The Blueprint for Better Relationships & a Peaceful Life - Dr John Delony

Go see Chris live in America - https://chriswilliamson.live Dr. John Delony is a mental health expert, author, YouTuber, and speaker. How you we build a thriving relationship in the modern world? With constant distractions and endless options at our fingertips, trust between partners can feel harder than ever. So what does it really take to create a relationship rooted in trust, intimacy, and growth in today’s world? Expect to learn why you should maybe start sharing your spouse should have all of the codes to your phones, email accounts, and social media accounts, and why you should have theirs, why safety is important in a relationship and how it is built, the most common issues men have with women and the most issues women have with men, what men should know how women operate, if there is more to infidelity than just sex, the best values you should arrange a relationship and a marriage around, and much more… - 0:00 Should Your Spouse Know Your Passwords? 10:53 Why is Safety So Important in Relationships? 20:21 How Can We Solve for Peace? 28:42 Why Do Men Not Feel Good Enough? 32:44 How Can Women Make Their Partners Feel More Worthy? 35:33 Using Truth and Accountability to Build a New Relationship 39:16 What are the Biggest Female Dilemmas? 44:41 Can Infidelity Be Forgiven? 57:30 The Greatest Parenting Advice 01:01:16 Making Head vs Heart Decisions in a Relationship 01:04:30 How to Live Through Grief 01:09:11 Why Should We Live an Optimistic Life? 01:13:19 Do Kids Fix Everything? 01:25:47 How to Be a Better Version of Yourself 01:37:06 The Most Important Decision You’ll Ever Make is Your Spouse 01:47:20 Find Out More About John - Get up to $350 off the Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get $100 off the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  If you are married, your spouse should have all of the codes to your phones, email accounts and social media accounts, and you should have theirs, period. If your spouse isn't trustworthy or safe, you need to head directly into this challenge ASAP. You are worthy of safety and peace. If you're hiding things from your spouse, let today be your Independence Day from secrets, shame and fear. You are worth finally taking a full, deep breath. How did people respond to that?

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Not well, man. Let's go. Not well, dude. Not well at all. The idea that

• 0:33Speaker 01

  privacy and secrecy are the same thing. They've been conflated and I think it's madness. I think it's madness. If you will create a human with somebody, but you won't give them the code to your phone, I can't think of anything more insane. That's insane.

• 0:46Chris Williamson?

  There's a lot of dissonance going on there.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  It's not, dissonance is like a kind way to say it. It's madness. It's madness.

• 0:53Chris Williamson?

  That is wild.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, the number of folks that call into my show that are like, hey, I can't, I'm not gonna give her my phone. And it's like, why? Like, what is on that thing? It's like, well, it's mine. It's like, well, what is so, what are you hiding? Right? And I think every, every major pathology ends up, secrets fuel that, right? It's gasoline for pathology. And so, man, if you can't have a place in your life with the person you're ride or die with, that you can say, like, can you, can you check out my phone and get this picture off my phone? If that gives, if that causes you pause, or worse, if your partner won't do that, yeah, man, you gotta, you gotta have that conversation like now. Yeah. Why does that sound crazy? Does that sound crazy?

• 1:37Chris Williamson?

  I don't think so.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  I'm an old married man, so maybe it doesn't occur to me.

• 1:41Chris Williamson?

  It would have, it would have done to me 10 years ago, but that's because there was lots of shit on my phone that I didn't want my girlfriend to see.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  That's it, that's it.

• 1:46Chris Williamson?

  Whereas now, I don't care. I don't, there's nothing on there that I need to be worried about.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53Chris Williamson?

  So.

• 1:56Chris Williamson?

  I, I, what blows my mind is that conflation, that privacy issue, that privacy versus honesty.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03Chris Williamson?

  Thing.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  So people, so my wife's a coach and I work in mental health, right? So people are flying in all the time to stay at our house for a few days. And then, or we'll go out into the country where I've got a place and people will stay. I'll tell my wife, hey, I'm going out, someone's coming in. So that's private, but it's not, I'm not, I'm not saying like, hey, uh, right? I'm, I'm gonna go run an errand, right? And so, uh, and she, she has clients, right? But the idea that, I don't know, I think they're conflated and I think that's madness. I think it's madness.

