#35 Dr. John Delony - America's Mental Health Crisis

Dr. John Delony is a bestselling author, mental health expert and host of The Dr. John Delony Show. He has two PhDs and over two decades of experience in counseling, crisis response and higher education. Dr. Delony and Shawn dissect what they believe is causing the mental health crisis here in America. OUR SPONSORS: https://bullionmax.com/srs https://www.mudwtr.com/shawn (USE CODE SHAWN) https://www.goodranchers.com/shawn https://www.manscaped.com/ (USE CODE SHAWN) Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website - https://www.shawnryanshow.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnryanshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawnryan762 Dr. John Delony Links: Book - https://amzn.to/3UosBQa Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/johndelony YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnDelony Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

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• 0:46Shawn Ryan?

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• 0:50Speaker 01

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• 0:53Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:30Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, how's everybody doing? Got an important episode coming up. Got Dr. John Delony. We're gonna talk all about the mental health crisis that's going on here in the U.S. What's causing it?

• 1:46Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe a little bit about what might fix it. And what we can do as parents to make sure that this doesn't continue. Anyways, hope you all enjoy the episode. Please, head over to iTunes, leave us a review, and Spotify too. Love you all. Again, this is a very important episode. I hope you all get a lot out of it. Enjoy the show. See you soon. Cheers. One last thing, just one last thing. If we want to get ahead of this thing, there's one thing everybody can do that's real simple. Just be a nice person. Inject good into this world, and I promise, eventually, it's gonna come back to you.

• 2:31Shawn Ryan?

  Anyways, love you all, be kind.

• 2:37Shawn Ryan?

  That's it. Go Cards. Cheers.

• 2:47Shawn Ryan?

  I'll say this, the first thing that comes to mind is I had no idea how many people in this world live in fear all the time. All the time.

• 2:57John Delony?

  Tonight, the sheriff here revealing the worsening toll, at least 59 now dead.

• 3:04Shawn Ryan?

  What's your opinion on it? Why is this happening? The mass shooting in Buffalo, at least 10 people were killed.

• 3:11John Delony?

  We took some kids who had just grown up and never handled weapons, but grew up on first-person shooter games, and they were dead.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Screen time stimulates the release of the brain chemical dopamine.

• 3:24Speaker 05

  We're expecting people to look as unhuman as possible.

• 3:31Shawn Ryan?

  I see a lot of my friends dying because of suicide. Yeah. Because they're unhappy. And, uh, and now I see that spilling out into the masses.

• 3:39Speaker 06

  These messages were released on social media, and he, he felt just absolutely humiliated. And he couldn't face that humiliation at school that was awaiting him the next day.

• 3:50John Delony?

  That's a child. You know, this is what everyone on TikTok, you know what I mean? And he doesn't know what's happening to his brain. I've been watching that trash all day long.

• 3:58Speaker 07

  When high schoolers get phones that disrupt their sleep, subsequently, they go on to have higher rates of depression.

• 4:07John Delony?

  The climate's gonna kill us in 25 years. The Republicans are gonna kill us in 25 years. China's gonna kill us in 14 years. Russia's gonna kill it. The, the only news that makes its way through our ecosystem is, it ends here.

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• 6:59Shawn Ryan?

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• 7:10Shawn Ryan?

  John Deloney, welcome to the show, man.

• 7:13John Delony?

  Thanks, Shawn.

• 7:13Shawn Ryan?

  Appreciate you coming.

• 7:15John Delony?

  No, I appreciate your hospitality. This setup's a beautiful set, man, it's awesome.

• 7:19Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. So, I've been watching your stuff and you got some really amazing content on your channel.

• 7:27John Delony?

  Thanks, man.

• 7:28Shawn Ryan?

  Some deep, deep, deep stuff that people are open up about. And, um, and man, you handle that amazing.

• 7:36John Delony?

  I appreciate that.

• 7:37Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, so you're a psychologist, you work over at Ramsey Solutions, you're an author, you just came out with a new book. And so, I want you here to talk about the mental health crisis that's going on in the country. It's all over the news and I just got some stats and stuff, but crimes up, suicides up, addictions up, the 2020 divorce rate went through the roof. I just saw on ABC this morning that depression is up 135% since 2013. Prescriptions are up, both for, or not just prescriptions, but prescriptions and just addiction, street addictions up.

• 8:21Shawn Ryan?

  I just saw that 65 million people, that's 1 in 5 people in the US are on SSRIs. And, I don't know about you, but me personally, I just see, I've seen a lot of change in going out in public since 2020. I feel like when I go out, everybody's anxiety is through the roof. It seems like everybody's just trying to... Avoid each other.

• 8:49John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 8:50Shawn Ryan?

  And, and, nobody's really helping each other these days. It seems everybody's just avoiding each other, get out of my way. They're only worried about themselves. And, uh, it also seems like the past 20, 30 years, there's been a major decline in just overall happiness.

• 9:06John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 9:07Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, so I'd like to talk to you about all that kinda stuff.

• 9:10John Delony?

  Let's do it, man.

• 9:11Shawn Ryan?

  But first, everybody gets a present. Sorry, I'm fresh out of boxes, but, uh...

• 9:18John Delony?

  You know, like, we were talking about this off, off, off air. Like, I have a pathological addiction to this, man. And you, I, I got some a few months ago and I was sober, 60 days off gummy candies.

• 9:31Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 9:31John Delony?

  Dude, I hammered this bag. They're so good. These are so good, man. Thank you.

• 9:37Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome.

• 9:38John Delony?

  But, uh, kinda wanna hold them the whole, the whole time.

• 9:41Shawn Ryan?

  Go ahead.

• 9:42John Delony?

  Nah.

• 9:42Shawn Ryan?

  Whatever you wanna do, man.

• 9:43John Delony?

  Oh, man.

• 9:44Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, usually I ask a, I give Patreon a question. I, Patreon, they're my top supporters. Uh, that's the, they're the reason I'm sitting here, they're the reason you're sitting here. And, uh, I always give them a question to ask. But I've worked in most of their questions into the actual episode, uh, that I'm gonna, that we're gonna go through. And, um, so I have a personal question for you, cause it doesn't fit the interview. So, watching your channel and kinda researching you a little bit about all those topics, and you, you take phone calls on your channel, and people are opening up about all kinds of things that most people don't open up to in public, especially on a YouTube channel.

• 10:29Shawn Ryan?

  People cheating on their significant others, sexless marriages. A lot of stuff that most people keep in the closet.

• 10:36John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 10:37Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, so when I was watching that, it reminded me of a lot of the things that I deal with in my personal business. And, um...

• 10:50Shawn Ryan?

  When I was watching it, I was like, man, this guy probably gets emails, email after email after email of, I don't, I don't wanna, wanna tread lightly here, but you know, sob stories, victimization, you know, they want help, they want you to talk to them, and I'm, it's an assumption, but I'm assuming you don't have time to

• 11:13John Delony?

  Right.

• 11:14Shawn Ryan?

  ...reach everyone.

• 11:15John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 11:15Shawn Ryan?

  And because of the content that we put out on this show, especially when I'm interviewing the, the veteran operator, warfighter types, and they're opening up about personal experiences that they deal with, we get thousands of emails. And all those emails get read, but they don't get answered, and it would be impossible for me to answer all those emails, um, and, and still have a functioning family and business. But it does create a lot of guilt, that I can't reach all those people. And so, how do you deal with that as a psychologist?

• 11:51John Delony?

  Um, so, one bit of housekeeping, in the, in the mental health hierarchy, there's psychiatrists, which are medical doctors, and then psychologists, and then there's the rest of us. So I'm actually a trained counselor, just as a psychologist would be like, what the, it's a big thing. Um, so, circle back, uh, ask me that again?

• 12:16Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so.

• 12:18John Delony?

  Oh, oh, I got, I got what you're saying. So, I have come, I, I have a bad habit of running in and trying to help people with things that they haven't invited me in to help. And I've also had a bad habit of treating people like car engines over the years, like, oh, you have, you're broken and I can fix you. And what I've come to find out, that over time, most people need someone to listen to them, and so often, that email firing off. They've just taken their first step into saying something out loud or putting something on paper. And just the fact that I was there to receive that, that they felt safe enough, they actually trust some stranger with a, with a show or a podcast. Enough to reach out.

• 13:02John Delony?

  That starts a ball rolling down the hill for them. And so if somebody says, can you please help me? That's a different conversation, right? But on the whole, yeah, we get, I mean, we get so many emails and they're beautiful stories, they're, they're sob stories, they're victims, whatever the story is. Often it's somebody saying it out loud for the first time or putting it on, on paper, getting out of their body, out of their head on something for the first time. So I say that is a good thing, right? Yeah. When it comes to the other stuff.

• 13:29John Delony?

  It's like that old, it's the old airline thing, man. I gotta make sure I'm well if I'm gonna help anybody else, right? If I'm gonna be a good dad, I'm gonna be a good husband, I'm gonna be a good community member, I'm gonna be a good, like helping somebody who's suicidal, right? Whatever the thing is. And so I know I can't go help everybody do everything. And so not responding to some of these things or sending them to other people is a part of me making sure. It's like me lifting weights, it's a part of me staying whole so that I can go do the hard work. And I, my ego for a long time was built on how many people I could respond to. And that, the diminishing returns would come back pretty fast, pretty hard. Yeah, I can. So the greatest gift I can give people is to not, it took me a long time. Did it, years?

• 14:14John Delony?

  Yeah, and it also took, um. It took me, I have some major trust issues, man. My dad was a homicide detective and a SWAT guy. Like I grew up thinking like there's something behind the thing, right? Or not thinking, knowing there's something behind the thing. I have trust issues, always have. And it took me being married a long time before I decided I chose to trust my wife enough that she says, hey. They're getting more of your attention than we are. And I know enough to know that untethers me from everything and then I'll spiral out, right? So they get first fruits so that I can go be of service to other people. That makes sense. But yeah, it took me a long time because I attached my ego to how many people I could help.

• 14:55John Delony?

  And um, which meant I was bringing my wrenches and hammers and screwdrivers to other people's problems that they didn't even ask me to.

• 15:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 15:02John Delony?

  And suddenly I was tinkering away on engines that I didn't really know what I was doing.

• 15:06Shawn Ryan?

  I can, I can relate to that. But uh, yeah, well, thank you. Cause I need, I struggle with that a lot. I struggle with that a lot. Every time I open the email box and I see all of, and they're heavy, you know, suicide. All kinds of stuff and uh.

• 15:23John Delony?

  The only ones I will get directly involved in a hundred percent of the time is someone tells me they're hurting kids. Or kids are being hurt, child abuse and elder abuse, right? Or if somebody says, I think I'm, I'm, I think I'm out, right?

• 15:36Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I would love to ask you about that then.

• 15:39John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 15:39Shawn Ryan?

  Seriously, how do you, when somebody does that, and I haven't had the kids thing yet.

• 15:44John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 15:44Shawn Ryan?

  But uh, I thought I had a lot of people contemplating suicide. How do you, how do you respond to that email?

• 15:50John Delony?

  If it's in my immediate circle, if it's somebody, if it's somebody I'm talking to in person. Um, one of the big misconceptions about suicide, someone's thinking about hurting themselves is if I ask them, I don't want to put that thought in their head. I don't want to give them the idea. Dude, if you're, if you're thinking about killing yourself, somebody asking you about it is like letting the pressure valve off. Right? It's not, it's, there's not somebody who's struggling and you're like, are you going to kill yourself? And they're like, I never thought of that, man. No. It's not how that works. And so if it's somebody I'm on the phone with, if it's somebody in my immediate circle or somebody I work with or a friend of mine. I'll, before any other question, I will say, are you thinking about killing yourself?

• 16:31John Delony?

  Are you thinking about hurting yourself? I go directly into that conversation and we're going to reverse engineer anything after that. But I need to know where you are. You got a plan? You got a gun? Have you been practicing this thing? Have you thought this through? Are you thinking about hurting yourself? Right? And we're going to gauge that response from there. If it's somebody who's emailing me, um, often I will let them know. I'm calling nine one one in your area.

• 16:53Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 16:53John Delony?

  And I'm gonna pass this off to your local authorities. Cause I can't be everywhere, right?

• 16:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 16:58John Delony?

  And I also know that the local authorities can't always, but I'm gonna do what I can, right? And sometimes people are lobbing grenades at me, right? And they do the same thing to you. Either grenades or lifelines, whatever you wanna call it, but I can't deal with all that, right? But I'm gonna call the local authorities, I'm gonna call the local police. Every, every community has a local hotline, so if someone says, you know, from Louisville, Kentucky, I'm gonna call Louisville, Kentucky and say, I just got this email. Saying it says they're gonna hurt themselves, this is a local vet in the area, you may wanna check them out. And then I'm gonna pass that on to the people who know what they're doing in that area.

• 17:27Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. Yeah, it's just good to bounce, you know, things off of people and I feel like our inboxes are probably very common.

• 17:37John Delony?

  Yeah, yes.

• 17:38Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of similarities. But moving on, I kinda broke up what I think is going on in the country, why there's a mental health decline, and anything that you think of while we're having these conversations, please chime in, because I'm just going off what I hear on the media. But I've kinda broken it up into a couple of different categories, one being social media, one being the division of the country slash politics, definitely plays a role in it, I think. Covid, when 2020 happened all the way up until now, a lot of things started happening at home, a lot of stuff happening in the schools, and, and if that played a major effect in what's going on, the media seems to be very toxic nowadays.

• 18:23Shawn Ryan?

  And, and then addiction, you know, the fentanyl crisis is going on. People are being prescribed, I mean, it seems like that's just the quick fix.

• 18:32John Delony?

  It's madness, yeah.

• 18:33Shawn Ryan?

  You know, it's just, yeah, take this, take this, take this. So I'd like to hit each of these.

• 18:37John Delony?

  I'd love it, man.

• 18:40Shawn Ryan?

  You have any in particular you wanna start with?

• 18:42John Delony?

  Man, it's a big braided mess, so we can go where you wanna go.

• 18:47Shawn Ryan?

  Let's start with, let's start with social media.

• 18:50John Delony?

  Okay.

• 18:51Shawn Ryan?

  You always hear, everybody, I spend too much time on the phone, I'm glued to my phone all day. People are comparing themselves to the, the, the, the

• 19:03John Delony?

  Everybody else.

• 19:03Shawn Ryan?

  Extremely good-looking influencers that are out there.

• 19:06John Delony?

  Like Sean Ryan.

• 19:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 19:09Shawn Ryan?

  And uh, and, and everything, looks, money, happiness. I personally think everything on social media is bullshit and fake, but um, but a lot of people think the shit's real.

• 19:22John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 19:23Shawn Ryan?

  So let's dive in there. Let's go into social media.

• 19:25John Delony?

  I, earlier on, when you were rattling off some of those statistics, so many of those things go back to 2013, 2012, 2014. So there's a growing body of evidence that says, we can't tease apart the exact mechanism by which social media is hurting us. What we can do is say, up until 2010, 2011, 2012, people were plugging along and then all of a sudden, there's a swan dive of mental health. And that's when these things came online in a, in a mass way, right? They were, they were fumbling around for the decade or two before that, but this is when everybody started walking around with a smartphone. Everybody was on these, these services and things like that.

• 20:07John Delony?

