The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:57.540 Hello, everyone watching and listening on YouTube or one of the associated podcasts.

00:01:16.760 I'm here today with Dr. John Giloni.

00:01:20.080 He's the author of Own Your Past, Change Your Future.

00:01:23.080 We're going to talk today, and I'm very happy to do this, to talk to another clinician about

00:01:27.960 the fact that you live your life through a story, that you see the world through a story,

00:01:33.700 what that story might be like when things are going wrong, how it might be approved, and

00:01:38.260 also to talk about identity and its transformations in the most practical possible way.

00:01:44.340 And so there are specifics that we can talk about, but that's a good place to start.

00:01:48.440 What got you so interested in stories, John?

00:01:54.680 I think I reverse-engineered my way into it.

00:01:58.820 It was learning the trauma narrative that played out in the human body 10, 15, 30 years

00:02:06.600 later after the initial trauma.

00:02:08.980 And so I've always thought stories were narrative, right?

00:02:12.680 There's something I thought about.

00:02:13.740 I did not understand that my body was keeping the score, to quote Vander Kolk, right?

00:02:19.140 That my body was revving up and fighting battles that I didn't even know was happening.

00:02:22.860 And so we were looking at the long-term data, man, and people are having strokes and cancer

00:02:27.700 and heart attacks from childhood experiences.

00:02:31.360 And that made me step back and go, whoa, there's these different layers to these stories happening

00:02:35.900 all over the place.

00:02:37.080 And it's not just narrative.

00:02:38.420 It's the entire ecosystem that I call my body, right?

00:02:42.640 My human experience.

00:02:44.180 And then as I begin to pull the thread on those, man, those stories we're born into and the

00:02:49.640 stories we were told have such a formative shaping of our life experience.

00:02:56.240 And those stories become the stories we tell ourselves, which, as we all know, in mental

00:03:00.600 health professionals, that shapes everything.

00:03:02.660 Who I think I am and what I think I'm capable or not capable of, or I'm the worst thing that

00:03:07.320 ever happened to me, those stories are highly limiting or they are the jet fuel on a well-lived

00:03:13.760 life, right?

00:03:14.720 So if we can discuss those stories, man, what a shape-shifting opportunity for us.

00:03:21.040 Yeah, well, that idea about stories, in some sense, being stored in the body is kind of

00:03:26.200 interesting.

00:03:26.720 And so the way I conceptualize it is that a story manifests itself in a personality, in

00:03:36.520 a set of goals, in a set of assumptions about the world, perceptions about the world.

00:03:40.700 And if you have had terrible things happen to you in the past, and that's pretty much

00:03:47.560 true of everyone, although some people more than others, then your body computes the present

00:03:54.980 danger of the environment based on how many things have happened to you that are terrible

00:03:59.320 in the past that aren't resolved.

00:04:01.660 And resolved would mean that you had generated a solution for them.

00:04:06.100 And if your psychophysiological system assumes that all the danger that you were subject to

00:04:13.320 once is still present in the environment, then it's going to set you on edge as if you're

00:04:19.300 walking in dangerous territory.

00:04:21.680 And the psychophysiological consequence of that is that you're prepared for danger, and

00:04:29.660 that does such things as burn up excess resources because you're much more reactive and on point

00:04:36.700 than you might otherwise be in an anxiety-prone manner.

00:04:39.440 It also suppresses immunological function because your body isn't that worried about long-term

00:04:45.640 immunological health if you're confronting an emergency.

00:04:50.480 And so you talk in your book about changing your past, owning your past, and it's useful

00:04:56.600 to define that.

00:04:58.440 You're likely to overcome a trauma, let's say, and no longer in some sense store it psychophysiologically

00:05:05.600 if you've generated a causal story about the reason that the trauma emerged and then reconfigured

00:05:13.040 the way that you're conducting your life so that the probability that a similar thing

00:05:17.160 will happen to you is reduced to close to zero, right?

00:05:21.140 It's not catharsis, it's understanding, yeah.

00:05:24.940 The challenge there is, I think, following that thread all the way to our modern psychological

00:05:31.640 ethos, we've created a world that is based entirely on blame.

00:05:36.240 And somebody else is responsible, and so I've got to continue to cut and cut and cut,

00:05:42.000 and I reduce myself to a two-by-two square with which I can exist.

00:05:46.360 And if you enter my square, then whether it's ideologically or physically, then suddenly you're

00:05:51.780 affronting me.

00:05:52.840 And I think there's something about owning your past.

00:05:55.100 I look at it more in terms of, can I think through what I remember to have happened?

00:06:01.600 And by the way, we know that memory is a disastrous narrative storyteller, right?

00:06:07.020 So I care less about what actually happened and more, I'm in my 40s, I'm telling myself

00:06:12.360 this story that happened.

00:06:13.920 Can I tell that story?

00:06:15.220 Can I relive that story?

00:06:16.200 And my body doesn't take off on me, right?

00:06:18.200 It doesn't rush to solve the problem for me because it knows I'm driving now, right?

00:06:23.000 The thing about memory is that it's not there to provide an accurate, objective record

00:06:31.180 of the past, which is in fact impossible because the past is so unbelievably complex.

00:06:36.000 It's more like a navigation tool, which is I went here, I fell into something terrible,

00:06:42.520 and now I need to recalibrate the navigation map that I'm using so that I don't fall into

00:06:48.800 the same hole.

00:06:49.600 And, you know, one of the things that people might want to know who are listening is that

00:06:53.520 if you have a memory that's older than about 18 months and it haunts you, and when it comes

00:07:00.040 up involuntarily, it produces a stress reaction, what that means is that as far as your nervous

00:07:06.560 system is concerned, and so as far as your body's concerned, that danger hasn't gone away.

00:07:11.420 And what's happening is an unconscious alarm system that's looking for pitfalls and holes

00:07:16.160 is warning you that the map that you're using is incomplete in a manner that might enable

00:07:23.840 you to fall into the same hole.

00:07:26.280 And so one of the things that people can do that's very useful is, if you have memories

00:07:31.880 like that that plague you, is to bring them to mind voluntarily instead of waiting for them

00:07:38.020 to come after you involuntarily, and then to think through what has changed and what might

00:07:44.080 not have, but also to come up with a plan so that if a similar circumstance arose, you'd

00:07:50.100 be in a better position in one way or another to deal with it.

00:07:52.840 There's no other way of getting the memory to go away.

00:07:55.620 Like, merely recontemplating it in the same manner over and over won't do it.

00:08:00.200 And allowing it to plague you unconsciously, it'll do that forever until you solve it.

00:08:04.800 It might show up in your dreams, it'll show up in your fantasies, it'll trigger you, so

00:08:09.380 to speak, when you're talking to other people, if they happen to discuss a topic that's related

00:08:14.100 to it.

00:08:15.160 And it's because the narrative is one of failure and defeat, the event was one of failure and

00:08:21.960 defeat, and if there isn't a map to allow you to transcend that, that's functional, then

00:08:27.300 the part of your brain that is concerned with identifying danger is never going to let you go.

00:08:32.420 Yeah, and I think culturally, we've created a pathology of discomfort, and as you just

00:08:40.740 outlined so eloquently, the only way through this is to turn and face it and walk directly

00:08:45.280 through it, right?

00:08:46.100 And if you continue to run from the memories and pathologize and chase the behaviors, you

00:08:52.000 end up with our over-diagnostic approach to everything instead of turning and facing these

00:08:58.460 things and letting your body heal through relationships and other things in your life, man, we just

00:09:04.120 end up chasing your tail.

00:09:05.240 And you called it out.

00:09:06.880 The more you run, the more your body thinks it's winning.

00:09:09.940 It's getting away from this stuff, so it actually reinforces the anxiety.

00:09:13.060 It reinforces some of these psychological ailments the further you run from it.

00:09:19.060 The only healing is through it.

00:09:20.380 And the culture we've created for ourselves says that uncomfortable discomfort is bad,

00:09:25.140 and it's to be avoided at all costs.

00:09:27.300 And it's the only path to healing.

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00:11:05.800 If you run, then the signal that the story you're acting out is that the thing you're

00:11:15.040 running from is bigger than you, and that you have to hide.

00:11:18.700 And that's just a recipe for anxiety.

00:11:21.280 Now, it's not necessarily that easy to turn and face something, but you do detail out a

00:11:26.140 variety of strategies in your books that might help people do that.

00:11:30.060 You can differentiate the problem.

00:11:32.680 Like, you might have been traumatized at work, let's say, or let's not use that sort of jargony

00:11:38.340 phraseology.

00:11:40.580 You may be having tremendous difficulties at work.

00:11:43.080 You might be dealing with people who are tyrannical at work and find it very meaningless.

00:11:48.480 And that's bothering you constantly.

00:11:50.800 It's disturbing your sleep, for example, and it's haunting you.

00:11:54.080 And you tend to try to push it out of your mind when the thoughts come.

00:11:58.300 And partly that's because the thought of getting a new job is so daunting that you can't face

00:12:04.540 it.

00:12:05.240 And one of the ways of recalibrating that is to break down the problem into small and manageable

00:12:11.740 steps.

00:12:12.460 And so, for example, one of the things that you can do if you might have to consider getting

00:12:18.640 a new job because you're unhappy and miserable at work is open up your resume or your CV and

00:12:25.800 look at it.

00:12:26.680 Right?

00:12:27.520 So you might not be able to get a new job, but you might be able to open up your resume

00:12:30.620 and look at it.

00:12:31.580 And then having done that, you've sort of cracked the surface.

00:12:34.260 And then maybe you could spend an hour a week for a month updating it.

00:12:39.320 Or 10 minutes a day.

00:12:40.500 Or 10 minutes every two days.

00:12:42.020 Something like that.

00:12:42.900 But part of the trick is to take these larger monsters that are frightening enough so you

00:12:47.260 want to run away from them.

00:12:49.100 Decide that you're going to face the situation.

00:12:52.600 You lay out, for example, in your book, you ask people a lot of different questions about

00:12:57.600 what they're thinking.

00:12:59.660 And if something is making you anxious and afraid and miserable, it's very useful to lay

00:13:06.060 out, to write out all the reasons it's making you anxious and miserable.

00:13:10.240 And to ask yourself, what is it you're afraid of?

00:13:12.680 And then to develop a differentiated plan for dealing with those.

00:13:17.000 So let me ask you this.

00:13:18.280 In your psychoanalytic experience, can somebody, can the majority of people do this by themselves?

00:13:24.680 Because if I was to distill down all of the pathologies in modern civilization, I keep coming

00:13:31.500 back to a central, one central point.

00:13:35.340 And that's that we are desperately and pathologically and spiritually and frighteningly lonely.

00:13:42.760 And I'm wondering if we can, is it even possible anymore to tell a 21-year-old boy, 21-year-old

00:13:50.520 man, hey, you need to do this by yourself?

00:13:53.240 Or is the, because I keep coming back to the first thing you do before you start trying to

00:13:57.160 solve your problems is get a tribe, get a gang, get a couple of people in your corner,

00:14:00.780 get a mentor, somebody you can sit with.

00:14:03.740 And in our, we've had to professionalize it with mental health professionals, but get some

00:14:07.460 people around you to help be a good reflective mirror for you.

00:14:11.840 Because we're just, we're lonelying ourselves to death, I feel like.

00:14:14.300 Yeah, well, I don't think that people can generally do this alone.

00:14:19.880 It's actually very difficult.

00:14:21.480 And I think people can't do it alone in part because people, and I'm not being snide about

00:14:26.680 this, people aren't very good at thinking and they're not very good at negotiation.

00:14:31.440 Well, and when we're anxious, our brains shut off rational thinking, right?

00:14:35.960 It doesn't want us wondering, is that a nice bear?

00:14:38.060 It just wants us getting out of there.

00:14:39.320 Well, that's an additional problem.

00:14:42.440 You know, part of the reason that honesty and speech is so important is that there isn't

00:14:48.160 any difference between honesty and speech and thinking.

00:14:52.140 So you said, can people do this alone?

00:14:53.880 And the answer to that generally is no, because thought itself is generally a dialogical process.

00:15:00.800 So what you and I are doing right now is thinking things through.

00:15:03.940 Now we're doing that with an audience and for an audience, but you have some propositions

00:15:08.680 and I have some propositions and we're, we're pitting them against each other and cooperating

00:15:14.240 at the same time.

00:15:15.120 And we're allowing the discourse to modify our implicit presuppositions.

00:15:19.340 So we're allowing the discourse to modify our stories.

00:15:22.900 And thought itself is internalized dialogue or trialogue.

00:15:27.800 If you're really sophisticated, maybe you can break yourself into three people internally

00:15:31.340 and have an argument, but it's very, very difficult for people to develop a systematic

00:15:37.260 approach to thinking and then to counter that with another internalized systematic approach

00:15:42.860 to thinking and do all of that alone.

00:15:45.440 Generally, what happens in a healthy society, as you're pointing out, is that we have people

00:15:51.140 around us to whom we can express our concerns.

00:15:54.780 And then they react and then you react to that.

00:15:59.120 And that's thought.

00:16:01.020 And the fact that we would even ask people to do that alone is an indication, as you pointed

00:16:06.320 out, of how isolated and lonesome people have become.

00:16:10.460 You know, you said friends are people you can tell good things to and people you can tell

00:16:14.740 bad things to.

00:16:15.700 And you have friends because friends keep you sane.

00:16:18.780 And this is one of the things I liked about your book is this insistence that sanity, in

00:16:24.280 some real sense, is distributed.

00:16:26.460 It's not something inside your head.

00:16:28.120 It's something that you find as a consequence of being nested in a sequence, in a hierarchical

00:16:33.680 sequence of proper relationships.

00:16:36.120 And so if you could do it alone, man, you could do it in solitary confinement.

00:16:40.820 And, you know, even antisocial criminals hate solitary confinement.

00:16:45.100 We're socially on the leave.

00:16:46.580 And it's the way we punish prisoners, right, is to put them in the hole.

