The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Antifragile Emotions: Build a Life That Gains from Disorder by Sidney Anderson Ph.D.

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

Antifragile Emotions: Build a Life That Gains from Disorder by Sidney Anderson Ph.D. https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Emotions-Build-Gains-Disorder/dp/1971262005 In Antifragile Emotions, Sidney Anderson, Ph.D. applies the concept of antifragility to emotional life, offering a transformative approach to building emotional systems that grow stronger through difficulty. Moving beyond resilience, the author shows how to develop emotional capacity that doesn’t just withstand life’s challenges but thrives on them. Traditional wellness advice emphasizes managing stress, processing trauma, and returning to baseline. But this approach creates fragility when life inevitably delivers loss, rejection, uncertainty, and failure. The antifragile emotional system uses controlled exposure to stressors, multiple sources of meaning, and systematic capacity building to extract value from difficulty rather than merely survive it. Drawing on research into how people respond to major life disruptions, Antifragile Emotions reveals why some people emerge from difficulty genuinely stronger while others remain fragile. It examines the emotional barbell strategy, building redundancy, “skin in the game,” hormesis, and optionality. Readers will discover how to use anger as calibration, extract information from anxiety, build life structures with no single points of failure, and develop emotional range.

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And today we have another wonderful young man with us. The title of his book is called Anti-Fragile Emotions, Build a Life That Gains from Disorder out January 14th, 2026 by Dr. Sidney Anderson. And we're going to get into him and find out how to not have or what these anti-fragile emotions are and why do my eggs like them or not. We'll find that out too. Dr. Sidney Anderson spent 20 years in corporate IT consulting before earning his PhD in marketing from Florida State University. He's now an associate professor of marketing and crocodile wrangler.

No, I just made that part of because he's in Florida. You get it. And the Scott Emerson professor of business administration now researching how AI is transforming professional work. His book that we'll discuss on today's show didn't come from his academic research. which came from years of struggling with emotional regulation, particularly anger. I probably went on that Twitter and saw some people over it. I don't make you angry. Anti-fragile emotions is a framework you developed by asking a difficult question.

Why are people stupid? No, that was the question. That was my question. What if the goal isn't just feeling better but building an emotional system that gains from difficulty, drawing on Nassim-Teleb's concept of anti-fragility? He provides a systematic approach to building emotion. capacity rather than coping. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he has to cope with barbecue, really good barbecue, too. He is not particularly good at mediation. He has gotten much better

at functioning while angry. He's probably pissed off that I ad-libbed a bunch of funny stuff in his bio. Welcome to the show, Doc. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks a lot, Chris. Nice to be on your show. Pleasure to have you as well. And that barbecue in Austin, Texas. Have you been to Franklin's? You know what? I have not. The line is so long that I want to go to that. I'm going to have you. I figure, you know what? There's a ton of other, a ton of other barbecue places in the town. Oh, yeah.

I mean, you don't want to wait four hours. You know you can pay somebody waiting that line, too. Yeah. They usually run out. So sometimes it's like buying tickets to a concert. It sells out and you're like, I just did four hours for nothing. But evidently it's really good.

So I think you have to become an employee there if you really want to get barbecue there on a regular basis. So. Sydney, give us your dot-coms. Where do you want people to find you on the internet? Okay, for my books, you can find me at standpublishing.com, and my books are also available at Amazon. So tell us about anti-fragile emotions. You know, the title kind of has me triggered. No, I'm just kidding. All right. The Sympto led wrote a book back in 2012 called anti-fragility, or anti-fragile. I'm sorry.

And he developed this concept called anti-fragility. Let me explain that real quick. We normally have two ways to classify things, crudely. Either things are fragile or things. things are robust or resilient. So you take an egg or wineglass and you drop it, we know what's going to happen. It's going to break because they're fragile. And if we want to ship those things, we have to pack them in a way that they're going to get from one destination to the next without being harmed because they just can't handle harm. The flip side of that before this concept of anti-fragility was developed was being robust or resilient.

And so if we take a tennis ball and we throw that against the wall 10,000 times, nothing's going to happen to the ball because it was designed to withstand that robustness or that that that that stress. Now, there's a third concept that has always been there, but it wasn't really understood and applied to everyday life until Teleb actually voiced it. And it's called antifragility. So these are things that require stress to be strong. So if we look at our immune systems, we take vaccines or we're exposed through nature to pathogens. And if it's in a controlled way, that makes our immune system stronger. Same thing with our muscles.

If we don't use our muscles, if we don't stress them adequately, then our muscle's atrophy. And the third one that's always been around is our bones. We have to stress our bones, right? When an astronaut goes to space, and they're not too long, they actually, their bones start to weaken. So your bones also. So what he did is he applied this to other things in life. And I did after reading that book and after a number of years of thinking about it, I thought, what about our emotions? Our emotions can be the same way.

So a lot of the emotional literature talks about resiliency. And resiliency is really just getting back to baseline. Say if you have a divorce, I've had one, I've had two. You force and your friends say, don't worry, one of these days you'll get back to where you were prior to divorce. Actually, don't we want to get better? We don't want to just get back to baseline. We want to go beyond baseline and actually grow from that force. Yeah, because we got to show up the exes that we did better without them, too.

Exactly. Yeah, that's the best thing is when they see you and they say, wow, you're doing much better than when I knew you. Honestly, the best thing, the best revenge people is don't give a shit and just go live your better life. That's right. Let them lose, let them stalk you and lose sleepover. That's my policy. Yeah. You know, even take a divorce, for example.