  I tend to take a broader view, step back 30,000 feet and look at the whole situation. And what I know is our bodies, our human, like the machine that we walk around in, is co-regulated. You and I sit here long enough and our breathing will start to sync up a little bit. We will become, like our bodies are designed for that. We're designed to be in tribes of groups of people towards a common purpose. That's what we do. And in short order, we outsourced all interactions to these boxes, to these platforms, to a very unnatural state of being for ourselves. You could not talk to somebody

• 20:45John Delony?

  without being in the room with them, right? From all human history until right now. And then think how many conversations we have with other people in our head, but we never utter words. And our bodies are paying a price. And so the way I like to, to,

• 20:59John Delony?

  to make it, to, to distill it all down into a simple, simple language. I can text my wife all day long, "I love you, I love you, I love you." I'm giving her frontal lobe data. I'm not giving her body the sense that she is safe and loved. Seventy, eighty, ninety percent of communication is non-verbal. We've stripped all that out and we've just said, "When will you be where? I'll be there." That's a, that's a, one part of your brain processes that data. The other part of the body is like, "We're not connected, we're not connected, we're not connected." And when your body finds itself alone, lonely, by yourself, or think about it, when you're, if you, as a SEAL, you land and you turn left and you start running down a mile and you turn back and realize

• 21:42John Delony?

  your team went right, you're probably not gonna make it out, right? Or you're gonna have to do some, right? Ten thousand years ago, you wake up in the morning, your tribe has left you? You're probably gonna die of exposure, you're gonna get eaten by something, you're gonna run out of water. So our bodies are designed to be in connection and if it's out of connection, it will sound the alarms. And that, dude, that's what anxiety is, that's what OCD, those are our alarm systems going off. And now we've created an entire industry to shut the alarms off, to quiet the alarms. That's like, man, if your house is on fire and your smoke alarm's going off, if you get a ladder and climb up and pull the batteries out, you start the alarm, man, congratulations. Your house is still on fire, right?

• 22:22John Delony?

  And so I think in overnight, we have changed the way we interact and our bodies are rattling at the seams. And so then you throw in all of the photos and the, um, you know, you and I were going to school when we were kids, someone would say like, "You suck." Two weeks later, I could edge that off. Now I got my phone, I can just read it over and over and over. Or I can see fourteen people who thumbs up it and four, ten of them are trolls, I don't even know, but it starts to feel like the whole world's, right? And these machines are curating what they give me, right? And they're based off that slot machine technology where I'm gonna hold what he said, I'm gonna hold it, I'll give it to you now, I'll hold it, I'll hold it, hold it, give it to you now. And so dude, it's just hack the system, man.

• 23:05John Delony?

  And so I really care less about the individual mechanics, I'll leave that to my academic colleagues to, it's this or this. What I know is, it's killing us and I gotta, I've gotta be intentional about making other paths in my life, right?

• 23:21Shawn Ryan?

  What about, I mean, there's just so much that goes into social media that I think is toxic and that the

• 23:28John Delony?

  It's insanity.

• 23:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 23:31John Delony?

  It's insanity. Here's how insane it is. I do this for a living. I had no social media before I took this current job. None. So I didn't have social media until 2020, right?

• 23:43Shawn Ryan?

  You haven't had anything since 2020?

• 23:45John Delony?

  None. And then I got on it. And then about six or seven or eight months in, I was in my closet in my bedroom when my kids were banging around outside scrolling Instagram.

• 23:58Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, wow.

• 23:58John Delony?

  And I've taught about it. I know the neuroscience about it. I've met with professionals all over the country from Harvard to Little Faith Base University. Like, I've been everywhere. I know. And I remember looking up and I started laughing. I was like, it got me. Like, here I am hiding from my family because this little box was making me feel better about who I am than they were. Because you know what I don't know how to do? I don't know how to parent a six-year-old girl. It's what I got. I'm learning as I go. I got a 12-year-old son and I got a lot of built-in stuff here and he's facing a different world than I face, right? So, but man, that social media just keeps telling me, you're doing great, you're doing great, you're doing great. You know what I mean? And so it's, yeah, it got me too. And that's when I realized this, they're good. They're good.

• 24:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, on the contrary, though, you can be not great. You know, it's not always reinforcing that you're great. I mean, you got the smear campaigns. I mean, I went through my own smear campaign.

• 24:55John Delony?

  Did they got, what'd they do?

• 24:57Shawn Ryan?

  It's a long story. And, uh, yeah, I don't want to go into it, but it was a couple of years ago. And there was a tiff with another person that I had collaborated with and he'd started this big social media campaign. And, I mean, and the only reason I'm bringing that up is because that affected me. And I'm a, I'm a, at the time, Mid thirties, late thirties, SEAL.

• 25:20John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 25:21Shawn Ryan?

  Former SEAL, former CIA guy, had seen it all, I thought, in this stupid ass social media campaign that lasted for about six months is ruining my day.

• 25:30John Delony?

  Yes.

• 25:30Shawn Ryan?

  And I felt like the walls were closing in on me. You know, it did, it brought a lot of stress.

• 25:35John Delony?

  Yep.

• 25:35Shawn Ryan?

  And.

• 25:36John Delony?

  It's those little pirate boats though, right?

• 25:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 25:38John Delony?

  It's not a big ship coming, cause you're, we know how to handle that.

• 25:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 25:41John Delony?

  We know how to handle a frontal assault. It's those fourteen single-engine boats that are coming and just filling the bottom of the hull up with, with bullets and then taking off. Right, and so slowly they can take over the whole ship.

• 25:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 25:55John Delony?

  Just with a few boats, man, and you don't see, it's hard to, it's hard to see it coming.

• 25:58Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, I, I guess where I'm going is I think this is creating a lot of, I mean, I can handle it. You know, it was stressful, but I can handle it, but you know, a fourteen-year-old girl who exposed herself to somebody online.

• 26:12John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 26:13Shawn Ryan?

  In confidence.

• 26:14John Delony?

  Yep.

• 26:14Shawn Ryan?

  And now that photo's gone viral. And then that young girl kills herself because she's humiliated.

• 26:21John Delony?

  Right.

• 26:21Shawn Ryan?

  How, in, in social media day, people are like, yeah, just get off your phone, it's not that.

• 26:26John Delony?

  No.

• 26:26Shawn Ryan?

  It's not that easy, you know, I mean, my business, for example, is run off social media.

• 26:32John Delony?

  Mine is too, right, and that's, that's the paradox I find myself in is, um, it pays my bills, right? And I have to be honest about, it's doing good. It's connecting people, it's, it's, it's a GPA, it's pointing people to the right place.

• 26:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 26:47John Delony?

  And it's encouraging people, here's a way to walk through life, here's some stories, here's some different people who are lighthouses in a, in a world of smoke. Okay, I can, when I go home with my family, I can do something a little bit different, right? Here's a way to have a different conversation, I never had that thought before. I'm gonna go take that thought and with the five guys I meet with once a week that we have breakfast with, and just talk crap, and I'm gonna bring this thought up there, right? So it's, it's taking this stuff out of the imaginary world and putting it into the real world. There has to be some sort of balance there, and I think we're figuring it as we go. I also think, and this is, I didn't realize this is a controversial statement. Um, I grew up around guns, I grew up around them, right? My, like I said, my dad was homicide guy, and a SWAT guy, like, they were just, they.

• 27:32John Delony?

  And they were so everywhere that I understood at a tiny age. The respect you have for them and the tools and the like the again, never occurred to me to play with. Right. Cause I I was so ingrained and taught. I've passed that along to my 12 year old son. And um, the a lesser extent to my six year old daughter, right? They're gonna know what this is. And I'm I'm not ever gonna leave it out because there he's 12. In that same way, I'm an adult and I know how the social media works. And I know that there's neuroscientists teamed up with AI teamed up with people trying to make money, which that's their job. Good for them. Ah, it's my job as a parent to protect the mind of my 12 year old and my six year old.

• 28:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 28:16John Delony?

  And so I'm not gonna give them a I'm not gonna hand them a loaded gun and say, make good choices because they're 12. Right?

• 28:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 28:23John Delony?

  Not gonna hand them a cellphone that you don't understand the predatory nature of this thing. Your development, you don't understand the people um, are gonna lobby. You think that guy actually doesn't like you. That guy doesn't even know you. He's not even this country and he's gonna bomb you. Right? Or he's gonna take snaps out to you and use them later. Or that girl who you are so in love with at 16, you're not. And I I remember that I was there. I I remember it. But you're gonna say things in black and white and it's gonna be recorded or you're gonna take pictures of things in black and it's gonna be there forever. My job is to make sure that you don't do that. And so as parents, we have to re um, reinvest ourselves in our kids' lives. And I'm it's hard.

• 29:02John Delony?

  My son and I have had some hard conversations, some weeping conversations, some dad, you're you're making me the weird kid conversations.

• 29:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:09John Delony?

  Um, it's tough. It's real tough.

• 29:11Shawn Ryan?

  What so how do what is a? I mean, you gotta be worried about it. You got a six year old daughter, 12 year old son. What what is that? What does an example of a conversation look like when your kid, when your son comes home and all his friends have? Instagram and he wants to be on there. I don't I don't know if he's on there.

• 29:28John Delony?

  No, he's not. So um, I'll tell you about a real life conversation we had, man.

• 29:34John Delony?

  He missed a couple of birthday parties. And for an eleven and twelve year old, that's, that's your world, right? That's, that's the disco, right? That's, that's the. And he didn't, he didn't, and I asked him, like, why didn't you go to birthday parties, man? He said, I didn't get invited. Well, my first thought is like, well, I'm gonna go fight that twelve year old who didn't invite you. That's my first thought, right? I'm gonna protect my kid. And then I thought, oh, no, is it the weird kid? Is he not wearing deodorant or something? Comes to find out, he didn't know. Because they're just texting each other or they're DMing each other. In fifth grade, he was the only kid without a phone in his class. In fifth grade? Fifth grade. Without a cell phone to the internet, man. And so I'm, I'm, these, again, we're, we're putting ten year olds in an adult world, man.

• 30:15John Delony?

  And there's a reason why we say, you gotta be this old to drive and this old to buy beer and this old to buy lottery tickets, this old to buy guns. I can't put that ten year old in that world, right? And that's what we're doing. And so he said, and he was right. He said, Dad, you've taken away my ability to communicate with my friends and you even had a phone on the wall that had that curly cord. They could, y'all could call each other. And he looked at me, he said, I got nothing. And I said, that's actually fair. That's actually honest and that's true and that's fair. So as your dad, I gotta figure out another avenue. And I ended up reaching out to some parents, saying, hey, I chose to take this phone away from my kid. If y'all are gonna have birthday parties, let me know. And they're like, great. And it's been, it was me reaching out to parents and dude, it was awkward. It was weird because it's also me judging them too. Like, y'all give your kids phones, I don't.

• 31:00John Delony?

  Can you know, can you let me know? Dude, they've been amazing. They've been awesome. And now when kids come to our house, every one of them hands a phone to my wife. And they relish that time without it. They head off into the woods. We live on some acres. They head off into the woods and they're catching frogs and creeks and they're creating all kinds of tree forts and throwing, making swords and spears. What I think twelve and thirteen and fourteen year old boys should be doing out in the woods, right? Yeah. Um, but they turn their phones in and they don't think twice about it. And so there's some of that. I will also say this. I knew it was bad and I knew there was challenges. I finally said, bring me up a, like, tell me a TikTok video everybody's watching. Like, tell me what it is. And he named it. Bro, it was.

• 31:44John Delony?

  I've you and I've talked offline. I've spent my career in the sewer with people. I've seen stuff. I've had to go through crazy things, cleaned up gnarly messes, had to do I T investigations. You know what you see when you go through some of those like I've been there.

• 32:00John Delony?

  This was a video that quote unquote, everyone's watching millions of views and it was a super provocative. Thirteen year old girl dancing and to the point that I told my wife, get that trash off. And it's not because I'm a prude, it's because that's a child, man. And this is what everyone on Tik Tok, you know what I mean? And he doesn't know what's happening to his brain by watching that trash all day long. That sweet girl who's getting parents are getting paid off. The whole thing is just insane to me, right? And so at the end of the day, I can't control that, but I can control is what goes into my son's mind. And that's on me. And if I get to be, he gets to be eighteen or whatever and he grabs a phone and he leaves my house and he says, screw you, dad. You I'll live with that. You know what I mean? I'll I'll make that trade right now.

• 32:46Shawn Ryan?

  Last question on social media. I mean, because we got semi, we we have a lot of crossover, I think, in what we do, being a personality over at Ramsey.

• 32:56John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 32:56Shawn Ryan?

  How do you, how do you manage your social media and your family? And I mean, how do you, how do you, how do you manage yourself on there? Do you manage your own account?

• 33:08John Delony?

  Yeah, I I've got somebody who helps me do stuff, but um, but yeah, I'll I'll post my own. Um, one of my rules is you can't, nobody can post something that hadn't come out of my mouth, right? So I don't want some content writer speaking on my behalf. I don't like that. Um, I use Instagram and they pull, I don't even know how to log into the Facebook account and stuff. So it's all automated and they send it on that way. Um, the rules I have for myself are number one, I've got my social media on a separate phone.

• 33:35Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 33:36John Delony?

  And so um, it's a work tool and I think of it as like a table saw. I don't carry that with me into a restaurant. It's a work tool that I use for work for engaging with people. And um, so it's on, number one, it's on a separate device so that I'm not just sitting there doing this all day. I have to think about taking it with me. And then I got, you know, if I'm going to go get my oil changed or something, I'm going to be sitting somewhere for an hour. I probably should take a book, man. Take a book and read it. But I also might do this and get some work done. So that's number one. Number two, I'm not great, man. Like, I'm really not great. I find myself staring at that stupid thing sometimes or trying to to log back in. And so my wife and I have had some direct conversations and this sounds lame, but I give her permission, please call this out.

• 34:21John Delony?

  Because she says, I can see, I know something's coming two weeks down the road. When I see you just start to do this, because usually I start to do this when works hard, when I'm stressed out, when I'm worried about money, when I'm trying to figure this out. This just becomes, right, it just becomes a way to make, to feel better for a second. And she says, this is usually a, like a weather map or a weather report of something coming down the road. So I'm gonna put that thing down and I want you to go for a walk with the kids. I want you to go lift weights down the gym. I want you to go do something to head off wherever we're all headed, because wherever you go, we all go with you, man. And that's been, that's been a gift.

• 34:56Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 34:57John Delony?

  I've had, I had to outsource it, right? And I wish I could say I was tougher and I just suck it up.

• 35:04John Delony?

  It's part of my job and if I had to outsource it.

• 35:05Shawn Ryan?

  That's awesome. I've abandoned my account.

• 35:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I just, I can't do it, you know, I don't, it's hard to trust somebody to run your account because, I mean, old friends, old colleagues send inappropriate shit sometimes. I don't need, you know, somebody seeing that. And, and unfortunately, I get, I personally get annoyed because Instagram has become a communication platform. I just, I like it as a work tool.

• 35:33John Delony?

  Yes.

• 35:34Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and, um, but so many people reach out, hey, do you want to come on this podcast? Hey, you know, do you, they just want to have a text conversation over Instagram and so if I'm, it's just an ongoing battle, you know, but, um, well, let's move into.

• 35:52Shawn Ryan?

  Division in the country.

• 35:55John Delony?

  You have to help me with this. I don't know what you're talking about.

• 35:57Shawn Ryan?

  You'd let me spell it out for you.

• 36:00John Delony?