00:16:52.220 And we've just created a society where that's where we choose to live.

00:16:55.940 Yeah, and I love the idea of, I like to think of society, it's evenly distributed.

00:17:00.680 We carry each other's burdens in different seasons.

00:17:03.960 And that's the way through.

00:17:05.100 There's just simply moments when my wife gets sick or my dad finds himself, my aging father

00:17:09.480 is passing away, that, right, that's the old, you know, holding your arms up in the desert

00:17:14.840 narrative, right?

00:17:15.540 Like, we need other people to help us navigate these.

00:17:18.700 And how many, I won't put my experiences into your marriage, but the number of times over

00:17:24.400 the two decades I've been married that I've been hanging out with some friends that I

00:17:27.380 trust, and I say, my wife said this and this, and my friends go, man, she's right.

00:17:32.140 You're an idiot, right?

00:17:33.260 And so I need that sort of iron sharpening iron, right, to help me reframe something that my

00:17:39.140 body's taken off on.

00:17:40.260 Yeah, well, a good definition of sanity in some real sense, and I don't mean this in

00:17:46.700 a trivial or a coy way, is that you're saying if you can behave well enough that other people

00:17:54.900 can stand having you around so that they can provide you with corrective feedback.

00:17:59.860 And if you're sane enough so that other people can stand having you around, they'll reward

00:18:05.640 you when you deserve to be rewarded, and they'll punish you when you deserve to be punished,

00:18:11.020 and all you need to do is pay really careful attention to that feedback, and you'll be sane

00:18:18.100 and properly situated.

00:18:19.260 Now, you know, that can go wrong if the entire social community takes a pathological turn,

00:18:25.500 and that makes things more complicated, and that does happen from time to time, but generally

00:18:29.460 speaking, you have to be surrounded by people, and so we could walk through that.

00:18:34.540 Very few people can function effectively without an intimate relationship.

00:18:38.880 That's because you don't have anybody who's monitoring you over the medium to long run if

00:18:43.120 you don't have an intimate relationship.

00:18:44.440 And so how can you organize yourself intelligibly and sanely without the medium to long-term

00:18:52.980 orientation?

00:18:53.920 You just can't do it.

00:18:54.960 And how can you tell if you're being a civilized human being if you're not bouncing your behavior

00:18:59.080 off someone really close to you continually?

00:19:03.160 You can't.

00:19:04.180 You need the intimate relationship.

00:19:06.060 You need the family, parents and siblings, children, for the same reason, and you need friends.

00:19:11.540 You talk a lot in your book about friends, and you have some good practical advice, I would

00:19:16.640 say, and this would be something for us usefully to concentrate on, I would say, is you talk about

00:19:22.360 how people can make friends because people really don't know, and so maybe you could share

00:19:27.180 some of that with people who are watching and listening.

00:19:30.520 Yeah, I think there's two tracks I want to follow, and one we can circle back to.

00:19:34.340 This conversation we're having right now, evolutionarily, I think we're running a fantastic

00:19:41.200 experiment because for all of the history of mankind, nobody could sit in and listen

00:19:46.840 to you and I dialoguing this way unless they were in physical proximity, which that physical

00:19:52.920 proximity is a form of intimacy.

00:19:54.940 We're all in the same room, sharing the same meal, sharing the same fire.

00:19:57.840 And now we've created this bizarre intimacy where people can drive to work for two hours,

00:20:04.220 you know, one way, and they can go on road trips, but they're sitting by the fire with us, right?

00:20:09.960 And so there's this intellectual intimacy that's happening, but I think our bodies are hollering

00:20:14.540 at us.

00:20:15.300 When it comes to making friends, I spent a season, man, I was two inches from my wife,

00:20:24.580 and I was 2,000 miles away from her, and I shared a bed with a woman that I loved,

00:20:30.660 and I was profoundly lonely, and I always thought lonely was proximal, right?

00:20:35.580 You have nobody around you, and so I think it's proximal and it's emotional.

00:20:40.760 I've mastered the art of being alone.

00:20:42.780 I'm an introvert by nature, just a nerd.

00:20:45.100 I love to read my books, and so I mastered the art of being alone in a crowded room.

00:20:49.500 I can wave and smile and be completely on my own planet,

00:20:53.320 and that has a physiological and a spiritual cost to it, and so what I had to stop doing

00:20:58.680 was beating myself up for having a lack of character or I'm a failure.

00:21:04.240 No, I needed to learn a new set of skills, and that skill set was making friends.

00:21:09.820 When you're a child, when you're in middle school, when you're in high school,

00:21:13.000 when you're in university, everything is geared towards community.

00:21:17.000 You play games together.

00:21:18.600 You don't play games together.

00:21:20.120 It's all about doing things together, and then you cross that graduation stage,

00:21:23.320 or you get out of the army, and the world looks at you and says,

00:21:27.020 it's now you versus everybody, and so I think we just have to say,

00:21:29.680 hey, I don't have the skill set, so what do I got to do?

00:21:32.680 I think we overthink it.

00:21:34.260 I think hospitality, going first, asking people over to your house,

00:21:39.480 to your events, to your thing, and just go first.

00:21:42.700 Get over yourself.

00:21:43.760 Look at it as you just got to quit smoking at some point.

00:21:46.260 I just got to make friends at some point.

00:21:47.620 I'm going to go first.

00:21:48.760 People are going to say no.

00:21:50.020 They're going to challenge you.

00:21:51.360 You're going to find out that nobody wants to be around you,

00:21:53.440 so you got to go to the mirror and ask yourself,

00:21:55.520 what is it about me that I'm projecting in the world that nobody wants to spend time with me?

00:21:59.000 It really challenges, but, man, just let's stop over-pathologizing.

00:22:02.600 Let's just go be weird.

00:22:03.640 Go be weird and be hospitable.

00:22:05.400 Go first.

00:22:06.100 Go first.

00:22:06.460 Yeah, well, you know, you said that you're an introvert,

00:22:09.120 and the thing about introverts is they often have to learn consciously how to socialize, right?

00:22:15.160 Because extroverts, while they're tilted so hard in that direction,

00:22:18.240 it just comes naturally to them.

00:22:19.840 We could walk through some of the initial stages in forming relationships

00:22:23.400 in a very behavioral manner because people might find that useful.

00:22:27.740 So Benjamin Franklin said that one of the things you could do

00:22:31.320 when you first moved into a neighborhood was to ask one of your immediate neighbors

00:22:35.600 for a very small favor.

00:22:38.180 Right.

00:22:39.360 And the reason for that is because it gets the reciprocal trade moving in the proper direction.

00:22:47.100 So people like to be of service to other people,

00:22:50.180 and if you ask someone to do you a very small favor,

00:22:54.280 then you put yourself in their debt, and then you can also reciprocate.

00:22:58.800 So you allow them to show themselves in their best light

00:23:01.440 because you allow them to easily indicate that they're positive and friendly

00:23:05.540 and willing to do something for someone else,

00:23:07.740 and they're very happy about that if you get it right.

00:23:10.260 And then you're in their debt, so you can offer to do them a favor.

00:23:14.020 But we have to be very honest about how countercultural that is now

00:23:18.680 because overnight, just with a snap of the finger,

00:23:22.960 we don't ask our neighbor for a cup of sugar anymore, man.

00:23:26.300 We just get on Amazon Prime, and it shows up at our house.

00:23:29.160 Or we don't ask a friend to drive us to the airport anymore.

00:23:31.280 We just click a button on our cell phone, and somebody comes and picks us up.

00:23:35.160 And overnight, I think we have shifted this idea from,

00:23:39.160 I'm going to honor you and allow you to be of service to me, which is a gift,

00:23:44.160 and I'm going to allow my needs to be heard out loud.

00:23:47.340 I need some sugar.

00:23:48.060 I need an egg.

00:23:48.840 I need a ride.

00:23:50.060 I need you to help me move, right?

00:23:51.360 The worst call, we've suddenly become, we think we're a burden, Dr. Peterson.

00:23:58.000 We think we are a burden to our friends and neighbors.

00:24:01.760 And burdensomeness, perceived burdensomeness,

00:24:04.900 the idea that people are better off without me,

00:24:07.900 that's one of the pillars of suicidal ideation.

00:24:10.980 And our entire civilization has run that way.

00:24:15.040 We consider ourselves a burden.

00:24:17.520 And so the very act of asking a neighbor to help with something

00:24:23.260 is an act of defiance in our current era.

00:24:26.080 Go for it, man.

00:24:27.000 You want to be crazy, and you want to be countercultural?

00:24:29.680 Ask somebody to help you with something.

00:24:31.720 What a gift.

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00:25:40.520 Well, you can also do things if you move to a new neighborhood, for example.

00:25:47.940 You can, there'll be a local cafe somewhere.

00:25:51.760 You can go there once a week for like several months or twice a week at a regular time,

00:25:56.540 and you can introduce yourself to the owner,

00:25:59.800 and you can tell them that you've moved into the neighborhood,

00:26:01.880 and you can introduce yourself to the waiters and the waitresses,

00:26:04.580 and you can become a known fixture there, and you'll start to feel comfortable there,

00:26:09.500 and then you'll be able to start to have conversations with people there,

00:26:12.820 and you can do the same thing with people at your local store.

00:26:16.260 You have to, and you know, I had clients who didn't even know how to introduce themselves properly,

00:26:20.720 which can be a real impediment for people.

00:26:23.280 So, you know, you say to someone, well, you look them in the eye because then you're watching their face,

00:26:29.560 and then you can see how they're reacting,

00:26:31.940 and your unconscious socialization abilities will kick in if you attend to the right cues.

00:26:38.140 You say, hello there, I'm Jordan Peterson.

00:26:41.700 I just moved into the neighborhood.

00:26:43.840 I'm going to be dropping into your store pretty often.

00:26:46.680 I thought I'd introduce myself, and then you stick out your hand,

00:26:49.400 and you look at them, and you make sure that you're paying attention to them and not you,

00:26:54.400 and you say, what's your name?

00:26:55.860 And everyone responds positively to that.

00:27:00.040 And maybe if they don't, then it's time to find a different corner store.

00:27:04.080 Right.

00:27:04.500 You know, and then you try to remember their name,

00:27:06.380 but if you don't, you say, you know, we met the other day,

00:27:08.940 but I'm terrible with names.

00:27:10.480 I forgot your name.

00:27:11.160 Could you tell me again?

00:27:12.220 And if you do that, then, you know, that little corner store,

00:27:15.840 then it's not completely foreign territory, and you're not alienated from it.

00:27:20.480 You're going to start to feel comfortable,

00:27:21.720 and the same thing is true for this place you might go every week.

00:27:24.880 You have to establish these routines of socialization

00:27:28.560 because otherwise you're in enemy territory, at least unknown territory,

00:27:32.200 and that's extremely hard on you physiologically

00:27:34.740 because you don't know if you're surrounded by friends or foe, eh?

00:27:38.480 And so it's the same with your neighbors.

00:27:41.160 You are proposing an act of revolution by going to a new environment

00:27:45.880 and sticking out your hand and saying, hi, my name is John.

00:27:48.760 What is your name?

00:27:49.460 And actually listening to the response.

00:27:51.100 That is a revolutionary act.

00:27:53.540 That's a transformative.

00:27:54.460 I take my son.

00:27:55.820 He's 12, and so I've started being highly intentional about our relationship

00:28:00.340 because I'm in the early stages of raising what is soon to be released in the wild,

00:28:06.180 a grown man.

00:28:07.340 And so we have breakfast every Tuesday at this establishment here in the States

00:28:11.680 called Waffle House.

00:28:12.600 It's just a chain diner.

00:28:13.800 And one of the revolutionary acts I'm trying to teach him is the act of radical generosity.

00:28:23.200 And I, again, I struggle with sometimes basic, hi, my name is.

00:28:28.420 And so the way I began doing this, the Waffle House opened in our small town

00:28:32.940 outside of Nashville, Tennessee.

00:28:35.280 I started over tipping in a significant way

00:28:38.720 because nobody wants to be working the 6 a.m. shift on a Tuesday at a Waffle House.

00:28:43.100 And so I told my son, hey, we're going to take care of these waitresses.

00:28:47.180 They're awesome.

00:28:47.760 They bring us coffee.

00:28:48.600 They bring us juice.

00:28:49.400 They're lovely.

00:28:50.780 And within a few months, they know our order when we get there.

00:28:54.620 They are smiling when we walk in.

00:28:56.440 And it has absolutely transitioned our social interaction.

00:29:00.400 Now I look forward to spending time with my son,

00:29:02.300 but also hanging out with these great waitresses

00:29:04.240 and asking about their cool tattoos, right?

00:29:06.580 But it's just going first.

00:29:08.040 It's just going first, going first, going first.

00:29:09.760 Yeah, well, that emphasis on somewhat excess generosity in those situations

00:29:15.000 is extremely useful, too, because it doesn't take that much to distinguish yourself

00:29:19.980 on the attentional front from the run-of-the-mill customer.

00:29:24.280 And, you know, you only need, imagine this, you probably only need between 10,

00:29:31.060 maybe under 10 places to go in your social community in order to be well-situated.

00:29:37.720 And so you said, is it every week you do this with your son?

00:29:42.240 Yes, sir.

00:29:42.820 Okay, so we could do some quick arithmetic around that.

00:29:45.140 How long in all does that whole event take?

00:29:49.120 By the time we sit down and get him to school late every Tuesday,

00:29:54.900 it's probably a grand total of 45 minutes.

00:29:57.740 Okay, and what about travel time?

00:30:00.340 It's probably 20 minutes there.

00:30:02.920 So it's about an hour and a half.

00:30:04.320 Okay, so it's 90 minutes.

00:30:05.640 Full circle.

00:30:06.340 It's 90 minutes, and that's once a week?

00:30:08.980 Yes, sir.

00:30:09.880 Okay, so then you figure you're awake for about 16 hours a day.

00:30:13.880 And of that awake time, say 12 hours is useful for doing the sorts of things that you're doing with your son,

00:30:21.020 because you're going to spend four hours in just self-maintenance, right?

