, your body would be freaking failing you if it let you sleep all night. Of course you're going to wake up at 3:00am and wake up at 3:00am and wake up at 3:00am Your body would be failing you if it let you sit and have a deep, intimate, romantic romp with your wife one night. Because it's not time for sex. It is time to not die. You are all you've got, right? And so we blame the body and we go after the body. We try to solve for sleep and solve for romance and solve for all these things instead of getting to the core issue, which is your body has recognized you are all on your own, brother. And when it does that, it sounds every alarm it has. And that's the way we're wired. And so instead of fighting that, reach out and call a friend. And to your point, I, I believed like you did, like, it's an emotional issue because we would just call somebody. The research we did internally here and we, we talked over a thousand people. Like 8 out of 10 people have nobody to call. They got nobody. They've just gone 5 years, 10 years, 11 years, 15 years without nurturing the friends. They were stuck in these classrooms, in college. They were stuck in sororities and fraternities and kickball leagues and PE classes and whatever they had. Their lives were curated around community, connection. And then you walk across that graduation stage or you get out of the army, you get that sort of that certificate from your trade school, and then it's you versus the world, man. If you make a sale, it's because he didn't make that sale. And he's coming for the food on your plate. Like you're coming for the food on his plate. And I don't got time to talk to you. We're both turning wrenches, man. We got to get these cars out of here. Or if you're a medical doctor, dude, you got 15 minutes of patient. Get him out. Get them out. I don't have time to talk. And suddenly you wake up and you have nobody. You got nobody. And so, man, I wish it was just emotion. I think you're on to something, but I think it's deeper than that. I think we have cultivated a quick and quick in quick time. The loneliest generation in human history, man, and I think it's costing us dearly.

Yeah, it's a conditioning aspect too, because who has time to connect when the bills are due or when I have to take my kids to school or whatever it is. There's a sense of overwhelm that I think I'll speak from a parent's perspective because I'm a dad of two. And you have children as well, too.

Yeah, for.

For the parents listening, let's say, specifically the fathers, There's a recapitulation that I think we're all going through. I know I am individually, and I can feel it from my social sphere collectively, where we're understanding that the old way of our fathers and our grandparents, it just simply doesn't work anymore. And it didn't even work that great for them either, by the way. This is. This is why you have so many women holding up signs that say, fuck the patriarchy. I think there's some. Not all, some truth to that. There's a kernel of truth in almost everything. I wonder from a psychological perspective, how you see this playing out where men are being forced to be completely rewired, mentally, emotionally, not just to their wives and women, but to the way they show up for their children. As a father, as a parent, there's such a just decimation of what it meant to be a man versus how do we actually be an embodied, wholehearted, whole man. Now there's a huge bifurcation and really re. Understanding that. I think I'm going through still. And I'm in. I'm in this work. I'm deep in this work, man. It's been a decade of podcasting. Like, how do you see this playing out? The old way of being a man dying versus the new way of how men are being called to show up.

Terry Real says there's been two great lies in the last 60 years of transformation. One is the feminist movement told women, you don't need anybody. You just need yourself. The greatest path forward for you is to act more like men. And the greatest lie told men is they're the problem. You don't need to change. If things could just get back to the way they were, then everything would be fine. And both of those are lies. You can't do life by yourself. I don't care what gender. You can't do life by yourself. And the world has simply changed. That's why the cascade of divorces set off by women. You know why? Because they can. For the first time in human history, they don't have to put up with an abusive, aloof, idiotic husband. They have economic. They have some economic freedom. They can just leave. And they are leaving. And so men can either get in the room in their mom's basement and play video games and complain about it and eat Twizzlers and write crazy things on the Internet, or they can go outside like men have done for centuries when the. Yeah, when the fields no longer produce cotton. Okay, then we got to produce apples. How do we do that? We got to learn how to do it. We got to practice and fail and practice and fail. And our families are at stake. And if you look at Reeves latest book, our children are at stake. Everything is on the line here, man. And so we need a group of men to say, okay, world has changed. I got it. I do know how to go work hard. Real, real hard. And as my wife, we had a famous showdown. I've talked about it a little bit, but we had a famous showdown in the garage. I just turned in. I think I was just turning in the last manuscript for my latest book. And I. I was. I mean, I was dying. I was dying and I was sick and I just had family leave the house and it was a big mess. And then I was down in the gym because you don't miss a day. You snap into a slim gym. I was that guy too. It was. And this is. Dude, bro, this 18 months ago. This is 24 months. It's not a long time ago. And then my manager called and said we got two big speaking gigs, that they were shape shifters for us financially. They were a big deal. And I started screaming and cheering in the garage. And my wife came down and she's like, what are you doing? She was laughing, what are you doing? And I was like, I got these gigs and she usually shirks away when things get. Get heavy and she is thoughtful and where I tend to be a little bit hot headed. And this time she didn't do that. And she got close to me and she said, hey, man, I'm watching my husband die and I'm watching him cheer the whole way. And I got pissed and pushed back. And then she said something that was real heavy. She said the. The piece of pie and the pie chart of how much I love you. That is how much money you make. It's full. You can go make all the money you want, but don't ever lie to yourself or other people and say it's for me and the kids. It's not. It's for your own ego, so go get it. And then she said this line that slayed me. She said, john, we have enough. And I didn't have a psychology for I Just knew how to work real hard and go make money. And I thought that's the way I could be the best provider for my family. And there is some truth to that. Yeah. And I also need to sit down and make sure on a daily basis, my son, who's now as tall as me, we're eye to eye. He's becoming a man. I need him to know there is not a thing he can do, there's not a place he can go that I won't love him and I won't come after him, and I will love him till the end of time. And that means I have to learn how to touch him. I have to learn how to hug him. I have to learn how to look him in the eye and say, I love you. And most men cannot do those things with their sons. And I have to hold space for my daughter and not lecture her every time she walks in the room. Why are you wearing that? What are you doing? What do you think? I just have to be a guy that is fun to be around and show her, hey, this is. I'm going to treat your mom. This is the low benchmark for how you deserve to be treated. Right? And I. I bear that responsibility. And I want her to know I'm fun and I'm. That I love her and that she is never going to be able to outrun my love for her. I gotta learn how to do that because there's skills I do not have. And that's just my. That's my new adventure. The same as when World War II kicked off and people had to start running into factories to help make bombs and bolts. They know how to do that. They had to learn how to do it. That's just where we're at. Stop being a baby and stop whining about it and get on the horn and learn how to do it. Learn how to be vulnerable. Your family and our culture's at stake. That's it.