• 2:34Chris Williamson?

  One interesting thing is

• 2:38Chris Williamson?

  the openness to give your partner your devices and email accounts and messages and social media and all that sort of stuff. Actually acts a little bit like a, a guardrail for your behavior as well. You know, like there's always, there's always stuff that's kind of

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:54Chris Williamson?

  ambiguous.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56Chris Williamson?

  You just, some chick replies to your Instagram story.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:59Chris Williamson?

  Or it's somebody from your past that is associated with an ex or party or whatever. Like it, you know, there's a million ways that this could go. Your behavior with that person can be the beginning of a, just a little bit, it's a little sort of fissure or a crack. I got a ton of stick for saying that, uh, if guys want to remain loyal to their partner, but they've struggled to keep their dick in their pants in the past, it's a bad idea for them to go out to a nightclub and drink with their friends until three in the morning. And the implication, it was, both people didn't like that. On one side, the guys didn't like it because it felt controlling and the girls didn't like it because it sounded like the guys were uh, only loyal due to a lack of options.

• 3:42Chris Williamson?

  I'm like, look, if you're a mild version of a guy that likes cocaine, but he's trying to quit, being in a house with no cocaine is a fucking wonderful solution to that. It's way easier to avoid temptation than it is to resist it.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:56Chris Williamson?

  And this, you can be the most loyal guy in the world, but if you're 15 beers deep and the wrong night with the wrong thing and you kind of didn't know what was going on. And this is a terminal, like an existential problem that you've found yourself in now. Just remove yourself from the situation.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:13Chris Williamson?

  It's way easier and it's kind of the same with this that if you and your partner have this level of honesty, transparency, openness, where you're just sharing each other's social media accounts back and forth. Can you just see if such and such has messaged me? It's like, what's this fucking group chat with like, it's just dick pics. It's like, yeah, I know, I know, like, fucking, it's the boys, like, as opposed to, oh, I hope she doesn't open that message on the thing.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Well, and it works in reverse, like, you establish trust. I've got friends, literally, that we grew up on the same street in Houston, in Texas. Same street since we were zero. She doesn't get into those text threads.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Like, she may see the thread pop up and she knows, or when I see something, if I grab her phone, it'll get directions somewhere. And text threads come from her college roommates. I don't open it, right? A, because I have full trust, but B, um, there's some, there's private things, but they're not secrets, right?

• 5:12Speaker 01

  And she could, and you know what I mean, but like.

• 5:15Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen that video? It's a girl driving in a car. She's in the passenger seat and it's captioned below, this guy's presumably saying, uh, can I check your text messages? And she goes, hands him the phone, goes, can I look at your social media accounts? Hands him the phone, says, can I look at your chat GPT history? And she throws the phone out the window.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  I, I, I think it's this, I want to have the benefits of a fully anchored partner, but I don't want to put all of myself on the table. I don't want to put both feet in that boat. And you can't have one without the other.

• 5:54Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain that a bit more deeply?

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I want the benefits of being fully seen and fully known and fully celebrated. And, but I don't want you to see all of me. And so it's a hedge. And if you've got past traumas, you got past relationship, you got burned, all that. The hedge makes sense, but you can't hope for all of this, right? It's like, I want to get in great shape, but I just don't want to mess with the diet part. Like, you can do that, you're not going to see the results you want. And we blame the other person for that. It's like we're going after the food companies now, going after the colors in my Skittles or like. I mean, man, we're going down rabbit holes, dude. At the end of the day, if I want to go fully into this, then I gotta go fully in. And if I don't, then I have to own that I didn't want to go fully into that.

• 6:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  You get what I'm saying? And there is some, there is blame and there's, there's pressuring. I get that. But you have to say, if I want the benefit of this, I gotta go all in, which means you gotta risk getting hurt bad, man.

• 6:53Chris Williamson?

  Because if you are not all in, there's always this thing in the

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Always.

• 6:59Chris Williamson?

  That said, well, you know, I wasn't rejected because that wasn't me.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  It's a haze, man.

• 7:04Chris Williamson?

