The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 343: Dr. John Delony—A Beer, Some Nachos, and a Barstool

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

343: A Beer, Some Nachos, and a Barstool with Dr. John Delony The bestselling author, mental health expert, and host of the Dr. John Delony Show chats about the crisis of confidence that comes from living in a post-expert world, the dangers of certainty, the choices we can make to live a non-anxious life, and how sharing nachos and beer with good friends can help. John's book is Building a Non-Anxious Life  

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Lipson today. That's J-E-R-R-R-Y-A-I-S-Y-S-Y-N. Well, here we go again. With the way I heard it, episode number 343, it's a good one. Oh, it's a good one. It's called A Beer, Some Nachos, and a Barstool. Where do I sign up? Three of my favorite things, all in one title, especially if I were to embark upon a conversation. more especially if I were sitting across from somebody in a position to offer some useful advice.

Somebody, for instance, with a couple of PhDs who's worked in the mental health field for many, many years. Somebody who actually knows what they're talking about. That would be Dr. John Deloney. He's written a great book, and he's becoming a pretty good friend. And Chuck, I saw you taking notes as he was talking almost as though he was diagnosing you. Well, wouldn't he be taking the notes if he was diagnosing me? Well, see, that's what makes John so different. He can't write.

He somehow got me to write down the stuff that's going to help me. No, listen, you know, you said he's got two PhDs. He also has a master's degree, a bachelor's degree, an education management certification from Harvard University and a group crisis intervention, individual crisis assistance, critical incident stress management. I don't even know what that is, dude. Krinnis critical. In spite of all that, he's filled with good advice. Yes, and he's like a regular guy. He's a regular guy, thus the title,

a beer, some nachos, and a bar stool. That's where he does his business. Yeah. The operating premise is simple, folks. We've never had more people in the care of mental health professionals ever. The world has become a very anxious place, people for lots of perfectly understandable reasons are not sleeping without a little assistance from Mother's Little Helper. They're not waking up without similar assistance. They're self-medicating

in every imaginable way. They're drifting apart from their significant others. They anesthetize themselves day in and day out, and they're just balls of frustration and uncertainty. And look, I'm sure you see it everywhere. I hope I haven't just described you. But if the shoe fits, listen up because something is definitely happening that feels new and it feels different and it's kind of scary. And a lot of experts have a lot of opinions. But John, this is a guy I met, by the way, at the Dave Ramsey event about, I don't know, maybe five months ago.

And I was really, really taken with him. Michael Easter was involved in this too. He's been on the podcast. But John's a guy. I just wanted to have back just to talk with him like I really would talk to somebody over a beer and some nachos on a bar stool. And that's what you're about to hear. There's a lot of wisdom. There's a lot of common sense.

He's written a terrific book. And I think there's a lot in this conversation worth jotting down, including some great quotes. I've forgotten about the C.S. Lewis reference, basically the definition of friendship when you're with people who say things that cause you to go. Oh, you too? Relatability, you know, finding something to relate to, not being so alone. All of that stuff is for sale, and it's on the menu. And the power of community, you know, the power of surrounding yourself with people that you trust, whose opinions you value, and, you know, who can listen and say, yeah, I've been there, yeah.

And finding a way to turn the people already in. your life into those people, right? Like not going out into the world searching for friends, but looking around at your neighbors and finding a way to make them the friends you always wish you had. Yeah, I think there's a lot of good stuff here. I really, really do.

He's a smart guy, a beer, some nachos, and a bar stool with Dr. John Deloney. Chuck, you say it this time right after this, go ahead. right after this. Thank you. Shameless plug. Long before she was Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble.

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Pick up a bottle at noblespirates.com. K-N-O-B-E-L-Spirits.com. Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. Perfect, perfect. Man, Chuck is just producing the heck out of this thing, man. Well done. You know what?

Basically, we're going with the quotes around the word producer in much the same way I've put them around the word host for most of my life. So, yeah, let me... Michael, how are you, man? Can everybody hear each other? Well, good enough? Yep. John Deloney, Mike Rowe. I hate to break this to you, Mr. Producer, but we've already met.

I know that. We're best friends, Chuck. We shared a terrific plane ride, actually, from... Did we leave from L.A. or did we leave from here, John? You remember? We left from Los Angeles to come to Nashville, and then you guys came back. Right. Was this a spirit flight and coach? Yes. Essentially, basically.

Basically. Are you kidding me? This was like the Dave Ramsey Express. Yeah, it was pretty nice. It was pretty sweet, and I was going there to do a bunch of stuff. You know, I met John on stage with Dave at this workforce event. we did. And I wanted to bring Dave some bourbon because he has a fairly remarkable collection. And I had some with me. And Dave wanted to try it on the plane. Well, John, this guy, when he pours a bourbon, he does it with a certain amount of intentionality that I found delightful.

He pours it with a gas can. And you forget the important thing is it was like 9.30 in the morning. And so I'm sitting there like, I mean, I have all of today left to go. And also, you can't turn down an opportunity to test drive Mike's new stuff. And so that made for an adventurous plane ride. It sure did. It was the barrel strength. I had the barrel strength with me. It's a hundred and twenty one proof. Yeah. It was just a gift. But Dave's like, well, let's open it up right here and see how that goes. And he opens this up. And on these streets, Mike, We call it a heads-up would have been nice. And you kind of let the team down on that one.

Yeah, like I might have stopped at the Bob Evans on the way in and laid down a foundation, some pancakes, some waffles, a little food, something. How many bottles did you get through on that flight? We had to sign an NDA on that one, Chuck. Fair. We actually drank the one, but he, you know, there were five or six people on the flight.

There's a few of us. But, John, that was a really fun look for me. into Dave's world, which I was pretty familiar with, but I hadn't had a chance to meet his posse. And you obviously are a part of that world. And I didn't have a chance to talk much to you on the flight out. But after the event, everything you said, I found myself nodding in a kind of violent agreement. And when I found out that, you know, you had a couple of PhDs, your curriculum vitae is. impressive, not just in the mental health field, but in the education field. And there I was, you know,

mouthing off with my normal kind of rant against cookie cutter advice with education. And you and I just seem to see things very similarly. Read your first book. And I want to tell you that I got this one in the mail a couple of days ago and stayed up all night reading it. I do want to tell you that, but I can't because I didn't. But I read about 50 pages and then did the thing, you know, that you do as a fake host to create the illusion of knowledge and prep. So I think I know enough to have an intelligent conversation about my own relationship with anxiety. But you've said some things in here that I really want to jump into. And, you know, we're joking with Chuck.

He sent me this link. And I watched about 20 minutes of you in front of four or five thousand people. And I dug everything you were screaming, man. I really do. And the audience was hanging on to every word. And I guess maybe we start with the not so encouraging fact that never before in the history of bipedal humanity of so many people been under the care of a mental health expert. What the hell, man? That's my world. That's my gang is mental health folks. And you mentioned it kind of arc of my career. I've been an educator. I was a high school teacher

and then an elementary school teacher for a year and then I've been at universities ever since. And every year it seemed like I was getting more and more underwater dealing with the young people that were getting dropped off and then also with their families. And I just went back to school to get some more information on sitting with people in their mental health issues just so I could keep up with my job

and keep up with what was going on with me in my house. And yeah, that was a hard, hard reality to step back a couple years ago and realize more people right now are under the care of a licensed mental health professional than ever before in human history. And more people are medicated for some sort of mental health, quote unquote, disorder than ever before in human history. And we have access to food. We have access to climate control inside our homes, in our offices, in our cars.

And we have a way to communicate with more people than ever before in human history. And we are going stone mad. We're going insane as a culture and as individuals. And so I had to look in the mirror and go, maybe we're not solving the problem the right way. Well, I mean, are people more screwed up than ever before? Are the circumstances more dire than ever before? Or is the advice and the approach to treatment simply failing like it's never failed before? Or some combo of all of it?

The best analogy, I was talking to a couple of my nerd friends the other day about this. And it's like we're all inside of an aquarium and somebody's pumping in poisonous gas and what we're doing is we're spending a ton of time x-raying everybody's lungs and trying to come up with different masks for folks to wear inside of this thing instead of just going up and dealing with

the poisonous gas is getting dumped in here. And so we've created a world that our bodies just can't live in, Mike. We're not designed for this. It's a madness. And I don't think that anybody got here nefariously. I'm not a big conspiracy theory guy. There's a few that I think.