  What a mess dude, what an absolute mess.

• 36:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, and I don't want to go into why we're divided or anything like that, but we are divided.

• 36:09John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 36:09Shawn Ryan?

  And, and I think media ties them with this section as well. So we could just throw it in there if you want, but I mean, it's just, it's divided friends, it's divided families. I've seen it in my family. I deal with it in my family. I have, I mean, I know people who have had kids who are turning two years old and the grandparents haven't even come to see the kid yet because of a difference in political opinions.

• 36:38John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 36:39Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and, um, and I, I see it everywhere. I see great, what I would have considered very strong families, just

• 36:52Shawn Ryan?

  obliterated, you know, and, um, how do, what's going on? Why can't people? I mean, I remember when I was growing up, you know, election day was a good day.

• 37:06John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 37:06Shawn Ryan?

  Teachers came to school wearing American flag ties.

• 37:09John Delony?

  Oh dude.

• 37:10Shawn Ryan?

  You know, that pins, everybody was patriotic. We're going to vote. It was a big thing.

• 37:15John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 37:16Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and, and now,

• 37:20Shawn Ryan?

  damn, man, I mean, you can't, you can't bring anything up without somebody. Without triggering somebody's anger and, um, how do, how do we skate around this nowadays?

• 37:33John Delony?

  You can't. I think we, I think a group of us, um,

• 37:39John Delony?

  let me back all the way up. So psychologically speaking, we are wired to identify the tribe. We talked about that earlier, right?

• 37:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 37:47John Delony?

  And one of the greatest, um,

• 37:54John Delony?

  One of our brains are our prediction machines and there's threat detection scanners. That's what they do all day long, right? I think this is gonna happen, I know where we're headed here. And is that gonna hurt me? Is that gonna hurt me? Is that gonna hurt me? Is that gonna hurt me? Right? And that's why someone in your situation who's seen a lot of potential threats, your brain's got a lot of GPS pins in it. And so it's always like, oh, that guy, that guy. And you, like, the hard thing for a SEAL coming home is, that's just a dude in the mall. Right? Like, that's not a, right? Like, he's walking at me with a backpack. And your brain goes, here we go. And it's like, nope, I gotta, I gotta relearn, right?

• 38:28John Delony?

  What we did in short order, man, is we bought into, not bought into, we went to a place that gave us wisdom on what's going on in the world. Right? And slowly that turned into a way to make money and sell ads.

• 38:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 38:44John Delony?

  And like, regardless of what anybody says, MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, they have one job. That's to sell ads. That's their job.

• 38:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 38:54John Delony?

  Period. The best way they can get you to sell ads is to get your attention. And the best way to get your attention is to convince that brain that they've got something that's gonna keep you alive. And the best way that they can get you to think that this someone's gonna hurt you is to give you a them. And if you go back all through history, all the way back, when a, when a country wants to take over somebody else, they start with dehumanizing language, they start with us and them, and then they builds and builds and builds until you have no, there's no, nothing else I can do except go to war. And we've done that here.

• 39:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 39:29John Delony?

  And it has been not a common purpose. It's been, at least it's not them. And at least it's not them. And all of a sudden, man, I wake up and it's been 10 years and the machines learn what I like and what stories interest me. And then it's become this, I'm just yelling at myself in a trash can. And so I yell it out of here and I hear it in this ear and I'm like, no way. And I yell it and it comes back in this ear. And it's just the same noise, the same noise, the same noise. And then my friendships circles start to contract.

• 39:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 39:59John Delony?

  But it used to, while I was a kid, man, my dad and I had different, different ideas on stuff. And he encouraged the mechanics of thinking through things. A, because he believed what he believed was true. And so if I believe what's true... What, what, what, what fear do I have you go exploring somewhere else? Cause I know where you're gonna end up. Yeah. Right? Doesn't bother me. And it was the exercise that was important. Now families are split up because you have crossed, you were an enemy now. And we've, at some point, either it's gonna happen or we're gonna have to figure it out out of ash, right? Yeah. Or we're gonna have to have a collective.

• 40:40John Delony?

  Everybody, we gotta stop, like stop, you know what I mean? It's kinda like when you're in a, I, I used to be an old hardcore kid, like go to a old punk show and then the pit gets heavier and then it gets heavier and then all of a sudden people were throwing fists and the singer would stop. It stopped the band. It's like, everybody stop, like that's not why we're here. And everyone's like, oh, yeah, whoa, okay, cool. And then we get back, like, at some point, a group of people on both sides are all three hundred and sixty, have to say enough. We gotta stop going after each other. There's bigger issues at play here. Yeah. And I don't honestly know a way around that. What I've, again, I can't control that. So I always go back to what can I control as a cornerstone of mental health, right? What can I control? I've turned it off. I've turned it off. Turn what off? The news?

• 41:22John Delony?

  Yeah, I simply don't. If I have to, like, you know, there's a big news story the other day about the raid and all that. I, like, my wife will come by and she'll just be like, something happened today, probably wanna check in on it. And so that's once every three months, I'll pull it up and I went to Fox News and I went to MSNBC and I thought, probably somewhere in the middle. And then I went about my day. And, cause it's not giving me any data. It's trying to capture my attention like a, like a tractor beam, right? And what I can control is how I treat people in my community. How I communicate with my kids, how I get involved in my kids' local schools, how I, like, how I give to charities in my, like, what I can do in my local area, that's what I can, I can do. I think that's what's unmooring about

• 42:06John Delony?

  federal election, national elections, is it's, you realize at the end of the day, like, I get one ping pong ball toss. To win that goldfish. Like, I just get one throw and it feels powerless, right? And I think people get angsty, I wanna do, I wanna do, I wanna do, and man, we, we just unschool. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's just.

• 42:27Shawn Ryan?

  I feel like free thinking is gone for the most part. Everybody's trying to indoctrinate their kids. They're trying to indoctrinate everybody they know. It's a control thing and if, if, at least I, I think it's a control thing where it's, you know, you don't think like me, so I'm gonna make you think like me. And, you know, there's a lot of that. And, and, and, like I said, I, I deal with it within my family, with friends. Everywhere I go, I deal with it and I've tried all these different methods, like, all right, we just won't talk about politics, but then you have, you have the one asshole, you know, they just,

• 43:05John Delony?

  Everyone, everyone.

• 43:06Shawn Ryan?

  They just keep going. And it's like, can we just talk about something else? But they just keep, they keep at it because you don't think how they think. And so how do you, how do you deal with that when somebody just keeps pushing and you can't, let's just, you can't get away?

• 43:24John Delony?

  What, I can't own that. And so I've put up, so we started a few years ago, um, right before COVID. You know, I think maybe it was right during COVID. Like I sent a letter to my family, all right, that said, here's what we will not talk about over the holidays. We're not talking about COVID. We're not talking about politics. We're not talking about Trump. We're not talking about, we're not talking about any of that.

• 43:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 43:47John Delony?

  And just putting it out there. And so that gave us a touch point. And I got a very, like, my family's respectful and they're cool. And, but as you mentioned, inevitably you end up nowadays, you can talk about, man, you got a lot of potholes in this street. And now all of a sudden, we're talking about, you know, China and the conspiracy, right? So we can just get all, and so that one email gave all of us a touchstone. And, and different people threw flags across that week, like, hey, whoa, whoa, we're not talking about this. And it literally just stopped it. If somebody continues, they are choosing to not be a part of this. I'm not gonna fight you. I'm not. Like, I was, I, I keep my fights for just a few things. If you wanna opt out of hanging out with me and my buddies, if you wanna opt out of

• 44:31John Delony?

  going to the show, if you wanna opt out of Christmas time with, with me and my family, it's cool, man. You're a grown up, you're allowed to do that. But my job is to uphold the boundaries that I put up there. And I'm not gonna have this, this, I'm not gonna have my community dissolved because you're an idiot. Right? And so you opted out. And then that, like, they suck it. Dude, I can't control that. You're a grown up. And at some point, that loneliness either combust, right? You go bananas. Or you find your way back in and say, dude, I'm sorry. And the other thing I got is this, I got some grace for, it occurred to me a few months ago, this is just a few, I'm just, just thinking through this. Um, you've heard that old saying, like, you don't make good decisions

• 45:11John Delony?

  when you're under threat. And you don't make good decisions when you're scared. And you don't make good, like, that's, that's the importance of training, right? So that when your default setting is calm and distance and make good, make good choices. And I wanna be graceful. Cause I lost some friendships. Man, I got some big divides and across fam- like, it, it became a mess, right? Yeah.

• 45:34John Delony?

  And I circled back and remember twenty twenty, like, I called multiple friends of mine, their doctors here, research professor here, path, like neuropath over here, uh, or, uh, homeopathic doctor over here, like, you know, make their own granola and whatever over here.

• 45:51John Delony?

  Everybody had different takes on, in twenty twenty, like, as we talk about COVID too. Everybody had a different take, everybody had different severity. But the prevailing wisdom was, we're all gonna die. And if you didn't have the prevailing wisdom, we're all gonna die, it's that they're trying to kill us. And if you didn't have, they're trying to kill us, it's, they're trying to control us. One of those three narratives made its way into every single heart in the United States of America, probably globally, but I'll just talk about here. And when I think I'm gonna die, literally, or I think somebody's nefariously trying to control me, that sets off every alarm I got.

• 46:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 46:28John Delony?

  I'm gonna come out swinging, or I'm gonna come out and go run, or I'm gonna freeze, right, the fight, flood, freeze, I'm gonna shut down. And if I look across the country, that's what happened. And what I realized I did was, like, you've been in these, very few people have been in situations that somebody pulls a gun and it's about to be on, right? Or have had to draw a weapon, or been in a situation where there's bodies, whatever. It's only those who've been there that actually know how they're gonna respond. Everybody else is like, no, they watch a lot of John Wick, and they're like, no, if that happened to me, I would, you don't know. You know what I mean? You don't know, until you've been in that room. I did, so I think it's unfair to judge somebody on, like, that first moment, right? When I used to work crisis stuff, I'd show up on scenes, and the first time somebody sees a dead body, right? The first time somebody sees somebody's insides on the outside, and they go out in

• 47:13John Delony?

  the front yard and throw up, or they step back, I'm not gonna judge that first impulse, right? That's the first time you've seen that, we're gonna have a conversation about it, and this may not be the job for you.

• 47:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 47:21John Delony?

  Um, similarly, I've had to circle back and say, I've held people accountable for decisions they made when they were in full firefight. And maybe it's worth me reaching back out with an olive branch, saying, hey, now there's some smoke cleared on some of this stuff, the dust is starting to settle, and I'm sorry, and I'm gonna try there, I'm gonna start there, and if they come back and they're like, yeah, you, all right, you're opting out. But I, I'm, I think I'm gonna loop back and start to have some of those conversations, because I'm holding people accountable for decisions and things they said, posts they posted, text messages they sent, whatever, during a time when they were under duress, too.

• 48:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 48:01John Delony?

  I don't know, it seems like a, it seems like something I can control.

• 48:04Shawn Ryan?

  That makes, makes a lot of sense.

• 48:05John Delony?

  It may not work, but I'll give it a shot.

• 48:07Shawn Ryan?

  Well, what kind of, um, I mean, what, this was actually a question that somebody from my Patreon had, is, for somebody that wants to stay informed, but knows how toxic the media, politics, the division is, how can they, how can they stay informed? Because I do think it's important to stay informed.

• 48:28John Delony?

  Absolutely, it is.

• 48:28Shawn Ryan?

  You know, we are at a pivoting point, and the country's either gonna go one way or the other now. And, um...

• 48:37Shawn Ryan?

  And so a lot of people want to stay more informed than than than I think they did in the past.

• 48:44John Delony?

  So one of the couple of my rules, I don't read headlines, I read the article.

• 48:47Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 48:47John Delony?

  A lot of times it'll say so and so.

• 48:52John Delony?

  The article is, I mean, the headline is designed to get me to stop in a sea of bright colored lights. And to say, what about me? And so if I'm, if I want to know something, I'm gonna read the article and I'm gonna get it from multiple sources. And here's the important part, I'm gonna stop. We have this idea, uh, you've probably, I imagine you've done this too, I do this all the time. I have imaginary conversations with people that I'm never gonna have in real life.

• 49:15Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:16John Delony?

  Right? Like, dude, if I saw that dude, I'm gonna tell this dude right. And our bodies spin up as though it's actually happening.

• 49:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 49:24John Delony?

  Right? As though they're actually here and we're actually in a confrontation, even though it's not happening at all. Right? Our body likes the cortisol, our body likes the adrenaline, our body likes to ramp up, especially if you're an addict like I am. You may still be a cortisol adrenaline junkie too, maybe not, but I, I like it. I like feeling that, I call it that internal pump, right? Like, it's time to go and I'm in the shower, dude. I'm like at my most vulnerable, I've got like a loofah and I'm like, I'll tell that drink. It's the leaf, the least tough thing in the world, right? Um, we think ruminating, we think thinking about things over and over. We think worry is helpful because we think it's productive thinking. I'm, I'm working out a scenario ahead of time.

• 50:06John Delony?

  Worry solves nothing. Ruminations solves nothing. And I think it's a broader concern that more data is an antidote to anxiety.

• 50:18John Delony?

  If I just go get one more cup of coffee, I need to talk to one more guy. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go make one more phone call before I jump in and start this job. I need to get one more thing here, I need to watch one more YouTube clip. I need, go do it, right? How many times have I sat there scrolling the entire length of a workout, trying to find the perfect workout? Right? Just, dude, just shut up and go.

• 50:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 50:38John Delony?

  Do I buy a Glock or do I buy? Get something and get somebody who can coach you, right? And we'll figure it out later. Uh, I'm the worst with guitars that way, dude. Like, I can sit there like, I don't know if I want this guitar. A. I'm not that good. B, it's not like I'm a professional, so it doesn't really matter. Like, it's always that I'm trying to get more data as a way to make myself feel better. So I say that, all that to say, once you've read the article, you know what you need to know.

• 51:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 51:03John Delony?

  Sitting there scrolling for hours and going down the rabbit holes, which those things are designed to do, right? They're just like, uh, water parks. They wanna get you down that thing so they can take you way to the other side of the park, man. Like, I'm gonna read the article, I'm gonna know what I need to know, I'm gonna have my opinion on it, I'm gonna go get a counter opinion, I'm gonna go about my day. Right? I'm like a swim in it.

• 51:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 51:23John Delony?

  That's, that to me is the challenge. Here's the other one. If I've, I have a core philosophy is have a guy. Like, one thing I never worry about is banking, cuz my, one of my best friends on planet is a, one of the banking commissioners in the state of Texas. If I have a question about banking or finance, I call him. I also sit by Dave Ramsey every week, so if I have a question about like wealth building, whatever, I got a guy.

• 51:45Shawn Ryan?

  Does Dave, does Dave know something about that?

• 51:47John Delony?

  Occasionally.

• 51:50John Delony?

  And so, uh, and Dave, like, on the show, he's like, you know, sell the truck, get out of debt. He unpacked bond rates for me one day, and I'm a pretty smart guy, and my head almost exploded. Like, he's a savant, right? I got a guy, I know. I have a friend who's the, the CEO or associate CEO of a, of a HVAC company. You know what I never have to worry about? An air conditioning question. If I have a question, I call him and say, hey, what's the, the latest thing I should get? Cuz I gotta replace my air conditioner. I don't Google it, I don't go to Yelp, I got a guy. And so, similarly, if I ever have a question about Blackwater, I have a friend in my local community named Sean that I can ask about. You know what I mean?