That's really well said. I remember Matthew Hussey. He said, what women really want is a good man with an edge. And of course, I've heard Peterson talk about, a man must be dangerous in a certain way. Whatever. He quoted it as, a dangerous man is a man that could be trusted, not because he's dangerous, but because he has the capacity to be dangerous. Or in your case, he has the capacity to be vulnerable and to cut with a razor's edge, make money, chop wood, carry water, but also have the switching capacity. John. And this is what I've struggled with personally and we had a lot of people mention this in our community, in the liberated life tribe. In order to be liberated, we can't have a disconnection from our own vulnerability. And we also, as men get to understand how to switch from being the provider and hard charging to having his heart open, taking a deep breath, doing our breath work, and being present with our woman. This switching capacity is really interesting for me. I wonder how that's played out for you.

That's masculinity. So in Terry Real's the Masterpiece book.

I don't want to talk about it.

He's so good. But his. I think it's the Maasai tribe and he talks to them about masculinity. And y' all are so. I guess they were holding hands with their sons, a lot of. A lot of kissing with their like, just very different than here in the West. And they were a vicious warrior tribe. And he was like, what's the masculine? And they finally got to it and they go, oh, masculine is doing both and knowing when each one is appropriate. And we've lost that in our culture. We've lost the nuance, the both and of it all. And I think that's where the, the mastery is. And to be honest with you, the person I learned that from most directly is Jocko. This idea. What is your end game today? My end game is. Here's. I'll give you a perfect example. There's a lot of. Of some bajillionaire bought the field next to mine and they're building a palace, like a 9,000 square foot house and a recording studio. I'm in Nashville. It's a whole event thing going on over here, guard stands and all that. And then I got my little house and my chickens running around right next.

And so it's casting a shadow over your garden.

Yeah, exactly. Well, a lot of the laborers keep driving up the wrong driveway and we. I have a quarter mile gravel driveway way back into the woods. You can't see my house from. From the road. And so these guys come in with trailers with backhoes and all sorts of equipment comes up into my house and I have to tell them, hey, wrong place. And they got to go all the way back down. Well, a guy pulls up the other day pulling a front loader, which is like a big tractor looking thing on a trailer. The trailer had a flat tire and I wasn't home. I was out of town on a speaking gig and my wife said, hey, it's wrong place. Come up here and turn around. He didn't he just put it in reverse and tried to back this thing all the way down. He carved up my road so bad. And then we've had wild amounts of rain in the past couple of weeks, so my driveway completely washed out. Out. And I got back in town, saw this madness. My wife can barely get her car up and down this long road. She doesn't drive a big truck or anything like that. So I just went over to the neighbors and said, hey, man, do you know the name of the, of the, the GC working this thing? And they gave me his name. I called him and totally cool. Said, hey, accidents happened. This guy tore up my driveway, didn't come fix it. Cool. One week goes by, two weeks go by. This past Sunday, all of a sudden a front loader comes driving up my driveway. And I can see it from way far away, right? It's a quarter mile driveway. Dude gets on top of the front loader and I wave, wave him in. I'm wearing, I'm wearing overall, like coveralls doing yard work. And that dude launches into me. You called my boss screaming at me. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. My wife is there, my kids are here. And now I've got a situation. I got a dude who just rolled up on my place out in the country in the hills of Tennessee, man, right? There's banjos start playing in the background, right? It's on. And. And I had a choice to make that could have got real, real ugly. And I would have been right in the eyes of the law. I would have been right in the eyes of everybody. This dude rolls up on my place. What was my end goal? To have my ego shined up in front of my kids and my wife to let him know that nobody flexes. Or do I want a clean driveway, dude, so my family can get up and down the driveway. And so I listened to him and I let him run his mouth and run his mouth and I finally said, hey, dude, you want to look at the text messages that I sent? I'm not mad. I work too. I work hard. Everybody makes mistakes. I said, I just expect people to be people of integrity and to fix their messes. And that dude looked at me and he dropped his shoulders and he said, I'm not mad at you, dude. I'm mad at them. And we talked through about how there's a lot of routing problems and yada yada. And at the end of the. And then my wife and kids left and I looked at him and Said, hey, you cannot come up here yelling at my family like that. That is unacceptable. You can't do that. And he said, man, I'm really sorry. You know what? He went and did an amazing job cleaning my driveway up. He did an amazing job. It's now all since been destroyed because of all the tornado stuff that came through, but he did an amazing job. And here's the thing. What do I want at the end of the day? I want my family to be able to come and go in my house. I don't need my ego massaged. Would it have been cool for my son to drag that guy out of his front loader and to, you know, get in a big fist fight on my gravel? What an idiotic, moronic thing to do. And here's the other thing. I was raised by a homicide detective. I was raised by a SWAT guy. If it had come to that, my wife knows, we would have been all, okay, right? And because I know that I'm loved and I know that I can take care of myself if I need to, I can lead first with compassion and kindness and, hey, what's what, we both need to win here. And that can sound soft to this red pill nonsense, but, dude, I'm telling you, long term, my son got to see his dad de. Escalate a situation. My son got to see his dad, his dad honor his wife not by getting in a fist, but I got to honor his wife by quietly saying, we're not going to talk to my wife in front of my wife like that. We're not going to do that here on my property. And I got to see my son stand up for myself, but also do it with compassion and grace. That's how you change generations, man. And by the way, 20 year ago, me would not have done that at all. I'd either be in a hospital or I'd be in jail. One of the. One of the two, right? That guy would have gotten off that front loader and beat me sideways, or I would have had to be. So it's just deciding what's the end game here? Do you need to stand on the sidewalk and prove to your wife you honor her? That's such a stupid definition of honor. Honor is to. Did you get your family home safely today? Yep. Good. You win. You win. So let's start thinking of the long game. Is it going to take on the teacher or the little league coach? Is that. Is that what we need here? What's the long game? No, I want to teach my kids self respect. I want to teach my kids dignity. I want to teach them self control and critical thinking. And I want to teach them. This is a freaking Little league game. Everybody needs to take 40 off and relax. Right. So I just think it's about putting the long game first. Judd is, is the most eloquent about this mindfulness, that space between what just happened and how you react to it, man, that is modern day masculinity. Can you pause before you react and think long game about what we actually need here. And if you can do that, the whole generation of men will change. And also you got to go lift weights just in case it goes down, which it will sometime. You gotta be able to take care of yourself.