A lot of people, you get divorced, and then you work over a couple of months or years, and you get back to where you work, where the divorce doesn't bother anymore. But a lot of times, we don't question, what did we learn through that divorce? What did I learn through the pain? What did, how did I contribute to divorce? Things like that. How can I make myself better? So when I go into this next relationship, I don't carry that baggage with it.

Oh, yeah. And then, you know, you've got to get back to more beyond baseline, because if you're a guy, you just lost 50% of your stuff. You've got to get the 50% back, and then you've got to get additional 50 so that when you have your next divorce, you can give that away and still be at baseline. This is how I think.

See, I've never been married. I'm saving for my first divorce, because this is how you plan ahead. I've got about two million saved, and I think I need probably three, maybe probably for the attorneys in the fight. So I'm just planning this out, and then I'm just going to bang out like two or three marriages

because I'm 58 now, never been married. So I'm just going to be like two or three marriages really quickly. And that way I can catch up to everybody else. Awesome. I just turned 58 last week. So you and I are right there. It's awesome. January 26 was mine.

I was February 19. We were probably separated in the hospital room. That's right. Yeah. We were. We might have been brothers. So my motivation for writing the book really is if we look at a lot of the emotional literature, it talks about positivity.

And I started realizing, especially with this emotional regulation I was going through and joining some men's groups, that this, this, this, this, this, this, our striving to stay positive is actually making us weaker. Because a lot of times we don't then address some of the real issues that we're dealing with. It's just, if somebody else says, then we're just kind of either, we're going to ignore it, we're going to suppress the anger, we're going to express the anger. But what we rarely do is actually to learn from that anger. So just always staying positive sometimes, it actually prevents us from dealing with some of the issues that we deal with and that are actually sometimes need to be dealt with. They don't need to be ignored. Yeah. Can we flesh that out a little bit? I totally agree on that point because some people do this, I don't know, panacea is the right word, but does hear no evil, speak, no evil, you know, hear no evil, see no evil, you know, and they just go la la la la la, la, la, the world is great. My world is special. in a warm, cozy place, nothing can hurt me. And, you know, like you say, they're not dealing in self-accountability with the problem in

itself. And ignoring it doesn't make most stuff go away in life. That's usually what I found, especially when bears are outside my tent at night. Yeah, that's for sure. We look at some people that say they're on social media and they will carefully curate their social media content to where they're never offended. If anybody voices any disagreement with them on anything, I need to remove you because I need to stay positive. But what it prevents them doing is actually dealing with life.

I mean, we deal with negative people or negative things or just reality. It doesn't have to be negative. It's just reality all the time. So it's one thing if you try to do that in your small bubble of a social media platform, but what about work? What about our relationships? And so this idea of trying to stay positive all the time, the way it makes us weaker is because we just ignore the reality of how difficult sometimes it is to be in a relationship. That difficulty

doesn't have to be bad, but a lot of people don't take the time to actually learn from the difficulty. They just try to ignore it and stay positive. And that's just not, it's not something that's sustainable. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, usually if you ignore problems, they just get bigger. Yes, they do. They get hungrier like the bears outside of my tent. Yeah. We ignore problems in our relationships with and then and then when the relationship blows up then we wonder I wonder why my relationship grew up because you never want to address anything difficult and I've learned in my third marriage now that I do address things that are difficult whether it's the whether it's sex whether it's money whether it's family issues at the time there there's some some difficulty right

but we we grow from that my wife and I're actually closer I'm closer with my with my third wife like I say my best wife, then I have been with any other woman. And part of that is just it's just stepping outside of my norm and actually saying, you know, I'm just going to address this and just deal with this difficulty instead of just trying to sweep the drug. Yeah. Yeah. So you, I mean, so you did two practices and then you got the third one right. It's got three balls and a hit that one over the fence there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, this, this deals with a lot of.

stuff, one of the ways that I learned to regulate my emotions, and I don't know if you get, let's talk about this, I don't know if you get in the book, but there's a lot of people that have triggerable emotions that come from trauma, sometimes little, a lot of times big tea. You know, they have fight or flight reactions of emotions to scenarios that make them feel or their brain thinks that they're in a similar situation where that trauma was. And so it becomes a survival response of sometimes, very negative emotions are very, yeah, things that aren't going to go well. And, you know, I think we've all been there when those places. I've probably put some people through that with my poor

reactions when I was younger, where, you know, all of a sudden this person is screaming and yelling at you and you're like, and they're accusing you of stuff and you're like, what the hell's going on? And if you know them well enough, you know that that's their trigger traumas from childhood, giving them fight or flight things. So do you address those sort of emotions in the book? I do. There's a, there's a, there's a, There's a concept. It's not in the book, but there's something I've heard through the reading I've done. And it says if it's hysterical, it's historical. So sometimes we do hit those trigger points. And that's happened to me. That somebody will say something to me that's seemingly innocuous. And then I go off the deep end. And I wonder like, why was I triggered? And then I realized, oh, that's how what happened in my childhood or something. It's something historical. And sometimes we don't address it. So the book does talk about understanding some of these things like anger.

Like that was one of my big things is anger and understanding how to handle that in the face of some of these historical traumas. Now, the book does say that if it's a big trauma, something like child molestation or something like that, that book is not, this book is not for those folks. It does recommend in the book that you should really seek some professional help. I'm not that person. When it comes to things like dealing with our anger, a lot of the, if we looked at anger back in the 70s or something like that, I think it was something like we need to express our anger. So they used to have these little batons, patented ones, and you could beat your partner with it. And so that was expressing your anger. And then it was now suppressing your anger.