• 52:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 52:30John Delony?

  I can Google it and find all kinds of garbage, or I can call somebody who actually knows. And so, what I have to do then is not outsource all of my insights and knowledge and relationships to the computer. I gotta go be with actual people.

• 52:44Shawn Ryan?

  You'd look for a resident expert on the topic.

• 52:46John Delony?

  Real humans who've got wisdom, who've actually done the work themselves, who have walked with other people, who know the academic knowledge too. There's, that's another weird thing that's happened now is, if someone's like, no, I actually did the studies, like, oh, figures, idiot. Now it's like a virtue to know less. Right? And so, we're just in this weird environment where I'm all sitting down with wise people, right? You and I had lunch together months ago, like, I'm gonna sit down with somebody and be like, oh, that guy knows what he's talking about, I trust him. And now we can have different conversations, right? And, and that to me is a much better way to get news than. Walking into a Vegas casino, right?

• 53:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 53:18John Delony?

  And just all the lights and sounds.

• 53:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I find a lot of people, this is a little off topic, but I'm just gonna go and, myself included, but, you know, I used to, when this channel started, I used to do a lot of gun reviews and shit like that.

• 53:34John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 53:34Shawn Ryan?

  And, whatever, it's a review, it's just my opinion. But, what I find people do, and I started noticing that back then, and now it carries over into everything. Global warming, climate change, politics, like whatever, whether there's science, there's, it seems like nowadays you can look for information, like I'll, I'll give you an example. Maybe I did a gun review on that gold-plated Desert Eagle behind you, and I said,

• 54:12Shawn Ryan?

  "This gun's horrible, it sucks, I think it's a piece of shit." Well, and there's fifty other reviews like that. People will go, and they will research everything they can do to

• 54:30Shawn Ryan?

  confirm why they need to buy that gold-plated Desert Eagle. They might see fifty negative reviews, but they're gonna keep looking for the one reason-

• 54:38John Delony?

  Cause that's the one they want.

• 54:39Shawn Ryan?

  That justifies why they want that, and that's, I think that's carrying over into everything now. It's carrying over into, into science.

• 54:48John Delony?

  Yep.

• 54:48Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I could, I just, the reason I brought up global warming, uh, climate change is because the interview I did before you was about-

• 54:56John Delony?

  Oh, the climate science.

• 54:56Shawn Ryan?

  It had something to do with that. And-

• 54:59John Delony?

  So here's-

• 54:59Shawn Ryan?

  When I was researching it, I could find science that says, that basically proves it wrong.

• 55:05John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 55:06Shawn Ryan?

  And I can find science that basically proves it's happening.

• 55:09John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 55:09Shawn Ryan?

  And, I mean, I'm-

• 55:13Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know what I'm getting at?

• 55:14John Delony?

  A hundred percent.

• 55:15Shawn Ryan?

  People will just sit there and they will justify their beliefs, justify that purchase. Just they want, they will research, research, research, go through the internet just to justify why they need that thing or why their belief is right.

• 55:27John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 55:28Shawn Ryan?

  And not wrong and, and um, anyways.

• 55:31John Delony?

  There, there, no, I, I, I think the politicalization of science has become a mess.

• 55:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 55:37John Delony?

  And it's, it has, there are some nefarious scientists, there's no question about that. Um, here is a great lesson I learned. So I've spent 20 years working in higher ed, right? I was a professor and I was, um, did my own research, but also was a dean of students working with people when the wheels had fallen off their lives, right? And it was a fascinating, I, I jumped to a media company, to a, um, to Ramsey Solutions, right? In 2020. And here's what was an awesome moment for me. It was a big, like neon sign of clarity. When King's, I think it was King's College, when COVID first kicked off and Kings, I think

• 56:19John Delony?

  it was King's College out of London, I may be wrong there, but one university group put on the table, we think 15, I'm making the numbers up, but 15 million people are gonna die. The media picked that up, politicians picked that up and took off. This is nothing, they're making it up or we're all gonna be dead, right? We heard 15 to 20, well now 20 is the new number, right? And we heard 50, now all of a sudden it's off to the races. And the bigger the number or the bigger the red font or the scarier the breaking news story could be, the more they got our attention. In the academic world, when they laid that down, the whole goal of a scientist is to be less wrong. You reject the null.

• 57:02John Delony?

  I proved to you that I wasn't wrong, right? Or I found out I wasn't wrong. So when they laid that down, every science group in the world that had a, that had a lab or some sort of interest or some sort of skill set around that, said, game on. It's a, it's a game to be less wrong. And then within two or three weeks, they were like, oh, cool, not only 10, we've revised the models down and data's coming in. And then it, it's revised here and it's revised here. The only two groups that don't have a revision mechanism are media and politicians, who can't come back and say, hey, we reported this on Monday, we got some new data, here's the thing on Friday. Cause then it's like, ooh, you changed your mind, you're not stable. And I'm thinking, Why do you read a book? It's to learn something new, right? Why do you get an ops report?

• 57:47John Delony?

  So I can learn something new. And then you get there and you're like, ops report missed this one. And you relay that back. So now they've got a bigger, better picture. But we've created a world in media where there's no, there is no, hey, I learned something new button. We should all celebrate when we find out, oh, man, we've been doing this for five years. We were way off. We need to start doing this now. We should all cheer. Instead, we turn that into the next election cycle as to why you should hate them and why they're stupid. Right? Instead of saying, dude, thank God 15 million people aren't going to die. It's only going to be this number. Awesome. Can we get us? It's, it's a, it's, everybody's using the same words, but they're just flying past each other. And there are scientists now who have social media has like, I can make a lot more money posting.

• 58:32John Delony?

  I can make a lot more money doing public speaking than I can at my professor job. I can make way more money writing a book than I can writing an article that nobody's going to read. And so it has changed the incentive structure for thoughtful people.

• 58:47Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 58:48John Delony?

  It's a mess.

• 58:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:50John Delony?

  Back, back in the, in the seventies, 60s, 70s. If you did something, if you were in higher, if you did something for business, if you did something for like a company, you were a charlatan. How dare you take money? How dare you take money from business? Because our job is to create bricks of knowledge and put them up there. They can come buy those bricks on their own. That's not our job. So much so that it was divorced from reality. Right now you end up with these studies that do nothing. Right? So the interplay is good, but it's relatively new that scientists are in it. Or the incentive structure has shifted.

• 59:26Shawn Ryan?

  That makes a lot of sense. Well, let's take a quick break.

• 59:30John Delony?

  Cool.

• 59:30Shawn Ryan?

  When we come back, we'll get into the implications of what COVID-19 has done to the mental health of the population.

• 59:39John Delony?

  You got it.

• 59:42Shawn Ryan?

  You know, guys, the older I get, the more obsessed I get with the maintenance of my own lawn. But it's a big job. So I started paying somebody to do it, and I would love when they would put these little designs in my lawn. But one thing I started noticing is I started missing all the little nooks and crannies. And that's an equipment issue. Then I found Manscaped.

• 1:00:12Shawn Ryan?

  Thanks to the lawnmower 4.0, it's real easy to get those wide-open spaces. And it has light on it, so now I can mow my lawn in the dark. Then there's those hard-to-reach things.

• 1:00:29Shawn Ryan?

  Thanks to the weed whacker,

• 1:00:32Shawn Ryan?

  I'm no longer standing in the front of the mirror on one foot with the other foot above my head, trying to get all those hard-to-reach places, when my wife walks in and you have that awkward look on your face.

• 1:00:47Shawn Ryan?

  Get 20% off and free shipping with code Shawn. S-H-A-W-N at manscaped.com. That's 20% off with free shipping at manscaped.com. Use code Shawn. It's time that you enjoy the finer things in life and get yourself a platinum package for your platinum package.

• 1:01:11Shawn Ryan?

  Shave your balls. Be a man.

• 1:01:18Shawn Ryan?

  I love to talk about my meat. And so what I'd like to do right now is show everybody what I'm packing. Don't get too excited, ladies, because I'm talking about Good Ranchers. You see, Good Ranchers has premium meat cuts. So how many of you are tired of going to the grocery store and you look at the meat aisle, and it's empty, or it just looks like garbage? Because that's what it is. It's garbage. That's why you get Good Ranchers. It gets mailed, you get meat, premium meat, mailed right to your front door. So ladies, you can get excited about that. Who doesn't want meat mailed right to their front door?

• 1:02:01Shawn Ryan?

  Like, on-call, literally, on-delivery. Anyways, it comes to your door. They're all individually packaged.

• 1:02:11Shawn Ryan?

  Like this, some good looking meat, right? Throw it in the freezer. You thaw them out. You never run out of meat for dinner. So, so you can have meat every single night. That's right, carnivores. So what I need you to do is go to goodranchers.com/shawn. You're going to get $30 off your first order and they're going to ship you your meat for free. It's like a dream come true. So anyways, once again, go to goodranchers.com/shawn and get your meat shipped to your front door today.

• 1:02:55Shawn Ryan?

  All right, John, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to dive into COVID. But, um, but no, in all seriousness, a lot is, obviously, a lot has changed since COVID hit 2020. And I want to know what you think the implications are going to be, you know, from all this on, on, on everybody. I mean, it's affected adults, kids, masks. People are scared shitless. They're going to die from it. People think it's a hoax. I mean, it's, it's affected everybody in different ways. Just, I guess, it just matters how you think, you know, and what, what you're... You don't want to get in that.

• 1:03:38John Delony?

  Yeah, yeah. So I consider myself an optimist and a stark realist. Okay. Um, hope is a big thing for me. Like, if there's not a light at the end of the tunnel, there's... Well, I'm not going to walk in that tunnel, right?

• 1:03:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53John Delony?

  And I think, I think what happened over the last couple of years is a hundred year play out. Um, and you-

• 1:04:00Shawn Ryan?

  You think this is going to affect us for a century?

• 1:04:03John Delony?

  At least. Here's why. Um, not COVID. I don't think COVID is. We had a generation of adults who went crazy. And we pulled the pillars on-

• 1:04:21John Delony?

  We pulled the pillars on the bedrock of where the how this thing what this thing sits on.

• 1:04:29John Delony?

  We pulled the pillar on education. If you go to that school, those teachers are trying to kill you. Or if you don't go to school, right? Like, so we pulled the pillar on education. We stopped worship services across the country. We pulled the thread on on like on on the binding um principles that people get up every day. Like, that's the reason they they operate in the world is to uphold their religious faith to live into it. And we we stopped it. Stop. Can't do that. We pulled the pin on on government. Everybody talks crap about government and everybody. But at the end of the day,

• 1:05:11John Delony?

  I thought that everybody like behind closed doors had my best interest. I no longer believe that. And whether it's true or not, doesn't matter. It's the fact that I don't believe that. It's the fact that we told a group of kids, that doctor is giving you bad advice. I'm a plumber. I know more than that doctor does. I Google it. Or I watched a YouTube video. That guy's trying to kill you. Regardless of like masks or no mask, right? You need to take ivermectin or you need to I don't care what the doctor was saying. You have a group of parents, a group of adults, a group of media supervisors who went to war against the medical. So you're talking about medicine, education, government, religion. In three years, we pulled the pin on all of it.

• 1:05:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:54John Delony?

  And now I got a six year old daughter who's trying to navigate a world that I don't think we fully understand what we've done. We turned it into ash. Now we've given her reason to doubt things. And so these kids are swinging off. It's like jumping out of a plane. I I took my first jump out of a plane the day they've talked some of us into do my first skydiving thing, and I'm terrified of heights, man.

• 1:06:18Shawn Ryan?

  You did that voluntarily?

• 1:06:19John Delony?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was wild.

• 1:06:22Shawn Ryan?

  I hate jumping out of planes. Can't stand it.

• 1:06:24John Delony?

  I I I knew the moment I hit the ground. I'm gonna do that for the rest of my life. I loved every second of it.

• 1:06:29Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 1:06:29John Delony?

  Yeah, oh, yeah, it was awesome.

• 1:06:30Shawn Ryan?

  Good for you.

• 1:06:31John Delony?

  It was awesome.

• 1:06:32Shawn Ryan?

  Scares the shit out of me every single time. I have no idea why you would want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.

• 1:06:39John Delony?

  Uh, well, yes. It was taking us up to fourteen thousand. We got to twenty five hundred. I was like, I can't believe we're gonna jump. And the guy's like, we got a long way to go. I was like, no. But yeah, anyway, I loved it. I didn't know why I was telling you. Why was I telling you that? Um, oh, it's like jumping out and then like, hey, I didn't pack this shoot and I don't know how solid it is. I'm not jumping. Like, that guy on my back said, I packed this and I have a vested interest in both of us landing safely. All right, let's jump, right? And that's what we've done with our kids. And literally, they're gonna have, we're gonna have to, as a culture, build that back. Um, my daughter lost some critical developmental moments. Like what?

• 1:07:25John Delony?

  Like how to, how to read facial features, how to be uncomfortable, how to, um, have rejection and like these critical things that happen when you're four, five and six. Just go on, go on, go on. Damn, I didn't even think about that. Facial expressions? Yeah. So she's gonna not, you don't think she can read body language? She can't. I mean, she's gonna have to learn, right? And kids are incredibly resilient, right? So I, I, I don't wanna oversell that. But I do think down the road, I, I see it, I see it with her, I see it with my son, I see it with their friends. It's a different environment.

• 1:08:02John Delony?

  And, um, you put that on top of this stuff, outsourcing, communication to the electronic world. And yeah, like we spun the top on that one. Why do you think it's gonna take a hundred years? Cause I think you gotta cycle out, right? Now, I mean, you look at folks who go through major collective traumas together. They're great grandkids, right? You've seen some of those studies or heard about them that, um, trauma gets passed on and on. And so I think there's a collective trauma. And here's the other thing, they saw adults, and this is a big one. So I've been on, people have asked me like my thoughts on masks, no masks, all that kind of stuff. I've got my opinion on that stuff. Mm hmm. More importantly, our kids saw our parents go crazy.

• 1:08:45John Delony?

  And children absorb tension. They absorb chaos and they make it their fault. Because the adults in the world are their entire world. And so if dad is angry.

• 1:08:58John Delony?

  I need to fix me to bridge this gap. Very few kids understand dad's crazy. Our dad's having a bad day. They think dad's mad and I need to fix this. And so we have children who have become responsible for the emotional regulation of the adults in their world. And they cannot carry that weight. And it will spin out in all different. So it's going to take a group of people and a collective effort to say, and unfortunately, usually if you look at throughout history, it's a calamity. It's some big challenge that a group has to rise together to meet, which I think we will, so I'm optimistic long term. There's going to have to be some things that people put aside their anxieties, put aside their drama, put aside their, I'm keto, I'm vegan. They're gonna put that crap down because we've got bigger problems to solve.

• 1:09:42John Delony?

  It's going to take that sort of collective coming together. My dream is that we would have the willpower just to do it. I don't, I'm not super optimistic about it. I think we're gonna have to have a challenge, we're gonna have to rise and meet it.

• 1:09:55Shawn Ryan?

  The light in the tunnel's dim for that, huh?

• 1:09:57John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:58Shawn Ryan?

  So you think that, basically, I mean the...

• 1:10:04John Delony?