Wow. So wise. Because I loved how you said 20 years ago that would not have been the case.

No, probably 10 years ago that would not have been.

I think, dude, I think this is what's missing in the narrative. And look, I'm not here to on or put down David Goggins, but you know, we've talked about this with many different relational professionals on the show and psychiatrists and psychologists. There's almost a wounding that that Goggins comes from. And maybe it's palpable to you at times. I know it is for me. And part of the whole red pill community has this thing of like, you know, snap it to a slim jam. I'm going to go in the gym downstairs every day like you do. That can actually be really harmful because it's just a mental loop that I think men almost take a false pretense to. That that's what makes me masculine, is by me never quitting, always gritting and always going hard. I think Goggins even says something like stay hard. It's like, well, that's not what the world needs right now. And I think you did a really good job of eloquently speaking. Like they could have gone the route of Goggins. Maybe if he rolled up on Goggins driveway, there would have been a fist fight. Right. And so the emotional intelligence. And again, I'm not here to shit on Goggins. I think, I think at the stage of development that many young men are, are he's actually of service to them in a big way. But that's not the only lever we can pull. What are the other levers that young men. Maybe there's parents listening and watching that have young children at home. What are the other levers that we can pull as parents? You did a really good job, you know, embracing compassion and getting to the end Result, which was getting the driveway fixed. Are there another couple of levers that we can pull when, let's say, me, us as fathers meet these demands? Where our nervous system floods, the catecholamines start flowing in that space between, oh, my God, my body's experiencing rage and anger. There can be a breath. There can be a training. In the same way that you and I go to the gym and train our bodies, we can actually train and do reps for our mind in those situations, what levers do we pull? What's the training look like there specifically?

Your reference to Goggins is powerful. I don't know him personally. We've got some friend of a friend kind of things, like one or two space connections. I actually think if he'd been in my situation, he would have done the exact same thing. And here's why. Because he knows what he could have done to that poor man on the front loader. He stood on a bedrock of 100 confidence. When I now trust myself enough to know, dude, you got to take a day off from the gym. And those are rare days for me, but you got to take a day. Take a day. Last night, I woke up every hour on the hour because we live out in the country, and I don't have. I don't have. My weather radio is not working, and my family was asleep. That's on me. I have taken that responsibility to make sure to check the weather when there's tornadoes everywhere. And we just got kissed by one, just whisked right by. It was wild. And then they were saying, hey, they're going to be all for the rest of the night. It's on me. Up every hour on the hour. What's like, what. Why do I go to the gym? Back to those two words. For what? So I can show up and be a great husband, be a great dad and live a long time and be able to roll around on the floor with my grandkids and take them to the zoo and buy them ice cream. Especially when my kids say, don't do that to my grandkids, right to their kids. I only do it anyway. That's why I'm going to the gym right now. I'm done trying to get like. And so if I want to show up and be a great dad today, if I want to show up and be a great husband today, you know what? I need more than the gym sleep. I need a rest. So I'm gonna take. I'm gonna take this morning off. I'm gonna sit with my daughter My son and I'm go to work. And so I think we're talking to a generation of young men at the extreme Goggins. And then the way, way less Deloney. Just a knucklehead living out in the woods is resting on a bed of confidence. Can you. And so when you're in your 20s, I think you need to over hit the gas. I'm okay with that. If you're not married, you over hit the gas. Go. I told my son the other day, he's 14. I said for the next 15 years you've got a couple jobs. One is to work hard and say yes to almost everything, every door that's open to you and get really, really strong. Because I know if he puts 15 years in the weight room from, from the ages and in the, in the jiu jitsu gym and wherever from the age of 14 to basically 29 to 30, that will, he will have got grit, he'll have got strength, he'll have got all these different things that will carry him. So I want 20 year olds to hit the gas. And when you're faced with these wild situations, you step back and the footing you have is so concrete, you're confident. And when you're confident, you don't have to run around scared, you don't have to react because you know, Jocko doesn't have to fight somebody on the street. Why? Because he knows I, I don't have to fight anybody, dude. I've, I've got incredible resources. I've got a great show, I've got a great family who loves me. I don't gotta do something stupid. That's just dumb, right? I've got too much to lose, man. I just want my driveway fixed so we can go about our day. And so it's. But that only comes when I was 25. I was so scared of. Do you think I'm. Do you think I'm tough? Do you think I'm. I'm smart? Do you think I'm this. And that's the other part about the PhD thing I probably should be more open about. My sister's a savant. Like, think goodwill hunting. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. My little brother missed like two questions on the act and I was the Texas high school football guy and listen to too much punk rock. And so I've been trying to answer the question my whole childhood and into my adulthood. Do you think I'm smart now? Will you love me now? You think I'm smart now? Do you love me now? Do you love me now, look at this. Look at this. And my wall is full of certificates that are trying to announce the world how smart I am. And that's. That's one of the. That's one of the. The engines underneath the whole boat. Right. That was driving this thing through the water is not. Now you love me, dude. I'm through with all that crap. When I got to work here at Ramsey, I called the HR director, and I was like, hey, where do I send all my transcripts? And he's like, I don't want them. And I was like, no, I need to send them to you. I got two PhDs, a master's degree, a bachelor's degree, a Harvard certificate. Like, I need to send all this. He's like, bro, I don't need them. And then it Finally, I started laughing. I was like, I don't think you understand. I need you to need these things. This is all I am. This is all I am. Yeah. Right? So it's stepping on this thing of confidence and then being able to, as Judd says, exhale. I'm just going to be mindful. I don't have to react here. And so. But you have to go through that time to build that confidence. It cannot come from watching a lot of YouTube videos. It cannot come from being the best. Damn, whatever you call it, online streaming gamer. It can't come from being able to quote all the new Netflix comedy series. It comes from just doing the hard work. So get out there and do the hard work.