But what people really don't talk about, and what I haven't seen until I wrote this book, and it's just one chapter in a book called Anger as a tool, is this idea of, of, What can you learn from anger? Not all anger is bad, right? If it's an injustice to you, to someone you love, and I'm not talking about a social injustice. I'm talking like a true injustice, then that's something that you should be angry about. Now, to express it anger is a different story, but this idea that we should never be angry is just unrealistic. And if you try to think you like never being angry, especially as a guy, that's a hard thing to do. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, and, you know, I mean, trauma, that was the biggest thing I didn't learn for a long time was that trauma triggers these emotions. And if you don't have them resolved, that you'll drag them all through life. You know, you see people that shoot up a McDonald's or a Bwindies or something, you know, you hear these stories of the news,

because someone didn't put cheese on their Big Mac. Yeah. And, you know, and I, and that's, I mean, it's a total inappropriate response. We've all probably done that throughout our lives where we've really been mean and destructive to someone who was just a bypassing witness in our life, you know, like the, you know, the server gal at the restaurant or something, you know,

and it's sad that, oh, you know, we didn't get owners manual to this thing. So that's my excuse. And but people can read your book. I mean, technically, if they do have traumas, it might help them kind of identify. Then maybe that they don't, they do have traumas. They need to resolve. And then they can go do those. But, you will help.

I mean, again, I've had trauma from my. life from from my upbringing you were divorced twice yeah for my childhood some of the things I get angry about so the book does dress those I'm talking about like sometimes some of the traumatic things that I haven't gone through some of these real you know like children that were raised in really traumatic childhoods mine was more of a normal childhood with a lot of yelling and screaming and and loving parents but just not knowing handle things yeah they probably had their own traumas well they did I know Both of them did. Got to love generational trauma, isn't it?

Great. Yeah. One of the things that in the book, it talks about this idea of horesis, which is this idea that something in small doses, a poison in small doses will, your body will acclimate to it. Now, I'm not advocating people taking poison or anything. But what I'm saying is this idea of these things that we are dealing with, whether it could be something like public speaking, it could be, it could be,

working with somebody or dealing with somebody that we really don't like, that in small doses, we can actually build some anti-fragility by doing it. If somebody is afraid of public speaking, for example, whether it's based on a trauma or just based on a normal feeling that most people have, that if you start in small doses, then over a period of time, you actually build up. But what people tend to do is they tend to stay fragile. If somebody says, hey, I want to promote you to another job, but this job is going to require public speaking. A lot of people just say, never mind, I don't like public speaking. Oh, no.

And then they shy away from that. And then they wonder, why are I proceeding in my career the way I'd like to, whereas it's something that they would address, take on, head on at a little bit of a time, that's something that they could actually, would make them more antifragile. So this anti-fragility can be applied in several different ways, and I illustrate that in the book. Let me ask you this. Did you ever study stoicism? Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.

I mean, a lot of the stuff that they teach in there, it's just, I call it the owner's manual for men. And if you really look at it, much of it is, even more in today's world, I think, than ever. I have to, I have to remind myself of the opening of the book just about every morning. I think we've got a picture coming from Etsy. You know, it basically states, you know, every day when you wake up, you're in a date with, you're going to deal with some miserable, stupid, uneducated, ignorant people.

And they're going to, you know, if you're going to, you know, if you're let them, you know, basically your life will be a living hell. So how you meet the day or how you meet the moment or how you respond is key, basically. I just gave a summation, folks. That's not a quote. So did some of that play into this or is it maybe something fairly separate than stoicism that you're talking about? It's loosely related and I'm working or completed another book called anti-fragile stoicism. So I'm kind of between the two. But the last, I think it's the last chapter in this book is called the anti-fragile stoic. So it's not classical stoicism, but what it, the difference is, a lot of times with stoicism, I've read quite a bit of that, it tells us to not be

affected by what others think of us. And, and since we can't control the external, then why should we worry about it? Sometimes the external has something to tell us. So criticism. If somebody criticizes me, I can say, stoicism would say, don't worry about that person's criticism. It doesn't matter. That's external to you. And there's nothing you can do about it. My book says, wait, what about if there's information?

There's some validity to that criticism. Ignore it. Or do you want to actually say, what does that criticism tell me? Now, if the criticism is invalid, then, hey, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's fall back on stoicism and say, I don't need to worry about that. But what about if it is valid? And the book would say that the more you address that head on and accept that criticism, whether you like it or not, the more anti-fragile you'll become. The more avoiding criticism makes you fragile, criticism, either saying and processing it, this criticism doesn't apply to me,

so I'm going to ignore it, or this criticism does apply to me, and what can I do to make it better? the more you're able to do that and differentiate, the more anti-fragile you'll be caught. The better handling criticism, whether it's valid or not. Yeah. There's kind of an interesting thing with stoicism and all that, where, you know, you look at it and how you respond. Of course, that makes a huge difference in response. But being able to kind of stop it for a second so it doesn't overwhelm you, hit you,

trigger you, lead you down that path. You know, it used to be that I would have anxiety attacks, panic attacks when I was young. And I had to start learning where the trigger was. And the first trigger was, I get upset about anything back then. And I would feel my stomach clinch. And then outwardly, like, everything would clinch. All my muscles would clench up. I would just become angry.