  Just sixty percent me, ninety percent me, but ten percent was on my career. Ten percent was on my friends or ten percent was on that, that orbiting.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  That's not how it goes. It is ten percent is you weren't trustworthy or you were going to use this against me. And so I start to weaponize the same person I'm in the boat with, right? And when I've got a foot on the side here, I like to poke them. Yeah, just either get in or don't get in.

• 7:28Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think that.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  And it goes, it goes, by the way, you're nuts. If you meet somebody and you're like, hi, my name's John. Here's all my stuff. That makes you psychotic, right? But once you cross those lines and say, hey, this is for real. We're going to make a run at this or we're all in or you're standing at the

• 7:43Chris Williamson?

  Also, you can be all in at, at varying levels, right? You can

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 7:48Chris Williamson?

  At the, at the very first date, it's like, there is a appropriate level of disclosure at each different stage.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:55Chris Williamson?

  But you can max out that disclosure as you go along as opposed to purposefully tampering that down.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:00Chris Williamson?

  So, yeah, I think that there's people who are all in in relationships and I think there's people who aren't. And the people who aren't should get together and the people who are should get together. And the problems occur when one group dates the other.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  That's fantastic, huh?

• 8:13Chris Williamson?

  You think?

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the Love Island, right? Those who can't, like just go, go, you all stay there.

• 8:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. You know I was on Love Island, right?

• 8:21Speaker 01

  No, no, you weren't really?

• 8:23Chris Williamson?

  I was the first person through the doors of season one.

• 8:27Chris Williamson?

  You didn't know this?

• 8:27Speaker 01

  No.

• 8:28Chris Williamson?

  I thought that's where you got the joke from.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 8:29Chris Williamson?

  I was the first.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  I wish I was that savvy.

• 8:31Chris Williamson?

  The first person through the doors of season one.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Did you win?

• 8:33Chris Williamson?

  No, no, I didn't.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  How do you win? I've never even seen an episode.

• 8:37Chris Williamson?

  Uh, you, it's like a vote thing toward the end. It's that popularity contest, public popularity contest toward the end of each couple.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Is it like Big Brother?

• 8:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, basically. It's couple Big Brother.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 8:47Chris Williamson?

  And 24 hours a day, surveilled by cameras and stuff. That was a, fuck it, that was a real, that was 10 years ago. 10 years ago this summer, I was on.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  That would have been a way better joke if I had known that.

• 8:57Chris Williamson?

  Well, you doubled up.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Well, there we go. Edit this part out.

• 9:01Chris Williamson?

  You're right, because the, even within Love Island, you see that there's people in there who are a very small cohort of people, and they usually don't stay very long, that are actually in there trying to find a life partner.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Trying to find a first.

• 9:12Chris Williamson?

  And then the rest of them are just trying to play the game. So I think this would be a great analysis for somebody to do if someone that's watching that's got too much time on their hands. If you can

• 9:23Chris Williamson?

  take every couple that finished the show of Love Island, UK and US, and then track how long, either how long they stayed together or just basically what the attrition rate is. I guess the attrition rate for couples that finished Love Island in a couple is over 95%. I think that, like, maybe one in 20 couples, or less, probably, probably less than 95, like, would have been able to stick together, so.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Are there any that are still together from those original seasons?

• 9:55Chris Williamson?

  I, I literally can't think of any. Tommy Fury and Molly May were the two, like, with the, the big.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Tommy Fury, the boxer?

• 10:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, he, he was on as well. It's an illustrious history in the UK. But they, they separated, but now they're back together.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:09Chris Williamson?

  So, I mean, hardly a gold standard relationship. Had a kid, kids like 18 months old, separated, got back together, public break, all this bullshit. So, uh, but yeah, I, I really think.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  I need to watch more TV, man.

• 10:23Chris Williamson?

  There's two cohorts of people. There's people who are all in in relationships and those that aren't. And the problem occurs when one group dates the other.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  If you're dating somebody, or if you're, or married to somebody, and they won't show you their phone, I would head straight to a therapist's office. Because that, to me, is a huge sign. That's a huge sign. That there's some, or maybe not to a therapist's office, but at least sit at a table across from each other and say, we gotta put this issue on the table. Because there's something going on there that that person has to feel safe with you.