  It's gonna be my daughter's kids or my daughter's grandkids. They're gonna have to figure something out.

• 1:10:09Shawn Ryan?

  You think all of us are gonna have to die before this starts to reset?

• 1:10:13John Delony?

  Or we're gonna have to go to our kids and say, I'm sorry. I went bananas. And I'm turning the TV off. And here's the other thing, we were talking earlier about getting off social media, talking earlier about getting off the news and figure... Somebody sat down with me the other day and they said, I'm, I've, and it's, it's somebody I'm close to and they said, enough's enough. I gotta change my life. I don't sleep anymore. My this, my this, my this. It was, it was a hard conversation, but it was them just being vulnerable, just being open. Here's where I'm at. A dude, a writer around my age. And I told him, I'm gonna, I can tell you some things. It's the hours of 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM that wind most people down. Because I'm gonna tell you to get off your phone. And I'm gonna tell you to go for, lift weights. I'm gonna tell you to go for a walk.

• 1:10:58John Delony?

  I'm gonna tell you to change what you eat. That's all fine.

• 1:11:02John Delony?

  But when you do all those things, at eight o'clock, you're gonna be staring at your wife. And you're not gonna know how to talk. You're gonna feel a little bit weird. It's gonna feel a little bit awkward until you all learn some new skills on how to communicate together, on how to have sex instead of watching Netflix again, on how to do some of these things that we've just lost over time. And most people fall apart there. And so I just go back to this. I go back to scroll on. I go back to Netflix. It's like, hey, I'll just start the next episode for you, bro. Like, you don't even have to move. I'll just start the next one. And by the way, that series is over. I know you're gonna like this one. I'll go ahead and just start it for you. I don't even have to move, right? And the groceries will just come. So we've created this world where we're insulated from some of the... So it's gonna take people saying, I'm gonna engage that two hours of awkwardness until I learn a new set of skills.

• 1:11:46John Delony?

  And I can practice these skills. And are you in it? I'm in it. Are you in it? I'm in it. And I'm gonna go to my kids and say, hey, I acted crazy the last two or three years. And I'm sorry. I was scared. I was nervous. I was whatever. I'm in this together. Now I'm gonna have to go kick a soccer ball. Right? I went and bought me and my son bow and arrows so that I've, I've got things I can do that I love and bring me peace. It's meditative for me. And I have some time with him and we're outside, so I can hit all these buckets at the same time. And that's an hour I'm not spending on social media. I'm not sitting on a couch watching TV. For the first sixteen, seventeen years of my marriage, we had no recliners in the house. Cause my wife's like, if there's a recliner here, you will sit down. And if you sit down, you'll turn the TV on. Turn the TV on. I've lost you.

• 1:12:32John Delony?

  So there's no... That's how radical we got in my house. And now we've created a world where sitting down feels weird. You know what I mean? Um, we're gonna go move. But it's gonna take a group of people facing discomfort and heading into it. Then, yeah, man, I'll be all about that, man. If we wanna do that.

• 1:12:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48John Delony?

  I know we can. I know we can. No question.

• 1:12:51Shawn Ryan?

  Man, are there that many families out there that don't communicate, that just sit there on the phone? Uh, we don't do that.

• 1:12:57John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:57Shawn Ryan?

  I, me and my wife have great communication. We always have.

• 1:13:00John Delony?

  No, it's, it's that two inches apart and two thousand miles away from each other, man.

• 1:13:05Shawn Ryan?

  That's, that's that common.

• 1:13:06John Delony?

  I sit right here on the couch and I'm scrolling ESPN Sports and she's scrolling Pinterest and... We are in different planets. We're right next to each other. And it's, our bodies are screaming at us, man, like, not connected, not connected, not connected. And we call this together time. And it's, it's, it's wrecking families. And it's kids. I mean, you can go, I mean, you can go sit at a restaurant now.

• 1:13:28Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, I see it everywhere.

• 1:13:29John Delony?

  On the screens, man. Well, I don't want to deal with my, the discomfort. You got a little kid, right? I don't want to deal with the discomfort of an unruly child in a restaurant. It's embarrassing. It's annoying. They knock a water glass over. They don't like this food. Like, that's just part of being a parent.

• 1:13:44John Delony?

  I can make all that go eggs, hand them a phone.

• 1:13:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46John Delony?

  Right? And that's generational, man. Cause then you have a kid that doesn't know how to, what decorum looks like, doesn't know what respect and dignity looks like, doesn't know how to control their body for an hour. Um, and all of those things ripple through a society, ripple through a community. And so it's, it's a group of restaurants saying, no phones welcome. Like they did when they said, no smoking in here. And it was like, oh, we're gonna shut you down. They didn't. People just quit smoking in there, cause they wanted to go eat in the restaurant. There are no phones allowed in this restaurant. It's gonna take something like that. It's gonna take a group of parents at a school saying, we're not gonna, everyone, if we all agree, no kids on phones, or anybody in, cool, we're gonna do that. And it's gonna take stuff like that.

• 1:14:29Shawn Ryan?

  Man, the whole distrust thing you were talking about too, I mean,

• 1:14:34Shawn Ryan?

  just thinking about being a little kid and you got your parents think, think one way, you got the school that thinks the other way, you got your friends that think this way. Everybody, like I was saying, the sciences seems to be manipulated on both sides. And, um, and what the hell, I mean, where, where are our kids gonna?

• 1:14:55John Delony?

  I thought my teachers were the smartest people in the world. Here's what, beyond the smarts, I thought my teachers loved me and cared about me.

• 1:15:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:02John Delony?

  I thought my minister at church loved and cared about me. I thought.

• 1:15:09John Delony?

  Um, I'm trying to even go back when I was the earliest memories I have. I thought that Ronald Reagan and George H. and I thought Bill Clinton, I thought they loved me and wanted the best for me.

• 1:15:21Shawn Ryan?

  Right.

• 1:15:22John Delony?

  Um, I don't think that's a clue. I thought my doctor knew everything.

• 1:15:26Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:27John Delony?

  Right? And if he said to do it, we just did it. Like, because the doctor said, we don't have that anymore. And it's less about, like, again, I hope you hear what I'm saying. Like, it's less about, I disagree with your advice. It's more, there's a pinhole in the air of the institution. And, um, I heard it put best the other day. Um, I mean, everybody from Jordan Peterson to Esther Perel. I mean, these are people all over the aisles saying, we have some common stories that bind civilizations together. And we pulled the thread on all of them all at the same time. And so we're gonna have to decide, I'm gonna build better things. They're gonna make these, um, dysfunctional things obsolete.

• 1:16:10John Delony?

  That's a better, harder road to hoe than it is to just go burn everything to the ground. Right? One of them, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, because this, I'm, I'm getting out of my lane here on what I don't know. One of them feels very much like the greatest generation that came from World War II. And we're gonna channel this into a collect, we had a collective purpose here, defeating evil. And now we're gonna have a collective purpose here. And of course psychologists, we can pick this apart, but they came home and built. Versus what you experienced in overseas, which is, we're just gonna keep burning. Oh, you build up a little, we're gonna burn it down. We're gonna build up a little, we're just gonna burn it down.

• 1:16:49John Delony?

  And one of those, right, one of these, you end up over time with some functioning societies and some, some institutions that help everybody move forward. Yes, they got cracks. Yes, they gotta, we gotta work on them. There needs to always be critics. Oh, that's important. But it's better than nothing. Right? It's better than scorched earth. And so, um, yeah, uh, absence, a group of people getting together saying, let's start building. Let's start doing something right. Let's start creating. Um, man, yeah, it's gonna be tough. It's gonna be, it's gonna be a long century.

• 1:17:18Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think, are there any other implications from, from COVID that you think are gonna?

• 1:17:25John Delony?

  I think the general, again, like.

• 1:17:31John Delony?

  What if the next one's bad?

• 1:17:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:34John Delony?

  Right? What if the Sean Ryan disease ripples through? I mean, nobody's gonna put on a mask? Nobody's gonna stay at home? Nobody's gonna not work, right? And so, we cried wolf too much and too loudly on both sides of the... Everyone was yelling. And so now, the next thing, yeah, it could be tough. It could be tough.

• 1:17:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58John Delony?

  What do you, what do you think, man? Like, what are you, what are you experiencing?

• 1:18:01Shawn Ryan?

  With, with, uh...

• 1:18:02John Delony?

  Like, as, as a young dad, as a... Like, you've seen a lot of the world. You've experienced a lot. You get the emails from all over the country.

• 1:18:11Shawn Ryan?

  I think the biggest thing that I've taken from the... The, I'll say this. The first thing that comes to mind is I had no idea how many people in this world live in fear all the time.

• 1:18:24John Delony?

  All the time.

• 1:18:25Shawn Ryan?

  And that became, the veil got lifted when COVID happened. And, you know, my son wasn't born, you know? He's 11 months old, so, um... But I, I'd saw, I just saw fear everywhere.

• 1:18:41John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:42Shawn Ryan?

  Fear that your rights are gonna be taken away. Fear that you're gonna catch the virus. Fear everywhere, you know? And, and I just, I don't live in fear. I never have.

• 1:18:54John Delony?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:18:54Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I don't live in fear and, and I don't want my son to grow up living in fear.

• 1:19:01John Delony?

  How do you balance, um...

• 1:19:08John Delony?

  So, some would say, I don't live in fear.

• 1:19:12John Delony?

  But I still put on oven mitt before I grab my cast iron skillet off the stove.

• 1:19:18Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:19:19John Delony?

  Right? I'm not scared of the skillet. It's on fire. It's hot, so I'm gonna take precautions, cuz I'm not dumb, right? I don't live in fear of my gun, but I don't load it till I'm out, till I'm getting out of the car to go hunt, and I, I keep it on, right? So, I take precaution. How do you balance not living fear with... Rational, smart. Well, I feel like it got wiped, right? I don't live in fear, which like, I'm just gonna act insane. Or I'm scared of everything and I'm not gonna, I'm gonna hold my breath for the next, for the rest of my life, right? There's gotta be a balance there.

• 1:19:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, for me personally, I guess we all live in fear to a certain extent, right? We, we, I mean, I have, I have a fear that I'm gonna be out with my family and there's gonna be an active.

• 1:20:05John Delony?

  Something happens, there you go.

• 1:20:06Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I mean? So what do I do? I figure out the solution. All right, I'm not gonna let that control me and not go anywhere for the rest of my life.

• 1:20:13John Delony?

  Right.

• 1:20:14Shawn Ryan?

  I'm gonna learn how to handle a weapon to be able to protect my family if that were to happen. And then I'm gonna go about my day.

• 1:20:22John Delony?

  There you go.

• 1:20:23Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and, and for me, that was the same with COVID. And I, at the beginning, I took it extremely, I was the guy out there with the Lysol can.

• 1:20:33John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Shawn Ryan?

  Hit my packages, you know, and then.

• 1:20:37John Delony?

  Then you, then we got more information and then we got more information, right?

• 1:20:40Shawn Ryan?

  And then I formulated, and because the science was manipulated on every front, everywhere you look at, the media, everything. I just educated the best, educated myself the best that I could and then formulated my own decisions, you know, and

• 1:20:57Shawn Ryan?

  to be able to move about my day back to normal.

• 1:21:00John Delony?

  Right.

• 1:21:01Shawn Ryan?

  I, I look at the problem, I figure out the best solution for me, and then I'm, I move about my day.

• 1:21:07John Delony?

  So you did that, you did it on a micro scale, what I was talking about a minute ago, on macro scale.

• 1:21:13John Delony?

  Here's discomfort, I'm gonna stare it down and I'm gonna walk right through the middle of it. So that as you, just something as simple as I can get on about my day, right? What do I have to do to get on about my day? I've gotta have to learn this, I gotta learn a new skill, I gotta learn how to do these things, I gotta educate myself. I don't even know how to educate myself in the right way. I'm gonna, right, so I am going to do these things so that I can go through discomfort. And I think that's the path forward. People like, how do I heal from anxiety? You gotta turn fate, walk into anxiety, that's the thing. And, and you can't, the more you run from it, the tighter that's, that thing spins, right?

• 1:21:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:49John Delony?

  It's facing that discomfort and heading into the middle of it, right?

• 1:21:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. But that, that, that's at least the first thing that comes to my mind.

• 1:21:57John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:58Shawn Ryan?

  You know, when I think about COVID is all the fear that was wrapped around it.

• 1:22:05John Delony?

  And I I tend to think COVID was was an accelerant. Um, I think that fear has been brewing for a long time. I think, like you said, it pulled the veil off and just dumped gasoline on existing coals and it just.

• 1:22:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:18John Delony?

  Went wild.

• 1:22:20Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into addiction.

• 1:22:23John Delony?

  Okay.

• 1:22:23Shawn Ryan?

  So. I don't know why, you know, but addiction is on the rise. It's getting worse with all the fentanyl coming up through through the southern border. And it's getting laced with everything. But on top of that, you have addiction from, I mean, it seems like. There was a period of time where doctors were just.

• 1:22:47John Delony?

  Tic tacs, man.

• 1:22:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Here's some benzos. Here's some oxy. Here's some painkillers.

• 1:22:52John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:53Shawn Ryan?

  Here's some SSRIs. Here's. And.

• 1:22:59Shawn Ryan?

  What it, why is addiction and suicide too? Why is addiction? What what's hap- why is it right now just going through? The numbers are insane.

• 1:23:10John Delony?

  Yeah. So I think it was in 2019. This is how naive I was as a college professor. The um, or as a college administrator in 2019. A study came out in JAMA, the Journal of American Medical Association. And it was such a stark, like, whoa, I didn't know that. And I thought this is going to be the one. This is going to be the study that everybody starts ringing the bell on. Right? This is our our generation's Sputnik.

• 1:23:39John Delony?

  For the third year in a row, the average lifespan of a US citizen had gone down. Right? And. You may have heard this. You may have heard this term. So 2019 is pre-COVID. It had gone down and they said it was not because of murder or whatever the media was cranking up. Right? They called them diseases of despair. And it was organ disease failures, addiction, suicide. And organ disease being like liver disease and heart attacks. And so I heard one prominent doctor that I have high respect for called, said, we are lonelying ourselves to death.

• 1:24:14Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 1:24:16John Delony?

  I heard another guy say we're we are distracting ourselves to death. And ultimately, we've created a world. At and I would go back to the pace, the speed of things. I would go back to, we talked about earlier, the lack of tribe, the lack of relationships that have all overnight been outsourced into a different mode of communication. Um, the, the, the work has taken on an identity. Like you have to, work has to solve all of our existential crisis now, right? We used to learn about these things, hard issues at home and our religious institutions, even at school a little bit.

• 1:24:57John Delony?

  Now workplaces teaches you about dress and decorum and diversity and all these things you should be having conversations in your culture and your community. Now the workplace is responsible for this and you got to take care of all my healthcare and you got to take care of all my mental healthcare and my spiritual care now and now you got to make me feel comfortable. Work, so we have all these things happening at the same time.

• 1:25:20John Delony?

  And so if you go back to the analogy like of the alarms going off, mental illness, man, it's, it's an alarm system. Our bodies are pretty attuned machines. They're, they're incredible. They'll let you know that something's not right. And I can address the fire and that's hard, man. You got to get water. It's going to get everything wet. It's going to turn everything into a mess and you're going to have a big cleanup after it's over. It's going to be hard, but it puts a fire out. Your house survives. Or I can climb up there and what addiction is, is like climbing up on your smoke detector and taking a pillow and just duct taping it around it.