I want to destroy things. I destroyed a few printers. It was like that scene from, what is it, office space? We were just beating prison. I think I did be a printer. one time to death with a baseball bat in my office while my employees watched. I had some issues, folks, when I was young. Still do, probably, actually. And people in the audience right now, we've been listening for 16 years, man. You got a, you got a whole fucking, you got a boat you can

sell to a, you can buy for a psychiatrist. Anyway, and I had to, so what I had to start doing was identifying that once that, once I triggered that, that, you know, I had to become conscious and aware, okay, I'm angry about some. Obviously, I'm, going to clench up this muscle right here, my stomach, and then everything's going to go to hell. And so I've got to shut, I've got to start shutting down now. I've got to start trying to take control now over what's going on with my body triggers. And slowly over time, I just trained myself like a new dog, and it worked. But I had to see what you said, you know, I had to start seeing when the trigger started

and realizing what the mechanisms were behind it. Yeah. You know, I agree with you. I sometimes my trigger point is so quick that I don't have time for it to even feel that. You know, I wish my stomach would hurt a bit or give me a signal because sometimes it just, it just knows. Now, I've gotten much better with it. I've been going to this men's group for for six or eight months now. I've done a lot of reading. And I started reading, the older I got, the third I was able to handle it. But when I was wrong, man, it was just like, watch out. But, you know, I realize a lot of times with friends or other people, loved ones, if you mention anything to them, the first thing they do is shut you down.

That's not true. And it's, I haven't even finished what I have to say, and you're already defending yourself, right? You don't want to even validate whether what I'm saying is true or not. You just want to shut it down because it's this idea. I just want to stay positive. I want to have this positive outlook at myself. I look at myself, are we allowed to cuss on this show?

Sure, yeah, yeah. I look at myself sometimes, and not a negative way, I just say I'm a piece of shit, because I am sometimes, right? Yeah, we all are. We all can be, but what I'm able to do

a lot especially in any way, I'm just saying that I can look at myself and be very critical and very, I forgot that word, but introspective. Oh, okay. I look at myself and say,

Hey, did I just piss on that guy's foot? Yeah. You know what, man, that's my bad. I shouldn't have done that. What I don't want to have is this rosy picture of myself. I'm a pretty optimistic person. I call myself an optimistic realist. I like an optimistic positive view of the world,

but not a fake rose-colored glasses type of positivity. It's who I am and I'm learning who I am. And sometimes I want people to tell me, hey, you're screwing up on this. And so I can say, you know what, you're right. And I've gotten so much better at saying, let me think about that and say, you know what, you're right. I do need better. And it makes me more anti-fragile.

If I constantly ignore your criticism, give it no validity at all, I'm going to stay somebody who can't deal or grow from criticism. Yeah. And sometimes maybe taking that step back, correct if I'm wrong, can help kind of diffuse you a little bit in overreacting and can get you to maybe analyze it with a clear head. You know, I've been guilty of that too, where you don't realize you're being triggered and suddenly you have their head in your hands and you're standing there and you're like, did I just decapitate a guy because he didn't put the milk right in my maca chakato, whatever?

And you're like, my bad. Sorry, dude. You know, the judge says I can't do that anymore, evidently. Yeah. Anyway, but you, you, you, taking that step back and kind of taking a breath, I mean, and going, okay, let's, let's analyze what we're doing. Because I've been guilty, that was the other thing I was going to say, I've been guilty of reading an email or a communication and launching into fucking space. And, and I totally misread it. Somehow I read it through some rose-colored trauma blinders and, and now I'm the stupid one. But that's pretty much all the time. I've done that. I think we all have. What I'm getting better at is actually reaching out to that person, whether it's in person, email, whatever, and saying, hey, I misread that as opposed to just ignoring that. Because it teaches me, it helps to regulate my ego. And I realize the more I can regulate my ego, the more I can regulate my emotions. Talk to us about that. How do you identify that and stuff? That's an interesting topic. It's really just understanding that, first off, I'm not the only person that exists. I know a lot of people that the only person that really exists to them, it's themselves. And I realize that that's not me.

Wait, there's others? Yeah, there's other people in the world. That was just you and me. But the more I get away from my ego, the more I understand that it's not about me, the more I'm able to to regulate my anger. Sometimes people do things for, for out of meanness and sometimes it's just inadvertent. But all we'd look at is it happened to me and so I should be angry at it. And, you know, I look at this idea of in the books called the optionality of saying, again, you can be angry about something, but you get to choose how you react to it. Is this anger, is it, does this anger warrant me blowing up?

Sometimes it does. And you mess with one of my kids. My anger is, I'm not going to, I'm going to remain calm as I can, but I'm not going to just ignore it. Sometimes something will make me angry. And I think this is not even worth addressing because it's just ridiculous. And a lot of times we don't think we have the emotions. It's like either we should be angry or we should not be angry as opposed to, I can be angry about something, but I still get to choose how I expressed that anger. and there's several ways in the book, like six or eight ways that you can express that anger through something called optionality.

Yeah. And I like your, this is a big thing that people need to realize because there's some people that run surely on ego and no accountability. And they're usually the most highly reaction of people. You know, you say anything and they can flip off the handle. And then many times, I don't know if you talk about this in the book, but many times, sometimes they say, see, and this is the reason I'll read the email wrong, is because I'm, I might be at a mood, or maybe something triggers me, or read the first five words. I'm like, this mother ever is going to do this and this email, and I'm going to just start firing off or sponge until I, before

I read the, but those trauma rose glasses or that behavioral pattern that we've developed over a life, like you say, where we respond and overreact to stuff, you know, launches me in they're a totally wrong direction. Then I look really stupid. But for some people, that's just day number 10,500. So what I've been, what learning to do is is to take that step back. I still don't have the best trigger warning, but realizing it's not all about me, but I take the time to actually acknowledge the fact that somebody might be having a bad day

that what they said to me or the way they said it may not have been out of meanness. It just maybe they're frustrated at their wife. Maybe they, this has nothing to do with me. A lot of times I just think this has nothing to do with me. They're dealing with their own issues. So I don't have to worry about it. And what really prompted me to start changing and to actually write this book as a result of that, I got tired of looking at myself.