• 10:54Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about safety. What's it mean? Why is it important?

• 10:59Speaker 01

  I don't think you can have a relationship without

• 11:02Speaker 01

  safety and without trust. But I think safety says, I can say what I want, put that on the table, and you'll be curious about it. You won't hurt me with it. Or it means I can say I'm interested in. And it it basically says, I can be me and you won't weaponize me against me.

• 11:17Chris Williamson?

  Give me an example.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  I'm a physician and I I'm not, but let's say I was a physician. And my wife gets accustomed to a life. We're living a life as a as a doctor's house. And I increasingly get frustrated with the HMO system. And I

• 11:39Speaker 01

  am taking yoga on the weekends. And I'm like, man, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna be a yoga instructor. And one day I come home and say, I think I want to quit medicine and I want to do yoga. Right? Safety would say, that person will instantly say, you know what that's gonna cost me? And somebody who is safe would say, tell me more about that. And we might get to a place where I need to go see somebody. I'm not doing well. I don't like the system. I want to start thinking about their careers, but at least it would be met with curiosity, not with instant, I'm gonna weaponize this against you. You know what I'm saying? That may be a bad analogy, but it is taking the things that you want. And I'll even go as far, I don't like to say this in relationships. So I'm gonna say the things I need and I'm not gonna use that against you.

• 12:23Chris Williamson?

  Right?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Um, one of the things we talked about last, like one of the things when I'm on the road, I just like my wife to call every once in a while. We just call.

• 12:31Chris Williamson?

  She did last night. This was the funniest thing. So we sat at we so fucking funny dude. We sat at dinner and your phone goes and you look and it was your, did you red button her? Or did you just let it ring out?

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, cause she knows I don't answer my phone when I'm at a meal with friends.

• 12:46Chris Williamson?

  You actually red buttoned her?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  What does that mean?

• 12:47Chris Williamson?

  Like you you canceled the call or did you just let it ring out?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't remember.

• 12:51Chris Williamson?

  I can't remember either. Anyway.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  I have a thing about, I try not to touch my phone when I'm at dinner.

• 12:54Chris Williamson?

  Your phone rings. You see that it's your wife. This is something that you've asked her to do because you like to know that she is thinking about you to the point where she'll ring you.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:05Chris Williamson?

  You watched, saw it come up. And then just went back to talking. I thought it was the funniest thing.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Like I called her right when I got into the car, but it's, but she doesn't say, when I get home. How dare you ask me to call you? All you ever want me to do is to reach out. She knows, hey, that's one way that my husband likes to feel loved when he's on the road. Like, cause he gets lost in the sea of travel and whatever. And she doesn't weaponize that against me, however small that might be, right?

• 13:35Chris Williamson?

  Why is safety so important?

• 13:38Speaker 01

  I mean, that's Maslow's one oh one, dude. You can't, you can't fully exhale until you're safe. Whether you're safe physically, whether you're safe professionally, whether you're safe relationally, you can't exhale. I think it's a core human need.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Do you agree with that or no?

• 13:53Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  I wish I could be more sophisticated. I think that's wired into like small tribes of people. Like I have to know my tribes with me. If your tribe gets up and leaves and you wake up next morning and they're gone, you know, you're not going to live, right? I think that's wired into us at our core, core, core.

• 14:11Chris Williamson?

  How do you think it's built in a relationship? What's safety?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  It's practiced. It's practiced from the, the moment I meet you. Will you open the door for me? Are you going to pick up the bill? Are you going to respond when I text back? If I say, hey, I don't like that, are you going to? And the waiter comes and says, no, we're good, right? It's, it's, it's built piece by piece by piece. Or, um, hey, text me when you get home. You know, texts like that's, that's practicing safety or not practicing safety. And that can be get a conversation. Hey, you didn't text me last time you got home.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  I can't stand feeling like I'm confined. Like I can't stand, that's when you get to have a conversation about honesty and integrity. I don't like feeling like I have a chore when I get done meeting with somebody.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  I really like when somebody calls. We can have that conversation.

• 14:59Chris Williamson?

  You've got something intention which you need to navigate.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. Otherwise it becomes, was that, uh, Neil Postman quote? If I don't say anything.