Yeah. The hard work comes with blood and sweat and tears. And that's why there's some faculty in the brain that I think resists pain. But then we can train that faculty to actually love the pain, which. I'll never forget this John, full stop moment for me. I was. I was interviewing Gay Hendricks, author of the Big Leap, and he said, you know, Josh, the real quotient that we all get to understand is that if you can learn how to love your fear, just like you would love your wife or love your boyfriend or girlfriend, whoever you are, then that's actually how you achieve mastery through your emotions, is by learning how to love your fear. And at first audible. John, I did not get it. I'm like, what the hell is he talking about? Love my fear. Like, how do we love our fear? But it's not about falling in love with your fear or actually, you know, figuratively loving your fear like you love your wife. It's learning how to dance with it. We had a guy on the show, Akshay Navanti, and he's doing a solo expedition. He was actually on Mind Pump, I believe or he's going to be on Mind Pump and he's crossing the Antarctica. I'm like, what drives you to do this? He's like, I actually just really love my fear now. I think There's a catch 22 there where it can become an addiction and a thrill seeking like, like, like the big wave surfers. But, but fear in itself isn't the issue. It's actually our response or the way that we kind of come at fear or come from to fear. Does fear come up for you still? Do you still deal with aspects of fear? I assume so because you're human. Maybe when the tornado was flowing you were like, hey, I have some fear here. How have you personally, John, how have you learned to love your fear, to dance with your own fear?

Dude, that's such a great question. Here's, here's my. I'll give you a esoteric response and then a very ugly, scary, heartbreaking, real world, my favorite. So the esoteric response is this. One of the things I learned researching this book about anxiety was the way anxiety, the, the system works in your brain is if you, you've probably talked about this on your show a million times. If your body feels anxious about a thing, you have social anxiety disorder, whatever that label means and you don't like being around groups of people and that begins to winnow down to groups of people to one on one situations. If you avoid groups of people because I have my body makes me anxious. Your body gets exactly what it wanted which is to not die via that group of people. So it knows this is the way to keep us safe and to avoid that group of people. It reinforces the anxiety. The only way to turn that alarm down is to head right into that group of people. Right? So I any ask any clinician worth their, worth their salt and they'll tell you anxiety just is exposure and most people can get there, right? So that's the, like you have to face it. The heartbreaking real world example. And I'll remember this till the day I die. I've walked with the family behind closed doors for the last year or so when they first sat down and said our four year old daughter's been diagnosed with a rare brain cancer and she probably won't be here this time next year. And we don't know where to start all the way through their memorial service and at the memorial service that was just a few months ago, one of the most amazing couples I'VE ever seen in my life as, I mean, asking, calling me and asking me like, all right, we have to pick out a dress she's going to be buried in. How do we ask people to speak at the funeral? We don't know how to tell them, like, what, what do we want to say? How do we pick what songs? Like, questions no parent should ever, ever ask. The dad looked at me at the funeral and he said, most people spend their entire life avoiding pain. And we weren't given that opportunity. And so we had to go straight through it. And you could either be dragged through it, or him and his wife held hands, and sometimes they pulled each other through it, but they held hands and walked straight through the gates of hell. And I'll tell you, I've never seen this before other than one other couple who's experienced the loss of a child. I've never seen a couple stronger as this couple is on the backside of this thing. And it's because they knew it was coming and they decided, we're not going to duck our heads. We're going to walk straight through this. Was that hell? God, are you kidding me, right? Was that. Do they need tons of support and resources and professionals? Of course. Did they need outpouring from people all over the country, praying for them, sending money? Yes, they need all that stuff. They couldn't do this alone. But the sentiment on day one, I told him, y' all think you're going to talk about your daughter today? We're not going to talk about daughter. We talk about you all, too. Most couples won't survive this. You'll have to decide today. We're going to survive this. And they came back the next time, they're like, we, we will survive this. Now we got it now. Now it's game on, right? And so I, I, I think when it comes to fear, I've learned to. Brene Brown calls it steering into the ice, right? Most of us want to steer away from it. We want to like, we start sliding on the ice. And you, your instinct is to turn, and your instinct is to turn away from it. You got to turn into it, man. You got to go right into it. And eventually, if you don't slide off a cliff, your car will find its footing, right? It will come to a halt, and then you can figure out what's next. And so for me now, I don't run from the signal when the alarm happens. My body gets anxious and tries to get my attention. I head directly towards that, that alarm. I don't run from it. I don't try to duct tape pillows around it. I head straightforward. What's my body trying to get my attention for? Is it AI and how it's probably going to take my job in two or three years. Okay, that's a big one. Can I solve that right now? No, I can't. I can't do anything about that. Do we usually overshoot technology, Take it over by about two or three decades? Yes, we do. Okay, so let's exhale a little bit. What could I do right now? I could go take a class on AI. I could call somebody who's an AI expert and just spend a couple hours learning about. I can turn into the spin on the ice, and that's the. That's the choice I got. I can sit in my house and stew, and I can come up with stories about it's going to kill us all, or it's all going to be a waste. Nothing's going to happen. Both of which I don't think are true. I can turn into the ice and head straight for it, or I'm sending my kid to high school next year, man. Like, my heart rate's starting to go up a little bit. It. Okay, what can I control about that? I control where he goes. Because I'm bigger than him. I can control some things and say no, or I can begin to open my hands slowly, slowly and let him appropriately become the man he was God designed him to be and that I've raised him and trained him to be. Me and his mom have me and his mom has trained him to be. And I can guide him and scaffold him and walk alongside him and still hold him accountable. But I'm going to slowly begin to let that thing go. And is that going to be hard, scary? Yes. But that's me heading straight into the fear. And eventually you become appreciative of the alarm, not scared of it or running from it. The alarms are a good thing, man.