00:30:24.460 So let's say 12 hours.

00:30:26.360 90 minutes is about approximately one-tenth of that.

00:30:30.080 We'll just use that as an approximation for easy mathematics.

00:30:32.860 So you've fixed 10% of one day, and there's seven days.

00:30:40.880 And so that's basically 3% of your life you've fixed by doing that.

00:30:44.680 And that means you'd only have to fix 30 more things, and you'd have fixed 100% of your life.

00:30:50.540 Well, you know, you tell a story in your book about one of your friends who was talking about exercise and health,

00:30:56.760 and he said to you, change the things you do every day, the things that repeat.

00:31:03.400 Those are your life.

00:31:05.800 That's the routine around which your life is built.

00:31:08.220 People very much overvalue special occasions and vacations and that sort of thing,

00:31:13.260 and they don't pay nearly enough attention to the kind of thing you're doing with your son.

00:31:17.740 It's like that's once a week.

00:31:18.840 You might be able to do that for years.

00:31:20.840 It's 3% of your life.

00:31:22.500 If you get that perfect, now you've got 3% taken care of, and you can move to the next small piece and do the same thing.

00:31:30.260 You do that with some friends, and you do that with your wife, for example, a couple of times a week for a couple of hour sessions.

00:31:40.000 You know, one of the things I found in my practice was that this is useful for people who are trying to embark on an intimate relationship,

00:31:46.720 is you need to talk to your wife about the domestic economy and the practicalities of your life together for about 90 minutes a week.

00:31:58.040 And you need to date at least once a week for that length of time, or maybe twice if you can manage that.

00:32:06.540 And if you don't do that, you will become isolated and lonely, and you'll develop a backlog of communication.

00:32:12.640 And if you don't fix that, you'll end up divorced, and then you'll be fixing it for the rest of your life.

00:32:19.180 Absolutely, absolutely.

00:32:20.620 And whenever, man, backlog of communication, I love that.

00:32:24.620 I love that idea, as though I'm just putting rocks in a backpack, and eventually that backpack's going to wear me down

00:32:30.860 if I don't have a regular practice of communication.

00:32:34.900 And again, somehow this became a moral or characterological issue.

00:32:40.220 I think it's a skills issue, man.

00:32:41.860 I think taking some of the drama and smoke out of it and just saying,

00:32:45.760 hey, I don't know how to tell you, wife.

00:32:48.760 I've never seen it done.

00:32:49.940 I didn't see it at my house growing up.

00:32:51.240 I've never seen it.

00:32:52.240 I don't know how to do this, so I want to practice once a week.

00:32:55.860 Let's go over our calendar.

00:32:56.960 Let's go over our budget.

00:32:58.660 Like, how are we going to spend money this week?

00:33:01.380 And let's practice.

00:33:03.340 I'm going to try to tell you what I need this week.

00:33:06.300 About five years ago, my marriage was, I mean, we were hanging on by a spider's web, just hanging on.

00:33:12.760 And so my wife and I realized, if we're going to hang on to this thing, we're going to have to rebuild it out of ash, right?

00:33:18.560 And I can't tell you, I'm a 6'2", 195-pound, I lived in Texas my whole life, Texas male.

00:33:25.240 What it took for me to look across the table and tell my wife, I just occasionally want you to tell me that you're proud of me.

00:33:35.020 That was a hard thing for me to say, and I didn't even realize how desperately I'd been searching for her approval for the first 15 years we'd been married,

00:33:43.880 and how much I kept going out on a limb and on a limb and on a limb, and I was taking her non-response as rejection, and I never put my needs out there.

00:33:51.280 And I was embarrassed and ashamed to say it, and then she said, man, that would have been super helpful 15 years ago,

00:33:57.780 and now she makes it a regular practice of our marriage to say, hey, I see you, and I appreciate what you're doing for our family.

00:34:06.200 Golly, what a gift.

00:34:07.340 And I didn't know that doing the dishes was akin to foreplay.

00:34:11.320 Great, I will knock those dishes out all day long.

00:34:14.060 It's about practicing saying your needs out loud, and then, man, get out of your head.

00:34:19.360 The number of hours I've spent researching workout programs when I could have just gone to work out or researching how to tell your wife instead of just telling her, what a waste of time.

00:34:29.580 We have too much data, man.

00:34:30.960 We have too much information.

00:34:32.020 We need to go do, go do, go act, go act, go act.

00:34:33.820 Well, you can have a preliminary conversation with your partner, let's say, and say something like, look, we need to tell each other what we need and want,

00:34:45.080 and we're both too stupid to do that because we don't really know what we need and want, and we have almost no practice at it.

00:34:53.660 And worse, here's something about that that's really quite sad and frightening.

00:34:58.300 It's like, you know, if one of the things you wanted to hear is that your wife was grateful to you for, let's say, providing properly for the family,

00:35:06.340 so say proud of you, there's a part of you that's quite insecure that wants that message, and you're vulnerable on that point, hey?

00:35:15.940 And so then if you share that vulnerability, the person with whom you're sharing it knows exactly where to stick you if they want.

00:35:24.080 And so it takes real trust to do that.

00:35:26.780 But the alternative is assuming that, and people do this all the time, they'll say things like,

00:35:31.400 well, if you loved me, you'd know what I wanted.

00:35:34.200 It's like, well, first of all, that's a pretty perfect love.

00:35:38.020 And second—

00:35:38.600 I'm not clairvoyant, right? Yeah.

00:35:40.580 Well, right.

00:35:41.100 Well, you're not even smart enough to do that for yourself most of the time than someone else.

00:35:45.520 And so, you know, you can make an agreement with your partner and say, look, here's something I'd like to hear you say,

00:35:53.520 and here's the words I'd like to hear.

00:35:56.020 Will you just say that?

00:35:57.640 And the other person might object, and they'll say, well, that sounds false if I do it,

00:36:02.840 or it won't be real because we're just practicing it, and it's artificial.

00:36:08.260 And then you think, well, wait a second.

00:36:10.460 We're going to be together for the next 10,000 days.

00:36:16.400 And if it takes—

00:36:18.640 Yeah.

00:36:19.260 Yeah, or more.

00:36:19.980 And if it takes 20 stupid practices to get it right, that's not so much stacked up over 10,000 days.

00:36:30.000 You know, and it might be—with many marriages, I would say there's probably 10 things that each person wants to hear

00:36:36.660 on a quasi-regular basis that would make the difference between the marriage succeeding and the marriage failing.

00:36:42.640 But it means you have to sit down with your partner and say, look, we should decide jointly what we need and want,

00:36:48.380 and we should have enough courage to try to express ourselves stupidly in the attempt to get it.

00:36:55.100 And then allow ourselves to make mistakes, you know, while we're practicing.

00:36:59.800 I love that.

00:37:00.960 I find that we've become goal-obsessed.

00:37:04.740 And so if I want to do these things so that I can keep my marriage, I find that I end up way out on a limb.

00:37:12.880 I find that by chasing somewhere I don't want to go, I find it more valuable to say I want to live a life that is not chasing happiness

00:37:21.320 because that's just cocaine and cotton candy, but I want to chase a life of joy.

00:37:24.600 And all of the data tells me a good marriage, a good connection with the romantic, intimate partner over a long period of time

00:37:33.400 is the best bet I have in maximizing joy.

00:37:38.080 And so if I'm going to do that, that means I've got to be awkward.

00:37:40.760 And by the way, if you can stand in front of somebody naked and say, do you see me and you think I'm beautiful?

00:37:46.800 Do you want to join bodies with me?

00:37:49.000 Surely you can say, hey, when I see dishes in the sink, it makes me feel like I'm not being the romantic partner.

00:37:57.680 I feel like I'm less of a wife because I've created this narrative in my head that this is what a perfect wife does or a perfect husband does.

00:38:03.380 Can you help with the dishes?

00:38:05.000 Good gosh, you can do, you can stand in front of somebody naked and say, here I am.

00:38:09.940 Surely you can say, hey, can you help with the dishes, right?

00:38:11.900 And then we have to be, stop being so, looking for people coming at us.

00:38:19.220 What's that great saying?

00:38:20.160 Whatever you go looking for in the world, you're sure to find.

00:38:22.540 Start receiving those, that feedback as an invitation, not as a, you've been screwing this up, right?

00:38:28.520 Because my wife could have heard that, me saying, hey, I just want you to say you're proud of me every once in a while as me throwing a grenade, right?

00:38:35.120 You're failing me because you're not doing these things.

00:38:37.100 She took it as, here's an invitation.

00:38:39.440 Here's a way you can love me better.

00:38:41.460 And what a gift, man, what a gift.

00:38:42.800 Yeah, well, you can also-

00:38:43.440 We got to get over ourselves, man.

00:38:44.700 You can help people box those sorts of things in too by saying, look, let's make this discussion about the smallest thing possible, right?

00:38:53.920 We're not opening up Pandora's box and assessing the validity of our entire marriage.

00:38:59.900 We're going to try to get one small thing slightly better.

00:39:03.260 And we're going to assume that lots of things are going well.

00:39:05.860 And so we're going to sit down for 90 minutes a week.

00:39:09.460 Maybe that's not all at once.

00:39:10.820 And we're going to share what's on our minds.

00:39:13.560 And we're going to talk about what we would like to see happen and how we would respond positively to that.

00:39:19.840 And we're not going to leap to the conclusion that that's a generic criticism of the whole marriage.

00:39:24.260 This is partly also why people don't have these conversations, especially when they have developed a backlog of communication.

00:39:32.100 So my wife and I had a rule too, which was, well, we had a couple of rules that helped us along with this to not have the backlog.

00:39:39.160 And one of the rules was, don't agree to anything that you don't agree to.

00:39:46.960 Because the last thing, well, the last thing I wanted to hear five years down the road after we had embarked on a particular pathway was,

00:39:55.940 well, I didn't really want to do that, but I just went along with it because I thought you wanted to.

00:40:01.040 It's like, well, what now am I, what am I supposed to do about that now?

00:40:04.280 You know, that was five years ago and we talked about it and I didn't want you to agree because you thought it was easier to agree.

00:40:13.280 I wanted a consensus, you know, and so, and the corollary to that was if we're going to talk about something that needs to be addressed now

00:40:20.740 and that will be fixed in the future, we don't get to drag up the past.

00:40:25.180 Because that's another thing that happens, right, is you start talking about things that are problematic

00:40:29.000 and one person or the other goes, well, you've, you always act like this, you've always acted like this

00:40:34.860 and there's no chance in the future that you're ever going to change.

00:40:38.380 It's like, well, instantly you're in a fight because your whole character, past, present and future, has just been savaged.

00:40:45.500 When the conversation should be something like, our mealtimes might go 15% better if after you were done eating

00:40:55.500 and you, and we had all finished, you brought your dishes to the sink and rinsed them off and put them in the dishwasher.

00:41:02.680 And here's what I'm willing to do in return for that.

00:41:06.220 Well, I like to, I like to even take it one step further and personalize it because I find I react.

00:41:13.380 When somebody says you need to, as soon as somebody points their finger at me, I just, I am fully limbic, man.

00:41:19.640 I go, I go fight or flight instantly. And so I, I tend to say, hey, uh, here's a good example.

00:41:26.860 I work at Ramsey Solutions in Nashville and, uh, have a history of helping people get out of debt,

00:41:32.920 pay their financial debts off and work together as a community and as a couple to pay their debts off.

00:41:38.340 One of the most common questions we get is how do I get my partner on board?

00:41:42.520 Like he wants to just buy a huge pickup truck and buy the biggest house.

00:41:46.140 And he's run the credit cards up and I keep coming to him with these numbers and it's, it's very short or it's not about numbers.

00:41:53.180 And if you come at somebody like you need to sell your truck and you do this, well, now you've started a war.

00:41:57.980 There's a difference when you sit down and say, hey, I'm scared to death and I can't breathe because we are so indebted.

00:42:05.220 There's something about saying it would really be a gift to me if when dinner was over,

00:42:09.660 if you took and rinsed your plate and just took six seconds to put it in the dishwasher, that'd be a gift to me.

00:42:14.500 That's different than you need to take your dishes out, right?

00:42:17.440 And one of those puts me on the defensive.

00:42:19.280 One of those is an invitation.

00:42:20.860 And I've just decided, man, my life is too short to continue to, to do anything other than invitations, except in very few moments.

00:42:28.420 Hey, everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:42:35.280 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

00:42:41.620 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

00:42:48.300 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.

00:42:56.720 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.

00:43:04.180 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone.

00:43:07.280 There's hope and there's a path to feeling better.

00:43:10.560 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.

00:43:15.700 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:43:23.620 Yeah.

00:43:24.520 Yeah, well, that conversation about debt, too, is one of the ways that you cooperate and negotiate with your spouse and your friends, your family, for that matter, is also to jointly develop something like a joint vision.

00:43:39.100 You know, because you might be able to sit down with your wife and say, well, look, if we could have the dinner times that we really wanted, if they were optimal, like you've done with your son, let's say, what would that look like?

00:43:52.420 Well, let's say you have a couple of kids.

00:43:53.860 You think, well, do we all want to sit down together as a family?

00:43:57.580 This has to be a question, right, to both of you.

00:44:00.320 Yes.

00:44:00.680 That you're actually imagining.

00:44:02.000 Do we all want to sit down?

00:44:03.740 Okay, yes.

00:44:05.180 Well, how often?

00:44:06.700 Do we want to do that like seven nights a week?

00:44:08.880 Is this something that's actually a crucial foundation for our family?

00:44:12.680 Or can we do it five nights a week and maybe do something different on Friday?

00:44:17.420 And you think, well, do all those micro things have to be negotiated?

00:44:20.680 And the answer is, those aren't micro things.

00:44:23.680 You do that every day.

00:44:25.380 They're absolutely foundational.

00:44:27.140 And then you want to hear what the other person has to say, because if you don't, they're not going to be fully on board.