• 15:07Chris Williamson?

  Oh, unspoken expectations of premeditated resentment.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  That's right. If I don't say anything and I feel like I, I feel like I got a chore every time I leave, then I'm gonna start resenting you, right?

• 15:16Chris Williamson?

  So does compatibility in one way between two people look a lot like? What you need to feel safe and what I am prepared to do in a relationship work well together. Because you can imagine a world in which getting a text, good night is a really important part. When you're apart to make you feel good. That's something you want for the other person that feels massively constricting. And if you just build lots of these things up over time, one person really wants a thing. The other person cannot deliver that without it feeling like a huge sacrifice on their part. Is that what incompatibility is or compatibility?

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I I still like to distill it down to a choice. Right? Like I get to choose to be inconvenienced and I'm gonna text you, right? Or I like to choo- I I get to choose. If if it's that big of a deal, I need to go look in the mirror and ask myself, why do I feel so constricted? When this person says, hey, will you just check in? Why do I feel s- I would need to sit down with my wife if she's like, I just can't call you at nine o'clock. She goes to bed real early, like, I just can't call you. Like, we would need to have that conversation, right? Because she would be choosing to not call. But yeah, that is compat- that's compatibility versus incompatibility. I like that. It is, I'm putting down what I want. Will you choose to do this or not do this?

• 16:31Chris Williamson?

  I mean, the super compatibility would be something like, this is something that I really want. And the other person going, I love to give that. I absolutely love to give that as opposed to.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, but but that but that switches, right? It um. I think you have to be careful with the initial feeling of that. Because you hear about that all the time, like, we love to do this when we were dating. And now that we're married, you don't love to do that anymore. So I think it's continually not saying what I want to do or what I really feel like I I it's, will I serve you?

• 17:03Chris Williamson?

  That's true. I understand, but there is a degree of how heavy is the weight for somebody to make that choice?

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 17:09Chris Williamson?

  It's way easier for somebody to be like flying with a tailwind.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:13Chris Williamson?

  Than flying into a headwind.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:15Chris Williamson?

  With this stuff.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely. But I want I want the person on the other end of that to own own that, not to blame.

• 17:20Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Right?

• 17:21Chris Williamson?

  What's the difference there? Let's say that you've got two people who have, uh, one person really wants a thing, the other person really struggles to deliver it without it being a super heavy weight that they have to pick up. It's just not their love language or whatever it might be. How does that?

• 17:35Speaker 01

  I think the, I think the, the, the current cultural narrative is everything relationally that makes me uncomfortable, I have to blame you for it, for needing this or wanting this. And all I want people to do is to say, in this relationship, I don't want to. I don't, I don't feel safe doing it. I don't like doing it. I don't want to do it. And I want people to own that instead of lobbing their grenade over the fence.

• 17:57Chris Williamson?

  What would lobbing the grenade over the fence be?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Coming up with sophisticated, um, dating dynamic articles and posting them in the Times. That might be one, right? Um, it might be running you down, weaponizing it against you, right? You always, you always need, need me to call. You always need me to call. You always need me to call. Instead of saying, I get so tired at night. I put the kids to bed. I just crash. Like I, I'm choosing that. And then we need to have that hard conversation, right? And then I can go. She loves me. She's falling asleep at nine o'clock. She's running the whole house with me on the road. I'm a big boy. I'll be all right.

• 18:28Chris Williamson?

  It's another version of trust.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 18:31Chris Williamson?

  It's another part of, I don't have these weird little secrets.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 18:35Chris Williamson?

  These bits of me that I feel shame around. I'm not prepared to show you. I'm not prepared. I don't feel sufficiently safe for me to be able to say, I get tired after I put the kids to bed.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  That's it. That's it. But that's a you. That's me. That's I. I'm putting that on the table versus I'm going to perpetually blame everybody else for my discomfort. I'm going to say, I don't like this. I don't feel comfortable with this. Or I've got all these other things and I crash. You can choose to interpret that as I don't love you, but I do. I really do. And then I get to be the big boy on the other side of the table and decide what I want to do with those feelings. But it's just about taking ownership of it, right?