I just think, we were trying to do the best we could, and it was really cool. We liked apples, and instead of having them one month a year, we figured out how to ship them in. Let's have them every day. And that's awesome until your body can't handle that much sugar in a day, right? So, man, it would be really great to not have to go hunt an animal just so my family can eat. How cool it would be if somebody just shipped it to me? And then you find yourself 100 years later sitting on a couch and you push a button on your cell phone, you never move. So I think we've just created a world where everything's comfortable, and our bodies are trying to get our attention that we're not, that's not how we're designed to live.

And on top of that, you throw those cell phones in, man, and the terror economy, and I just don't think our brains have a chance to live. And then we go crawling off to our counselor and say, hey, I can't sleep. I can't do this. I can't do this. And I think the challenge is, instead of sitting back and saying, all, let's look at your life. We say, well, you have a this. And there's 15 options we can try. Let's start with number one. And you come back and let me know. And that's just, I mean, we got 15 minutes with you, and then we go on to the next and on the next.

And so I don't even think it's a matter of we're not, the treatment's not right. I think we're just not dealing with the problem at the root. So, in other words, anxiety is a symptom of something. But if it's not a symptom of the environment, and I think maybe you're suggesting that it is, we're living in a pretty unique environment. I mean, you just checked a couple boxes.

I suspect if people wanted to sit down and make their own list, their own parade of horribles, where do you start? Lockdowns, confusion, experts that seem to disagree with each other, kids, the uncertainty of what to do with a kid, the desire not to screw your kid up, but the understanding that you're probably gonna, the screens that you mentioned, the TV that's constantly on, the person you live with that is somehow becoming further and further estranged. frogs and boiling water and then one day you look up and, you know, your favorite food doesn't taste right and nothing is lining up anymore. But then again, you know, I listen to what you say,

and I think if you're inclined to be anxious, you'll find a thing to be anxious about. It just seems that maybe there's more things to choose from today, more things on the anxiety menu than ever before. And yet, I have a pretty simple life. I'm a pretty selfish guy, and I've, you know, I live simply. But, man, I've been walking around shaking my head for the last couple of weeks asking myself, why am I so jacked up over these responsibilities that I, why can't I get in front of it? So, I don't know. Is there a parallel between the anxious person and, like, job satisfaction?

Like the idea that maybe job satisfaction doesn't have as much to do with the job as we think it does, and maybe anxiety doesn't have as much. to do with the environment as we think it does. Maybe it's something else going on in our big old noggins? I think as a culture, we've accepted anxiety as an identity. We've accepted this is who I am. And I think that's relatively new. I can't tell you how many times over the years a student would come in and they'd be 22 years old and they would be weeping and say, hey, I've got depression. My dad just moved out on my mom. Or my mom just got diagnosed with stage four cancer. And I would say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you don't have depression.

You're sad. You're heartbroken. That's a totally different thing. And so we've diagnosed every, we've pathologized, every feeling, every human experience has become a label so that we can send it to an insurance company so that some professional can get reimbursed. And so when you dice and slice up the human experience in that way, it makes us nuts. So I think it's Bray Brown. It says, whatever you go looking for in the world, you're going to find. And so, yeah, if you've said I'm an anxious person, you're going to see angst every.

everywhere. And nothing is more annoying when you're in the throes of an anxious time to find somebody who's completely at peace. Right? It's annoying. It's easy to point with them and be like, you're an idiot. You don't understand what's actually coming. You know they're listening to us through the street lamps, right? And it's just easy to go down that road, but it's just not real, right? So I think, number one, it's that. Number two, I do think environment has a ton to do with it, but we don't have the tools to look at our environment. And we like our creature comforts, as we all do. So the easy thing to do is to blame anxiety. Same as a politician, man. You get some knucklehead of politician up there just running their mouth about something and your marriage is

falling apart or you've outsourced everything in your life to technology and you don't know how to do anything or you get laid off. It's easy to point at that person. That's just a symptom of what's going on at your home. And so I think it's a whole bunch of stuff. Here's the big deal. Our culture has completely taken away people's own personal power. That ultimately was my, I didn't understand it being in the higher ed world. And so probably the greatest gift I've received from Dave is watching him sit with hurting people day after day after day in a non-education environment, which is, all right, we can talk about theories all day long, we can talk about these issues all day long. You right now can't sleep and you can't breathe do these three things, right? And so I think,

I felt trapped to as an educator, as somebody who cares about hurting people, looking at them and going, yeah, this happened to you, this abuse happened to you, people treated you differently because of X, Y, and Z, you're always going to be less than, you're always going to be broke, and you're always going to have something wrong with you, someone's got to come fix you, and that can be me. And I've completely abandoned that. I think there is rights, I mean, wrongs to be righted, but I want to hand people of the driver's seat of their own car back to them.

Yes, if you are doubled over with anxiety and you can't breathe, it's the worst I've been there. And let's go upstream and start making some hard choices about your life. Your smoke alarms in your house will go off if there's not a, I mean, they'll quit ringing if there's no fire, right? It's just handing people the steering wheel back. I like the smoke alarm analogy. Yeah. You know, mine didn't go off the other day, but I started getting the beep that you get on the battery's low. Now, I'll tell you, man, I hopped over the anxiety.

and got right to white-hot rage, right? Because it's 3.30 in the morning. And this thing, it's a splinter in my mind. And it's not a question of getting up. And, you know, this ceiling is 13 feet high. I have to go to the garage to get a ladder. You know, I'm in my underpants. It's dark.

The dog's barking. Beep, beep. And it's like, rather than going, you know something, what a wonderful fail-safe this is. What an amazing bit of safety. protocol I have in my home. You know, what a great reminder, you know, to, you don't have to wait for the thing to start chirping. You should be swapping those batteries out every four or five months, staying ahead of the curve.

My mind doesn't go there. I'm just annoyed. In your analogy, it's like the smoke alarm actually goes off. There's an actual fire somewhere in the house. And your primary concern is to get away from that annoying sound, not the flames. I mean, that's how we deal with it. And that's how we do with a lot of our issues, right? I got debt.

I want you to take it away from me. You've got health issues. I want you just to tell me that being unhealthy is okay and that I'm, everything's going to be great in my life. I have anxiety. I want you just to make the ringing stop so that I can go about my travel sports and my job that I hate with my terrible boss, making not enough money in a house I can't afford in a car that I'm leasing. Like it's some point we have to turn the lights on and turn the music off and stop the party and say, what are we doing, right? And you and I both know, I mean, this happened in my house. I was just on

the phone with, it was an uncomfortable conversation with my electrician, the electric company. And they've been out to fix several things and several things and several things. I cannot deal with it long enough. And then it starts to affect everything until stuff just starts going. And so I think as a culture, we can wait until this thing falls over and it will. Make no mistake, it will. History, that's just history, right? Or we can turn the lights on. and go, hey, let's just, everybody, let's just stop. And I'm going to take care of mine, you take care of yours, and we'll take care of this together. And I just can't wrap my head around our inability to do that right now. And the only thing I can think is maybe we don't have a picture of what that looks like.

And so here we go. Well, my theory has always been in some way stuff has to go splat before it gets better. I just hate that. I hate that. It's just reality. It's true. But I hate it, man. It's so unnecessary. It is, but, you know, I'm trying to find a silver lining. Like, how can I feel good about how bad things are? Okay. And I don't want to be deluded either. But when I look at some of the crime, right, that's in our face right now, like we just see people running amok. It feels like the world is in a throes of some kind of riot. And I feel like, my God, what, is there anything good to be said about this. And the only thing I can come up with is, well, the people who elected the people who have enacted the policies that are allowing people to behave in a way where there's no actual

consequence, eventually, maybe, maybe then the lights will come on, as you say. But to really round out the metaphor, when we go to flick the switch and the lights don't come on, it's because the aforementioned electrician is so busy. He can't get it. He can't get it. to your house to fix the fundamental thing that's broken. And so we get caught in these tautologies, right? These like these endless feedback loops. And that makes me anxious. Well, and that's for me in my house. I'm out. I opted out. And my dad was a homicide detective growing up. And so he used to put Polaroid pictures on the family desk. And he would say, hey, dad helped put these guys away and they get out in the next month. So if anybody knocks on the door, you just call. And here's the deal.