00:44:33.700 Plus, they might have a better idea than you.

00:44:36.160 You never know.

00:44:36.860 So let's say we decide, well, we're going to have dinner together at six o'clock, five nights a week.

00:44:45.120 And we're going to let people forage one night a week and maybe sit in front of the TV.

00:44:49.780 And we're going to go out one night a week, something like that.

00:44:52.400 And we'll try that for a while.

00:44:53.700 And then the next question is, well, what would we like to serve?

00:44:58.760 And who's going to cook?

00:45:00.600 And who's going to clean up?

00:45:01.980 And if we wanted it to go as well as it possibly could, how are we going to get the kids involved?

00:45:07.240 And do we want to experiment with some new foods?

00:45:10.020 And, you know, that mealtime, if that's the evening meal, let's say that's 90 minutes, that's more than one-tenth of your day.

00:45:18.800 And so that's 10% of your life.

00:45:21.080 That's literally 10% of your life if you get the evening meal right.

00:45:24.080 Yeah, but it's bigger.

00:45:25.060 It's compound interest.

00:45:26.160 That grows over time.

00:45:27.440 I think that 10%—you take care—it's like putting 15% of your income in retirement.

00:45:33.040 It grows to infinitely more than 15% of your income over time, right?

00:45:37.040 So if you take care of that 10%, it's not just taking care of that 10%.

00:45:39.940 Suddenly, if your marriage is in sync, you're an infinitely better parent.

00:45:43.700 Right.

00:45:44.100 An infinitely better citizen.

00:45:45.080 Right, right.

00:45:45.520 An infinitely better worker.

00:45:46.740 And it becomes very recursive.

00:45:49.740 The famed psychiatrist William Glasser, he gave me—I love this analogy.

00:45:54.740 He says that he could—his famed line was, he could fix any marriage in two sessions.

00:46:00.700 And he said, we think in pictures, but we speak in words.

00:46:05.180 And if couples can simply align their pictures, then you get a very clear path.

00:46:10.340 So when my wife comes to me on a Monday and says, hey, this weekend, you and me, we're going to go on the hottest date.

00:46:18.400 And then she just walks away.

00:46:20.060 Monday night, I'm wondering where we're going.

00:46:22.400 Tuesday night, I'm wondering what I'm wearing and for how long, right?

00:46:25.460 By Wednesday and Thursday, I'm wondering who's going to keep the kids.

00:46:28.440 And I don't care because they're going to be fine and what hotel we're going to end up at.

00:46:31.440 And then Saturday comes along, and I show up in a suit, and she shows up in her running shorts and a T-shirt.

00:46:38.480 And I say, what are you doing?

00:46:39.980 And she says, what are you doing?

00:46:41.200 And I say, I thought we were going on a hot date.

00:46:42.780 And she says, it's seven tacos for $10 down at Taco Hut.

00:46:48.100 We're going on a hot date.

00:46:49.280 Hey, I love tacos, and I hope she loves the occasional rendezvous.

00:46:54.740 But we both used the word date, and we had very different pictures.

00:46:57.660 Now, I'm upset.

00:46:58.540 She's upset.

00:46:59.420 And we just, so in my house, every single day of the week, every day I'm not on the road, we ask ourself this question.

00:47:06.760 Hey, what's the picture of today look like?

00:47:08.600 It's just become a vernacular in our home.

00:47:10.280 And so when she says, I need some space this evening, I need some time by myself, I tend to go, okay, cool.

00:47:16.540 After dinner, and after the kids, and after you're done writing, and I won't hassle you for the last eight minutes of the day.

00:47:22.340 For her, she's thinking, the moment you walk in this house, I'm out, and I might come back in a week, right?

00:47:27.860 We just have to align our pictures.

00:47:29.440 And I'm cool either way, and she's cool either way.

00:47:31.320 It's just managing those expectations and being so clear with one another.

00:47:34.900 Yeah, well, that's exactly the process of defining a shared vision.

00:47:39.520 And one of the things that's lovely about that is it makes you, you're not reactive then, so you're not the thing that's being chased by the monster or the dread.

00:47:49.420 You're the thing that's actively conceptualizing the manner in which the future is going to shape itself.

00:47:54.560 And what you have is the delightful opportunity to share a joint vision that, in principle, would be better for both of you than anything you could do alone.

00:48:04.540 Like you said, that all the data shows that one of the best things you can do in your life to maximize your long-term health and increase your probability of at least some joy is to have a functional, long-term, intimate relationship.

00:48:18.380 And so you have to attend to that.

00:48:19.820 And a huge part of that is the development of these shared visions.

00:48:23.420 And it's really useful to develop micro-visions.

00:48:27.680 And so, you know, we just talked about—

00:48:30.260 What would you tell clients back in the day when they would come to you and they'd have a three-year-old and they would have just had—and they have an infant.

00:48:38.260 They have child number two.

00:48:40.060 And they would say, we're not having sex anymore.

00:48:44.560 We have like an intimacy.

00:48:46.020 We become co-managers of our house.

00:48:47.580 And your response as a clinical psychologist would be, you've got to schedule it.

00:48:51.660 You've got to put it on the calendar.

00:48:52.600 And the response always is, I don't want to do that anymore.

00:48:55.880 What's the follow-up?

00:48:57.580 That's great.

00:48:57.880 That's a great question.

00:48:58.800 Well, my first response is, well, how often do you want to have sex?

00:49:04.660 And people hate that.

00:49:05.940 People hate that question.

00:49:08.040 And so they avoid it.

00:49:09.600 They say, well, you know, we don't really want to be that calculating about it.

00:49:13.260 It's like, okay, right, whatever.

00:49:15.960 We're going to parameterize this once a year.

00:49:19.760 It's like, no, that's probably too little.

00:49:21.740 Okay, 15 times a day.

00:49:24.460 It's like, no, that's probably too much.

00:49:26.580 Okay, so now we've got some parameters here.

00:49:28.900 It's somewhere between once a year and 15 times a day.

00:49:32.320 Let's see if we can narrow that in.

00:49:34.160 And this does make people uncomfortable, right?

00:49:36.180 They don't want to specify their needs and wants.

00:49:39.800 And I think it's partly-

00:49:40.780 What's the source of that discomfort?

00:49:42.400 Where does that come from?

00:49:43.460 Well, I think they're embarrassed that they need anything.

00:49:46.500 So it's just fundamental shame.

00:49:48.640 Like it's that same exposure of nakedness.

00:49:50.720 And then they're unwilling to share the information with their partner because it's revealing.

00:49:58.520 And then they're afraid they're going to be rebuffed.

00:50:01.800 And they're afraid they're going to get into a fight.

00:50:04.220 They've got lots of reasons not to want to do it.

00:50:07.120 But-

00:50:07.360 And that rolls back to those stories that have been haunting them since they were kids, right?

00:50:11.620 Yeah, yeah.

00:50:12.280 And they don't want to have the difficult conversation up front.

00:50:15.440 And so we might say, well, okay, let's be reasonable about this.

00:50:19.320 It's going to be some number of times a week.

00:50:21.660 You guys have jobs.

00:50:23.300 You have kids.

00:50:24.100 You're busy.

00:50:24.980 You're not going to have a hot date every night.

00:50:26.680 You just don't have time for it.

00:50:28.380 And so why don't we be reasonable about it?

00:50:30.460 We could try.

00:50:31.380 Let's aim for something like twice a week.

00:50:33.980 It's like, can you think?

00:50:35.500 Or maybe we could start with once a week.

00:50:38.680 Because zero once is a lot more than zero.

00:50:41.240 It's a lot more than zero.

00:50:42.720 And so then you think, well, all right.

00:50:45.900 And then they say something like, well, you know, we did all that dating when we were dating.

00:50:50.500 And now we don't want to do that anymore.

00:50:52.820 It's like, okay, so what are you saying here exactly?

00:50:55.500 You're saying that you don't want any more romance.

00:50:58.960 And you don't want any more hot sex.

00:51:02.020 And you don't want to put any work into it.

00:51:04.380 And it's just going to happen magically, even though it's clearly not happening.

00:51:09.260 That's your theory.

00:51:10.720 And then let's run that theory out.

00:51:12.820 Okay, so now you have new kids.

00:51:15.140 And that's going to be, it's going to be like that for a few years.

00:51:18.240 Maybe until they're 10 or 11.

00:51:20.840 You're going to be occupied with your family.

00:51:22.500 And so now you have a sexless marriage with no intimacy for a decade.

00:51:26.780 So what does that look like in like 2032 when you're in divorce court?

00:51:31.860 Right, right.

00:51:32.500 Or you're recovering from some addiction, right?

00:51:35.340 Right, right.

00:51:35.840 Of work or of alcohol or whatever it is.

00:51:39.100 Because your body's got to, it's got to meet that need somewhere.

00:51:42.900 And if it can't get it, if it can't get it a true deep connection,

00:51:46.580 it will come up with all kinds of cheap substitutes, right?

00:51:48.820 Yeah, like an affair.

00:51:50.920 That's right.

00:51:51.320 Yeah, so of course you don't want to do this because it requires difficult negotiation.

00:51:56.100 But how would you like to have your marriage deteriorate into hell over a 10-year period?

00:52:00.960 How does that sound as an alternative?

00:52:02.760 It's like, well, that's not very good.

00:52:03.960 It's like, okay, so which of these two things are you more afraid of?

00:52:08.380 And then when people really think that through, they think, oh yeah, well, maybe,

00:52:12.120 you know, I could take the risk of making what I want known.

00:52:15.540 And then, okay, so now you specify it.

00:52:18.820 Well, a date.

00:52:20.020 Which night?

00:52:21.200 How long?

00:52:22.300 Are you going to find a babysitter?

00:52:23.560 Are you going to do this every week?

00:52:25.160 Who's going to be responsible for what in relationship to this date?

00:52:28.700 All these details have to be negotiated.

00:52:30.520 And then we remember, you know, by the same logic that we've already employed,

00:52:35.080 if this is two hours a week, then that's 15% of one day.

00:52:41.380 That's another 5% of your life.

00:52:43.140 And it's the intimate part of your life.

00:52:44.740 And if you got that right, my God, you might be a much happier person.

00:52:48.800 And so that's another one of the only 25 things you have to take care of to set your life up.

00:52:54.300 But I mean, you said, why are people afraid to do this?

00:52:57.860 They're afraid to show their vulnerability.

00:53:02.440 Man, they don't trust their partner.

00:53:03.740 They don't know how to negotiate.

00:53:05.300 They don't even know what they want themselves.

00:53:07.420 You know, like, it's not that easy for someone to admit that they need any physical attention at all,

00:53:13.180 even though everyone obviously does.

00:53:15.300 You know, because you're putting yourself on the line then.

00:53:17.700 And that is the definition of intimacy in some sense.

00:53:22.160 Absolutely.

00:53:22.940 I can't tell you, and I know you've experienced this too,

00:53:27.660 whether it's a single mom with three kids just trying to figure out what day it is,

00:53:32.860 or it's a multi-multi-millionaire who's got resources that far exceed anything I could imagine.

00:53:38.460 I've rarely, rarely sat down across from somebody and had them be able to articulate,

00:53:45.760 what do you actually want?

00:53:49.340 They cannot answer that question, and they fill it with addictions.

00:53:53.540 They fill it with hobbies.

00:53:54.640 They fill it with dopamine chase.

00:53:56.920 They fill it with so much stuff, and nobody can answer that question.

00:54:00.740 What do you want?

00:54:02.880 Because we just don't have a culture that has a shared vision of where we're headed.

00:54:07.860 We have a culture of you're hurting and somebody else's fault, and let's start pointing fingers.

00:54:13.220 And, man, we've got to circle the wagons on a shared vision moving forward.

00:54:16.680 Because what do you want?

00:54:18.640 No, that's not a question anybody asks.

00:54:20.280 It's what do I don't want, and why am I feeling just uncomfortable?

00:54:23.880 It's because of him.

00:54:24.480 It's because of him.

00:54:25.020 It's because of her.

00:54:25.380 Well, then if it's what you don't want, you're driven by negative emotion.

00:54:28.500 If you're running from, not to.

00:54:31.980 If you're driven by a vision, that's positive emotion.

00:54:34.800 Because approaching something positive in a visionary manner generates positive emotion.

00:54:40.540 If you're only fleeing from things you don't want,

00:54:43.140 then you're constantly in a state of anxiety and depression.

00:54:45.820 That's how it works.

00:54:46.840 Where did that go?

00:54:49.640 Where did we lose a shared vision?

00:54:51.400 Why can't somebody put a flag in the ground and say,

00:54:53.240 this is where we're headed?

00:54:54.360 That seems to be gone.

00:54:56.680 Yeah, well, that's a complicated question.

00:54:58.280 I mean, I would say that's the consequence in the most fundamental sense of the death of God

00:55:05.780 in the most fundamental way.

00:55:07.600 It's the death of a sense of higher order unity.

00:55:11.940 Now, it's also a very complicated question.

00:55:14.260 If you ask someone, what do you want?

00:55:16.300 If you could ask your wife that, what do you want?

00:55:18.940 You'll probably freeze her into immobility.

00:55:21.380 Because it's really like asking, how do you want all of your life to go?

00:55:26.640 Oh, please summarize.

00:55:28.600 And one of the things that, yeah, well, it's a lot, you know.

00:55:32.260 And one of the ways that you can deal with that, which you undoubtedly know as someone

00:55:37.260 who's conversant with cognitive behavioral techniques,

00:55:40.060 is you can ask people more micro questions, too, about what they want.

00:55:43.980 So you might say, well, well, we did that on the dating front already, right?

00:55:47.960 We talked about that.

00:55:48.740 We talked about how you might think about how you want your mealtimes to go.

00:55:52.320 We only talked about dinnertime, but you could talk about breakfast and lunch as well.

00:55:56.780 And then you could, and there are other micro domains that are very crucial that you can

00:56:02.000 also consider.

00:56:02.760 It's like, so you could ask yourself, well, if you could have the education you wanted,

00:56:08.280 what would that look like?