• 19:08Chris Williamson?

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• 19:52Chris Williamson?

  Which is why Eight Sleep has been clinically proven to give you up to one hour more of quality sleep every night. And if you're still on the fence, there are 30 day sleep trials. So you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. And if you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to $350 off the Pod 5 by going to the link in the description below, by heading to eightsleep.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's e-i-g-h-t sleep.com/modernd wisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. What are some of the powerful but non-obvious ways that safety gets degraded?

• 20:32Speaker 01

  I think, I think in two ways. One, if somebody has the courage to put that on the table and the other person hears it and metabolizes it, and then I'm going to say chooses to not, it gets degraded in that way. And I think it gets degraded in big ways. Like you, you sleep with somebody else, but it gets degraded often little by little by little by little. Or the other way it gets degraded is you don't say anything. And, right, you, your partner comes down on their phone all the time, all the time, all the time. Well, they set it down and then you take the phones and you put them away. Right? And then they go get it. Well, you didn't say, hey, it bugs me when you walk in and you're still, you're still carrying your work day on the phone or you're still just swipe them when you walk in the door. Instead of saying that and then dealing with what happens

• 21:16Speaker 01

  when you put that on the table, you try to act your way to it, right? And it goes back to that resentment part. But trust is, I don't trust myself with you or I don't trust, I'm not safe enough to put this on the table or you're going to take this and weaponize it or you're just going to disregard it. Just messy.

• 21:33Chris Williamson?

  Is this related to solving for peace?

• 21:35Speaker 01

  That's, yeah. I, I don't want to go to bed at night knowing I didn't say a thing. And I need to go to bed at night knowing I said that thing with somebody who wasn't going to weaponize it against me.

• 21:49Chris Williamson?

  Dig into the

• 21:50Speaker 01

  That's just basic honor and dignity, right?

• 21:54Chris Williamson?

  Dig into the solving for peace thing for me.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  It's it's it's uh it's probably I'm probably pathological with it. Cause my my whole my whole job is talking with like

• 22:04Chris Williamson?

  Highly disregulated people.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Well, it's that, but it's like, hey, man, I've got seven. This may be you, I don't know. I've got um it's it's the Instagrammification of like finance stuff. I've got seventeen like passive income properties that are leveraged one hundred and forty percent, right? And I've got this and I've got this and I'm moving this around. And let me put it this way, here's one. I get so much grief for paying off, I think my mortgage was three point O, maybe. Dude, I just got abused online. What an idiot. You don't know how to do math. Like you're such a fool, right? Cause you could have put that in a basic high yield savings account. And it's like, dude, I I it's a sleep tax. That's what I call it.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Like I put my head on my pillow, knowing nobody can take my house away. And we don't have a psychology for that in this culture. It's all about amplification and it's all on paper money. Versus they can't take your house, dude. And it just

• 23:04Chris Williamson?

  Different people will have different priorities.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Of course, yeah, yeah. And for for me, it was that, right?

• 23:09Chris Williamson?

  Of course, if you grew up, it didn't even need to be some fucking childhood ancestral trauma. Simply, I have I have a story in my mind from somewhere. That's it. Maybe outside and maybe inside that I really want. I know that my dad, my my mom and dad paid the house off. Maybe in the mid the mid fifties. And I I don't think I've ever seen my dad as proud of something. Where he said, mortgage free.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  It's mine.

• 23:35Chris Williamson?

  Totally mortgage free. And they there was no expedited bullshit, like you're paying it off at forty times the pace that you're supposed to normally. This was chugging away on a twenty five year mortgage.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Chipping.

• 23:48Chris Williamson?

  Some shit like that. And then they get to the end of it and yeah.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  It's it's solving for peace relationally, solving for peace financially, solving for for peace professionally, right? Like, man, the the number of folks I work with that are just They're just melting. And I always want to ask like, for what, man? Like, what are you for what? Like, well, you know, like, like, most, I tried to be cute with Jordan Peterson one time. I was like, nobody can answer that question for what? And he clapped back in the right way. He was, he said, of course, that's the hardest question to answer. It's like, for what? What do you want? And, yeah, I think it took me, it's taken me a long time to get there. But for me and my house, man, I want peace. And we'll go from there.