• 1:25:54John Delony?

  You can be addicted to, you can work 90 hours a week or 120 hours a week and we'll give you a million dollars. That's an addiction. You can be addicted to sex pornography, you can be addicted to earning more money, right? You can be addicted to 50 million different things and now you got the doctors just handing out, you know, um, pills, man. And so it's a collective. And then I I look at the same thing with hours watched on Netflix. I look at tho- that is that's a it's a long tail suicide. I'm not pulling the trigger, but I'm cashing out of my life. It's the lives of quiet desperation. And you look at the tail, man, it just slowly fades.

• 1:26:35John Delony?

  And that used to just be the American male, and now it's everybody. I'm just out of the life that I've created for myself. What do you mean that used to just be the American male? That was the this this civilization and its discontents, right? It was it's this it's this homogenization of taking men and saying, you know what? Actually, here's what this looks like. Tuck your shirt in where pressed khakis, go to this job and come home, and you see the thing starting to rattle. Um, and then you create all these distractions over time. You can get a bigger house, you can get more land, you can get a this. All of those are ways to absorb energy of somebody being forced into a system that they were not designed to live in, right? And then you throw women into the workforce, and then it's like, you know what? You need

• 1:27:20John Delony?

  to take all of your instincts, all of your the things that might have made you whole. You know what's really gonna make you whole? More money, more power, more prestige, more accomplishment. Get on that trip. And so now we've just created an entire ecosystem. It's madness, right? I'll also say this. This isn't talked about a lot. Um, this might even be my next book. If you lay, you remember going back earlier, there's a part of our brain that is just scanning the system 24/7, 365. Are you safe? Are you safe? Are you safe? Part of safety is, do you got a community? Do you got a gang? Do you have people that you can call at 2 a.m.? Part of safety is, are you in an abusive situation? Is somebody hurting you? Are you in an abusive work, toxic work environment, whatever that is?

• 1:28:03John Delony?

  The third one is autonomy. Do you get to choose what happens to you tomorrow? Right? There's a natural, built in, whose control? Are you driving or somebody else driving your life? And we don't talk about this a lot, but we have the most insanely indebted society, voluntarily indebted.

• 1:28:22John Delony?

  Debt forever was a, it was a slavery tactic. It was a way to capture people and control their movements. And now we do it for a shiny car and a shiny T-shirt, right? And so there's a part of our brain that is screaming, we're not okay. You don't get to decide what you do tomorrow. Toyota Motor Company does. Or Bank of America decides what you do tomorrow, not you. So you're in an abusive situation at work? Keep showing up, dude, because you have no other options. Because you owe a hundred thousand dollars in student loans and in credit cards and your stupid truck payment, right? It's like, and we've created this world and said, I need to have all these things. And our brains are screaming at us, we're not okay, we're not okay, we're not okay.

• 1:29:06John Delony?

  And it can't, we can't live, you've been in a building where the fire alarm's going off? It's just so loud, right? And the blinking lights are so loud. Eventually, you either have to get out of the building. Someone's got to go clip the wires and cut that thing off. Or you just have to put on some headphones and veg out. And that's, that's the opioid crisis. That is fentanyl. That is, I'm just out. I can't, I'm stuck here, I'm out. I'm just gonna go through my life and I'm gonna be done.

• 1:29:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:37John Delony?

  And that's where we are. And so it's a re-engagement of purpose. There's a reason dudes who get out of the military and they're thirty years out. As soon as they get back in a gang and back with the team, they're all talking about thirty year old stories. There's a reason in high school football, guys who are forty and run into each other. They just go back to telling the old high school stories. Because for most of us, that was the last time we were part of something bigger than ourselves. It was the last time we were part of a team that had a purpose towards a goal. And as a society, we do not have that. We have said, you versus me. Technically, you and me are.

• 1:30:14John Delony?

  Like, we're, uh, we're competitors, right? Like, like, uh, there's a, there's a, we're not in a common gang. Now, now those of us who do this for a living, no, no, there's not, dude. It's infinite, right? We're not enemies at all. In fact, we're all supporting one another and, uh, trying to make sure people are well, right? So, but it can feel that way. We have to have people in our lives towards a common mission. And honestly, when people start making sure that they're safe and they've got a gang and they have autonomy in their lives. My boss, Dave, calls it peace, right? I call it, um, just value and worth. I'm worth just going to bed at night without meds.

• 1:30:57John Delony?

  I'm worth getting up and having coffee because I want to, not because I have to, right? I'm worth rambunctious reckless sex with my, with my spouse. I'm just wheels off because we're so safe in this relationship. It can get weird, like whatever the thing is, I'm worth loving my kids so much that I'm gonna treat, teach him how to treat his body by treating my body right. I'm gonna model that, right? So we have this sense of worth and it's this, and in my job, in my day job, watching people come in and they've paid off $200,000, they've paid off their house, they simply walk different, man. Like, cause it's the first time, it's like, oh, I'm unchained, I'm unshackled and I've got peace in my life. And by the way, to do this, we had to work on our marriage.

• 1:31:42John Delony?

  We had to figure out a new way to talk. We had to become a team and a unit and we had to get some other people in our lives to walk with us. And now all of a sudden, this whole thing, now we've got a new journey that we're healing towards. Does that make sense?

• 1:31:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:52John Delony?

  And so it's all of it, but I think it's people saying, you know, I'm worth more than sitting on my couch. Like, I'm worth more than a life of quiet desperation. Um, what does that look like? And some people, the, the, some of the language in the faith communities have been, you know, churches are dying. They're not.

• 1:32:13John Delony?

  CrossFit is the new church. Um, like, listening to podcasts and getting a podcast community is the new church. Facebook groups, the new church, yoga communities. People are gonna find ways to get together and to have a common sense of purpose and mission. Can it be something bigger than abs? Can we do something bigger than that? You know what I mean?

• 1:32:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:32John Delony?

  Uh, can we do something more bigger? That's, that's a more collective, uniting front towards a, a common good. And that's just, honestly, I'm gonna go revise my answer. There is light at the tunnel. Maybe it's not a hundred year thing, but it's gonna take young dads like me and you to say, we're gonna do better. You know what I mean?

• 1:32:51Shawn Ryan?

  You know, um, off this, off the topic of addiction, but something that, uh, I'm noticing too is, and I'm guilty of it. Um,

• 1:33:04Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think that people know, I don't think they do things.

• 1:33:12Shawn Ryan?

  We're always worried about what everybody else wants, you know? And, um,

• 1:33:19Shawn Ryan?

  like, the five-year-old might get a, he might want a red fire truck, but he wants the red fire truck to post on Instagram to show all his friends that he's got the red fire truck. And as soon as that's over, he doesn't give a shit about it. And I see that happening with adults. And with everything from cars to private jets to watches to, and I see all these people and they're buying

• 1:33:46Shawn Ryan?

  all this shit that they don't even appreciate. They don't, I don't think they even want it. They just want it because everybody else wants it, or they think everybody else wants it. And-

• 1:34:00John Delony?

  What's that old Fight Club line? It's a-

• 1:34:04John Delony?

  But working a job that we hate to buy things that we don't need to impress people we don't even like.

• 1:34:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:34:12Shawn Ryan?

  I feel like that is had gas thrown on it as well.

• 1:34:16John Delony?

  Yeah, it's peacock feathers, right? It's I used to have my peacock feathers that I would show my little tribe. And I can show the planet, right? And there's so many coming in. Yeah, it's just it's an arms race.

• 1:34:28Shawn Ryan?

  So how do you get people to turn inward and figure out what they want?

• 1:34:33John Delony?

  It's it's, man, this is a word. Talk about a word that's just been beat to death. Um, for me and my wife, it was solving for freedom. And not solving for freedom in some obnoxious,

• 1:34:49John Delony?

  like esoteric way.

• 1:34:53John Delony?

  What is a way we can build a life for ourselves and model for our kids and our community that we can have the most peace?

• 1:35:02John Delony?

  Let's work really hard. And what I mean by really hard is I was the dean of students of a law school, a great law school, right? I had a great salary and I drove a $3,200, 1992 F-150. That was a piece of junk. It was hilarious. But my truck was a depreciating asset. So I bought him at the bottom of I bought it at the bottom of its depreciation. So it would lose none of my money. And that's how I got to and from work when I wasn't riding my bike to work. And so I decided, well, we've got this issue. We got this issue, gas prices. I'll just ride my bike. I'm gonna get healthy. I'm gonna do right. So I started looking for ways, where's ways we can unhook from

• 1:35:45John Delony?

  the tether, right? Let's just don't have a TV in the house for a season. That sounds okay. Well, now we're gonna have to go for walks together. And now we're gonna have to talk. That's boring, right? So all these things downstream, people wanna go to TV or Instagram to learn how to talk. Just go for a walk, right? So it's unhooking. How can we owe nobody any money?

• 1:36:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:05John Delony?

  How can I un? And what I found is contrary to what I expected. When I bought suits at Marshalls for half price, or I got them at the half price rack at the sale. A, nobody ever said to me, they may have talked behind my back, it never stopped me from getting the job that I wanted, right?

• 1:36:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:25John Delony?

  Driving my truck was turned hilarious. It was funny. Everyone gave me a hard time about it, but in a good natured kinda way.

• 1:36:32John Delony?

  And then you started quietly watching people sell their, turn their leases back in and buy a car with cash. Yeah. Cause when people say, why'd you drive that crappy car? I don't owe anybody any money. And it was that simple, like, ah, right? So I'm gonna begin to solve for freedom in a way that how can I move through the world? Right? That's why I went and got another graduate degree. All my education was in working at universities, right? My master's degree, my PhD was in education. I thought if this system shifts a little bit, I'm in a mess. Well, I worked at a university that gave me a free class every semester. So I thought, I'll get another degree in counseling. So I have some options to get, right? So it was just living a life of freedom. By the way, I was gonna read these books anyway, so why not?

• 1:37:16John Delony?

  Um, like you're a great example. Like I've got this set of skills and I think maybe the greatest skill you have is the skill of how to learn a new skill. And so like, man, I'm gonna create this thing. Well, then I'm gonna have to learn how to do photography. I'm gonna have to learn how to set up cameras. I'm gonna have to learn how to, and you did it, right? Yeah. And so podcasting goes away tomorrow. Like the medium just dissolves. You've got so many new skills. You know what I mean? You've got communication skills. You'd be a great therapist someday. So, I'm gonna continue to solve for freedom, which means I'm gonna live a life of discomfort. I'm always gonna be pushing towards something. I'm learning how to hunt my own food. I'm gonna learn how, not because I think it's coming down. It's a good skill to know how to do. Right? We got big gardens. It's solving for freedom in the, in the, in the truest sense of that word. Interesting.

• 1:38:00John Delony?

  Yeah. And really, I guess if I'm, but I'm, I'm, I'm just processing this as I'm talking. Solving for freedom is really solving for peace.

• 1:38:09John Delony?

  What's the least amount of like drama? I'm gonna know my neighbors. Yeah. You know what I mean? I'm, I'm gonna do these things that are gonna give me peace throughout my day. If I have a hard conversation I need to have, I'm just gonna have it now. I'm not gonna think about it for four weeks. Let's have it right now.

• 1:38:23Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into some of this active shooter stuff.

• 1:38:26John Delony?

  Okay.

• 1:38:26Shawn Ryan?

  That's definitely on the rise.

• 1:38:28John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:28Shawn Ryan?

  And

• 1:38:31Shawn Ryan?

  what

• 1:38:33Shawn Ryan?

  what's your opinion on why is this happening? Guns have been around forever.

• 1:38:38John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:38Shawn Ryan?

  Way before me or you came around.

• 1:38:40John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:40Shawn Ryan?

  They were in abundance when I was growing up. We didn't have this problem when I was growing up. Why is this happening so much more frequently now? Is it because of lack of human interaction? And people and kids are desensitized?

• 1:38:55John Delony?

  He, I'll just run through some of the like, some of the things that have over time made me go huh, fascinating. I heard an honor shame researcher who studied honor shame cultures that are different than the culture we exist in now. Made a compelling case um for

• 1:39:14John Delony?

  fistfights in school. Used to serve as pressure release valve on a system. When somebody shoves another kid, you remember like back in high school, everyone got there and ran to watch what's gonna happen. And you heard another kid hit another kid. It was visceral. You felt it. It was real. And I don't want none of that. Or occasionally people like, I want a lot of that. And right. And those kids went and took jiu jitsu, whatever. But there was a collective visceral like a releasing of that valve. Right as I graduated high school. Getting in a fight at school across the country, you go to jail. They arrest you, take you out. So my son, the idea of getting in a fight in school is insane. It's madness. It's a trip to jail.

• 1:39:58John Delony?

  He has a very different opinion. Now, I'm not saying fighting in school is good. I'm saying that we did a good thing and over time, we allowed this pressure valve to build up and build up and build up and build up. And then the pervasive sense of another I I study, I think this was out of the FBI. They took some kids who had just grown up and never handled weapons, but grew up on first person shooter games.

• 1:40:21Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:40:21John Delony?

  And they were deadly. They're incredible. Because their heart rates didn't change. They didn't have the trigger impulse. They just were able to through their targets. And so it may be that we've got a generation of kids that are skilled in like that's a picture in their head that wasn't in my head. I was when I was playing Mario Kart, right? Or whatever I was Donkey Kong, right? And a third one maybe there they were everywhere, but there wasn't this like

• 1:40:52John Delony?

  Uh, now I'm getting on a limb here, but I just have to imagine there's a romance to, to media violence that didn't exist when you and I were in it.

• 1:41:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:05John Delony?

  Um, and the stories you hear from active shooters that the first time they pull a trigger and it hits somebody, there's a, oh, this is, this is real, right? This is a very real situation that I was in a fantasy, I was in my head, I was in a, this isn't a movie, this is, you know what I'm saying? It was a detachment from reality and all then you take all that and throw it into a box and...

• 1:41:30Shawn Ryan?

  So they're not realizing what they're doing until, until they're...

• 1:41:33John Delony?

  I think very few, uh, I think very few. There's, there's, I, I've come to believe after just sitting with people, I don't, I don't, I think there's less evil than we think there is. I think there's people who end up on divergent paths and yeah. But again, it could be the mental health crisis and, and the this, and the this, and the this, and I've got an outlet for this and I've got all of these media outlets putting just gas on it, putting gas on it, and here we are. I don't know, I know here we are, is what I'm thinking.

• 1:42:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:02John Delony?

  What I do believe is this, um, I think it was Thoreau or Emerson, one of the greats, I'm gonna, I'm gonna butcher the quote here, but I pity the young adult who never fired a weapon as a kid because he never understood the extent of a man's rage.

• 1:42:25Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 1:42:25John Delony?

  There's something about sitting with a kid and teaching them firearm training. When you watch them pull the trigger the first time and it r- it ripples through their body, that it's, the respect is instantaneous.

• 1:42:41Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that they respect that?

• 1:42:43John Delony?

  Uh, the kids I've been around, it, it's a whoa, right? And so...

• 1:42:51John Delony?

