Dr. John Delony - Best-Selling Author, Podcaster & Mental Health Expert | Building A Non-Anxious Life

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