Wow. My heart was just cracked open by your share of the family and the funeral and picking the dress. And I'm not even going to compare my life to that in any way because it would be disrespectful. However, what comes up for me there is my son was born an emergency cesarean, and we were in the NICU for 10 days. And sometimes, sometimes our creator brings us these situations, John, that we don't necessarily want. And there was probably the most anxiety and fear I was ever experiencing in my whole life because we didn't know what was going on as you know, the western medical system has its own clutches and has its own issues. But what really, what came out of it was this beautiful love that the roots that touched hell for us, to quote young, allowed me to have the branches that touched heaven for my son. When I hold Nova, when I'm with my son now, it is the most incredibly beautiful thing because, because we've been to hell.

Yeah, you got to hear over the, with him and.

Yeah, I got to actually. And it brings up emotion to me because I'm just like my. I don't want parents to go through what we went through. I don't. Because it's so, it's so incredibly painful. But yet, but yet we were afforded this extra capacity to now love him and appreciate him in a way that maybe I never would have, I would always love him. I'll do anything for him. Much like you shepherding your son as you release him into high school. But the amount of love that I'm able to pour into him because of those 10 days of just massive anxiety and not sleeping, it was a gift. It truly was a gift.

There was a few nights when I was the dean of students at the law school in Texas. I also moonlighted with the. I went through a series of about eight years when I didn't sleep very well. It was almost like a fight club a little bit. I started with MMA training that went from 8 to 10pm and then I couldn't sleep and then it just kind of carried on. I started just never sleeping. So I would do work with the police department, helping them as a crisis guy, doing death notifications and showing up. And there was one night I remember going to sit with a family who's childhood just died and letting letting a mom know that her child has died is the worst conversation you can have on planet Earth, bar none. And I remember coming home and I think my son was three, maybe four, and it was probably two in the morning, three in the morning when we finally got them to services and the medical examiner come and taken the young, young child away. And I just got in bed with my kid, just got in bed. And it's like, oh, this is what peering over the edge looks like. This is the single most precious thing in my life. And he never woke up because he sleeps like he's encased in concrete. Thank goodness. But it was, it was, it was a moment, right? It was a moment I had, right? And I'll never lose those moments. Those are sacred, holy moments. And I, I, this is totally a tangent, a Buddy of mine named Link, they had a baby who. It was baby number four died during the birth. And it was about six or seven months later that my wife was pregnant. And then she had an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured and that almost took her life. We lost that pregnancy. And him and I were talking one day, and I said, I know my situation's not near as bad as what y' all went through. And he stopped me and he said, we don't. We don't compare grief. We don't compare trauma. Loss is. Loss is loss. And those three. Those words have. Have just transformed me, dude. I used to roll my eyes at the single. You know, a guy or single woman who was 33 with their dog, and their dog of 14 years dies. Loss is. Loss is loss. And when you're in pain, I'm not going to judge your pain. I'm gonna sit with you, man. We'll figure it out. And then we got to still get up and do the next right thing. But loss is scary, man. Fear is scary, trauma scary, Tragedy scary. And I think instead of judging it and being like, let's flex through it, dude. I'm gonna sit with you, man. I'm gonna sit with you. I got a lighter if you got a smoke. I like your smoke. I don't smoke, but I like your smoke. Right.

This is what my. My lady loves so much, is when it actually just happened today, I was in a hurry because we're actually moving to some new land tomorrow, which is amazing. And so I'm going through that new homeowner thing where it's like, we're out in the country, too. And so I'm, like, meeting with contractors and managing my podcast. Podcast and my staff and my family and the home at the same time. And I just cracked this morning, and I was. I was sharp with her, and I felt into it, and I called her right back, and I said, babe, I'm really sorry. I could have been softer with you. I could have been much softer with you. I know. I know you're not sleeping. I know that Naya kept you up. I know she's teething. I'm really sorry. And it was genuine. It was a genuine moment for me, and she appreciated it. So it just, like, made the space more loving.

Yep.

And it was not what was modeled to me, John. And it's not to put down my parents. It was not modeled to me by my father or my grandparents on either side. This is. I think you already mentioned it with many stories and many shares this is how we heal generational trauma. This is how we heal generations as men, is by not thinking of vulnerability as a weak point, but it's actually the warrior. Look at the Spartans, man. The Spartans would literally, if you look at the movie 300, they would love with an open heart. They would. He actually checked in. Leonidas checked in with his wife before he took an imminent life, and he would go out on the battlefield and kill. That, I think, is the warrior we're being called to. It's not easy. Nobody said it would be easy, but it's real, man, And I feel it, dude.