It was like it wasn't enough that my wife. would say, hey, you've got an anger problem. Or someone else would say, I got tired of being embarrassed after I got upset about something silly. At one point, I said, you know what? I don't want to see myself this way. It doesn't matter to me in a sense, or up to that point, it didn't matter to me in a sense of what other people thought of me. When I got to the point of I don't like myself this way, that's what prompted me to

change. Yeah. And write the book. Now, again, I'm not perfect. Writing this book doesn't make me just immune to the normal things that we deal with as humans. But what it did do while I wrote it, it provided a framework, if you will, that I can start to express some of this stuff. And hopefully, you know, to help other people that are going through the same issues. Yeah, there's a bit of a self-awareness.

Does this, I think, does this self-awareness kind of fall under emotional intelligence where you, you know, there are people that Clearly, they're not aware of their emotions, so they don't have any intelligence. They're intelligent stupid. But I've been there. I've done that. Maybe I'm still doing it. But there's certain levels of higher consciousness and awareness and self-awareness where we become a little bit more emotionally intelligence and then we become aware of it.

You know, maybe I shouldn't say everything that comes to my mind to spill it right out my mouth. Maybe you should qualify it first or something. There's something. I was talking to a colleague years ago. and he told me that I can't, I said, why did you say that in the meeting? He says, I just couldn't help myself. And I think the problem is you care too much.

And the way he took it, he said, what do you mean? I said, not everything, you don't have to be the person who solves everything. And so I'm seeing this quote, and it says when you're presented with something that you feel you might need to respond to, there's three things you ask yourself, does it need to be said? Does it need to be said right now? And does it need to be said by me? And if the answer is no, then don't say it. Sometimes things have to be said. Yeah. And things they have to be said, but they don't have to be said by now. And some things have to be said, but they don't have to be said by me. And I'm talking a lot to say, I don't need to be the referee in this, where he always thought, and he's a very caring. loving person, but he just felt it was incumbent upon him to always do that. And to me, that's

also another example of really not regulating our emotions, right? I'm almost having fragile emotions. It's like you feel the need to step into everything because you have to write this injustice, but that can end up harming us. And so understanding, do I need to address this? Do I need to address that now and practicing that, even though that's not explicitly stated in the book, that is another form of billing this anti-fragility. So we're not so fragile thinking we have to address everything all the time. I imagine for your research, one of the biggest issues we have in fragility is online social media. That's probably made things far worse than it used to be. Oh my gosh. I don't have a Twitter account or if I do, I don't use it. I don't respond. I do. I'm on

TikTok and LinkedIn and Facebook, all that. But that's for me to post almost like a running record on Facebook of my life. So when I go back and I do this maybe four or five times a month, when I go back, my wife and I went to Italy and my wife and I went to see this play, it's not to make social or political stands. But I marvel at the responses that people have to something that somebody posts online. And it's like sometimes people can't say anything without somebody being offended. And to me, that's just the ultimate sign of fragility.

You don't even know this person. You really not even care in a sense about what that person said, but you feel the need to have to respond to it. And some people do care. And they show their fragility by going off the deep end. And the ultimate form of that is when people start making death threats about something that's absolutely, and they blow their lives. up over. Oh, yeah. Some people are going to go to jail for.

Yeah. It's a fair fragility. Now, being antifragile is understanding, hey, do I need to respond to this at all? Or if I do, can I do this in a way? I choose my form of antivagulity. It's just not to respond to it at all. Yeah. And some of that, you know, I do that now a lot more of getting better at it.

But one of the things that I had to realize, you know, and this is back when I had to have these anxiety attacks, I would have. I had these anxiety attacks where I'd lock up my muscles when I was young to the point that it would clench my heart. And I would literally, my body would shut down to the point that I would have to go to sleep just to try and reset and alleviate the stress. And I would literally wake up again, feeling normal. And then just as soon as something pissed me off, we'd go right back in the cycle. And, you know, I finally did go see a psychiatrist. That's the right thing to do.

And they had me on these elephant tranquilizer pills that were crazy that I'd take two of a very. every four hours to become a human being again. And by the time I weaned myself off them by willing them down over time and learning what my triggers were like my stomach. And I was taking depressus to Zoloft. By the time I started learning more self-awareness and trigger control, I would take a quarter of those tranquilizers and then knock me on my ass. So I was really jacked up with adrenaline and just to give me an idea.

You know, just one, a quarter would knock me out for the night or the day. But I was taking two of those every four hours just to keep from murdering everything I could see. So, yeah, I feel kind of lucky I got through that. But one of the challenges I had was I would feel how it hurt my heart, and it hurt my health. And, you know, the doctors are like, hey, man, you're going to give yourself a heart attack. My business partner had one. And he went in the emergency room. He thought he had a heart attack.

And they go, no, man, you're just, you just have an anxiety attack. And I was like, dude, I'm having these five times a day. You have one and you're in the ER, right? But your health, I mean, getting angry, blowing your lid and enraging yourself, it causes a lot of health damage. You can have heart attack or stroke. You can trigger it. Yeah, I'm sorry.