This is my dad really doing his best to help his family. And then there's me, the nine-year-old, like, you know, the neighbor knocks on the door. And I go full like, oh, this is it, man. This is it. This is it. And so I think we can continue to live like that, or I'm going to have to say, okay, the politician X told me this, politician why told me that? That didn't work. But the greatest gift I can have is knowing my neighbor now. I'm just going to go with that. I'm going to go with the neighbor. I'm going to stop looking at all the tear. I'm just going to answer the door, right? I think if I don't continue to live like that, I'm going to go mad like I have before. And so I don't know. I'm just opting out. And what does opting out mean? I'm not going to own anybody any money. What does opting out mean? I'm just going to treat my neighbor right. And I'm going to trust you first. And if I show up and you have completely lied, that's cool, man. I'm not going to do business with you. I'm not going to hang out with you anymore. I'm going to go about my day. And what I'm finding is, the lighter my grip is on these things, the more people want to be around me, the more my kids want to be around me, the better I sleep, the better decisions I make

throughout a day. And the better I'm able to engage, is this a hill worth dying on or not? Versus, like you said, just defaulting to rage, man. Is it kind of like, don't sweat the small stuff and everything is the small stuff? I think it's one step before that, because I think if you owe $100,000 in student loan, and you elected a guy that said, I'm going to take all these away, and then you bought a house and you bought a car and you put a kid in school, and all of a sudden they didn't go away.

That's not small stuff, right? I can't pay my bills. That's for real. So let's go one step before that. If you create a life where your alarms aren't going off all the time, then you get this new $500 a month of bill, and it's super annoying. It really pisses you off because you told me different, but it's not tragic. Then you don't have to sweat the small.

stuff. Gotcha. Well, there's no debtor's prison, Chuck, right? Right. So, I mean, now, I'm not, no judgments, but what are the real consequences of being unable to pay your bills? They're serious for sure. You can lose things. You can have things repossessed. Your credit can be forfeited and so on. But there's no debtor's prison. Now, there used to be. Now, there's not. Is this good? Is this bad? Does this lead to more or less anxiety? Does this encourage more profligate behavior or not? I don't know. But I do know that there's always a consequence to removing the stakes.

These loans are going to be forgiven in some way, shape, or form. At least they have been in some way, shape, or form historically. Let's say we forgave them all. A lot of people are really calling for that. What in the world is that going to do to encourage a four-year school to lower the tuition, right? Well, that's been Dave's problem with it all along is, and he'll even tell you, he's not against forgiveness.

Well, he's still that for me. He's still that for me. Yeah, tell him you're welcome. He's not even against forgiveness, especially with groups that were preyed upon, which are super clear, like marginalized students and veterans, groups that have been, like, the minutes of these meetings came out, like, let's go after them because they'll pay more.

if we forgave them all right now, if they came out, said, you know what, we were wrong, we're forgiven. School starts next week, and a whole multi-million students just crank them back up again because that's the only key we got to the car. And so be a person of integrity across the board. If they're so evil and so bad, first stop making them. And then let's deal with the issue here.

But it's a strange place we find ourselves. Again, I can get pretty nihilistic, pretty quick. That makes me realize, oh, this has not. nothing to do with solving big problems. This has to do with placating people and patting them on the head so you can get what you want next time. And I, as a citizen, as a dad of two little kids, as a guy who's trying my best to be a husband that makes at least a grade of a C, I just got to step out of that game completely. C plus, man. C plus, man, I'm in. Your solid C plus across the board, very. Yeah, I guess got a default to, okay, what can,

what am I contributing to this issue and what can I do to help the warmth and laughter inside my own house and I'm going to start there. But how do you sweat? Look, you're an expert. I've looked at your, there are many initials after your name, right? You're in the expert class. But I hear you say, and I've heard you say, that it's a tough time to be an expert. And look, I really wanted to talk to you about advice, both the advice you dispense, the advice I dispense, that Dave dispenses. We're talking about Dave Ramsey, of course. Advice scares me almost as much as anxiety itself. Because I don't know who's listening. I mean, there are, you know, 500,000 people will listen to this conversation we're having

sometime this month. I don't know where they are. You know, I don't know what they need to hear. I often wonder, you've got a big platform, you know, and a lot of people listen to you guys. And do you worry sometimes about saying a thing that could be perfectly sensual? for a whole bunch of people, but not for others. And how do you parse that? Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page

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You can see why I love these guys. If, on the other hand, you have better things to do with your time, then watch my mom and me be impossibly charming together, then allow me to remind you, here, without all the cleverness and charm, that unlimited talk text and data on a blazing, fast, network for just 3499 a month really is an unmitigated bargain from an American wireless company that keeps all their customer service in this country, supports our veterans in a meaningful way, as well as the Microwworks Foundation, and allows me to exploit my own mother in a national

advertising campaign. Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just 3499 a month. at puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure talk. I think if you speak in absolutes, you better be right.

Absolutely. You're always wrong on that. You're always wrong. Here's the other thing. I've done a couple of episodes on my own show where I've started with, hey, I was wrong.

Because I've got buddies who listen to the show who are, like, I'm a generalist expert. will. And I got buddies who were like down. I spent 15 years studying protein synthesis, right? And they'll call you and say, hey, you botched this one. Here's a good example. So it came to me recently, somebody that I know is in my personal sphere and they have a child that's terminally ill. And there was a funeral coming up. And I'm always telling people, hey, you need to take your

kids. Don't avoid hard things. Take your kids, especially seven, eight, nine year olds. Take them to funerals. They need to see their parents grieving. That's good for them because when they grieve when they're 14, they're going to remember, I got a model for this, and it was my dad or my mom, and I trust him. I'm not crazy. And this person came and said, hey, I've got this terminally ill kid who's going to be experiencing this same scenario just on the other side in about 18 months or so. Should I take him to the funeral? And my instinct was, yeah, that's just kind of my thing. But I call a child trauma psychologist.

That's what she does. And she said, John, are you crazy? No. Oh, man. No. We're not doing 30-year life lessons here. We are going to have as much joy as humanly possible. Absolutely not.

You're wrong. And so I had to go back and go, dude, I was wrong. I was wrong. And so for me, here's the word expert for me. Do you have the actual knowledge? Do you know what you're talking about? And that means, I know it's cool to like poo-poo on education these days. Do you know what you're talking about?

You have to have some information. The second thing, and it can't come from some nonsensical website. The second thing is, do you have an experience with this personally? Have you felt what you're talking about? And the third thing is, have you walked alongside a whole bunch of other people? Because it always looks different. And I think if you experience that and you're able to say the words, I was wrong, or I changed my mind, which I think is one of the marks of a wise person who says,

I changed my mind, then I don't have any problems with it. I do hope that people don't weaponize stuff that you talk about. But I think people who give advice for a living should be very, very careful. And I think we live in a culture. I was talking to somebody the other day. Mike, they got a marketing person who got laid off. And I was talking to them about six or seven months later. And they're like, hey, I'm finishing my marketing course.

And I was thinking, you may not be the best instructor for that course. Like, that may not be the thing. Right. And so I think we're just in a place where anybody can fill up a course on anything. Anyway, so that's the whole other rabbit trail. But, yeah, I think you should be wary of experts. And at the same time, I don't want to live in a post-expert world, right? That's a scary place to be because I just don't know very much stuff.

Yeah. Look, we're desperate for credible sources. We're desperate for wisdom. You know, parents want a playbook. But your experience may vary. Your situation may vary. Let me tell you this. Here's how I've solved that problem because when I was in working in higher ed, I was

around brilliant people, brilliant people. And I would ask him, hey, what do you think about fill in the blank? What do you think about Trump's indictment? What do you think about from a legal perspective? What do you think about this? What do you think about this? And they would rattle off. I think this.

I think this. I think this. And especially on issues of nutrition and health and mental health, then I would hang around. My kids would play with their kids. And I would see them handing their kids a bunch of gummy bears or handing their kids an iPad. And I would think, hey, you told me this. But, oh, that's what you believe. And so I have stopped.

You won't hear me say, hey, what do you think about? I just don't ask that question anymore. I ask, what do you do with your kids? What would you do if this was your house? And they'd say, like, I'd rewire the whole thing. Okay, well, that's what I'm going to do. But I'm not going to ask you what you think, because what you think and what you actually do are two different things.