What. What's scarier? Like, to your listeners, what's scarier? Putting on some MMA gloves or some boxing gloves and get in a fight? Or standing in front of your wife buck naked saying, this is me. Do you still love me? That second one is way the hell scarier for me. Right? And it's not about aesthetics. It's just about saying, or, let's go one step further beyond just being naked, right? Because a couple of your podcasts will be like, oh, yeah, right? So, like, one step, one step even further. Is getting in a fistfight or jujitsu match, is that scarier than sitting down with your wife and saying, I've been talking to somebody at work and I'm so sorry. Please don't leave. Right. Now that you see all of me, do you still love me? Will you still stay? This happened to me when I was a kid. I've never told anybody that this guy did this to me, that this teacher did this, that I failed this, that I cheated on this. Now that you see all of me, do you still love me? Dude, that's way, way harder from a strength and toughness and grit perspective than getting enough freaking fist fight. And by the way, the ramifications are way longer, right? And so if you're talking about what's tougher, what's harder, what's the. What's the. What's the more brutal path? I would much rather lift weights than take a knee in front of my wife and say, I'm sorry, I totally blew this. Do you still love me? I'd much rather go do a hard workout, man. And so on the it's hard scale or it's scary skill, go do the real scary stuff. Be vulnerable, man. Yeah, I dare you. I dare you. And I don't know many men that don't get that way. They don't finally unzip from their big protective suit that don't have a lot of work to do, man. Because once you get that suit off, like, we. I got some. I don't know how to do this stuff. We got to go learn.

We're being called to evolve in the switching capacity that you spoke about. And also we're being called to have a true embodiment of an open heart. And that may be esoteric to some, but I don't care, actually. Not to my audience. But maybe if y' all have shared this podcast, then you're hearing the term open heart. That can be a bit confusing. To have an open heart. I guess it makes sense logically, but to the somatics in the body. How do you even describe that? As a man on the path, as a man who's evolving. What is even having an open heart mean to you?

To me, it's. It's. I've learned again. This is. This is conditioning. This is teaching. This is education. Men don't always do great with esoterics. Great. Cool. Here's what that means. Every single day of your life, touch your daughter and your son on the face with both hands and look them in the eye and say the words, I love you and I always will. Say it every day. Dad, stop. So late. Nope. Look at me. I love you and I always will.

Yeah.

Oh, gosh, honey. When I wake up and you wake up in the morning, if we wake up at different times, same times. Can I have a 30 second hug? And I want you just to hold your spouse. Just hold them. 30 seconds. Don't break it. And then when it's over, I want you to grab the back of their neck. Not grab, but put your hand on the back of their neck. Look them in there and say, how can I love you today? And for most men, their partner will go, would you. To my. What'd you do to my husband? Or did you get into the vodka in the middle of the night again? Like. Like, did you take all my Percocet after my surgery? Like, they're not going to know what to do with you. And so you're going to do it again. You're going to do it again. You're going to do it again. And you want to know what being open hearted is? It's when your mom calls and says, I don't ever get to see my grandkids. You don't love me enough. This Christmas you're coming. And you know our budget. We can't afford it this year. We can't afford it this year. I've got to double down on my business during that season. Wholehearted to saying, mom, I'm not gonna be able to make it this year. And I know that's disappointing. I know that's so frustrating. But we're gonna do our best to make it in March. You'll have the funnest time. We're gonna FaceTime with the kids, we're gonna send y' all some fun gifts, we're gonna send you all some funny videos or whatever. But we're not gonna having a boundaries is what I'm saying. It open hearted is not owing anybody any money. Got all these morons who are running around like, and they got 900amonth truck payments and they got student loans with degrees that didn't even finish. And they've got shoes and jeans that they buy on credit cards. And they're talking about freedom. And yeah, you know who owns you? Every bank in America owns you. Unhook from all that crap. Stop letting a bank tell you what you're going to do every day. Decide I'm going to drive a beat down Corolla because those stupid things won't stop running and it's mine and nobody can come take it from me. And so if my boss tells me to do something I don't want to do, I can just smile and be like, I ain't doing that because I don't owe anybody anything. Right? That's freedom, not flexing. Right? So it's doing those things that's living life with an open heart. Just last night I took my son. We went and checked on a couple of our elderly neighbors. Y' all doing okay? When the storms came through, it was a complete waste of our time. Of course they're doing fine. They've been living there way longer than this city slicker that moved out there.

They're like, we're good man.

How you doing teaching my son? You go check on the least of these in your community. When something goes sideways, you go pick up all the big logs and sticks out of the road. And I'm just teaching them that. During COVID we live downtown. Downtown Nashville, my son and I would go for long walks together because we were allowed to go outside. And we took a trash sack with us and we had little rubber gloves and we picked up trash in the neighborhood. So I got to spend hours with my son. I got to get sunlight and vitamin D and get all that I needed. And I taught into, I wired into my son's nervous system. Look around in your community for ways you can help. Like those are all simple, no cost ways to go Change the world that you're in. That's living with an open heart so I don't have to talk eloquent. If you can't get through, you know, beyond order. Peterson. Second, if you can't get rid of. Through those things, great. You start asking your wife, how can I love you today?

There's so much truth to that. I rewind that. Y' all listen to that again. Share this with somebody who you feel is not free, who's in bondage. Because, like you, I've said this many times. I'm sure you said this in your own words. I think we're only as liberated as our darkest secrets. Whatever I'm withholding from myself, number one, or from my. My lady or my family or anyone, they can feel it. We can all feel it. Enteric level. You know, when somebody. We talked about this before we hit record. You can feel when someone on paper isn't actually who they say they are.