I mean to catch you off. But yeah, a lot of cortisol and stress. And I've been saying, I used to say, I'm not going to, I'm going to die, but I don't want to die of a stress if he's heart attack. Yeah. And some of the times that I've gotten upset, once you kind of snap on of it, your head hurts, your chest hurts.

It just hurts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the person you tore the head off, he kind of hurts too. Oh, yeah. You know, he's bleeding all over the floor and stuff, and you're like, damn it, get a towel. And then you get upset from that.

You're bleeding on my floor. No, I'm even more angry. Yes. You have to hit in the head a couple more times. Don't do that, folks. What the book ultimately is about, it's about building capacity. More we learn to deal with the more capacity we have. But what we tend to do is, an example in the book, is somebody who's training for a marathon, right?

We only operate an ideal condition. Somebody says, I want to run a marathon, which I would never do that because I just, I'm not, I can't do it. You're not crazy. I'm not crazy enough to do. I like this idea that I'm going to run a marathon, which is a difficult. thing to do. I hand it to anybody who's run on. But they say, are you going to go run today? You're going to train? Oh, no, it's cloudy outside. It might rain. You're going to go today? Oh, that's too cold out there. Oh, you're going to wait a day? No, it's actually raining today. So when the

marathon comes, they're actually not prepared for it. Where somebody who is really dedicated to running this marathon of the best ability, they're going to say, I'm not going to let anything shy of my foot fall off stop me from training for this marathon. When they go go train for it, They've actually built the capacity to do it. And if it gets cold or if it starts raining, it's like, I've seen this. I've done this. And it's building this capacity. So the anti-fragility actually builds the capacity to deal with things that we're always going

to do with their lives, rejection, failure, anger, us getting anger at other people, people getting angry at us. These things are unavoidable in life. And to try, the more we try to avoid the things that are presented to us every day, the less capable we are of handling these things and the more fragile we become. Yeah. And I mean, you get into the pattern too, and it just becomes like a lockstep sort of reaction. Yeah.

And yeah, I mean, I've had, you know, this happens a lot with social media and political discussions, sometimes the people in different political parties where, you know, you reach the point that you just want to physically do something to them that you shouldn't because it's illegal. And it's just morally wrong probably. And sometimes I've found that, you know, like you've talked about, having that self-awareness, step back, take a breather. And sometimes I can, you know, the first reaction is, I'm going to choke the shit out of it.

And then you stop and you go, okay, maybe they don't understand or I'm not communicating effectively. And this goes into a lot of what being a leader is about, because I have to do this a lot, you know. You have to, when somebody fails at something you communicated or gave instructions to do, and, you know, you're upset, but sometimes you have to go, maybe they didn't understand what I said, you know,

and they're like, Chris, you know, somebody, there was something today I had where I wrote something on a text message I was in a real hurry, and I wrote something, I was short, and I didn't realize that it miscommunicated that maybe I had done something when I hadn't, but I was trying to figure out if I needed to do something. And so it really confused the person on the other side, and then when I saw what I did, I was like, gosh, you know, a couple more words made it would have made it better clear.

That's my fault. And, you know, so you have to deal with that when you're communicating with people. And sometimes it's you. And so sometimes just having that reset moment, that step back, like you say, you can reframe, repurpose maybe is the right word. And you can go, okay, well, maybe I need to teach them a different way, not by choking them out. Maybe I need to communicate this in a different way. I need to come with a different strategy to approach this and see if that sticks.

And sometimes I found that that does stick. Now, I agree with you on that. Being a professor, our world is all about communication. And there's times I'll talk to other professors and they'll say, I can't believe that that person doesn't get what I'm saying. And I say, dude, give them some grace. you know, I'm not saying we're specialists. They haven't gone through the training we've gone through.

Why would you expect them to understand, especially if it's something esoteric about the research we're doing, that's exactly why you're talking to them. So how about you have little grace? And maybe we maybe it's not that the people are dumb. I meet a lot of people who are smarter than I am. I don't have PhDs, but maybe the topic we're talking about, we need to dumb it down or just have a little grace for that person.

And saying you need to come to my world. No, I'm talking to you. I need to come down to yours. as well. Yeah. You know, that's sometimes what I've had when I've talked to people that have trauma. You know, I'm 58 and still dating after all these years is sometimes when you meet them and you see the things they think about and they talk about every day, you can go,

their whole world revolves around that trauma. And that's been 40 years and they're still affected by it. And clearly, you just start seeing all the themes of their life that they built around that trauma. and you go, okay, and you can give them grace because you realize that what happened to them as a child wasn't their choice. They likely didn't choose that, especially if it was something really big T trauma like sexual abuse or assault. They didn't choose that, you know. I mean, me sticking my hand in the blender or sitting in a, you know, on the hot pan on the stove, yeah, I probably did that at my own volition. But, you know, trauma, you know, this is something that a person was damaged.

And then I see them as a damaged person that probably needs my help more than me to become just the replacement for their abuser, where if I treat them poorly, they're going to go, see, I can't trust men. Here's another man doing the same thing, whatever. And if it gets near me, you'll do the same thing that happened to my trauma. It's basically the response in their minds. But yeah, it helps me be easier to give them a little grace and understand their position. I recently have one of my attorney friends who does a lot of litigation work and mediation and, of course, suing and all that sort of stuff. And he wrote a big thing about when he goes into court or when he goes into negotiation and mediation, whatever, over a lawsuit, potential lawsuit, he actually sits down and he thinks, okay, where is this other person coming from on the other side of this lawsuit? What's the motivations?