What do you do with your kids? Right. What's fun to say out loud? What do I like to hear myself say in certain situations with certain audiences? That's what I'm going to say. How would I like to say it? Would I like to talk like this? Would I like to bring them all in and sit?

them down and educate them. I mean, the arrogance, the trap. I mean, maybe I'm just, I've just gotten older. I talked to somebody the other day, a woman at an airport who just sat down and we started chatting. And she was very complimentary of microworks, but she said, you know, in my family, no one had ever gone to college. And so there was great joy and great pride when we had a kid who did. I cringe sometimes because, you know, he's listening to some of the things that you've said, right, about having our thumb on the scale and about how pushing college has created so many of these problems. But here's this woman who's so proud of her son and here's this kid who, right? So where he's coming from is so different than where, you know, my friends, most of my

friends went to school. Most of them assumed a large amount of debt. Most of them assumed a large amount of debt. Most of them regret it, and virtually none of them are working in their chosen field. So it's very easy for me to look at my cohort and then go out into the world and say, hey, heads up world. Here's what's going to happen to you. And then I can find all the data. And I can cherry pick the stuff I like. I can talk about Nick Eberstadt's great book, and I've had Michael Easter on this podcast, and now you're here, and I create my own reinforced book of truth, you know, but I still don't really know who's listening. I don't know who's going to walk up to me in the airport. I don't know who's listening to this right now, much less what they need to hear. So it just makes me,

not quite gun-shy, I guess cautious, maybe humble. But that makes you worth listening to. And that keeps you from becoming a asshole. That, yes, both cheeks. Honestly. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's the certainty. Yeah. It's the certainty trap. We crave. We crave. to hear certain sounding people telling us true things. But it's in such short supply. What I really liked about your book, the eight pages that I read. The back cover.

The synopsis on the back really moved. Best table of contents ever. The copy editor did a bang-up job on the back of this thing. This guy on the front looks so much like you. I really have to congratulate you. Hey, AI can do amazing things, Michael. It's pretty amazing. Well, it wrote a hell of a book.

No, the fact that you got halfway through it and basically called an audible, you kind of just called yourself on your own bull crap. So, like, you set out to write a helpful guide about anxiety and realized halfway through that the very thing you wanted to do was to avoid all the clinical stuff, right? you kind of fell into it and suddenly you start revealing some things about your own personal life that I don't think most people in the mental health field would have done. That's a compliment, by the way. Oh, I appreciate that. I think you just nailed going back to the advice. I think people who give advice have to be very careful to always remember you're speaking with people, not Adam. And I pride myself on that. Dude, I'm no better than anybody else. You can walk a marathon or you can run it. You still get the same sticker, and so I can sit in a whole bunch of classes for a whole bunch of years, and they're

going to give me a fancy piece of paper, and I can write a big, big, ugly book report, and they're going to give me a piece of paper, but it is what it is. I'm still just a dad trying to figure it out, too, and so I fell into the trap of, here's what you got to do. You should do this. You should do this. You should do this. And my wife and I had a pretty rough exchange down in my little basement gym, and I checked out of my house, and I went to a hotel for a week, and I had to have a come to John meeting, which is like, oh, you're writing this little fancy book telling everybody what to do, and you're not even doing this in your own house. Who do you think you are? And so, yeah, halfway through it turned in from me on a stage to me pulling up a bar stool saying, hey man, I need a round. Let's figure this out together. Good for you. I mean, honestly, I just, I think I'm going through something similar, honestly. I just, tell me about it. Well, I mean, I don't doubt my intentions, but I sometimes, when I hear myself saying the same things over and over, I think people play a drinking game with this podcast. Chuck and I joke about it all the time. Parapitia.

Oh, he's going to talk about a peripatetic moment, some sort of parapetia. Or he's going to talk about the reverse commute. Or he's going to quote Frost and say, way leads on the way. When he does that, we all drink. Well, you know, all my fans are now hopeless alcoholics because I'm, And lucky for them, Mike Roe has a new bourbon line to... And it's terrific. Coincidence? ...dorced by Dave Ramsey and John Deloney. Are you struggling with your alcohol? Have I got the drink for you? I'm Micro.

I guess, you know, I'm still very much a believer in checking yourself. And I think the thing that I've done right that has kept me more or less in my lane is insist on a behind-the-scenes camera that doesn't stop wrong. Chuck hates me because I say, look, I don't want you to count us in. I don't want to hear three, two, one. When I hop on this thing to start talking to somebody, I want to know that we're rolling because I think people can sense that. And I think when they hear that, it sounds like something honest. But that in and of itself becomes a trope. That becomes part of your schick. That becomes a thing that you get used to doing. And then you kind of default into all of these systems

that you build for yourself, and then one day you walk by the mirror that's always been hanging there, and the guy looking back at you strikes you as a douchebag. Yes. And you have to go, well, when did he turn into such a schmuck? And then all of a sudden you're like maybe being unnecessarily hard on yourself, or maybe it's just time to shake things up. It sounds like somebody's going into the fourth quarter life crisis, my friend. It's good to see you.

It's good to see you. It's nice to be here. Thank you very much. No, but I mean, you sound like a guy who is questioning have what I done is the role I have played. Have I played my part? And have I done a good job? Maybe, yeah. As just a random guy in my house, I would say, I think the world is different.

But I could tell you is I spoke to at a pre-session to a university faculty a couple of days ago. And they brought in a big guy who's an expert in change and basically laying out, hey, if we don't change some things, we don't exist. gone. And then the president gave his message and then they had me come up and give my anxiety talk. Because you're sitting in that audience, you're wondering, well, what about me? Right. And I got down on the talk and I sat down in a room, it's a theater full of university faculty and the head staff. And sitting right behind the president on the second row, president gets up to go talk and somebody pulls my jacket, my shirt. And I look over, man, I'll get choked up saying this, man. I look over and it's a dude with his name on a shirt. It's one of the facilities and maintenance guys,

the guys who clean the air conditioners at the college, the guys who make sure the water's running. And he's crouching down and to think of the courage it took for him to walk down in front of all these university faculty members in an open light theater and say the nice things he said to me, it tells me, Mike, you're making a difference because you're encouraging people to go do those jobs. And those jobs, the only reason those lights are on in that building is because that actually guy's doing his job. So I would tell you, like, it's just a regular old dude who's in those worlds where you're not around. What you do is matters. But I think bigger than that, we're living in the loneliest time in human history. And is it that? How crazy. It's insane.

That we're so lonesome, but never more connected. Yeah, but Mike, when you are sitting with your gang, when you have a group of guys that will call you and be like, hey, that post you just posted was hilarious, but take it down, because that's not who you are. That happened to me early on. My buddy Kevin, he was a CIO, and now he runs, he's a CEO of a lawn care company. Mike, I posted what, somebody wrote an ugly comment about me. It was the funniest, my response was one of the top five funniest things I ever said in my life. And my phone ring shortly thereafter, and it's him, and he has a loud, boisterous laugh. You can hear all the way from Texas. He's laughing so hard, and I was like, I didn't put two and two together. I said, what? And he

says, dude, that post, and I start laughing. I was like, ah, I know. And he's laughing, laughing, laughing and he goes, oh, and then he goes, hey, take that down. And I said, what do you mean? Take it down. And he said, take it down. And I got kind of indignant. And I was like, no, that was funny. And he goes, it was hilarious. That's not who you are. And the world doesn't need another ass. Take it down. And dude, I got so mad and I took it down because he was right. And so when I have a a group of men like that in my life, whether they're next door neighbors or they're all the way in Texas, but we're still in communication, I don't have to always be wondering if I'm doing a good job, If I'm playing a role in my charade because I got a group of people that I'm anchored to.

It's when I find myself on the road for a year and I'm not calling my buddies back and I just text them emojis. That's when I start waking up in the middle of the night wondering, do I have any value here, do I have any purpose here? And I think it goes back to we are not designed to be as freaking lonely as we've made ourselves. Good God, dude. That's it. That's it. And I think intuitively we all know it. But look, I mean, here we sit right now. If this isn't a metaphor for our times, I don't know what is. Right, right, right. We're all trapped in our little boxes.

We're all in our offices. Different states. Three different states. Chuck's in North Carolina. I'm in California. Where are you? You in Nashville? Nashville.

Tennessee, yeah. Right. So there it is. We're like lily pads in some swamp, just hopping across the entire country, trying as best we can with the tech we have to, be understood and hopefully say something that somebody listening will hear and nod and maybe their life will be better for it. But what do we know? Like, what do we really know? We get feedback so much of it's anecdotal. What you just said is about the nicest thing anybody said to me in a while.