Yeah. And here's what's awful about our wives and kids is they go about trying to fix it because they think they're the problem. It's cruel. It's cruel. Especially. Children will realize there's a fractured relationship between them and their parents, their primary caregiver, and that's wired into their evolution into their bodies. If that caregiver leaves, we're dead. So they will try to solve that relationship forever. And it's not their freaking job. It's ours. We're the adults. It's our job to solve that problem.

I've definitely been through that. My mom was bipolar. My dad left when I was two months old.

There you go.

I made a conscious choice that these things happen for me, to grow, to be able to serve. But it didn't come with a flick of a light switch. It came.

I know, man. Yeah.

Dude, Before I let you go, I have to ask you this question. Specifically, your relationship with Ramsey and finance. Part of what we teach in liberated life is physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, financial ways that we nourish ourself. And so financial is such a key that for a long time, I didn't even look at my bank account because I was like, it scares me. It makes me feel like I don't even want to look at it.

Yeah, but.

But there's a maturity. There's. There's a maturation process that I've gone through. What was your maturation process about? Money? And how did that even bloom into this relationship with Ramsey? I mean, one of the leading voices in the world.

Yeah. I mean, it started back in 2006, I was a dean of students. My wife was a elementary school teacher. And every month I was just taking care of the money because I was the man of the house. I didn't even ask. I just paid the bills. And every month we were getting further and further behind. And I remember calling my wife in one day and said, because I know the money struggles my parents had. They're always. There's always, always electric tension in the house because of money. And my dad, like I say, was a cop. And then at some point in my life, he quit and become a minister. And I remember telling myself at a young age, like, if this is what the public thinks of public servants, I'm out. We don't even have groceries, dude. Like, I'm out. I quit. I'm gonna go make a bunch of freaking money because I'm not gonna have this in my house. Well, yeah, I sucked at making money. I didn't know how to do that. I was a. That was a bravado thing for an 18 year old to say, I don't know how to do it. I remember calling my wife in and saying, I'm going to end up exactly how I grew up and I don't want to do it. Would you take the money over for a while? And she started crying and she said, I've been waiting for this day. And she didn't have the tools to come ask me and tell me. She was scared, right? She was brand new at this, I was brand new at this. And that. That was the first day of surrender. And then I've learned over the years that just dumping that onto one partner isn't fair either. And so really my relationship with Ramsey, I don't know anything about Ramsey other than the ideas of I want to be able to not owe anybody any money. When I graduated with my master's degree, after I took my qualifying exams, I had a medical issue and I did not have enough money on my credit card to go to the emergency room. And so I called my buddy who's a banker, and I said, hey, I know this is a crazy thing. It's the middle of the night. I'm going to try to tough this out. I was bleeding real bad. And I said, I'm going try to tough this out and hope everything's gonna be fine. If I go to the er, can I borrow your credit card? I remember him getting real quiet, and he said, dude, you can have anything you need. But I. I swore to myself, I'm never going to make that Call again. I'm never going to put a friend in that position again. And I'm never going to be not able to take care of myself or my family. And so it took us 15 years, dude, 15 years to pay off six figures of student loans, all the stuff we drove, crappy cars. People have always made fun of my cars. They always have, probably always will. And I got. I unhooked myself from giving a crap about a depreciating asset as a some sort of symbol for my success in the world. I promise you my net worth is better. I don't want to be that guy. But I promise you we're doing good. And I drive a Highlander. It's great, it's fine. It's a reliable car and it will never stop running, right? So I just don't care anymore. And I have an old 06 truck and I can't kill that tundra either. And it's just going to keep going. And that's great by me. And one day I'm getting nice. It doesn't matter is what I'm trying to get to. And ultimately I ran into Dave here. I honestly, I had no idea how famous he was. I had no idea how big this operation was. I knew he was on the radio. I had no clue as to how big and powerful that voice was. I just knew I'd lived my life that way and I had known about him for about 20 years. And so I joined as his mental health guy. And then just having a. It's kind of like I learned to play guitar, being a rhythm guitarist next to Van Halen. Just over the last four years, I've learned a whole bunch about money. And it's, it's. The studies are starting to come out about how this debt is crushing families psychologically and it's crushing individuals like mentally and emotionally and relationally. There is a physiological toll to our culture for owing $32 trillion. Forget the math problem. Our culture can't breathe. And so that's where we, that's where we unite there. But I, I don't care about interest rates, I don't care about credit score. All that stuff is complete waste of your time. If you don't owe anybody any money, you opt out of the system, man. Don't buy solar panels first. Pay off everything you own first. And you're going to sleep like you have never slept in your life, knowing nobody can take your house, nobody can take your cars, nobody can take food off your table. That's freedom, brother. And then you can the Maturity. What are the crap you want to do, man?

The maturity that happened. I'm 44. The maturity that happened for me in my late 30s. And definitely when Kerry Michelle got pregnant with Nova, there was a fire that was lit in me to face all the things inside of me that made money wrong. That rich people are bad and that bad things happen when people use others to make money. The unconscious capitalistic lens that I think is propagated by a lot of people out there, specifically Tai Lopez in his garage. Look at me. I'm just hanging out my garage with Ferraris behind me. Like, these are not the messages that we need. I really loved how you, how you explained that, because in order to be free, to be truly liberated, there has to be. It's unequivocally true, especially for a man who may identify as the provider in the home. Obviously, women can be the provider too, but I think nature and our creator designed it, that the man does the providing and the woman does the nurturing. I just wonder the parts of yourself, the parts of myself as men that we get to come to terms with, which is both painful, yet beautiful. In order to be financially mature, pick one of the five. If you pick finance, first, your mind and your emotions are going to have to grow to meet the demands of your finance. Or pick the emotional. You're going to have to rise to give yourself the support and the scaffolding so that you can actually rise to the demands of your emotional load. In other words, it doesn't really matter where you start, as long as you're actually committed to the growth process. Have you found this to be the case with money yourself? I mean, that must have been an incredibly challenging moment where you gave your wife the reins and you're like, take the money. There's a maturity process in that.