  It's it's before there's a bravado to it. It's before there's a yeah. It's before any of that. It is. This is a powerful tool. And it rattles through a kid. I remind him with with comic regularity about the dangers of. I don't have to remind. I don't have to tell my kid, my son. He knows. He's seen it, right? He's helped me clean a deer. He sees it. He's felt it. And I still remind him and I still have guns and say, I still have all the safeguards at my house, but I think that training kids. Same as defensive driving, right? Like if we train kids, this is what happens here. It sounds counterintuitive. You mean, you tell me train every kid? Yeah, I do, because I think it elevates the respect for it.

• 1:43:33John Delony?

  People don't play with stuff that they respect. Um, there becomes a safety element to it. That again, you divorce them from reality and then someone finally turns eighteen or twenty one and they go get that gun or they go. Take that gun, they got all this anger and rage and now it's out on the street. Um, I don't know.

• 1:43:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:52John Delony?

  I I may prove to be wrong with how I'm raising my son, but.

• 1:43:55Shawn Ryan?

  It's a deep topic, you know, I don't think anybody.

• 1:43:57John Delony?

  What do you think?

• 1:43:59Shawn Ryan?

  What do I? What do I think? Why it's happening?

• 1:44:04Shawn Ryan?

  I think it's a. I think it's. I think kids are desensitized.

• 1:44:10John Delony?

  Okay.

• 1:44:11Shawn Ryan?

  Nowadays, and it goes back to your loneliness thing, but.

• 1:44:15John Delony?

  Desensitized from.

• 1:44:16Shawn Ryan?

  I think.

• 1:44:16John Delony?

  Watching all the John Wick movie like.

• 1:44:18Shawn Ryan?

  I think they're desensitized from the video games. I think they're desensitized from the from. I mean, I I'm not. I don't watch much TV, but Walking Dead.

• 1:44:30John Delony?

  Right.

• 1:44:31Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I'm all about shooting some zombies, but.

• 1:44:37Shawn Ryan?

  When we're watching that and I see, you know, I see a guy pick up a bat with spikes in it and beat a kid to death.

• 1:44:45John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:45Shawn Ryan?

  In the head.

• 1:44:46John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:47Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and that's that's just that's that's acceptable now.

• 1:44:50John Delony?

  It's entertainment.

• 1:44:51Shawn Ryan?

  That's TV.

• 1:44:52John Delony?

  Yes.

• 1:44:52Shawn Ryan?

  And we're worried about. We're we're over here worried about offending people. On I don't want to get into it, but you know what I'm you know what I'm getting at. We're worried about this.

• 1:45:03John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:03Shawn Ryan?

  But over here, we have a kid getting his face beat in and it looks very real.

• 1:45:08John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:09Shawn Ryan?

  I've seen that. Happened and it looks very real.

• 1:45:14John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:14Shawn Ryan?

  And they're seeing it over and over all the time, video games, movies.

• 1:45:19John Delony?

  It's a detachment from reality, right?

• 1:45:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:21John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:21Shawn Ryan?

  And and I think there's a and and then in the social media and the loneliness and you don't interact with people. You don't go through a checkout aisle anymore. You don't all of that. I noticed things changing in the military when we started moving towards drones. You know.

• 1:45:41John Delony?

  There's a detachment from the violence, right?

• 1:45:43Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you have a detachment.

• 1:45:47Shawn Ryan?

  There's a there's that personal attachment is gone, you know, before we would go on an operation, we would go and we would meet the pilots that are going to cover our ass while we're taking down the target on the ground. And there's a personal connection there.

• 1:46:00John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:01Shawn Ryan?

  Well, as drones came in, you don't have that personal connection. You're talking to somebody who's in the desert in Nevada. Who's controlling a drone that's flying over Afghanistan. They don't know you. They don't really give a shit about you. You know, because there's no personal connection. And I I think that that a lot of this stuff is happening because there's lack of the lack of personal connections.

• 1:46:25John Delony?

  Hmm.

• 1:46:25Shawn Ryan?

  I think that between the violence that's that's seen everywhere and and how graphic it is nowadays and the lack of, you know, human interaction is desensitizing kids and they don't value life the same that that that that we used to.

• 1:46:49John Delony?

  I mean, so can we could we agree that not me and you, but I think collectively, I'm asking this this out loud.

• 1:47:00John Delony?

  If we could agree that

• 1:47:04John Delony?

  because what I tend to do is I hear that and I I wanna say these kids have a character issues or they got moral issues. It sounds to me like it's less character moral issues and there's a set of skills that we as the adults in their world have not imported on them. And if we can go back and I go back, it's just such we've all made

• 1:47:29Shawn Ryan?

  Parents.

• 1:47:30John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:31Shawn Ryan?

  The parents, I mean, lack of lack of personal connection within the family because you go out to you go out to dinner, you go out to lunch, you go to the mall and you see parents glued to the phone all the time, you know, just like you were saying, two inches apart.

• 1:47:47John Delony?

  And here's the thing, though, my six year old daughter, if I'm in there scrolling on my phone, she says, hey, Dad, look at this picture and the picture is like of dragons and wolves. I don't know what it is. It's some world she lives in sometimes. I don't know what she's talking about. I don't want to look at it. I'm trying to look at something on Instagram. And I'll scroll and go, yeah, that's cool, honey. It looks nice. And she'll say, Dad, look. And I'll look at it. I'll go, ah, scary. And I'll go back here. She doesn't have the verbal skill set, the cognitive capacity to say, hey, man, I'm growing up quick. I'm more important than that. What she thinks in her little six year old body is that screen is more beautiful, more important than me.

• 1:48:30John Delony?

  Something about me is less than than that and I need to fix that because Dad, Dad's supposed to love his daughter and he loves that more than me. Something must be wrong with me. Right? And parents, it goes back to us. I've got to teach my son the skill of this is real life. This is what real life looks like. And we could get as esoteric as commercial farming, like taking death out of our lives on a daily basis. I put that's in the chapter in this book, like we distance ourselves from death so much. We outsource funerals. We outsource our food. We outsource anything that's uncomfortable. And we create this bubble around us. And I love comfort, man. I like leather chairs. I like air conditioning. I like comfort.

• 1:49:12John Delony?

  But I got to head back into discomfort, back into reality, right? The world doesn't care what I feel my truth is. This is how truth is, right? And yeah, I think you're right. I think, I think the ki- kids get so separate from reality and consequence and truth that, man, I'm angry. I'm just so enraged and this is how I can solve this problem. Or this, this will stop the hurt, right?

• 1:49:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:40John Delony?

  And man, then you're off to the races.

• 1:49:42Shawn Ryan?

  I th- I think some of the cyber bullying and shit plays a part.

• 1:49:46John Delony?

  Absolutely.

• 1:49:46Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I mean.

• 1:49:48John Delony?

  It doesn't stop. It doesn't stop. And then there's just the pile on effect, man.

• 1:49:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, that's some serious shit these kids are going through nowadays to, to, to.

• 1:49:56John Delony?

  And again, they're kids.

• 1:49:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:00John Delony?

  And we don't let them buy cases of beer. And we don't let them drive. And we don't let them fill in the blank. Like, give them these stupid boxes and say, make good choices, man. I, I just, they, they gave my granddad, he's a hu- he, he passed away a few years ago. He's an amazing man, World War II vet, he's an awesome guy. When he was a little kid, they gave him cigarettes because it kept kids calm.

• 1:50:23Shawn Ryan?

  They gave him cigarettes?

• 1:50:24John Delony?

  Yeah. It was like, ah, give him a cigarette, calm him down. And now we know that's insane. I'm confident that that's how we'll look back and be like, y'all just gave children these portals to? Yeah, we did.

• 1:50:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:35John Delony?

  I, I'm confident of that.

• 1:50:37Shawn Ryan?

  I hope you're right.

• 1:50:38John Delony?

  Hmm. I mean, it starts with us, right? It starts with us.

• 1:50:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, you're doing it.

• 1:50:43John Delony?

  Got to. Yeah, we'll see, man. It's tough, it's tough. It's hard swimming up to that stream. What about suicide, man? You, you with a lot of vets?

• 1:50:52Shawn Ryan?

  What about it?

• 1:50:53John Delony?

  What do you hear? What are you seeing?

• 1:50:55Shawn Ryan?

  I see a lot of my friends dying because of suicide.

• 1:50:58John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:59Shawn Ryan?

  Because they're unhappy. And, uh, and now I see that spilling out into the masses. And, um, vets are killing themselves for very different reasons. I, I think.

• 1:51:11John Delony?

  Why do you think they're, why do you think they're?

• 1:51:13Shawn Ryan?

  I think there's a couple of reasons. I think one is the inability to reinvent yourself. I think is a big thing.

• 1:51:23John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:23Shawn Ryan?

  Um, but it's not really discussed a lot. I think a lot of people, I mean, it's definitely a lot of past trauma, you know? But also, especially for people that came from kind of my sector of the military and the special operations world. I mean, you're, you're, there's nowhere else to go. You're at the, you're at the tip of the spear.

• 1:51:46John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:46Shawn Ryan?

  You are the best of the best. And then when you leave, none of those skills.

• 1:51:54John Delony?

  Then you're just Dan selling insurance, man.

• 1:51:58Shawn Ryan?

  You literally are. I became a real estate agent. Failed miserably. But um, but I, I think it's, I think it takes in even, even, not even in just that sector, but there's a feeling you get being in war and combat when you're engaging, being engaged. And you're not ever gonna feel that again, you know, and I'm not.

• 1:52:26Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not saying necessarily it's a good feeling, but it's a.

• 1:52:30John Delony?

  Can I, can I get beneath that?

• 1:52:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:34John Delony?

  Going back to the original conversation we were having earlier, um, I have to imagine

• 1:52:41John Delony?

  something as cheesy as the connections I have still to this day. I'm in my 40s now.

• 1:52:50John Delony?

  To the kids that I played high school football, super five A high school in Texas.

• 1:52:58John Delony?

  If I saw one of, if I heard the name of one of those guys, I'd be like, yeah, let me give him a buzz. Let me call him. Right? Guys I've talked to in 20 years. I still feel, I can't imagine the exponential difference of camaraderie and connection. So I can imagine being in a room or being down a hall and the bullets are flying, but it feels like beneath that there is a level of trust. I'll never forget my buddies as a SEAL, I asked him, I just had a thought. Do you love the guys you were on, like, uh, on, uh, mission with? Not, not romantic, you want to date them, but did you love them?

• 1:53:40John Delony?

  And he said something to the effect of, it was a unfathomable connective love. It was a deep, unique love that was, that I know for a fact, he will die for me.

• 1:53:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:52John Delony?

  And that is something that is hard to replicate in a suburb. You know, four years later, and I wonder unplugging people from that level of camaraderie.

• 1:54:03Shawn Ryan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:54:05John Delony?

  Is that it ultimately, cause then that's a set of skills, then I've got to teach men and women, you gotta go make friends. And I know it's gonna be awkward and they're gonna be different friends than you've ever experienced. But that ends up being number one, instead of all this other, you know, I mean, like you gotta go get plugged into a community. It's gonna be weird and it's gonna be awkward and it's gonna like, like it is for everybody. I, I'm trying to get at what are some, some tactical things people can do. And I always come back to, man, it's gotta be lonely. Getting out and coming back and then all of a sudden I'm just living in a suburb with a nice house and a nice suburban, I think I should be happy. But I'm missing that, he'll die for me.

• 1:54:42Shawn Ryan?

  I think that goes back to reinventing yourself though, too.

• 1:54:45John Delony?

  So it's rebuilding your community also, right?

• 1:54:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yes, because, you know, these guys, myself included, you know, we're proud of what we did. We were the pinnacle. Of, I mean, it's going to the All-Star game and being picked for it. You know, and then you come home and guys can't.

• 1:55:07Shawn Ryan?

  This is something I struggled with. All the other shit is pretty well known, you know, survivor's guilt.

• 1:55:12John Delony?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:14Shawn Ryan?

  All that kinda stuff, right? And the camaraderie, missing being part of that, yes. I think where guys really struggle and, and it's not getting enough light is reinventing themselves, being able to box that up. Yeah, I was a SEAL and I worked at CIA. And that doesn't define who the fuck I am. I boxed that shit up and I put it away. Yeah, I'm proud of it. I did it. It was awesome.

• 1:55:37John Delony?

  It's a thing, it's a thing I was a part of it, it's not who I am.

• 1:55:40Shawn Ryan?

  But this is what I do now, you know, and we had this conversation.

• 1:55:43John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:43Shawn Ryan?

  Downstairs. I'm not a fucking operator anymore. Now, now I'm a YouTuber.

• 1:55:48John Delony?

  That's what, that's what my son, I, I was talking to him the other day and I was like, we were just talking trash. And I was like, dude, I was the dean of students at a billion dollar university and he goes, dad, you're a YouTuber. And I was like, oh man, like it hurt, right?

• 1:56:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it's funny.

• 1:56:02John Delony?

  But it's also true. It's what I do.

• 1:56:03Shawn Ryan?

  There's a lot that goes into this.

• 1:56:05John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:05Shawn Ryan?

  And now, I have a successful channel, but I reinvented myself. I based my fears. I learned new shit. I learned how to run all these cameras. I learned how to video edit. I learned how to photo edit. I learned how to.

• 1:56:21Shawn Ryan?

  Read algorithms, all that kinda shit I reinvented and I invested my time and now I have this, you know, I was able to reinvent myself and I think I was able to reinvent myself into other communities and learn how to communicate with people that aren't type A's and, and.

• 1:56:41John Delony?

  So we got a culture that tells us, just be confident. I think that's nonsense. I think confidence comes from accomplishment. Accomplishment comes from taking another step after another step after another step and you've regained confidence because you took a step and I learned a new thing and I opened this door, then I gotta learn these things, right? So now, I don't know, it feels like there's just this rebalancing of I'm confident again, right? And I think that's the story of life. Cause I'm confident in my marriage right now and then something's gonna happen or I'm gonna get older, one of our parents is gonna pass away and then that confidence is gonna get wobbly again and here we are back learning again. It's kinda get back up, kinda get back up, kinda get back up.

• 1:57:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:24John Delony?

  Um, that to me feels like the, the arc of life, right?

• 1:57:26Shawn Ryan?

  It's a great way to put it.

• 1:57:28John Delony?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:29Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 1:57:31John Delony?

  That's, that's incredible, man. That, the, the, there's a, there's a suicide researcher out of Florida State, um, last name's Joyner and he gave me the, the, uh, not me personally, but he put out a framework for suicide that has, has proven true over my career and I, I, we talked offline, I've done too many funerals, I've been in too many houses, I've cleaned up too many suicide scenes. The heartbreaking suicide scenes to clean up were the ones that it was a teenager or a young professional or a veteran who took so much time to carefully set up their scene so that it would be the least impact on the people they loved.

• 1:58:16Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:58:16John Delony?

  And they couldn't, they, there was something there that didn't allow them to realize, if I love them that, that this much, that I don't want my brains all over this plate. Like I love them so much, I'm gonna wrap myself up in three shower curtains and this, and this, and this.

• 1:58:34John Delony?

  They love me too. Couldn't see it. And Joiner provides this framework that is,

• 1:58:40John Delony?

  do you have the means? Have you practiced? Do you know how to do this? Right? Do you know what you're doing?

• 1:58:46John Delony?

  I think the framework is, do you have, you have opportunity, right? Do you have a gun? Do you have the pills? Do you have the thing? Can you get over that hump? Can you actually do this? Every cell in the human body is designed for one thing, that's to get to tomorrow. Can you override that system? And I think that's what makes military folks particularly lethal is they've practiced overriding their innate systems. They go into challenges, right? Instead of our natural inclination to move. And the third one was just like a lead weight in my chest was perceived burdensomeness. I think that's the three, but I know the burdensome one is accurate because it weighed on me for a long time. It's people who start to think, not that I don't want to hurt anymore, that I'm frustrating. People would be better off if I wasn't here.