Because I'll never get to see that. All I can do is hear about that. I get letters from people. It's very touching and it's real and I don't, I take it seriously. But it's just, no matter, how nice it is, after a period of time, whether it's inertia or expectations, you just start to feel more like a cog and less like this individual thing, more like a planet in some kind of horribly predictable orbit than the far more interesting comets, burning through solar systems, right? Yeah, but our comets are around chips and kids. So and a good bourbon and a hilarious, like, take on some old poem that you completely

butcher. I mean, that's the comets. And we're led to believe when we're kids that the comets are, if you could just make this much money. And if you can just get on this show and then get on that show, that's the comet ride. And it is freaking lonely. That Own Your Past book, when I found out we were on a book tour and the head of publishing, who's a notoriously quiet guy, he literally, we were in.

a SUV driving on the road, and he took his cell phone and just handed it behind to me. It had the list, and it said number one. And he goes, he reached around and goes like this. He golf clapped me. Then he had the driver pulled a car over. There was about six of us in the car into a liquor store parking lot. He went inside and bought champagne, and we drank champagne from a little plastic cup inside of an SUV and a parking lot. Then I went home, and Dave called me.

He was the first guy. He reached out, and he's lovely that way. And he called and was cheering on the phone. It was awesome. I called my mom. I called my wife. And then I went home to the hotel. And then I realized, dude, I haven't called my friends in seven months.

This is a weird time to be like, hey, guess what? Great thing happened to me. So Mike, you know who I talked to? Nobody. I went to bed. And I thought, oh, gosh, that's how this ends, right? And it became this huge neon sign. Dude, the important things in life, is this fun?

Yes, it's incredible. Are we helping people? No doubt about it. But dude, I need to sit at a table with a group of men and be like, hey, man, how are you? How are you? What's that great C.S. Lewis quote? The definition of friendship is, oh, you two, right? That to me is just, that's it, right? And Mike, of all the people, like Dave, being around Dave in his orbit and him inviting me to be on stages and stuff, I get to meet a lot of amazing people. But I remember our conversation. And not because you're Mike Rowe, but because I feel attention, because I believe, you know, deeply in education. I believe deep with all my heart. And I also know that it can be more harmful than good sometimes. And so I don't see that. There's a clip. There's a clip that made the rounds.

Oh, you do. Yeah. You posted it or your people did. Yeah. I don't do that kind of thing. And it honestly, I've been sort of a pain in the ass to my people ever since because I think we need to do more of that. But you captured an exchange between you and me on stage. And I think over a million people. have seen it. Oh, tens of millions of people saw that. No, went bananas. Who went bananas? Well, that's over a million for sure. Yeah. That's right. But, yeah, a lot. I'll say the social media people here, because I didn't have social media before I took this job, they have reminded me that as callous as it can all be and as fake as it all can feel, there's a single mom who is hiding in her closet because her kids won't stop screaming, who look at this thing and feels a little bit less alone.

and if she will feel a little less alone and maybe be inspired to call a friend and said, I'm not okay, when you come over with whatever half-eaten lasagna you have, then there's people on the other end of this. And I, as a guy who hate technology, I have to realize that, right? Yes.

And so it's got to be both in, but then I've got to still ask myself, great, what do I have to do to still be able to show up whole for my wife and my kids and my workplace, right? Because as our more conscious listeners will attest,

you begin this by talking about opting out. Right. Right. Now, I still want to kind of jump back into that because when a mental health professional opts out of activities that are causing anxiety, it seems to me that there's really something to learn there. But I was just struck too also, you know,

you talk about your kids. And really, you can talk about anything. But the fact that you have three kids sometimes must lead to incredible levels of unspeachers. certainty and anxiety. I got two, but yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like three. I'll tell you what, it's two more than I got. So look, people with kids can feel very anxious for lots of good reasons. People with no kids can feel very anxious because they don't have any kids. And they wonder if maybe they screwed that up too. So I'm just making that point in passing that that mom you're

talking about that might have seen the clip between me and you that went out to 10 million people. Yeah, She might be uplifted by that. But it's also true that a lot of those 10 million people who are scrolling through the endless myasma of clips should probably put the device down and maybe go read that C.S. Lewis book so they can nod there. It's only as effective as what does it inspire you to do next. We have a culture that lives entirely in our head. And I think we've tried to outthink all of our issues.

And I think a failure of the mental health community that I'm a part of is, we have told people that mental health is just getting all the right thoughts in the right order. That narrative is completely false. You got to go do. You got to act. So back then to this deeply rooted suspicion that cookie cutter advice is probably at the root of all evil. I believe that's money. Yeah.

The love of money. I think it's the love of money. Yeah. Yes. Oh, you too? Oh, you too? See? All right. All right, then. Well, what about this, John?

What about the responsible person who wants to be informed? The good citizen who wants to be up to speed with the headlines of the day and the issues of our time, right? Fill in the blank, from immigration to abortion to Afghanistan to the gender conference. People who want to have a seat at that table and want to understand what's going to. going on. It is responsible, it seems, to, if you want to be that person, then you have to pay a certain amount of attention. But if you don't want the anxiety that comes from paying a certain amount of attention, then you have to opt out in some way, shape, or form, bringing us back to that weird tautology again. I think there's an option three.

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reductionistic view, but that's what it's doing. It'll tell you to start fighting things. It'll tell you to run from things, right? We've all heard of fight or fly, right? Or freeze or whatever. So I know that if I avoid, my body gets what it wants, which is that thing didn't kill me. So it makes the anxiety response stronger. So if avoidance is your way of navigating the world, your body will scream at you endlessly because it's getting exactly what it wants. It doesn't want you to deal with that falling apart marriage, doesn't want you to deal with that job that's going, getting ready to go away, but you won't face that fact. And so every time you avoid, it goes, got it. And you start to lean back in and go in, it was going to ring those alarm. So the only way to deal with anxiety is to

head straight into the middle of that alarm. That's number one. Number two, the big news channels are publicly traded companies. They have a fiduciary responsibility to make money. That's their job, which means their job is to get you to click on things, not tell you truth. That's not their job. Isn't to give you facts. That's not their gig. Their gig is to get you to go, ah, and stay. And there's a way to do that, right? And there's a way to tell you the truth. If you went to like a truth, ghost story and all he did was tell you the truth, nobody would watch that movie, but you hire the right director and they will glue you to that seat, right? The third option is, is I have been on a relentless pursuit,

and it's kind of, it's a statement in my house, which is John's got a guy. And of course, I've got a woman too. When the COVID thing came out, you know what I didn't know anything about? Vaccinology? I didn't know anything about epidemiology. I didn't know anything about anything. So I have a buddy who's the dean of a pharmacy school. I called him.

And I said, hey, man, and he's like, here's the deal. And he rattled it off. I hung up and I said, he's in bed with big pharma. So I called my friend who's a cancer researcher. And I asked her, and she's like, boom, boom, boom. And I thought, figures what an academic would say. And then I called my pastor. My pastor was like, I was in the trial.

So here's what I'm doing. I don't know. I know enough to know I don't know. So I'm going to call an expert. Like today, the pump on my washing machine, keeps tripping the GFCI plug in my garage flooded again. And I call the electrician and said, I hugged a crying wife last night for the last time.

And he's like, dude, I'm going to replace this and this. He's the expert. He knows what he's doing, right? And so for me, I'm going to continue to root out. If I had a question about a syndicated TV show, I would not ask Google. I would not ask my local news. I would not ask my buddy Dan,

who's got opinions on everything. I would see if I get in touch with Mike, Hey, Mike, I have a question about being on a syndicated TV show. Can I pick your brain and you go? Yeah, that's what I've done the last 20 years. And I've watched people come and go and fail and survive. And so I think it's simply about knowing a guy, knowing a gal who knows what is an expert on a thing.

And I think that's the path forward for us. The most compelling AI response has been from Neil DeGrasse Tyson, as far as I'm concerned, who had a compelling argument that this actually just stoneages us. It will shut the Internet down because there's going to be such a, nonsense on top of nonsense, on top of regurgitation of nonsense, that people are going to have to just simply go to their neighbor and go, hey, what do you think about this? I think that's a great thing. That was the splat or a version of the splat I was talking about. Ah, there you go. That's fair. That's fair. Right. So, like, I mean, we have a crisis of confidence right now. People don't know whom to believe.