What's happened? What's their take on things from their perception of stuff? So that when he goes in there, he can understand them a little bit better. And sometimes that becomes communicated. You know, I learned that from great comedians who was at the Insult comic. It was around forever. Don Rickles. And Don Rickles used to say, you know, I can go, I can say stuff that sounds racist and sounds mean and sounds very critical.

But if people know that you have their best interests at heart, you're just trying to make them laugh. And then you also, you know, do your own jokes about yourself, your self-effacing, your jokes. People know that you're on a joke, but people know that you care. And being able to signal that is really, you know, you have to grow that and challenge that. You know, I think a lot of people know that people know that people think when I'm insulting, I'm joking. That's how much they've inlaid that assumption. Like, oh, you're so funny, Chris. I'm like, no, I'm really going to choke you out.

It gives you an hour if you realized that you went too far. So, yeah, I was just joking. I was just joking. I'll be back later when the cameras are off. Anyway, and it's dark outside. But yeah, it's, I like that idea of giving people grace. And when I see the human nature of it, like I've talked to some women that, you know, there was a serious sexual assault that had upon them.

They didn't, and there were children and they didn't really have a choice to it. And by giving them grace and understand where they were coming from, and a lot of their hatred and anger towards maybe men or other people or certain things. And a lot of times they'll compile, you know, like one of the things that people will do if they have sexual assault at a young age is they'll put on a lot of weight. So they're not attractive to future predators. And, you know, that complicates several things around them and belief systems and stuff. But it's so much easier to understand people when you do give them that grace. Like you say, I really like that concept.

Yeah. And I actually had to give start with myself to give myself from grace. like I said, it can be a piece of shit. And it's going to be down to myself. I just say, you know what? Everybody can't be. I'm just, I'm just willing to admit it. But what that helps me to do is to, at least in some attempt to stay humble,

to say to have some humility. And the more grace I give myself, the more grace I can give other people. And this book has helped me to really consolidate a lot of the things that I was going through to try to build this capacity. my wife and I, we have a house here and we have a house in D.C. And so we've been living apart and visiting each other a lot. And the last time she was in town, she said, no, you're different. And I said, she's actually said that to a friend we were having dinner with.

He's different. And so after dinner, I asked her, I said, what did you mean by that? She goes, you just seemed to see so much different than this last summer when we were having some issues. Wow. Yeah, the, the, the, right in the book. reading the book, talking to guys, going to my classes, it's helped me to be better with myself and the better man with myself,

the more anti-fragile I become, the more I'm able to deal with others. So this book is helping me deal with, it's helping me deal with my emotions, but the better I can deal with my emotions, than the better I am with other people, not just with other people in general. So I think this book, I didn't write this specifically for men, but it's probably more geared towards men.

I mean, women, I think, are going to find a lot of help with this book as well. If somebody just wants to say, like, I don't want to, my goal is just to get back the baseline. My goal is to build more capacity than this is the book for them. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, ego is hard to run on sometimes being self-accountable is what ego hides behind because ego can't be self-accountable. But yeah, it's, do you think, is this an issue we've always had with human beings, or do you think social media has made it worse or recent years have made it worse? It seems like we're at each other's throats more and more than ever before online and sometimes real life or over Thanksgiving dinner or something. No, I think this has always been there.

I think it's human nature. Now, again, this is not an empirical assessment. It's always been there, but social media just gives us the megaphone. you know, we look back in 1800s and some guy would stand on the corner with a megaphone and only those people in the vicinity could hear what he's saying. And now I can insult somebody in Australia at the same time I'm doing somebody in Germany and all around the world and it's just no end to it. So it just gives us a platform and a megaphone, if you will, to just to, and it helps to amplify

this. I think that's what social media does. I do think to what to your point that you were asking is, is maybe without social media, like people weren't just saying, let me go grab a megaphone and go stand on the corner and tell everybody what I think back in the 1800s. But now that they have social media, they say, I do have this megaphone, and so does everybody else. And so I'm going to use it as much as possible. So I guess I should backtrack a little bit.

Yes, I think now that I've talked through that, I think social media has exacerbated and amplified what humans have always probably been capable of. Yeah. Yeah, you know, like we said, we don't get an owner in Spanish in life, and sometimes you have to go through enough of life to learn what doesn't work, you know? I, you know, I, my, someone of my family is fairly young in their 20s, and they've never had a relationship with a woman, and they kind of have this utopia and Disney sort of fantasy about women.

And, you know, I've had to, try to say, you know, there's, there's kind of some things there that maybe you shouldn't, you know, you need to look at reality a little bit more, basically. And not so much the Disney fantasy thing you've, you've, you've taken on. And it makes, you know, I kind of have to realize that after a while, you know, after a couple of us cajoling that are guys on the team, the video gaming team that we're on for stuff, you know, we just kind of go, technically the best way to learn this is just go get yourself a woman and see how that goes.

And, you know, you can explain it to your blue in the face. You know, how to get eaten by a crocodile. You can explain it all you want. But sometimes you just got to have it happen to you to find out. You read up a good point. This book, in a sense, addresses that is people have this. They have this Disney idea of what life should be because of the self-hooked books tell them that if we just do this, then, and if you do this, then, and if you

you just stay positive and if you just manifest this you just manifest i was going to do that yeah yeah that's which to me drives me bonkers but if you just if you just what they don't say is look life i i love life i'm a very upbeat person and all life is life is tough sometimes and the reason it gets tougher for some people is they just don't have the capacity because like your cousin, I'm sure he's a great guy, they have this disinified view of women, of how their job should be, how much money is making, what their career should be like, what, what, what, what, how other people should treat them. And I've realized in my 58 years that life just doesn't work that way, but a lot of people still have that view of the world.