00:56:09.560 Like, if you were on, if you had the job or career track that would motivate you,

00:56:15.760 just hypothetically, what might that look like?

00:56:19.140 Sketch out a bad plan.

00:56:22.220 If you had some friends, well, first, do you want some friends?

00:56:26.100 And if so, how many?

00:56:27.200 And if you had friends and the right number,

00:56:30.600 how much time per week would you like to spend with them?

00:56:34.260 And if you had some time outside of work and familial responsibilities,

00:56:38.580 what might you like to do with your time that you would really like to do?

00:56:42.900 And the thing about these questions is that they're real questions.

00:56:47.820 You know, there's this gospel statement that if you knock, the door will open.

00:56:51.700 And that if you ask, you will receive.

00:56:53.920 And if you search, you'll find.

00:56:55.400 If you seek, you'll find.

00:56:56.880 And people who are faithless, in some sense,

00:57:00.100 think about it as kind of a hallmark greeting card approach to the world.

00:57:04.000 It's just, well, you just ask for things and they appear.

00:57:06.640 It's like, no, that isn't what any of that means.

00:57:10.980 It means nothing that you want will manifest itself unless you aim for it.

00:57:18.200 And you won't aim for it unless you know what it is.

00:57:20.900 And you won't know what it is unless you ask yourself.

00:57:23.960 And then you might say, well, why don't you ask yourself?

00:57:26.500 And the answer is, well, maybe no one ever explained to you that you needed to,

00:57:31.080 which is a crucial issue.

00:57:32.220 And then maybe you don't also trust yourself, you know, because you might think,

00:57:37.460 well, if I let myself know what I wanted, given my bloody track record,

00:57:42.060 I would do everything I could to screw it up.

00:57:44.280 So I'll just keep myself opaque to myself so that I don't fail at something that's truly important.

00:57:51.100 And then I can always regale with myself with the idea that, well, I didn't succeed, but I didn't really try.

00:57:59.280 Had I really tried, I might have succeeded.

00:58:01.280 Whereas if you let yourself know what you want and then you try, you also set the preconditions for failure.

00:58:07.480 So it's risky.

00:58:08.460 But the alternative is, well, you don't know what you want.

00:58:12.820 So it is a meditative practice.

00:58:14.960 Like, okay, if I could have what I wanted, imagine the world was constituted so that the entire planet wouldn't explode in an apocalypse if I got what I needed and wanted.

00:58:25.600 Yeah, right.

00:58:28.120 It's like, what would that be?

00:58:30.380 You know, what kind of areas would I like?

00:58:30.920 Okay, so is this a cognitive, well, I don't want to use jargon.

00:58:36.340 Is this a thought exercise or is this a feeling exercise?

00:58:41.180 Because here's what I'm seeing across the country.

00:58:44.880 I thought it would feel different when I finally got that associate vice president job.

00:58:49.120 Yeah, right.

00:58:49.640 I thought I would feel a certain way when I got a car.

00:58:51.800 I thought if I could just get her to date me, I would feel a certain way.

00:58:55.600 And people are realizing in rapid fashion, I thought if my politician won, I would suddenly feel a certain way.

00:59:03.640 Here's a great, I testified in a court case against somebody years ago.

00:59:07.840 A former student of mine got into some, did some really terrible things.

00:59:13.720 And he got a long jail sentence.

00:59:16.200 And the next morning I woke up and I read what the judge had written in the sentencing.

00:59:20.660 And I, he, the judge used some of my words and I remember feeling sick to my stomach.

00:59:28.140 And I called a mentor of mine, a psychology friend, professor of mine, and asked her, I said, man, I feel gross.

00:59:33.940 And she said, John, nobody wins here.

00:59:37.280 And I had this perception that I was going to feel a certain way when justice was done and the right thing happened.

00:59:42.460 And I realized, man, I had thought this through cognitively, but I had not managed.

00:59:47.560 How are you going to actually feel?

00:59:48.940 Because nobody wins.

00:59:50.000 Somebody's life is ruined over here.

00:59:51.260 Somebody's life is still ruined over here.

00:59:53.600 I think we have to, I don't know.

00:59:55.420 Let me, you're, you're infinitely, you've got infinitely more wisdom than I do on this.

01:00:00.980 But I find that the cognitive exercise is helpful, but it really is important to sit down and say, okay,

01:00:05.120 how are you going to feel five days after you've bought this car that you think you have to have?

01:00:09.740 Well, okay.

01:00:10.600 So the first thing is, is that the probability that you'll be happy because you've accomplished something in any permanent sense is virtually zero.

01:00:22.720 And the reason for that is that isn't what positive emotion is for.

01:00:28.920 Positive emotion is to indicate that you're making progress towards a valued goal.

01:00:33.480 Well, yes, now that's the driver, right?

01:00:36.380 Not, not the finish line.

01:00:37.760 Exactly.

01:00:38.340 Well, and that's actually pharmacologically separate, right?

01:00:41.580 Because a satiation reward, which would be the accomplishment of something, calms you and stops that program from running.

01:00:50.440 So, for example, once you've become vice president, if that was your goal, then the whole pursuing vice president program comes to a halt.

01:01:00.520 Now, the problem with that is it leaves you without a goal, and it also leaves empty space, which you immediately have to fill.

01:01:09.780 And so often people feel disquiet because now they don't know what to do, and they miss that rush because they're no longer pursuing something.

01:01:18.040 And so it's very important to know that positive emotion is experienced in relationship to a valued goal.

01:01:25.400 And then the question becomes, well, what's the most valuable goal to pursue?

01:01:28.840 And that's really a metaphysical and a theological question.

01:01:31.680 In terms of the mechanics of feeling, so imagine that you're negotiating the structure of a date with your wife, and you're developing a shared vision.

01:01:43.180 And so you say, well, on Wednesday nights, once a week, we're going to go for dinner, and maybe you specify the restaurant, and you're going to make the arrangements, and I'm going to get dressed up, and then we're going to go see a movie, and you're going to pick the movie, and then we're going to have a romantic interlude afterwards.

01:02:02.020 And we'll run that and see how it goes.

01:02:03.940 And then what you want to do is you want to picture that, and you want to watch how your body reacts on the emotional level.

01:02:12.660 And that's a bit of honesty, right?

01:02:15.140 And you can see, well, if we went to this restaurant, oh, I don't really like that restaurant.

01:02:19.620 I think it's kind of expensive.

01:02:20.920 I had a bad time with the waiters.

01:02:22.660 I don't think I'd be happy there.

01:02:24.600 Then you say those things to your partner.

01:02:27.600 You say, well, I'm thinking this through.

01:02:29.400 I'm imagining it.

01:02:30.400 And here's the objections that are coming up.

01:02:33.160 Maybe they're wrong.

01:02:34.600 Maybe I've got this wrong, but I'd like to hear your input because, you know, we want to get this right.

01:02:39.260 Should we re-evaluate my feelings about the restaurant, or should we think about a different restaurant?

01:02:44.760 And that should be a question because you don't know.

01:02:47.120 Maybe you're just stupid about the restaurant, or you're cheap, or you're afraid to go there because you don't have the right clothes.

01:02:53.720 I mean, you don't know, right?

01:02:54.980 But if you want to get your feelings in line, you develop the vision, and then you apprehend the vision with your feelings.

01:03:03.000 It's kind of what you do when you go to a movie, and you fall into the fantasy of the character.

01:03:07.260 You know, you embody all the emotions, and you evaluate it that way.

01:03:10.500 And so, and the other problem with that more goal-directed approach that you described is, like, I think people should plan and they should develop a vision.

01:03:22.140 You have to develop the vision and then be somewhat detached from it because it needs to be updated, right, and modified.

01:03:29.580 Hold it loosely, yeah.

01:03:30.640 Yeah, hold it loosely.

01:03:31.900 Yeah, that's right, because you're fallible, and maybe you can come up with a better plan.

01:03:35.600 Not every minute because you'll drive yourself mad that way, but now and then.

01:03:40.220 Or I was obsessed as a young higher education professional with becoming a college president until I sat down at the senior leadership table and I realized, I don't want that life.

01:03:53.420 I don't want that life.

01:03:55.560 I don't want 24-7, 365, and the politics.

01:03:58.120 I don't want asking for money.

01:03:59.340 I don't want that life, and I didn't have a backup plan.

01:04:02.840 I didn't know what to do.

01:04:03.480 I was, like, you nailed it.

01:04:04.660 I was completely rudderless because I'd made the finish line the goal.

01:04:11.080 Going all the way back full circle to how you open the conversation, I think that becomes really important to lay out an identity and reverse engineer.

01:04:19.700 Who do I want to be?

01:04:21.060 Who do I want to become?

01:04:22.820 And the goals end up, you know, it's like the old days when you went to grad school.

01:04:27.560 A PhD was simply a high five on a journey of continued learning.

01:04:35.160 I'm going to continue going down this rabbit hole, and now it's become a destination, and people walk out and announce themselves as educated because I've crossed this finish line.

01:04:43.480 Just because you run a marathon or walk a marathon doesn't mean you're fit, right?

01:04:47.560 It doesn't mean you're healthy.

01:04:48.780 Well, we talked about the necessity of goals, and so there's higher-order goals, and you need the higher-order goals because they integrate you.

01:04:59.020 And a goal of becoming a college president is a higher-order goal than no goal at all and just sitting in your bed and eating Cheetos, right?

01:05:08.620 So it's a better plan than no plan at all.

01:05:11.620 But then this is where things become profound and serious, and I would say even in a religious sense because what's religious is about what's profound and serious in some sense by definition.

01:05:24.160 So you might say, well, who should I be?

01:05:26.680 And you might think, well, I should be the college president.

01:05:28.820 I should have this car.

01:05:29.820 I should have this house.

01:05:30.960 Those are all very particularized versions of yourself, and the problem with them is that they're concrete and final actualities and not processes.

01:05:42.340 And so here's a good vision that's a high-order vision, and I think it's the vision that our whole culture is founded on.

01:05:48.520 I should be the person who genuinely confronts the problems and challenges that confront me in my life.

01:05:58.740 So that's an attitude of active and voluntary engagement, right?

01:06:03.640 That's an identity, yes.

01:06:05.140 Yeah, that's an identity of process as well.

01:06:08.920 It's like I'm going to be someone who doesn't shy away from the challenges of life.

01:06:12.880 Yes.

01:06:13.380 Okay, and then—

01:06:14.080 I'm a guy who confronts it, yeah.

01:06:15.120 Right, right.

01:06:15.600 And so that's St. George and the dragon, and that's a precondition for therapeutic transformation, because in order for you to improve, you have to identify the problem, the dragon, and you have to be willing to face it voluntarily.

01:06:29.500 And so you say to yourself, I'm going to do what I can to develop the courage to confront the problems in my life voluntarily.

01:06:37.040 That's who I want to be.

01:06:38.940 And then another element of that is, oh, I can't do that without telling the truth.

01:06:43.900 I have to be willing to see what's in front of me, and I have to be willing to admit to myself what I think and feel, and I have to be willing to communicate that.

01:06:53.840 And so you could say, well, that makes your goal something like, to think about it archetypally, you talked about Jungian approaches earlier, is that that makes you into a truth-telling hero.

01:07:04.160 And then maybe underneath that, it's like, well, could I become college president?

01:07:09.060 Could I be successful in my business?

01:07:10.880 Could I be successful in my marriage?

01:07:12.320 It's like, that's all well and good, and those are more concretized goals.

01:07:15.960 But the highest order goal has to be something like an approach rather than a final state, right?

01:07:23.280 Because you might say, well, I want to be the guy who listens to my wife.

01:07:25.220 The approach never ends.

01:07:26.840 That's right.

01:07:27.480 Well, and you can say to yourself, I want to be the guy who listens to my wife.

01:07:32.080 Yeah.

01:07:32.840 Okay, so you're never going to finalize that, right?

01:07:35.920 Because you're doing that all the time.

01:07:37.700 And that's also really useful because you don't hit the target and then find yourself left with nothing.

01:07:46.580 Because you can do that every day.

01:07:47.860 I want to be the guy who listens to my kids.

01:07:49.680 I want to be the guy who pays attention to my friends.

01:07:53.440 And I want to be the guy who speaks my mind carefully and judiciously.

01:07:58.220 It's like, you can bring that anywhere, man.

01:08:00.900 And you're talking about the difference there, that approach.

01:08:05.400 Let's use your example.

01:08:07.220 I want to be a guy who's a good steward of my wife.

01:08:09.960 I want to be, that's my identity.

01:08:12.180 And that means I'm going to have to backfill it with some goals.

01:08:14.440 We're going to meet once a week, and I'm not going to try to fix her like she's a car engine.

01:08:18.080 And I'm not going to try to solve her problems with her as though she's infantile.

01:08:22.180 I'm going to just listen, and I'm going to commit to being quiet.

01:08:25.220 And so when she says, I'm really struggling with my boss at work, I'm not going to jump in with,

01:08:29.040 well, you know, you should probably tell him, I'm just going to listen, right?

01:08:32.440 But listen, over time, I really look forward to learning more about my wife

01:08:39.240 and what she's experiencing in this season.

01:08:41.200 And it's different than last season.

01:08:42.580 It's going to be different in the new season.

01:08:44.620 I think it was Esther Perel who said, if most adults have four or five great loves in their

01:08:50.460 lifetime, and if you work really, really hard, it's with the same person.

01:08:54.260 And you become part of their journey.

01:08:57.360 And now I can't wait to hear about what my wife's been reading, who she's becoming,

01:09:03.240 and how I can best be a partner to her in this new season, whatever it is.

01:09:08.580 It's not constantly trying to get back to, remember how much fun we have and we were dating?

01:09:12.860 Man, what a waste of a life.

01:09:14.940 Let's go this way, right?

01:09:16.160 Let's move forward.

01:09:17.420 I think, tell me if I'm on the right track here.