But I wonder if the only way to get back to some default level of credibility in our institute, is for things to get epically worse, laughably worse. And if AI can do that, like somebody sent me a link the other day. They asked a chat, GPT, whatever it is, to narrate a couple paragraphs in the style of Mike Roe narrating Deadliest Catch. And what came back, had you told me that, hey, look, we lifted this from a show. You did five years ago. wouldn't have doubted you. Like, is that real? Right? Now, that's just voiceover, but you've seen the

deep fakes. You've seen the Tom Cruise videos going around. That's today. In a month, in two months and six months, so if what you're saying is, or if what Tyson was saying basically, was we're going to get to a point where the default is truly going to be caveat emptor, where it's truly going to be, there is no rational reason for you to believe anything that you see or hear in any media, ever, because there's no reason to assume that the people who are identifying themselves as themselves are. Therefore, your point, shut it down, take a breath, and talk to your neighbor. Oh, you too. Because I can look with my own eyes at my neighbor and see, hey, his field is growing better than mine.

I'm going to ask him how he's doing that. And when he says, well, get a cow out there and let it poo everywhere and your grass will grow, I'll say, okay, because he doesn't have a stake in it. And he's not trying to sell me some kind of turbo nitrogen. You see what I'm saying? I do, but does it work with mental health? Can you go to somebody? Now you're on the outside, you're looking in, and you see this person.

They really seem to have their crap together, right? They're coaching the Little League. They seem to be a devoted wife or husband. Their kids seem to love them and so forth and so on. Right? Do they become a credible source of advice? It seems like they could. But then again, we're all on the outside looking in.

Yeah, I think that social normans one of the most powerful things we can do, that nerd term, like, it's really important for me when I'm talking to young leaders in higher ed to say, hey, I got really, really scared when I had to make this call. When I had to call a parent and tell them that their kid had died, I got sick. I was almost throwing up. And to hear, they see me in a suit and they see me on a stage and then to hear, oh, thank God, you're nervous too. Yeah. So I think when it comes to mental health, if I'm a young man and I've got a new baby and I've got a wife and I'm tempted by the woman down the street and I think I'm going to get laid off and I'm just rattling and I talk to a guy that's

been married for 35 years at a coffee shop and he goes, yeah, temptation's real, man. And you've got to make the next right move. And it's happened to me, my whole marriage. and I've chosen to stay. I told the woman that I'm married to, that till death to his part, so I've held to that. I didn't know what I was doing when I was parenting. And so, I mean, then you go,

if we say mental health is, we never have an errant thought, or if we say mental health is, I never feel uncomfortable. Yeah, that's insane. But if mental health is, oh, I'm just like you, then, and we're all in this together,

man, that's a totally different proposition. Courage is not being unafraid. It's doing it anyway. The brave thing in spite of it. That's right. Yeah. And going back, if your spouse passes away, I would challenge you if you were not laid so low that you can't get out of bed for a while,

if you can't taste your food and if everything has a shadow over it, that's grief. That's your body shutting it down for a while. That's not something wrong with. The operating system doesn't have a bug in it. And that's where your community shows up with food and meals, and they don't say a bunch of stupid crap that's been stitched into pillows. They just sit with you quietly.

And you're not dysfunctional and you're not broken. And for those few that we can, I mean, you can look at literature over thousands of you, like, depression's real, anxiety's real, people have felt. You can read the old stoic literature and people feel anxious. That's part of it. And then they always talk about, and then I went and did the next thing. I went and did the next right thing. Or I reached out to somebody.

And that's a part of the human experience. part of the human experience, it's not a pathology. So stoicism, then, Cisophis, right? That's sort of a stoic kind of thing. I mean, pushing that thing up the... Not great. That's the pushing up the rock up, right? I think that's part of the drinking game as well.

Yeah. Ciscivus reference, yeah. Yes. Yeah, but you know what we never really talk about and what the Stoics would say, at least as I understand them, is that Cicepis is often used as a trope for futility,

but it really wasn't intended that way at all. It was really a story of finding great meaning in spite of... And every day. That's right. It's comets around chips and salsa, that's right. That's it. The joy and the satisfaction

that comes from doing the mundane, that's the trick, right? The, I mean, was a throw, right? millions of men, lives of quiet desperation. So the trick is not to lead a different life. The trick is to arbitrage the desperation and the futility out of the business of making little rocks out of big rocks, which actually serves a great purpose. And there is great dignity in that.

No one wants to hear that today. It's what I meant before when I said, it's easy to blame the job for my love. job satisfaction. It's harder to blame the jobber, or at least to even look inward. Yeah, it's, I mean, amen to that. It's very difficult. God, I'm smart. You know what? I got to write a job. You're getting there. You're getting there. You're getting there. I'm so full of crap, dude. I'm not. I'm serious. If you keep working hard, you're going to make a career of this. I talk to a lot of smart people and the stuff that sticks, and I guess we all do. I mean, if we're lucky, right? We're just all, like, not quite mirrors, but like little tiny mirrors all put together.

Everything's kind of broken and reflected and refracted. And I try and remember the stuff that I hear that's worth repeating. I'm so glad you mentioned C.S. Lewis, I'd totally forgotten about the friendship definition. That's awesome. So here's what this looks like, Mike. Here's real life. I'm an borderline introvert. I like being on stages and shaking hands, but boy, I love being alone. And I got my little bow and arrow set up, or I love hunting out in the woods, and I love my guitars in my basement where I can pretend I'm still in the early 2000s punk band. I love it. But I also know, as much as my granddad did, when they were handing him cigarettes when he was a kid,

and then a couple years later, they're like, whoa, our bad, this is going to kill you. Everybody's got to quit, and they're like, well, I'm down the rabbit hole now. They had a choice to make. And this is kind of an internet trope, but it's true. living the life as a smoker is hard. You're sick, you're always coughing, you don't have the energy that you have, and over time it kills you.

Quitting smoking is hard. So the goal here is not to find an easy path because there's not one. The goal is choose your heart. What are you going to do? I like being by myself, especially in a job that I have now, which is highly public and highly visible.

And if I don't have time with true friends in a unplugged, unfiltered, I probably shouldn't have said that joke, but it was hilarious anyway. If I don't have that... Take that post down. It will kill me. I will die.

So, I made a rule any time a buddy calls and says, hey, we're all getting together to watch the fights. Are you in? And my first thought is, I just want to go to bed. I have to go.

I have to go. There's not a debate. Hey, we're going to grab a drink, et such, such. Do you want to go? I just want to go to bed. I'll be there. That's my rule.

always say it with a sigh. And I have never, not one time have I regretted it. Never. When the fights are terrible, we all went to the fights. UFC was here in Nashville a couple weeks ago. We went. The fights were not great. It's one of funnest nights I've had in months because we sat around and laughed and screamed like children and made bets with each other and were hassling the people behind us and they were hassling us in all good nature. It was a blast. And so again, I've had to set up rules in my life. so that I can be well. I have this natural impulse, and then I've got to go past the impulse

and do the next right thing. That's with my proclivity to eat any sort of sugary substance that's in front of me, to skip a workout, to be short with my wife, to holler at my kids when they annoy me. All these things become automated responses.

So when I say I'm opting out, what I'm opting out of is the unintentional life, the outsourced life. I'm out. I'd rather be awkward and ask my neighbor, Hey man, can you, you've got this big tractor, and this happened a few weeks ago.

He's 75 years old. He's an awesome neighbor. Hey, man, can you grade my driveway? Because it's been raining really hard in Tennessee, and it washed out in my gravel driveway. Or I can pay $1,000 for somebody to come. And I can afford that right now in this little window of a life I have before Dave Ramsey finally realizes what's up and he fires me. That's fine. It's coming.

Welcome to my world. You know what? Let me tell you what happened. I went to my neighbor, and I haven't done this for the years I've lived in, I live out in the country. I went to him and I said, can you do this? And he goes, yeah, but I'm not taking any money. So my wife has a garden that's the size of the state of Kentucky. And she made a whole bunch of pickles, homemade pickles and all kind of stuff.

So after he did it, she made him a homemade sourdough loaf of bread. And we gave him a whole bunch of pickles and we've got chickens everywhere. And so we brought him over a basket. That man, 70-something years old, put his thing down. He was working on. and came over and just gave me a big hug. And it was a, like, I haven't felt that in years. It was my neighbor, man.