If I can just manage positivity and I don't have to deal with anything negative. Yet things are coming at them every day. And, then they're wondering why they're so miserable. Yeah. And they're like, why isn't this working out the fantasy on my head? Exactly. A lot of people that have a fantasy about life in their head, how it's supposed to be. I think I was guilty at one time.

I was focused on the destination as opposed to enjoying the journey. That was an interesting lesson. I had to learn over a lot of loss. And I would get really angry because, damn it, I did this thing and I did X and Y, and I was supposed to get Z. And, you know, two plus two equals four. but it doesn't, evidently, all the 100% of the time. You know, I did the hard work and it didn't pay out this time.

I worked for a company and they had a recession, laid me off, even though I worked my ass off to make sure I wouldn't be the guy who could get laid off. You know, life isn't fair. I tell my students that. My students sometimes will come to me at the end of the semester and they say, I worked really hard in the sports. And I said, yeah, okay, that doesn't guarantee you the grade that you want. I mean, just to work really hard.

You said something about looking more at the destination. My son, who is very successful right now, but about four or five years ago, he was struggling. And he's a very talented kid, but he had this view of where he wanted to be. I told him one day, I said, you know, your problem is you want to wake up in the penthouse without taking the stairs. Ah, I love that analogy. Yeah, I said, life does not work that way. from people who are lucky enough to get to take the elevator and you weren't born to that person. And most of us have to take the stairs and most of us never reach the penthouse.

But you want to just wake up in the penthouse because you exist. I told them that the more you keep thinking that, the more miserable you're going to be. And I don't know what happened to him, but he snapped out of it. And this is went from being a, I don't know what, but this guy. I am so proud of this kid now. And he is, he's making more money at 20. His birthday's today. He's making more money at 27.

I took me until I was in my 40s to make the money at this kid. I mean, but he, he finally started working. Yeah. Yeah. You learn, you learn, you know, life isn't fair. I had somebody write me the other day. And they gotten rejected for a podcast because they just didn't qualify. And it was through, it was through a PR agent.

They sent us her stuff. We're like, no. And they wrote me, and Fair was like the most used word in the diatribe. They wrote me on email. It wasn't fair. You know, you could see that he felt like he was entitled to be on any podcast he wanted. Somehow, you know, I guess every podcast in the world owes you a guest place or something. And I was like, yeah, that's, I'm like, you know, that's the battle cry of the spoiled child there.

I mean, you said fair so much. I got bad news for you. universe. It's not fair. No, my, my oldest son, he used to hate when I said this to him. He would say that's not fair. And I told him, nobody ever said life is supposed to be easier, fair. And to this day, he'll still hear, I remember

he used to say that to me. I hated when he said, he said, now I get it. Now I get it. And again, this book addresses this, not directly talking about fairness, but it talks about the struggle, the uncertainty, and insecurity, the failures we have. and the better we get it dealing with failure, the start of times the less failure we have.

It's just the people who can't deal with failure that end up shutting down. I used to do jiu-jitsu, and I used to roll with this guy, a bunch of guys, and I would ask this guy, hey, do you want to roll? And I could beat him. And so he would say, no, I don't want to roll with you. He would go find somebody that he could beat. And the guy never, he never got any better. I used to go roll with purple belt.

and brown belts and they choke me and literally hurt my neck. But I thought I'm never going to get better unless I roll with people who can kick my butt. I mean, sometimes that's who you learn from. I go out and I'll hang out with other photographers and I'll watch what they do. And I don't worry if they're better and worse than me. I'm just like, okay, let's see how they do things. And I might learn some stuff. But yeah, you're right.

Sometimes the only way you learn stuff is to go see. how there's a doing or study people are more successful than you. Yeah, you got to let the ego go, right? Yeah, yeah, you got to be like, hey, man, it's cool. But yeah, it makes all the difference of the world, really, when it comes down to it. As we go out, tell us about some of the offerings you have on your website and on, tell us about some of the offerings you have on your website and work you do for people that they can hire you for. On the website, I've just got some books. I've really leaned into this anti-fragility concept where I wrote a book about the anti-fragile man, which that one evidently is geared towards women. I'm working on a book about child rearing. I'm not purporting to

be an expert in child rearing, for example. I am a parent of three children, but where my expertise lies is this concept of anti-fragility and being able to see how it applies to several different things. I'm planning on getting a men's group up and running. My consulting stuff is from my IT days where I do data work and things like that. And where can people find your dot-coms and everything know about you on the interwhips? It's a stand.com and also on Amazon. It's been a fun and great discussion to have on the show. I really love it. And I'm glad someone's out here talking about it because we need to kind of dial back our world and calm it down a little bit. Right. I agree. Thanks, I agree. Thanks, thank you.

You know, it's been great. Thank you. And thanks, Johnns, for tuning in. Order up his book where refined books are sold. It's called Anti-Fragile Emotions. Build a Life that Gains from Disorder. Because there's plenty of it in the world to build from, folks. You got a whole freaking lumberyard on Twitter.

It's by Dr. Sidney Anderson. And you can find him online there. Go to Goodrease.com, Forteousch, Christch, Christfoss, LinkedIn.com, Forteous, Christf, 1, the TikTokit, and all those crazy places in the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.

You've been listening to the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain and your life. Warning, consuming too much of the Chris Walsh Show podcast can lead to people thinking you're smarter, younger, and irresistible sexy. Consume in regularly moderated amounts. Consult a doctor for any resulting brain bleed. All right, great show, Sydney, the long ones are the...