01:09:21.340 That idea of owning, acknowledging reality, I didn't mean to, but I'm looking in the mirror

01:09:28.400 and I've gained 100 pounds.

01:09:29.940 I didn't mean to.

01:09:31.900 It wasn't my intention.

01:09:33.400 But now I've spent 15 years in a middle manager job and I hate my life.

01:09:38.200 I hate going to work every day.

01:09:39.560 I think we do not have the skill set for one of the most important psychological functions

01:09:45.760 that we just took it out of life, right?

01:09:49.540 And I think it's Ernest Becker's work and Yalom's work.

01:09:53.220 I think we don't have any sort of ability to grieve privately or as a group.

01:10:01.060 We've lost the skill set of grief.

01:10:02.780 And so we can't acknowledge reality because we don't know what to do when we look in the

01:10:07.100 mirror and say, I didn't measure up to who I wanted to be.

01:10:10.020 I didn't mean to yell at my kid and I did.

01:10:12.760 I didn't mean to get another dessert and I did.

01:10:16.060 We can't deal with that grief.

01:10:17.900 And so we blow by it and say, you keep putting desserts in front of me.

01:10:21.900 Or if you had just picked up your trike, six-year-old, I wouldn't have yelled at you.

01:10:25.320 We just outsource our dysfunction everywhere because we can't sit in that gap between what

01:10:31.600 we wanted and our reality.

01:10:33.100 All right.

01:10:33.540 So a couple of things there.

01:10:35.240 You talked about finding yourself on the adventure of transformation with your wife.

01:10:41.960 Now, often men feel compelled, obligated to generate a solution to the problems that

01:10:51.480 their wives bring them.

01:10:52.480 And it is the case because women feel more negative emotion that they are more likely

01:10:58.380 to bring up problems.

01:11:00.060 That's why 70% of divorces, by the way, are initiated by women.

01:11:03.720 It's because they feel more negative emotion.

01:11:05.540 So if the relationship is shaky, they're going to suffer for it more first.

01:11:11.120 And they probably feel more negative emotion because they're more sensitive because they

01:11:15.440 have to take care of infants.

01:11:17.460 And so anyways, we can put that aside.

01:11:19.520 Now, it might be that you should help your wife solve her problems.

01:11:25.700 And maybe she's coming to you for that.

01:11:27.720 But one thing you need to understand, and you might understand this as a diagnostician,

01:11:32.160 is, well, do you know what the hell her problem is?

01:11:35.720 And the answer is, well, probably not because she doesn't even know.

01:11:39.100 So why does she want to sit down and tell you about her problems?

01:11:42.800 And the answer is, because she wants to find out what her bloody problems are.

01:11:46.980 And so you see this very often in therapy.

01:11:49.540 You know, and Carl Rogers made a lot of this.

01:11:51.860 He said, you know, if you just listen to people, they'll often solve most of their problems

01:11:55.260 themselves.

01:11:56.520 And so someone comes in and they say, well, I'm really upset.

01:12:00.300 And you say, well, what's on your mind?

01:12:03.620 Now, what's so interesting about that is often the people who are in therapy have absolutely

01:12:07.840 no one to tell their problems to, you know, like I have.

01:12:12.160 But I think the Rogerian magic, though, was listening and he brought that other side of

01:12:18.320 the equation that we leave out.

01:12:20.460 He listened and he genuinely did his best to love the person in front of him.

01:12:25.680 Yeah, well, okay.

01:12:26.780 And not sit in judgment of that person.

01:12:29.320 So my wife says, hey, I'm going through this.

01:12:31.260 I instantly go, well, you know you should instead of sitting back and going, I love this person.

01:12:36.240 Tell me, let's connect, not let's solve, right?

01:12:39.100 Yeah, so you'd hope that your mindset, and this would be part of establishing that higher

01:12:43.780 order goal, is imagine you would like your wife and you to have a good life.

01:12:49.200 And so when you're listening to her, that's uppermost in your mind.

01:12:53.000 We're trying to have a good life here.

01:12:54.720 Okay, so what's your problem?

01:12:55.920 Well, if you're listening to someone therapeutically, they're going to scattershot the problem.

01:13:02.340 They're going to say, well, it might be this, and it might be this, and it might be

01:13:05.080 this, and it might have something to do with the past, and it might be this, and it's quite

01:13:08.640 a mess as they try to calibrate the real problem.

01:13:13.120 And you have to listen to all of that, and what you'll find is that the person will dispense

01:13:17.540 with most of those hypotheses themselves as soon as they utter them.

01:13:22.380 They'll think, well, here's my problem.

01:13:24.760 No, that's not exactly right.

01:13:26.280 And so now that's off the table.

01:13:27.720 And they'll say, well, it might be this, and here's some reasons for thinking that,

01:13:30.900 but no, it's probably not that.

01:13:32.520 And so what you'll find is the problem space will clear.

01:13:35.880 Now, Rogers also pointed out, and this is very useful, is that one of the things you

01:13:39.620 can do when you're listening, apart from asking questions, which might be, well, I don't quite

01:13:44.420 understand what you meant by that, or you said something 10 minutes ago, and it seems to

01:13:48.580 contradict what you just said now, which are just helpful questions.

01:13:52.740 The other thing you can do is summarize.

01:13:54.600 And you could say, well, I've been listening for 10 minutes or 15 minutes, and it seems

01:13:59.800 to me that this is what you said.

01:14:02.280 Is that right?

01:14:03.620 And people really like that for two reasons, A.

01:14:06.680 One is you compact all that searching into the gist.

01:14:12.380 And that's a gift you can give someone.

01:14:14.460 And then also, if you hit the target, if you say, yeah, that's exactly what I meant, then

01:14:19.640 they know full well that you've really been listening.

01:14:22.300 And so if you're a man and you're listening to this and you want to know how to deal with

01:14:27.860 your wife when she's presenting you with problems, the first thing is, is step back a bit and

01:14:31.700 say, look, she probably has to go through the whole problem set and try not to take that

01:14:36.360 personally.

01:14:37.540 Just listen.

01:14:39.080 And you can summarize and you can ask questions.

01:14:41.640 But mostly you want to find out, well, what the hell is the problem here?

01:14:45.160 Now, you might want to leap to a solution for a bunch of reasons.

01:14:49.260 One is, well, to show that you have a solution.

01:14:52.680 Two is to show you're smarter than your wife, which is a very bad idea.

01:14:56.880 The third is to shut her up so that you don't have to sit there and listen.

01:14:59.900 And that's also a really bad idea because you can't shut anybody up about an actual problem.

01:15:05.740 Right.

01:15:06.220 That just doesn't work because it's an actual problem.

01:15:08.360 It's not going to go away.

01:15:09.520 Or if she's coming to you to connect and she's not looking for your solution, she just wants

01:15:13.760 to connect.

01:15:14.200 And this is the tool set that she has when you shut her up, you're giving a much more

01:15:18.600 existential, I don't value you, right?

01:15:21.740 I don't want to connect with you.

01:15:23.500 And that's a much bigger, I think that's a much more crisis or your relationship's in

01:15:29.160 a mess at that point.

01:15:30.260 Yeah.

01:15:30.700 Well, yes, exactly.

01:15:32.080 Well, and you'll find too with this 90 minutes a week that you have to listen to each other

01:15:35.900 is that in some sense, you need that amount of time to clear the air.

01:15:40.520 Because you can imagine that as you move through life, little dragons make themselves manifest

01:15:44.520 all the time because things change.

01:15:46.760 The car needs maintenance.

01:15:48.020 There's a problem with the kid.

01:15:49.200 There's something wrong with the bathroom sink.

01:15:51.980 We don't have quite enough money in the checking account.

01:15:55.080 You know, there's a hundred little niggling demons that pop up constantly.

01:15:59.160 And it's very difficult to establish the preconditions for joyful intimacy when there's a nest of

01:16:08.140 micro dragons swarming all over the house.

01:16:10.720 And you have to talk those through in order to keep them small and to make them go away.

01:16:16.820 And if you do that with some degree of programmatic regularity, then you do have the possibility

01:16:22.220 that you'll get beyond the mere sharing of problems.

01:16:25.520 Then you can have some fun.

01:16:26.860 Then you can play.

01:16:27.700 Yes, but I think two things.

01:16:31.420 One, a helpful tip for the listeners here that's been fantastic in my marriage is when

01:16:38.160 my wife sits down and begins to talk, I'll often stop at the very beginning and say,

01:16:41.960 are you asking me for a solution?

01:16:45.000 Or are you looking to just tell me?

01:16:46.960 Are you looking to connect?

01:16:48.280 And that is often frames the conversation in a way that I know what she's asking from me.

01:16:55.040 And it seems very unromantic at first, but man, on the back end, it saves.

01:17:01.260 So it's just like putting sex on the calendar, right?

01:17:03.040 It just, a couple of seconds of awkward changes the trajectory of your entire week and month.

01:17:08.540 I also think that men have, rightly or wrongly, we found ourselves, we don't understand our

01:17:16.520 relational value, and so we think our value can only be found in offering a solution to

01:17:22.580 something.

01:17:23.700 And there's a deeper intimacy.

01:17:26.140 There's a deeper connection.

01:17:28.500 My wife values me simply because I am her husband.

01:17:32.740 Yes, I help provide.

01:17:34.000 And yes, I can do all these other things.

01:17:36.880 There's utility there.

01:17:37.780 But I have to see myself as having more value than giving a person with less power or less

01:17:44.680 smarts than me an answer.

01:17:46.740 Sometimes the greatest gift I can give her is simply my presence, right?

01:17:49.880 And we have to get underneath that discomfort of, I'm out of my depths here.

01:17:54.640 I don't know what to do other than just listen, and I feel useless.

01:17:57.840 I feel like I've lost utility.

01:17:59.400 Yeah, well, I think the problem with that formulation is the idea of just listening.

01:18:04.660 It's really hard to listen.

01:18:08.120 And there's almost nothing...

01:18:08.820 Well, I like that.

01:18:09.320 I like that.

01:18:09.700 Well, there's almost nothing you can do that's more transformative than that.

01:18:13.860 And the reason for that is that just listening gives the other person an opportunity to just

01:18:21.260 think.

01:18:23.000 And so then you might say, well, what are they doing when they're thinking?

01:18:25.900 And here's what they're doing is they're asking themselves questions and looking for

01:18:29.660 a revelation.

01:18:30.300 They're trying to sort through information so that they can determine the best pathway

01:18:35.120 forward, and they're trying to update and develop their vision for their life.

01:18:40.260 And you do that in abstraction to test out the possibilities before you implement them.

01:18:45.920 And so if you give people space to think, which is exactly what you're doing when you're

01:18:50.940 listening, then they try out different versions of themselves so they can experiment with finding

01:18:56.820 the best fit.

01:18:57.680 And so there's nothing just about listening.

01:19:00.180 It's, I think, apart from speaking accurately and carefully and truthfully, there isn't anything

01:19:07.060 more difficult that you can do than to listen.

01:19:10.000 And one of the things I loved about being a therapist, and it's been very useful to me

01:19:14.180 in my post-therapy career as well, is that if you actually listen to people, they will tell

01:19:20.020 you everything.

01:19:21.400 And then they're so interesting, you can hardly stand them.

01:19:24.080 So give me, and by proxy, the listener, give a 22 to 27-year-old man trying to make his

01:19:36.620 way in the world, what is one or two or three things?

01:19:40.680 I guess I'm turning the interview around on you now.

01:19:42.520 Now, what's a couple of practical skills that I can do to lean into listening, to practice

01:19:49.900 listening, and stop trying to rush to a solution, try to get out of a conversation because I'm

01:19:55.420 uncomfortable.

01:19:55.980 I don't have the skill set.

01:19:56.780 I never saw my dad do it.

01:19:58.020 My granddad never did it.

01:19:59.360 They just barked orders and watched the game.

01:20:01.660 I'm trying to do something that is infinitely more difficult than just flipping channels and

01:20:05.960 yelling at the Packers game.

01:20:07.120 And what's a couple of things I can practice?

01:20:09.960 Well, I would say first is have some faith in your own reactions, not as solutions to

01:20:19.560 the problem, but as points of inquiry.

01:20:21.700 So for example, when we're talking, questions arise in the theater of my imagination, and topics

01:20:29.480 pop up, and I'm willing to put them on the table.

01:20:32.280 And the reason they pop up is because I'm attending to what you say, and that's generating

01:20:38.400 some thoughts in my mind.

01:20:39.720 And one of the great things you can do with people is ask them questions.

01:20:44.560 I mean, there is nothing, and this goes back to the issue of, say, making friends or establishing

01:20:49.540 relationships, there's nothing that people want more than to be attended to.

01:20:53.820 That's why advertisers spend so much money trying to garner attention.

01:20:57.100 That's why social media companies spend so much money garnering people's attention.

01:21:00.500 Attention is the fundamental currency.

01:21:03.780 And so people love to be attended to.

01:21:06.260 And so you dispense with the idea that you're just listening, as you're watching the other

01:21:09.600 person and you're listening.

01:21:10.880 And then you're attending to yourself and watching and listening, because you'll see

01:21:15.800 that as you focus on the conversation, and don't worry about what you're going to say

01:21:21.020 next or how you appear, which makes you self-conscious and miserable and awkward instantly, you pay attention

01:21:27.400 to the conversation, and then you watch what happens inside.

01:21:30.740 And this question comes up, and you say, well, I have this question.

01:21:34.160 And you don't evaluate the question.

01:21:36.320 You know, not if you're deeply engaged in the conversation.

01:21:38.860 You just lay it out.

01:21:40.480 And you draw the person out.

01:21:43.020 And you see, well, I don't quite understand what you said there.

01:21:45.840 Or it seems to me that this is a different way of looking at it.

01:21:49.280 What do you think of that?

01:21:50.060 The questions have to be honest.

01:21:51.380 But if you pay focused attention and you ask genuine questions, you've got like 90% of social

01:22:00.240 skill nailed.

01:22:01.960 And you get below, I love what you said about the little dragons.