It was my neighbor. But it was, oh, you didn't just write me a check. This is your time. This took a year for the ground to produce. And then your wife made this like, this is neighbors. And, man, I tell you what, that was awkward. It was weird. It was way easier than just getting on the internet

and hiring somebody, sight unseen, to come over and grade in my driveway. And they show up while I'm at work, and they send me a bill, and we just had this transaction. I want to know my neighbor. And that's going to help me be, healthier. Well, maybe that's the trap then. Like, the easier a thing becomes, the more suspicious

we ought to be of it. Texting is easy. And under the guise of staying connected, it's awfully effective. But it's easy. It's so easy that if you've lived long enough and you're a stoic, you'd start looking over your shoulder for the unintended consequence of that. And of course, what you've just described is precisely that. You can't bake sourdough bread or send pickles through a text. You know, you can't do it in an email. You can't even do it in a conversation. There's actually no substitute for it at all.

There's only one way to do what your wife did, and that's to have a garden the size of Kentucky and to make it happen. And can we be honest? Yeah. Go ahead. Oh, as I said, I could have taken him that basket, and he could have looked at me and said, seriously? I just did a thousand dollars worth of work. You're bringing me some...

There was some vulnerability there. I was nervous about it. I don't know what I would have done if somebody brought me a bunch of produce. Like, after I did a thousand dollar job for them. So it was a vulnerability, man. That's kind of nervous. And... You just have to be careful, man. You just have... I mean, it's... I'm just thinking I was maybe 11, and I had a neighbor, elderly guy, and my dad suggested that I go over and rake his leaves for him. It was fall and there were leaves everywhere and his lawn looked terrible. And I saw him, Mr. Willie was his name. And I said, hey, Mr. Willie, I'm going to clean up your leaves for you. He said, oh, that'd be great. Got a couple trash bags. It took me, I know, probably

two hours and I filled up half a dozen bags. And when I got done, you want to take these down to the compost pile. He said, that would be great. And he said, here, let me give you something. He handed me $5. So this is 1973. It's $5. That's $1 million. Wow. It was like, and I said, oh, look, I mean, thank you, but that's not really about that. There's no need for that.

Now, what he's supposed to do is say, no, no, I insist, and then stick it in my shirt pocket. What he said was, okay, and put it back in his pocket and walked inside. So, lesson learned. I mean, you're the mental health expert. Like, the moral of that story to me is, you know what, don't play those little little. games. If you feel like you're due the five bucks, take it and thank you. And sometimes, you can do an honorable thing by raking somebody's yard and you can be dismissive and high and mighty and haughty by saying, oh, no, I'm above your gift. And maybe their gift of the day is

not raking somebody's yard, but it's teaching an 11-year-old little boy. It takes this much effort. And if you find ways to serve people, you're going to both feel good and you're going to be able to pay your rent. And so, yeah, he taught you a great lesson, like, all right, if you're going to play games with me, I'm out. It has something to do also with the forgotten expression, you're welcome. Which is such a great thing to say. But Mike, we can't do it. When did we stop saying you? We can't because it is a position of, it's taken a knee. It's looking at somebody and saying, I needed you. And Our culture tells us if you need, you're weak. You have failed.

You chump sucker. You need to have your own infantry. You need to have your own food. You need to have your own thing because if it all comes down, it's going to be on you. There's a great, gosh, I wish I could think of his name. He's a researcher on basically the revolution, right, when it all goes down. And what he came out and said was the number one hedge against the end of a community is not having the right amount of bullets

and the right amount of meat in your freezer. It's having a great relationship with your neighbors. And man, that's harder to do than to get on Amazon.com and just have them ship you a bunch of ready-to-eat meals that you can eat on the moon or in the woods, right? It's way harder to know Gary and Jim Bob and that weird neighbor above you with all the cats.

That's way harder to get to know them. Maybe as we begin to land plane, we can go back to the silver lining in some of the calamity. Like the lockdown was a truly, truly terrible thing in my view and in almost every way, except I got to know all of my neighbors, all of them, because I was suddenly assigned a bubble that I had never really considered before, a bubble that was informed not by anything I wanted or thought I wanted, but purely by geography. So suddenly these people I see walking their dogs who I've never talked to, the people I pass. It's like, you know what? You're right there. And now you're so out of it, they're dinner

parties. They're friends, you know, maybe even more important than friends. They're actual neighbors with whom I have a relationship that I didn't before. So, I don't know. Anxiety, to your point, is our friend. It's our smoke alarm. It's our early warning system. And so to make it the enemy, that would be dumb. To go back to what you were saying,

if you find yourself waking up at 3 a.m., and you hear that chirping, or you hear the alarms going off, if you get up and you're pissed off and you sprint to the garage in your undies and you grab a ladder and you pull the batteries out of that thing, you've silenced it and you're going to get three more hours of sleep.

Good for you. But your house is going to burn down around you. And so instead of getting up and running, maybe that two or three hours investment in, man, when's the last time I reached out to my buddies? When's the last time I've hung out with people that I care about? What's the state of my marriage?

Is my job safe? Do I even want to do this job anymore? Those hard questions about reality, what's the state of my health? What's the state of my spiritual world? Like those realities, man, if you spend some time investing where you are in them, usually you can pull the thread back to the alarm and it will tell you the exact room where that fire is. And now that's when the hard work begins.

I hate this question, but I got to ask you to do it because I know it's a, I can't wait to read the book cover to cover, but the Reader's Digest version, I mean, there are half a dozen things in here that you're recommending people do. And I realize I'm contradicting all of my suspicion regarding cookie cutter advice. but something tells me these things really are, like, rooted in the Hippocratic Oath. You can't hurt yourself doing these things. All you can do is help yourself. What are the things? Really, I just distilled it down into a series of choices.

And I think the most common question I get from upset people is, oh, so I'm choosing depression, I'm choosing anxiety, I'm choosing chronic stress and burnout. No, that's your body responding to a life that we've created here. So what I want people to do is I use the word choice intentionally. I want you to take ownership back. And I also understand that it's some thin ice with people who've been forced to the margins, man, or kicked out of society completely and said, oh, why don't you keep up? Why don't you keep up?

All of that is true. I've sat with those folks. And after we get through the harrowing trauma or the harrowing tragedy, the harrowing marginalization, we always end up on the same question, which is, what are you going to do now? And so these six choices, it took all the academic nerd stuff. and I try to just distill it down, just be as candid as possible. If you're an Andrew Huberman fan, this probably isn't the book for you.

Because that dude's neuroscience. Like, he's savant and go to him for how dopamine interacts with your cholesterol, whatever. This book is for over-the-road truckers who didn't have a dad and they just want to be present with their kids. And every time they come home, there's just some angst in the house or the mom who just wants to be a little better. So you got to choose reality.

That's just baseline, man. what's the state of my marriage, what's the state of my job, what's state of my finances. You have to choose health and healing. Like, if you're waking up every day and you've got two monster energy drinks in one hand and a cup of cough in the other,

and you're wondering why you're a little bit short with your colleagues. I mean, or if you've got childhood trauma or if you're not well, whatever, you've got to do with your health and healing. You've got to choose, as we talked a lot about connection, you got to choose freedom. Who is running your life?

Is the bank telling you what you're going to do tomorrow because you owe a bunch of money? Is the car dealership telling you what you're going to do tomorrow because you owe a lot of money? because you owe them money on that lease car. Is your in-law still telling you what you're going to do for Christmas? So you've got to choose freedom there and mindfulness. That's just the gap between that guy cutting you off and you flipping him off.

If you can lengthen that gap and instead of going, that guy's trying to kill everybody, but you can exhale and say, God, I hope he makes it to the hospital before his wife passes away. I get to choose which one of those stories. I get to pick the story that I insert in that guy's car. one of those is going to raise my heart rate and dump cortisol into my bloodstream and the other is going to make me a little more peaceful.

I get to pick, that's mindfulness, right? If I walk home and my wife and I just had a big fight about the wet towels in the floor and I opened the door and there's a wet towel, I can go, oh, I knew it, she's just trying, or I could say, oh man, after the conversation we had last night about the wet towels, for there to be one there right now,

her day must have been hell. I'm going to pick that up, I'm going to go ahead and knock the dishes out of the sink too. I get to pick each one of those paths. That's just choosing mindfulness. And then the last one is, you and I can do a whole other podcast about this. All throughout human history, I don't think there's been a civilization that wasn't, their culture was not dictated by their relationship to some sort of deity, some sort of being bigger than themselves. And we have a culture now that's clipped all strings of any sort of anything bigger than us.