• 1:59:30John Delony?

  And that is, that felt like something I could speak into on the outside speaking in. Like, the other stuff may be true. You are not a burden. The world isn't going to be better off with you not here. That means we're gonna have to walk through discomfort together to get you on the other side of confidence, of skills, of reinventing yourself, of getting a new community. But you're not a burden. Like, we gotta, we gotta work through that one. And over and over, I just want this hurt to stop. I want it to stop. And I'm tired of being a disappointment. I'm tired of not being in my parents' style I was gonna be. I'm tired of letting my wife down. I'm tired of drinking again and drinking again. And I would just be better if I wasn't here.

• 2:00:12John Delony?

  And that tends to be the message, if I can point on that, you're not a burden, you're not a burden, you're not a burden.

• 2:00:19John Delony?

  And then I think we're in a, dude, I think we're in an oxygen tank. We talked about, right at the beginning, about hope.

• 2:00:28John Delony?

  Like end of time sells. It just does, man.

• 2:00:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:33John Delony?

  And.

• 2:00:37John Delony?

  I mean, if you, the climate's gonna kill us in 25 years. The Republicans are gonna kill us in 25 years. China's gonna kill us in 14 years. Russia's gonna kill it. The, the only news that makes its way through our ecosystem is, it ends here.

• 2:00:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:54John Delony?

  Why does anybody wanna be a part of that, man?

• 2:00:57Shawn Ryan?

  That's a damn good question.

• 2:00:59John Delony?

  I don't wanna be a part, right? And so either, we gotta call it, right? Yeah, like time's up, everybody. I don't think that's true. We have to say, let's do something different, right? Let's change the narrative a little bit. And there was something unifying about, you know what? Let's just go to the moon. Let's go there, right? Let's, let's, let's do some things this way. Let's stop evil here. Let's unite over some things. Let's, let's unify over some things over a common shared purpose, other than they're gonna kill us, this is gonna kill us, that's gonna kill us, we're all gonna die here. I don't wanna be a part of that, man. And I get the impulse to just be like, dude, I'm out. You know what I mean?

• 2:01:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.

• 2:01:37Shawn Ryan?

  Well, to kind of wrap things up, actually first, do you think there's anything else that's contributing to

• 2:01:46Shawn Ryan?

  the decline in mental health that's going on right now?

• 2:01:51John Delony?

  I think if there's one chief failure of the mental health community, and of which I'm a part of, so I think one of the things that we have not done a good job of is over the last 150 years, but especially the last 25, last 20, is we've convinced people that if you get your thoughts in the right order, then you'll be mentally well. You'll be healthy. You gotta get your thoughts in the right order, and that's the exercise.

• 2:02:21John Delony?

  And that is part of it. But we have completely discounted the importance of doing, action, behavior change, just doing things differently. Right. And so I can think about, thinking about, thinking about things all day long. The research is super clear about the benefits of exercise. On your cognitive awareness, on your, on your mental health. There's some really good stuff on eating well. There's some really good stuff about going to be with friends even though you don't want to. I just wanna go to bed. Like I got a rule in my house, cause I'm, I'm an introvert and I tend to just kinda huddle up a little bit.

• 2:03:02John Delony?

  Um, if somebody invites me to go watch the fights and my first thought is, dude, I just wanna go to bed. I have to go. I ha- I, it's a, it's a non-negotiable, you gotta go. Because I know I've never gone to watch the fights with a group of guys and come home sad that I went. It's always good that I went. Even if I stay up too late and I end up eating a bag of Doritos that I shouldn't have. Like the camaraderie and the, we're all, we don't even have to look at each other. We can all just sit and face the TV this way, right? We don't even have to communicate, but we're all doing a thing together. So, um, I think we have to stop discounting the importance of, uh, our feelings are important. There's, there, there's signals that our body gives us and they often lie to us.

• 2:03:46John Delony?

  And so I gotta feel that stuff, cool. I don't feel like working out, doesn't get a vote, I'm going to exercise. I don't, I feel like eating a cheeseburger, cool. I'm gonna go eat this salmon that I got in the car, right? I've, I don't feel like hanging out with my friends, I gotta go hang out with my friends. If we could create a series of things that I'm gonna go do and be conscious of our thoughts. Um, I think that's the path forward and we tend to bifurcate. I'm just gonna grind it and kill it and go crush it. Well, good, that's a recipe for, you're gonna burn yourself out. You're gonna start hating everybody. And then I'm the worst thing that ever happened to me. I'm the worst thing I ever did. I'm just a bottle of feelings and that's all I'll ever be and that's not true either. And so I think we've got a, a.

• 2:04:29John Delony?

  We've just sat down and I almost, I almost wonder what, what therapy would look like if we did it on a treadmill instead of on a couch, right? Like it, uh, that probably makes for a better meme than a reality, but um, there's something about, let's start acting, let's start changing the way we talk, let's start changing the way we talk to ourselves. Dude, if you're like me, I talk to myself in a way, dude, that if I heard somebody talk like that to the woman at the register at a grocery market, I'd go to jail. I, I wouldn't let, you can't talk to her that way. And dude, I talk to myself, you suck, you're the worst freaking dad. I do that to myself all the time. And it just becomes this stew that fires off the cortisol adrenaline and now we're off to the race. So it's, it's, I gotta start doing stuff different, man.

• 2:05:10John Delony?

  And I think then you'll start to see the, the, the turn be made and man, I, again, our man, pretty optimistic, I think we've got a, got a hoot of a century ahead of us.

• 2:05:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:22John Delony?

  But also, man, it just takes a couple of dads like you and me and people listening to this.

• 2:05:27Shawn Ryan?

  Cause a lot of people are already down that road. What, for people that are going down that road, you know, whether they're in the beginning of depression or, or in the thick of it, what are, how do people get ahead of it? You know, I think a lot of people wait too damn long before they start to seek any type of advice or help or, or anything. What, when do they start?

• 2:05:59John Delony?

  Every single faith tradition that I've known anything about worldwide, historical and otherwise, has some aspect of something we call confession. And we've made confession about saying all the bad things you've done. It's more the act of sitting down and looking at somebody and saying, I'm not okay. And I think it's the great David Kessler, the grief researcher who says grief demands a witness. There's gotta be something that I can sit down and, and look at somebody and say, hey, I'm not doing all right. That is, that's step one into healing, saying it out loud, writing it. People would call my show and I was new to this whole thing and they were calling in so often and none of these calls made the air, I don't think, but they would, they'd

• 2:06:44John Delony?

  end up editing them out. They'd call me and tell me, hey, I just cheated on my wife. I don't know what to, how do I have this conversation with her? Um, I hit my kid a little too hard, what do I, like, what do I do now? Uh, fill in the blank.

• 2:06:57John Delony?

  My first question to them was like, dude, why are you calling me?

• 2:07:01John Delony?

  To a person, every answer was, dude, I got nobody to talk to. I got nobody. And so it's creating a context, creating a world so that,

• 2:07:11John Delony?

  if I get to that moment, I can reach out and call somebody. Now, you and I live, we were just talking, we live 15 minutes apart, right? Out in the woods out here, we live 15 minutes apart, nice community.

• 2:07:22John Delony?

  It would be insane for you to pick up the phone and just be like, hey, man, I, you know what I mean? You don't know me that well, you've got, but if you come over and help me side in a couple of rifles for deer season, and my kids are playing with your kid, and your wife and my wife become friends, and you go hunting with me, and then you come help me mow my, now we're creating a context by which I'm gonna feel okay saying, hey, tell me about this, man, because I'm not seeing this right. See what I'm saying? And we tend to jump into this without building this. It's like trying to do the CrossFit Games without doing any pull-ups before, and you can't do that, man.

• 2:07:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:58John Delony?

  So, I don't know, it's kind of where I'm at.

• 2:08:01Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about like first signs? Should it be, I'm not happy, so maybe you should start looking at talking to somebody? Or making some changes?

• 2:08:15John Delony?

  To me, rage and anger tend to be.

• 2:08:17Shawn Ryan?

  That's first sign?

• 2:08:20John Delony?

  When you find yourself saying, if they would just, and I don't care who they is, and I don't care what just is, when you say that word, when you've distilled the world down into a them and an action, that's probably you. When you find yourself, somebody cuts you off in traffic,

• 2:08:36John Delony?

  and you're overcome with rage, right? Somebody cuts me off, and I start down a path, man, my brain, it's just automatic. That guy sucks, he's just a drug addict, he's trying to kill everybody. Over time, I can do the work, and when people say do the work, it's changing my default setting so that that guy cuts me off, and I take a big, deep breath, and I exhale, and I whisper a quick prayer and say, Man, I hope you make it to see your wife at the hospital before she goes. I get to pick the story that I'm putting into that car about why that guy just cut me off. Yeah. When I find myself watching the news and the other day, man, I was driving to work. It was about two weeks ago. I was driving to work. I had a bunch of stuff I had to take, like I had wardrobe changes. I got a guitar. I was taking, I was taking all kind of stuff.

• 2:09:21John Delony?

  Dude, I left one important thing in my house about 20 minutes away from my home and I just started screaming in the car. Rage screaming, dude. And it was at myself like you idiot again. Then I started laughing because I know. And then I called Justin, who's a, he's a coach for me. He's somebody that I talked to that he's a counselor role in my life.

• 2:09:43John Delony?

  Yelling at myself in the car again. Right. But I, that was the trigger for me. Like I knew.

• 2:09:51John Delony?

  I, I want to yell at this high school referee at my kid's little league game. That is not a problem with him. That's a problem with me. It's a freaking little league game. Why am I so mad? Every time I see Joe Biden's face. I want to. That's me. That's on me, right? He doesn't have the power to enrage me that way. I'm not going to give that up. So what is it about my world that I, right? So it's taking ownership of how I feel. And rage and disconnection is off. That's the other one is. People usually do this. They go at you or they run. They, they disengage. And if my wife comes home and I feel myself just wanting to turn or I just head into the bathroom. Or, uh, men are notorious about.

• 2:10:32John Delony?

  Wife comes home and I'm just going to go spend an hour in the bathroom, right? I'm just going to close the door and turn the fan on and just hang out for a while. That's, that's, that's just disengaging, right? What is it about her? My two kids come in and they're a lot and they're loud. I'm just gonna get away. Like, those are signs. But you need to sit down with somebody that you love, somebody you trust or a professional and just say. I'm, I'm finding myself disengaging from life. I'm finding myself wanting to swing and hit everything, which means I'm activated. And I shouldn't be activated by my life. All right. Those are a couple of ways just to know. Yeah. And there is no, uh, like, you know, on Dave's show, they, people come do their debt free scream. I don't think there's such thing as a anxiety free scream.

• 2:11:15John Delony?

  Like, I'm not anxious, right? As soon as you do that, you're gonna walk out in parking lot and someone's gonna call and say, hey, mom's got cancer, right? The goal isn't to not have anxiety or to not ever have seasons of depression, not to be sad. The goal is, can I create a firm foundation so that when those things come, I can weather that storm? I got a tribe, I got a gang, I got a community of people I can call that can bring me food, that can be with my wife when I take my kid to the ER. Whatever I gotta do, I got people with me, right? It's, it's not to live a

• 2:11:43John Delony?

  non-happy life. I think happy is like cocaine and cotton candy, man. It's just wispy, right?

• 2:11:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:50John Delony?

  Happiness comes in glimpses, it comes in moments. It's not the end goal.

• 2:11:54Shawn Ryan?

  That's great advice. Do you think the mental health, the stigma to go get help? I personally feel like that's starting to go away. And it's, it's becoming more accepted too.

• 2:12:08John Delony?

  Yeah, and again, it's a double edged sword. It's become, I'm so grateful that people can say the words, I'm not okay, right? If you talk to some old World War II vets, I've heard,

• 2:12:22John Delony?

  I would have done anything to tell somebody what I was going through, right? And I didn't have, it didn't exist. Like, the words in my mouth weren't even formed, right? There was no such thing as depression. There was just go to work and just go to work. And I would have done it. Like, I've seen some of those videos where they're just weeping, like, man, I would love to have told somebody what I actually did, or what I saw, or what I experienced. So I think there's beauty in that. My fear is that we're pathologizing normal life. The number of people who came into my office and said, hey, I've got depression, my dad just walked out on my mom. I'd say, hey, that's not depression, you're sad. And you're supposed to be sad, right? You saw somebody get shot and killed. That's supposed to be hard to digest.

• 2:13:05John Delony?

  Like, if you are able to just digest that and go to the supermarket, why should you go talk to them, right? So, we've pathologized any sort of uncomfortable feeling and made it a diagnostic, and made it a crisis, and made it something you gotta go talk to a professional about. And so it's a double edged sword. I love that people are talking about it, people are going to get the help they need, going to say, hey, I'm not okay. I think it's incumbent on the mental health community to not throw medicine at somebody. Medicine's important, man. I've had to take medicine for a season. It's not discounting that. It's not the solution to every problem right out of the gate all the time. It's asking somebody or being honest with somebody saying, "Yeah, your mom died."

• 2:13:48John Delony?

  It's called grief. And you're gonna be in a black hole for a season. And that's right and good. You need to have a community with you, right? You need to get up and you need to make sure you've got purpose in the day. You've got to do some of these things. You're not broken, man. You're supposed to be sad. It's living into some of those things, right? Your wife cheats on you. You're supposed to be devastated, man, because you went all in on this, right? It's supposed to hurt and be hard. And now let's excavate the scene and let's rebuild something new together. Or let's call it whatever the thing is, but let's don't pathologize life, right? But yes, I am grateful that people, especially in the circles I've run in, tough guys who are strong, who have seen stuff and done stuff,

• 2:14:30John Delony?

  are now able to say, "They've got permission to say, 'I'm not okay.'" And I think that's incredible.

• 2:14:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I do too. I didn't even think about the other side of that, though. I'm glad you brought that up.

• 2:14:40John Delony?

  It can be disempowering, too.

• 2:14:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, John, I know you're busy guy.

• 2:14:46John Delony?

  Nah, it's good.

• 2:14:47Shawn Ryan?

  But I just want to say thank you. Link in your book below in the description. And before you do go, what do you got coming up?

• 2:14:56John Delony?

  Oh, man, we're running and gunning. Just got the show. And we're about to hit the fall, so it's the live event season. So we'll be out on the road doing a lot of live events and doing all kind of wild stuff, man.

• 2:15:06Shawn Ryan?

  Nice. Well, I'll link everything below in the description.

• 2:15:09John Delony?

  And hey, thanks for feeding my addiction, man.

• 2:15:11Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, my pleasure. There's plenty more where that came from.

• 2:15:16John Delony?

  I need to come with some insulin. I don't know how you did it. These are like the best gummy bears. And I'm a connoisseur. They're so good. They're so good. Thank you.

• 2:15:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you.

• 2:15:25John Delony?

  Thank you for hospitality, brother. I'm grateful.

• 2:15:27Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure. Best of luck, man.

• 2:15:28John Delony?

  You too, brother. Thank you.

• 2:15:30Shawn Ryan?

  Cheers.

• 2:15:45Speaker 03

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