01:22:05.740 I might steal that down the road.

01:22:08.160 You get beneath the, hey, did you see what was on the news today?

01:22:13.640 Or, hey, we're overdrawn on our checking account.

01:22:15.740 You get beneath those things to the real statement, which is, I'm scared, or I feel lonely, or I

01:22:23.460 miss you, right?

01:22:24.720 These truly intimate connections, if you'll just, if you'll, yeah, if you'll just wade into

01:22:30.140 the uncomfortable waters of discourse.

01:22:33.380 Well, and I think the way to fortify yourself in relationship to that, I mean, I've been embroiled

01:22:38.960 in a lot of conflict.

01:22:40.540 And I really don't like conflict.

01:22:42.460 And I think the reason that I've been embroiled in so much is because I won't delay it.

01:22:48.220 Like, if there's an issue at hand, I want to address it right now.

01:22:51.060 And the reason for that isn't that I enjoy it.

01:22:53.500 In fact, I don't enjoy it at all.

01:22:55.220 But what I really don't enjoy is prolonged conflict that never goes anywhere and that

01:23:00.320 never ends.

01:23:02.540 Conflict delayed is conflict amplified, right?

01:23:04.520 Exactly that.

01:23:05.260 It just grows on you.

01:23:06.680 Exactly that.

01:23:07.640 And that's one of the oldest stories that people have been telling each other forever

01:23:12.340 is that ignored things grow in the darkness outside the city until they become monstrous

01:23:19.600 and break down the walls.

01:23:21.800 And so you think, well, I'm afraid of having, I'm afraid of listening.

01:23:24.900 I'm afraid of hearing the problems.

01:23:26.900 And that's fair enough.

01:23:27.800 It's no wonder you're afraid.

01:23:29.100 But you're nowhere near afraid enough of not doing that because that's a bloody catastrophe.

01:23:34.440 That'll be a bomb that'll go off in 10 years and blow up your marriage.

01:23:37.180 You'll find out that your wife had an affair because, well, for her own reasons and because

01:23:40.980 you didn't pay any attention to her for like 15 years.

01:23:44.160 And then you think, well, I was afraid to pay attention.

01:23:47.480 And yeah, fair enough.

01:23:48.520 But now look where you are.

01:23:50.400 You're in hell.

01:23:52.500 And that's just not an improvement.

01:23:55.500 And so-

01:23:55.860 How do you know, in our current ecosystem, how do you know when to wade through?

01:24:01.280 My little brother sent me something the other day that was like, in 2000, Y2K was going

01:24:05.940 to kill us all.

01:24:06.700 In 2001, I don't remember what it was.

01:24:08.620 Swine flu was going to kill us all.

01:24:10.040 In 2003, there's just this litany of we rally around the next end thing that's going to

01:24:15.680 happen.

01:24:16.420 And then we've reached this fatigue, right?

01:24:21.000 And there's true cancers out there that are coming for us that we're just like, I don't

01:24:24.980 have the energy anymore.

01:24:26.040 I'm moving on about my day.

01:24:27.340 I've been really trying to think that through.

01:24:30.420 And so here's some guidelines that I've sort of developed over the last few months.

01:24:35.780 So, you know, there's problems of various size out there in the world.

01:24:40.080 And the largest problems are the apocalyptic problems that you just described, right?

01:24:45.660 And it isn't even obvious which of those apocalyptic problems are real.

01:24:50.120 But we could say, well, there's always the possibility that large-scale systems will come

01:24:54.760 to a precipitous collapse.

01:24:56.700 And we have to live with that.

01:24:58.000 That's true in our own lives.

01:24:59.220 We could die at any moment.

01:25:00.640 So could the people we love.

01:25:02.440 Our cultures can fall apart.

01:25:04.560 The apocalyptic terror is always beckoning as a possibility.

01:25:09.340 Okay, now the question is, is that your problem?

01:25:13.320 Now, the answer-

01:25:13.760 Can you do anything about it, right?

01:25:14.880 Well, the answer is your own nervous system will tell you that.

01:25:18.280 Because imagine you're facing a problem that's so big that it paralyzes you and it turns you

01:25:26.240 into a tyrant.

01:25:28.400 Okay, that's too big a problem for you.

01:25:31.900 Obviously.

01:25:33.100 And what you have to do is you have to scale back the problem until you find a dragon that's

01:25:39.560 a size that you're willing to contend with, that you'll actually contend with.

01:25:43.360 And so, you know, maybe you shouldn't be addressing the large-scale political problems of the world

01:25:49.360 because your own house is a bloody catastrophe.

01:25:51.960 And you watch the news and it paralyzes you and turns you into a ranting tyrant.

01:25:56.660 And that means you're not the man for that job.

01:25:59.480 You have to scale back.

01:26:00.960 And maybe if you scale back and practiced straightening things up at the local level,

01:26:05.780 which isn't trivial or easy, you'd get better and better at it.

01:26:09.680 And then you could face larger and larger catastrophes and practically and productively,

01:26:14.880 right, instead of virtue signaling and going astray.

01:26:18.840 You know, you do this in therapy.

01:26:20.580 If someone is having a hard time making friends, you break that down into micro steps.

01:26:26.700 And one thing you might have to do, as we discussed,

01:26:29.160 is you might have to teach the person to introduce themselves.

01:26:32.240 You know, and their problem is, I don't have any friends.

01:26:34.180 It's like, no, no, your problem is you don't know how to shake hands and look someone in the eye.

01:26:39.680 Right?

01:26:41.560 And then you might say, well, can you do that?

01:26:43.360 And they might say, well, I'm afraid to shake hands.

01:26:45.140 It's like, well, can you look at me?

01:26:47.900 Can you stretch out your hand?

01:26:50.480 You know, can you touch my hand?

01:26:51.880 I mean, this might sound trivial, but lots of people are paralyzed with social anxiety.

01:26:56.340 And they have no idea how to shake hands.

01:26:58.500 Yeah, yeah.

01:26:58.980 And that just stops them cold, right?

01:27:00.880 Because if you can't introduce yourself, how the hell are you going to make friends?

01:27:04.860 That's right.

01:27:05.240 Well, it's being when our bodies take off on us.

01:27:09.500 I love how you said that, man, because our nervous system tells the truth generally.

01:27:13.560 Can I listen to my body and just instead of rushing to the diagnostic and rushing to Google

01:27:17.940 or rushing to WebMD trying to, can I just ask myself, what's my body trying to protect me from?

01:27:23.120 Like, whoa, I just walked into a room full of people and my heart rate just went up to 200 beats

01:27:28.980 per minute and I can't, my hands are getting sweaty.

01:27:33.040 What are you trying to protect me from?

01:27:34.360 These are my people.

01:27:35.200 These are my friends.

01:27:35.940 This is my, this is a wedding I got invited to.

01:27:38.400 Oh, okay.

01:27:39.180 I used to not be safe in this situation.

01:27:41.360 I'm safe now.

01:27:42.280 I'm okay now.

01:27:43.420 And I can think that through that gap between, instead of racing over to the bar to grab a drink,

01:27:48.180 to quiet that alarm system, or to race over to the snack table and get a piece of cake,

01:27:52.180 which is what I go to quiet the alarm system.

01:27:54.520 I'm a good Southern Christian.

01:27:55.540 So I like to eat my feelings.

01:27:56.420 Like, instead of those issues, I can just be really curious and I'm not going to go to war

01:28:02.660 with my body and try to shut the alarms off.

01:28:04.660 I'm just going to listen to them and say, hey, what's it trying to tell me right now?

01:28:06.660 Well, you talked about thinking in images before.

01:28:09.980 So here's a very useful thing the psychoanalysts learn to do.

01:28:13.720 So imagine you do go to a social occasion and you find as you enter the hall, you're getting nervous

01:28:21.080 and sweaty.

01:28:21.660 Now, if you watch, this is why Carl Jung, for example, believed that we lived through

01:28:27.900 a dream.

01:28:28.600 We lived life through a dream.

01:28:31.220 So, and that's a story.

01:28:32.840 And so what you'll see is that if you feel that nervousness and you attend to it, a little

01:28:39.180 drama will run in your head in images.

01:28:41.980 You know, and it'll be something like, well, I'm going to go in here and no one's going

01:28:45.820 to talk to me.

01:28:46.340 And this will happen in pictures, like a little movie.

01:28:48.780 No one's going to talk to me and I'm going to end up in the corner and I'm going to be

01:28:51.700 bored and I'm going to be sweaty and hot and it's going to be real uncomfortable.

01:28:54.940 And it's just like this other time when I went to this social occasion and this terrible

01:29:00.540 thing happened and the whole drama will play out in your head.

01:29:03.640 And then, you know, you think, oh, that's the problem.

01:29:07.100 And then, well, then maybe you have someone to talk to about that fantasy.

01:29:14.120 Or maybe because now you have the fantasy in front of you and you looked at it, you can

01:29:18.840 think, well, wait a minute.

01:29:20.080 As you said, wait a minute.

01:29:21.360 Wait a second.

01:29:22.100 It isn't like that other situation.

01:29:24.320 My friends are here.

01:29:25.520 I can go talk to John.

01:29:27.300 I know him real well.

01:29:28.260 We'll just have a conversation.

01:29:29.440 I can go sit at a table with one of my friends and spend most of the time there or it can

01:29:35.120 be with my wife.

01:29:36.520 But what will happen is we get nervous and that fantasy will make itself manifest.

01:29:43.900 But you don't want to face it.

01:29:45.100 And that's when you rush to a premature solution.

01:29:48.700 You shut it off.

01:29:50.200 Yeah.

01:29:50.500 So what you're doing there is you're failing to allow the anxiety-ridden fantasy to make

01:29:57.660 itself manifest.

01:29:58.440 And you do that because you don't want to know where you're vulnerable.

01:30:02.960 Right?

01:30:03.160 And no wonder.

01:30:03.780 Like, who the hell wants to know where they're vulnerable?

01:30:05.880 But the answer to that is, well, someone who wants to fix it.

01:30:09.340 Because you're not going to fix it.

01:30:10.400 I do.

01:30:10.840 Yeah, I do.

01:30:11.800 Absolutely.

01:30:12.380 Right.

01:30:13.040 And now I've come to, I love looking for those vulnerabilities.

01:30:16.540 I love a good community.

01:30:18.260 And I love the discourse.

01:30:19.520 I love my friends who will point them out and say, hey, here's a blind spot, which is

01:30:24.480 why, again, circling back, it's why we have to have other people in our life.

01:30:27.120 Now, if done in the right spirit, I love, that's the whole scientific process, right?

01:30:35.380 Rejecting the note, like, I wasn't wrong, right?

01:30:37.680 Like, the whole idea is, let's be a little bit less wrong, right?

01:30:40.640 So I think there's something beautiful.

01:30:41.240 Yeah, that's right.

01:30:41.920 That's the whole idea.

01:30:43.080 That's humility, man, is to be a little bit less wrong.

01:30:46.080 And Jesus, that's a real deal.

01:30:48.960 But what a fun way to live.

01:30:51.600 It's such an easier way to live than, I have to be right.

01:30:54.920 That is an exhausting grip on your life.

01:30:58.340 It's a choking grip on your life instead of, I want to be a little bit less wrong.

01:31:02.180 And I begin to seek out places where I might be wrong.

01:31:05.380 That's just taking the blade and trying to sharpen it as finely as possible.

01:31:08.740 What a fun way to live.

01:31:09.820 Well, the purpose of confession, classically, was exactly that.

01:31:17.240 So the idea was, well, I'm going to review my week, which doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

01:31:23.160 Why?

01:31:23.960 Well, I'm going to think about things that I did that didn't work out so well,

01:31:29.340 and see if I can specify what they were,

01:31:32.260 and see if I can figure out how to replace them with something better,

01:31:35.080 at least with the intent to do better.

01:31:37.020 And that confessional, you know, that confessional, in some sense,

01:31:41.540 which was supposed to be redemptive,

01:31:43.340 and that led to forgiveness, at least in principle,

01:31:45.880 was very much the same thing as

01:31:48.100 discussing in genuine dialogue the problems of your life.

01:31:53.700 It's like, well, here, I seem to have gone sideways here.

01:31:56.880 I seem to have gone sideways here this week.

01:31:59.120 How do I know that?

01:32:00.140 Well, my conscience is calling me out on it,

01:32:02.800 and there were some negative consequences.

01:32:04.540 And I feel that this is the mistake I made,

01:32:07.040 and I'd rather not make that mistake.

01:32:08.920 And as you said, if that's handled

01:32:10.600 as if the goal is to stop making those mistakes,

01:32:15.960 hopefully, incrementally across time,

01:32:17.960 then the evidence of the mistake can be an invitation to positive transformation.

01:32:23.100 And that would be the encouraging element of humility, right?

01:32:26.780 It's like, well, why humble?

01:32:27.760 But you have to do it in community, I think.

01:32:30.820 I think it went from this ancient religious practice of confession,

01:32:35.240 which I think you have to look back thousands of years and say,

01:32:39.600 this practice continued to roll on evolutionarily and culturally

01:32:43.980 because it had a deep value.

01:32:46.100 And then it was, I don't say co-opted,

01:32:48.140 it was absorbed by the mental health community

01:32:50.760 to sit down and across from somebody.

01:32:52.680 And I find great, great value in journaling,

01:32:57.920 writing things down, getting them out of my body and onto paper.

01:33:00.740 But I think we've gotten very isolated with our journaling

01:33:04.120 and our writing it down.

01:33:06.080 And we've become, I'm having this confession with myself now.

01:33:10.600 And there's value to that.

01:33:11.780 But I think the true value is having confession in front of somebody else

01:33:15.020 because then we force ourselves to say,

01:33:16.840 do you see me and do you still love me?

01:33:18.960 Will you still be here if you fully know me?

01:33:20.800 That it's the most difficult part of yourself to observe

01:33:26.040 is the place where you're most blind, obviously.