And we have begun to worship the only thing we have left to worship, which is the self. and when you worship the self, you end up with how I feel. When you end up with how you feel, you end up with nonsensical statements like my truth versus your truth, which doesn't even, that doesn't even make sense. Versus the truth. Versus the, there's an absolute, right? So I think you have to choose belief, and I'm not going to prescribe a religion to you, but you have to take a knee at this idea that the universe does not revolve around you. And there is something bigger going on than you. And actually when you do that, that is the least anxious place you can be because you are able to exhale.

And so those are the six choices there, ma'am. And again, I'll end with this. This doesn't inoculate you from the evil of the world. The world still is going to spin. And I wrote about this in the book, but my cousin passed away suddenly, this nine or ten months ago, just passed away. And because 10 years ago or 11 years ago, my wife and I said, hey, I'm sick of owing all these student loans. We had six figures. I'm sick of owning all this money.

I'm sick of this. And we started chipping away at it and chipping away at it and chipping away at it. Because we have a routine now where we tell our families when we're going to travel, when we're not going to travel, we don't wait until they tell us

what we're doing for Thanksgiving and we get all mad about it and fight about it and have arguments. We're not going to live like that. Because we've created this non-anxious world, when my cousin died, I bought two plane tickets, Mike,

I didn't look at my bank balance because I wasn't worried about it. And I'm not a wealthy guy, but I didn't worry about it. My wife called a neighbor to watch the kids because we've cultivated that. And then we flew down to Houston, and I got the privilege of standing before the casket

of one of my favorite people on the planet and being really freaking sad. I was real sad. But I was not worried about how the light bill is going to get paid, and if Aunt Susan was going to get mad that I didn't stay with her, I just booked the hotel. And so the non-anxious life is one where I get to sit at the feet of somebody who passed away

and be heartbroken and also not hungry at the same time. Or when my son and I go to Waffle House every Tuesday morning, it's kind of a ritual. He's 13. And I heard one of the waiters telling another guy, hey, I finally get to move out of this hotel. I think I've found a garage apartment I get to move into. And I winked at my son and said, watch this. And I tipped him $250. And the guy chased me out to the parking lot.

And he's this big guy. And he hugged me so tight. I couldn't breathe. And he's just a Waffle House server. And now my son will sneak some of his mowing money. He cleans the horse dolls of the neighbor's ranch next to us, and he'll sneak some of his money to tip people, too. That, I mean, that's the non-anxious life, man.

People are still going to get kicked out of their house, but now I'm in a position to not just complain about it and thumbs down somebody on social media, but I can actually say, hey, why don't you come over and we can figure something out? And so it doesn't inoculate you. It just gives you space to respond. And one other thing maybe that makes you a little different,

and me, for that matter, this is a sort of privilege. You know, that word makes me nervous, but I definitely have it. I have the privilege of talking about it. Yeah. In front of people who are listening. And I think that that's exactly what that is. It's a privilege.

And what we just did right here is a privilege. And thinking of your job as a privilege instead of a burden. Yeah. You know, thinking of it as an opportunity, thinking of it as a gift. back to the mindfulness, I suppose, that you were talking about. I want to close with one real quick thing that you said before. Playing the guitar in your basement when you're alone, you know, are you happier doing things alone that you're not necessarily really great at or doing things in front of people that you're proficient at? That's a great question. I've come to, in my

old age, I've come to really appreciate both of them. Day Ramsey throws a battle of the bands every year. So everybody comes to Nashville to make it, and then eventually most of us have to get real jobs. And so this company, he's got a thousand employees, and there's admins and secretaries and podcast producers that are the greatest musicians you've ever heard in your life. And so once a year, he throws a battle of bands that is second to none. And so we get together, and we all link up from different departments across campus and we make a band. And this year, I've put together a band. I always wanted to have a good, hardcore emo band when I was in the late, early 2000s. And I finally got it, Mike. And the drummer was like an American Idol touring drummer. I mean,

these guys are amazing. But we intentionally picked songs that I wasn't good enough to play. And so I've spent the last three months in my basement editing a book and then I put it down and try to learn this guitar solo from My Chemical Romance. It's a lot. It's a lot. It's a lot. I've spent the last three months in my chemical romance. That's the name of the band, by the way. That tells you all you need to know about that. Wow. But I've had a ton of fun sitting at home, just re-learning how to play, and then we get together twice a week. Dude, I just smile. It's a really busy travel season for me, and I thought about not playing, and my wife said, hey, when's about all the band start? Because she gets a better husband when I'm hanging out with a group of guys and we're playing loud in somebody's house,

and we're all in our 40s. We're too old to be doing this. I pull a muscle, and we're Dude, we rock, Mike. We jam. And so I think it's both in. But it's when the teeter-totter gets out of balance. If I just spend my whole life in my basement with my guitar, I miss out on the reason you join a chorus, right? And you've got to have the chops.

Or people don't want you in their chorus, right? So it's both in. Wow. Well, here, look, I just ask, let me show you something. I'm down here in my basement. Okay. Now, I can't play the piano, really at all. But I have this keyboard, right?

And I can carry a tune, but I'm not a pro. And as Chuck will tell you, I write unsolicited jingles for the sponsors of this podcast. And we record them in four-part harmony. People seem to like them. They're not great. They're with. They're with. They're with.

And I guess maybe it just really resonated. You know, I hope I didn't sound whiny earlier. I hope I'm not looking for any. I'm not looking for an ounce of sympathy or pity. I don't need it and I don't want it. I pity you, Mike. Because I know if I ask for it, like my old neighbor, it'll be, okay, I have no pity for you. Fine.

You know, you want the five bucks? I thought you're being reflective, man. No, no, I'm good. I think you're being reflective. I'm good. Well, thanks. Because right now I'm reflecting on the idea of, you know, a grown man sitting alone in his basement with an instrument he hasn't quite mastered, screwing around. When there's important work to do, there are other things to do, they're friends to call, their chores to finish.

there's a list of crap. But you have to make time in your life to do the thing you're not really good at that for whatever reason compresses time in a way that makes you glad to fog a mirror. Oh, man. That seems to be what's for sale. Yeah, there's nothing better than sitting down

and trying to figure out a guitar solo after the kids are in bed and suddenly someone like me who's as militant about sleep, it's 1 a.m. And my son comes staggering down. He's like, will you please turn that down? And I go, oh, I got to go to bed. And that's life. That's living.

And then I'm 40 years old. I've got a great life. I've got a cool job and that takes care of all my bills and then some. But man, I love being in front of my buddies in somebody's second story jam room. And then you rip that solo out you've been working on. And they all go, whoa, cool. Like, hey, that was cool when I was 18 and it's cool when I'm in my 40s, man. It just is.

And I wish it wasn't. And it sounds trite and lame. But, man, find a group of men. and find a group of women to just do life with. And that can be knitting, that could be gardening, that can be mowing. Well, I don't care what it is. During the pandemic, my son and I would go for walks, and we just took trash sacks with us and cleaned up the neighborhood when we walked.

And, dude, I got exercise, I got sunlight, I got time with my son, and we got to just clean trash out the neighborhood. You could do whatever you want, man, but just don't do it by yourself all the time. Do you get anxious before giving lectures on anxiety? I did to an academic audience, because I've really kind of shifted my focus from trying to talk to scientists to trying to talk to folks who don't speak that. And the reception has been remarkable. And it's a good reminder that even though people can do cool research experiments, they're scared and exhausted mothers and fathers too.

So not really. Of course they are. Building a non-anxious life is the name of the book. There it is. I assume it's pre-orders for the time being. When's it come out? Yeah, it's pre-order, which you know when you're selling a book really helps out. It's pre-order up until August 2nd

and then the book will be in your mailbox August 3rd or it launches out in all the stores August 3rd. I mean, I'm sorry, October 3rd, October 3rd. I was just going to say, I'm an incredible salesman. I'm an incredible salesman. You really are. John Deloney, go ahead, buy my book.

I dare you to find it. I dare you. Just the wrong date and the wrong course. It says right here, advanced reader's copy, uncorrected proof, not for resale or distribution. An author may not know exactly when it's coming. October 3. 10-3.

It's a terrific book. I know it from the 52 pages I've read. I'm going to finish the whole thing this week. John, thanks for making time, man. I'd really enjoyed every minute of it. Say hey to Dave and tell him to forget about that 20 bucks. He owes me. The John Deloney Show, wherever you listen to podcast,

building a non-anxious life, wherever you order books. You're welcome back anytime, my friend. I'm really grateful for you, ma'am. You too, Chuck. Thank you. Chuck who? If you're done, please.

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