It is. I, I actually think what I have found, especially over the last four years, is if somebody sits down at a table and says, I'm so scared I can't breathe. I can't keep living like this. We owe this much in credit cards, as much in student loans, as much in car payments. We're never going to buy a house. Yes, houses have tripled in price. Yes, they're crazy. But we're spending $2200 paying for yesterday's stuff, for last month's things, and we have, I can't do this anymore. It's staggering how many people get on a plan with their money. And let's be honest, your money, how you spend money tells what you believe in and what you value. And when a couple especially, and those studies are starting to come out now that, say a couple that share the same account, forget what the stupid influencers on social media say, Couples who have to sit down and decide who are we going to be and how are we going to spend our money, who are we going to give to, what are we going to buy? If they will stay plugged in. What almost always ends up happening is somebody ends up losing 50 pounds, their marriage is infinitely better. Somebody in both people end up getting raises. People I've challenged for years thinking that we make up the numbers. When you get on a plan and you start lasering in and deciding what's important and what's not, you become easily the most valuable person in your organization. And you rise up and you get raises after raises after raises. And so I think the challenge, I would say starting with emotions is starting with feelings, is the mental health community. And that's my gang. We've told the world that wellness mental health is just sitting in a room and getting all the right thoughts in the right order. And I think that's madness. I think you have to go do. And so the reason I like an exercise and nutrition plan or getting your money right is it starts a chain reaction of what do you value? Because if you're doing exercise and nutrition, you got to talk about time. What do you value? And the other most important thing, Time. The most important things are money. What is that? What are you going to do with that money? How are you all going to spend that together? And if you both come in with your hands open, it will bring you closer together and you will be an unstoppable force. I'll leave you with this. Dave did the largest study of millionaires, 10,000 millionaires ever done. You know what number three profession, the number three millionaires in the United States of America? Teacher. Freaking teacher. You know why? Because most teachers sign up for that job knowing exactly what it's going to pay, they are buying. They are trained to make lesson plans and follow those lesson plans towards an outcome at the end of the year. And they know I'm a teacher. I'm going to make $41,000 for the rest of my life. I will never be able to drive a Yukon. I'll never be able to drive a Porsche. I'm going to get a used Corolla and that's going to be my car. And I'm going to pay into this. I'm going to get a mutual fund. I'm going to get a index fund. I'm going to pay into that. I'm going to pay into that and I'm just going to make a plan and follow it. And they wake up 40 years later and they are a millionaire in net worth. Teachers number three. That's madness if you look at the math of it. But it's just about show. It's like exercising. It's going to keep showing up and showing up and showing up and showing up. Crummy exercises someday. Yeah, you have bad workouts. That's cool. You'll have some good ones too, right? It's just I'm gonna keep showing up and man, you start with your money and you get that right and you get a budget, you get a plan that literally can be the catalyst that changes everything in your life.

Man. It's almost like a string of firecrackers. Do you, do you like firecrackers in Tennessee where you start with one, it goes. That hits them all. It's kind of like that. It's exactly start with one firecracker. It's gonna. You're one of the. One of the five is going to affect all of the five for sure. Man, this has been so memorable. What a timeless conversation. Y' all. Share this. Share this with somebody who's been struggling really, truly. This book can change people's lives. The ideas and the thoughts from you and your downloads, your consciousness, your life experience. Building a non anxious life. Where can people get the book on Amazon but give us the website please.

You can go to john deloney.com and you get it in Target and Barnes and Noble. You get everywhere but yeah, it's. It's just out and about. And Josh, dude, let me just tell you I appreciate the work you're putting out into the world and you are. I'm honored to be side by side with you where we agree and where we disagree. But we're both salmon swimming upstream and I'm really grateful to. To have you just trying to be a different voice out there. Thank you.

Thank you, man. Feels good to receive that from you. I fully receive that and just super grateful as we say goodbye before people turn this off and go put this book into action. Because I mean what are you going to do if you're not putting it into embodiment. How do you define wellness? It's a concept in the book. It's a concept that we explore on wellness and wisdom. I don't think you can really have wellness unless you have the life experience and the wisdom that affords you that. How do you define wellness. What does that even mean to you to live your life well?

Can I paint you a picture?

Yeah.

Here's what. Here's what wellness means. You wake up in the morning and you have coffee because you want to, not because you have to. And you hug your partner. And if you don't have anybody hug your dog and you just sit there in it for a second, then you go to work. And you may hate your job, you may love your job, but you got purpose. And you're connected with your kids. Your kids are happy that you're around and that you're home. They don't always like you because that's part of being a parent. But you're. You're able to talk to people that you love, your friends, your family. And you have boundaries. Here's the magic word. You come home and your shoulders drop because you're happy. You've created a home that you can't wait to get home to, whether that's just by yourself or with a whole crew of people. You've got financial security. If your air conditioner goes out. The most annoying part of it is making the phone call to have it replaced, not trying to decide what bill you're going to pay. My definition of wellness, ultimately, is peace. Peace. And the whole. The whole ecosystem is trying to spin you up and keep you from peace, because if you have peace, you don't buy as much crap. And if you have peace, you don't participate in these big, giant systems so often. And so the whole goal is to stir you up. Wellness is peace.

Mic drop. Thanks for coming on the show. Appreciate you so much. Until we see you again on one of the other billions of screens that are out there. Wellness. John, thank you so much for being here.

I'm grateful for you, brother.

All right, y', all, we'll talk to you next week. Peace.