01:33:30.440 And so you can journal and you can concentrate on yourself,

01:33:34.040 but that still might produce a situation

01:33:38.560 where your blindest spots stay blind.

01:33:41.840 And also it limits your ability to problem solve creatively

01:33:46.480 because you only draw on your own resources.

01:33:48.700 One of the wonderful things about a marriage that's functional

01:33:52.600 is that both of you have two brains to work on,

01:33:57.300 to work out whatever problem happens to arise.

01:34:00.600 And part of the reason that marriage is difficult

01:34:02.840 is because life is difficult

01:34:04.840 and you have to jointly confront the actual problems of life,

01:34:08.900 which is what makes marriage different than dating, for example,

01:34:12.640 or different than an affair, which is a wish-fulfillment fantasy

01:34:17.820 in some sense of all the intimacy with none of the problems.

01:34:21.240 A very terrible thing to do to your partner

01:34:23.380 who is then laden with only the problems.

01:34:27.140 But it's very useful to have two brains

01:34:31.880 because each person is quite different

01:34:33.620 and the probability that the person you're communicating with

01:34:36.720 will have a different take on both the problem and the solution

01:34:39.520 is extremely high.

01:34:41.400 And so this is particularly true

01:34:43.780 if you're in a solipsistic crisis

01:34:46.720 in relationship to your mental health.

01:34:49.220 For example, if you're depressed,

01:34:50.700 it's very hard to lift yourself out of that alone

01:34:53.220 because some of that dwelling on your issues

01:34:56.540 actually facilitates the depression.

01:34:58.820 And the same thing happens with anxiety.

01:35:01.160 So now that we're here,

01:35:02.560 you're a trained and practiced clinical psychologist.

01:35:05.480 I'm a lowly trained counselor,

01:35:07.500 which for the non-academics,

01:35:08.940 there's a definite hierarchy there.

01:35:12.480 Have we over-pathologized culture?

01:35:15.800 Our individuals are...

01:35:17.400 I feel like we have become...

01:35:23.220 a slavish adherence to diagnostics and to labeling.

01:35:26.900 And when I look at expectation theories

01:35:31.420 that people live into the labels that they're given

01:35:34.520 or the expectations that are put before them,

01:35:37.400 I've got some high concern,

01:35:39.900 but I also don't want to be dismissive, right?

01:35:42.100 So help me with that

01:35:43.860 because I feel like everybody,

01:35:45.380 man, it's so easy to just go get a diagnostic

01:35:47.160 and go get a label and that becomes you.

01:35:50.380 And then I end up sitting with somebody

01:35:51.780 and they say, well, I can't take this job

01:35:53.260 because I was diagnosed with ADHD

01:35:55.000 or I was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder.

01:35:57.720 And my impulse is, hey, that's a context, not an excuse.

01:36:00.760 It is a way that you see and experience the world

01:36:04.540 and people experience you.

01:36:05.920 And you still got to get up and go to work.

01:36:07.600 So how are we going to manage that, right?

01:36:09.120 But I don't want to be dismissive.

01:36:11.460 Well, look, I think part of the problem is

01:36:13.480 is that it's a practical problem in some sense

01:36:16.320 because the diagnostic labeling process

01:36:21.000 is necessary for such things as insurance claims.

01:36:25.180 Right.

01:36:25.660 Right.

01:36:25.880 And so the lexicon-

01:36:27.960 But is that where we are, man?

01:36:29.620 Of course it is.

01:36:30.700 And the lexicon tilts-

01:36:31.640 That's heartbreaking, man.

01:36:32.740 Well, and there's some utility in it.

01:36:34.420 You know, if you're having panic attacks

01:36:36.560 and you're afraid to go out of your house

01:36:38.500 and I tell you, you have agoraphobia

01:36:40.420 and many other people have it,

01:36:42.320 sometimes that's a real relief

01:36:43.760 because you're not the only crazy person

01:36:46.360 of that type in the world.

01:36:47.820 And there's some pathway to treatment.

01:36:50.560 But I was trained fundamentally as a behaviorist

01:36:53.940 and the behaviorists aren't that,

01:36:57.000 what would you call it,

01:36:58.260 impressed with diagnostic labels.

01:37:00.220 And the reason for that is that

01:37:01.640 they tend to break down problems

01:37:05.400 into actionable units.

01:37:07.800 It's like, well, I'm depressed.

01:37:08.960 It's like, well, okay, fair enough.

01:37:10.980 But what's wrong with your life

01:37:13.580 and your mood in the micro details?

01:37:16.140 And how could we address that programmatically?

01:37:18.440 And I think the problem with diagnosis

01:37:20.480 is that it's really easy

01:37:22.540 to confuse diagnosis with cause, right?

01:37:26.020 Well, I'm miserable.

01:37:27.020 Why?

01:37:27.440 Well, because I'm depressed.

01:37:28.600 Now, well, maybe you have a biochemical problem,

01:37:30.760 but absent that,

01:37:32.700 depression isn't a black box

01:37:35.320 with homogenous contents.

01:37:37.080 There's specific reasons

01:37:39.320 that you're miserable and unhappy.

01:37:42.840 And what we need to do

01:37:43.900 is to break down those reasons,

01:37:46.600 differentiate them down to the level of detail

01:37:49.480 where you can start to experiment

01:37:51.500 with addressing them.

01:37:53.580 And so if the diagnostic enterprise

01:37:55.640 interferes with that,

01:37:57.320 then it's counterproductive.

01:37:59.740 And that happens very frequently.

01:38:02.680 Yeah.

01:38:03.020 I remember the first time

01:38:04.020 one of my students was hospitalized

01:38:06.260 for major depression

01:38:07.440 and suicidal ideation.

01:38:10.580 I was taken aback

01:38:11.800 that the first couple of days

01:38:13.100 after, you know,

01:38:14.360 they had gotten sleep

01:38:15.140 and were fed,

01:38:16.120 the protocol was,

01:38:18.700 your job is to get up

01:38:20.160 and go take a shower.

01:38:21.900 And then you can go back to bed.

01:38:23.280 We're going to take these tiny steps

01:38:25.420 towards, right?

01:38:27.080 That's, you know,

01:38:27.880 my friend Dave Ramsey is,

01:38:29.900 okay, we're going to get $1,000.

01:38:31.920 Sell whatever you got.

01:38:32.920 Sell your famous guitar.

01:38:34.280 Sell your,

01:38:34.700 we're going to get $1,000

01:38:35.520 in a savings account first.

01:38:38.440 And you're going to breathe

01:38:39.360 for the first time.

01:38:40.300 And then we're going to pay off your debt.

01:38:42.140 And then we're going, right?

01:38:43.040 It's these tiny baby steps towards,

01:38:46.800 and again,

01:38:47.360 I think we've been sold a bill of goods

01:38:49.520 that mental health is.

01:38:50.500 I just got to get all the thought,

01:38:51.440 right thoughts in the right order.

01:38:53.160 And there's something,

01:38:54.520 I think we just swiped off

01:38:55.720 wholesale,

01:38:56.160 the behaviorist approach.

01:38:56.900 I just don't see that working out, man.

01:38:59.720 I think we have to often

01:39:00.780 act our way into

01:39:02.840 a different way of thinking

01:39:04.200 and experiencing the world.

01:39:05.260 Well, the other thing too

01:39:06.280 that people should take heart

01:39:07.840 in consequence of

01:39:10.220 is that,

01:39:11.100 as you pointed out earlier,

01:39:12.840 when we were talking about

01:39:14.000 the cascading effects,

01:39:15.740 let's say of

01:39:16.360 sorting out

01:39:17.720 how you have dinner

01:39:18.740 with your family,

01:39:20.200 there's multiplying effects.

01:39:21.640 Well,

01:39:21.940 it might be

01:39:22.960 very disheartening

01:39:24.680 to see

01:39:26.060 at what small scale

01:39:28.020 you have to begin improvements.

01:39:30.500 Right?

01:39:31.340 But,

01:39:32.420 the truth of the matter is

01:39:33.660 is that

01:39:34.060 that tends to scale exponentially.

01:39:36.740 Is once you start

01:39:37.800 making improvements,

01:39:38.800 the improvements

01:39:39.360 feed back upon themselves.

01:39:41.400 And so,

01:39:41.780 even if you have to

01:39:42.500 start out small,

01:39:43.560 it doesn't take very long

01:39:44.900 before you're on

01:39:45.640 the upward trajectory,

01:39:46.720 and it's not linear.

01:39:47.940 You know,

01:39:48.180 you can fail precipitously,

01:39:49.960 right?

01:39:50.620 But you can also

01:39:51.380 succeed precipitously.

01:39:52.900 Once you get the ball rolling,

01:39:55.320 positive things

01:39:56.160 tend to aggregate together,

01:39:57.800 and you can make

01:39:58.520 a lot of progress

01:39:59.280 even if you start

01:40:00.100 from a pretty damn

01:40:00.860 dismal place.

01:40:02.320 So,

01:40:02.860 how do we get that

01:40:03.880 extraordinary insight

01:40:06.880 into the public lexicon?

01:40:08.360 How does that become

01:40:09.160 a way of operating?

01:40:10.000 Because all of us

01:40:11.060 are staring,

01:40:12.280 we're running around,

01:40:13.340 staring at our own

01:40:13.900 belly buttons,

01:40:14.400 waiting to not fall off

01:40:15.960 that precipitous decline,

01:40:16.880 and we are missing

01:40:18.480 the opportunity

01:40:19.400 for this accelerating

01:40:21.800 post-traumatic growth,

01:40:23.860 right?

01:40:24.100 We've been through

01:40:24.580 hard things.

01:40:25.680 Okay,

01:40:26.100 what come,

01:40:26.900 that's the whole book,

01:40:27.780 man.

01:40:28.100 What do we do now?

01:40:29.400 What do we do next?

01:40:31.060 That's the answer

01:40:31.740 to your question.

01:40:32.600 Well,

01:40:32.760 how do we bring that

01:40:34.100 into the public domain?

01:40:35.220 Well,

01:40:35.400 you wrote a book.

01:40:37.500 Yeah,

01:40:38.000 but,

01:40:38.100 I mean,

01:40:38.720 that's it.

01:40:39.020 And we're having

01:40:39.320 this conversation,

01:40:40.520 and so,

01:40:41.320 and that is how you do it,

01:40:43.440 and you try to communicate

01:40:45.000 the utility of,

01:40:47.260 what would you call it,

01:40:48.420 humble,

01:40:49.080 courageous,

01:40:50.040 incremental movement forward,

01:40:51.800 and honest communication,

01:40:53.420 social community,

01:40:54.580 all the things

01:40:55.120 that we discussed today.

01:40:56.580 And I should also point out

01:40:58.560 that we are out of time

01:41:00.540 for the YouTube interview.

01:41:02.980 Is there anything else

01:41:03.820 that you want to bring

01:41:04.700 to the attention

01:41:06.020 of the people

01:41:06.720 who are watching

01:41:07.320 and listening

01:41:07.800 before we close?

01:41:11.240 No,

01:41:11.480 I just want to say

01:41:12.020 I'm grateful

01:41:12.800 for your hospitality.

01:41:14.180 You've been a gift.

01:41:15.040 I appreciate you.

01:41:16.020 Well,

01:41:16.280 thank you,

01:41:16.740 and thank you

01:41:17.420 for your book.

01:41:18.080 And I would say

01:41:18.940 to people

01:41:19.460 who are watching

01:41:20.100 and listening,

01:41:21.340 Dr. Deloney's book

01:41:23.080 is a very straightforward

01:41:26.500 take on practical solutions

01:41:29.500 that you can implement

01:41:30.760 to start incrementally

01:41:33.340 improving your life.

01:41:34.360 And that is the right way

01:41:35.740 to progress.

01:41:38.460 One brick at a time.

01:41:39.620 You build a solid wall

01:41:40.640 one brick at a time,

01:41:41.780 and it can happen

01:41:42.820 a lot faster

01:41:43.460 than you think.

01:41:44.140 And so I think

01:41:45.540 the book fills

01:41:47.560 a necessary niche,

01:41:48.760 and I like the manner

01:41:49.860 in which you interwove

01:41:50.980 your description

01:41:51.600 of story and identity

01:41:53.160 and the broader

01:41:54.140 social community

01:41:55.000 and the issue

01:41:55.860 of incremental improvement.

01:41:57.020 And so I'd encourage

01:41:59.020 people who are watching

01:41:59.960 and listening

01:42:00.360 to take a look.

01:42:01.200 Yeah, yeah.

01:42:01.800 And it was real good

01:42:03.220 talking to you.

01:42:03.960 For those of you

01:42:04.640 who are watching

01:42:05.340 and listening,

01:42:05.900 I'm going to talk

01:42:06.480 to Dr. Deloney

01:42:07.280 for another half an hour

01:42:08.280 on the Daily Wire Plus

01:42:09.300 platform.

01:42:09.960 And the Daily Wire Plus

01:42:11.360 makes these professionally

01:42:12.900 produced YouTube

01:42:13.940 conversations possible.

01:42:16.300 And so thank you

01:42:17.300 to them for that.

01:42:18.220 And if you're interested

01:42:19.040 in hearing a little bit

01:42:20.520 more about Dr. Deloney's

01:42:22.260 biography and about

01:42:23.680 what's made him successful

01:42:25.220 in his career

01:42:25.940 and his marriage,

01:42:26.920 then head on over

01:42:28.760 to the Daily Wire Plus

01:42:29.780 platform and tune in.

01:42:32.020 And otherwise,

01:42:33.000 hopefully,

01:42:33.400 we'll see all of you

01:42:34.720 again on my YouTube channel.

01:42:36.820 And thank you very much

01:42:37.800 for your time and attention.

01:42:39.600 Hello, everyone.

01:42:42.440 I would encourage you

01:42:43.200 to continue listening

01:42:44.380 to my conversation

01:42:45.400 with my guest

01:42:46.280 on DailyWirePlus.com.

307. Childhood Trauma, Marriage, and Making Friends ｜ Dr. John Delony

Summary

Transcript