• 24:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I think that a good part of this is explained by this wonderful quote I had. So I had Adam Lane Smith on, have you seen him?

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I know Adam.

• 24:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so Adam, I think, would be another one for the

• 24:43Speaker 01

  The attachment guy.

• 24:44Chris Williamson?

  Round, round table, fucking, super crazy bullshit stuff. He just had this wonderful fucking insight around complexity. So he said that your life is, your issue in life is not that it's too busy, but that it's too complex. Your system is built for hard work, not for complexity. And his argument is that you can deal with any workload as long as it's sufficiently simple and linear enough. And I kind of get the sense with the peace versus war thing, too, that if there is a really, really heavy weight, but there's just one of them or two of them, probably super easy. That's why you got two hands. Thank you.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Or if there's a purpose for it, right? You'll carry it forever if there's a purpose for it. But complexity, yeah, that's still, Taleb was somebody, I told you, I got obsessed with Taleb when it came to complex systems. And instead of dealing with reality, we just makes it more complex. We make it more complex and we duct tape and nail another, you know, we, we jack up this side and shove a brick under it. And it just means that when the thing does fall, which all complex systems do, it, it will just have fall, higher to fall, right?

• 25:57Chris Williamson?

  I've got a good story about this. So I ruptured my Achilles.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Ah, no.

• 26:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, Lee. I

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Long did it put you out?

• 26:05Chris Williamson?

  Full 12 months. That was actually five years ago. That's interesting. I did Love Island 10 years ago, and the halfway point between then and now to the day was the day that I ruptured my Achilles. So it's an interesting arc. Playing cricket, rupture my Achilles, and this weekend, I didn't think, you know, this is during COVID. It was a brief interlude where the number had come down and everyone was able to go outside and I was playing sport. I go into the hospital, they do the diagnosis on it. They say, you need to come back in 13 days. We're going to open you up and stitch you back together. By the way, there's some painkillers. Go fuck off. I'd driven my car to the cricket ground. After that, I needed to go and collect a TV that I'd ordered to the supermarket so that I could

• 26:49Chris Williamson?

  put it in the new rental property I'd just brought, ready for the Ikea furniture builder guy to come in the next morning, open this stuff up, because on the Monday, it was the viewing day, it was the first day of photos, and then people were moving in three days later. And if I didn't, this huge cathedral-sized deck of cards that I'd built. And one thing, you remember when the Ever Given, you know, that huge Suez Mac-sized tanker got stuck in the Suez Canal? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was there for six days or something, and the entire global supply chain is so finely tuned that one tanker for six days in one canal is able to ruin the entire, billions and billions

• 27:34Chris Williamson?

  of dollars of, they're probably still dealing with the repercussions of that in small ways now, four years later. That was what my life was like. And that's what my life is always, always like. I always think if one thing, if one spanner gets thrown in the works, there is no wiggle room in the system. And in some ways, that allows you to maximize your time, and that's really, it's thrilling. That's it. Fucking squeezing everything out. We're addicts. We're addicts to thrill. Yes. But when shit comes and like you, fuck, I didn't, I left foot, as I had an automatic car, thankfully, it was my right foot that went. I left foot drove home. From the fucking hospital.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Which put everybody on the road at risk, right?

• 28:17Chris Williamson?

  Correct, correct, correct, correct. Yeah, wild.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  There's a, there's a, I believe there is a direct link between the rise in anxiousness and margin.

• 28:27Chris Williamson?

  And?

• 28:28Speaker 01

  A lack of margin.

• 28:29Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Financial margin, relational margin, home margin. But we have such an allergy to boredom. We have such an allergy to

• 28:38Speaker 01

  peace.

• 28:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  It's, it's, yeah, it's an allergy.

• 28:42Chris Williamson?

  What are the most common issues that men call you about? Like, what do you wish more women knew about how men operated?

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Man, if I had to summarize the, the male dilemma, it's

• 28:58Speaker 01

  like, what did, what did, what did I do? And why don't people like me? From my elementary school teachers to my parents, to my doctors, to my schools, to my dating prospects, to my, my collegiate education, to my employers, like to the, to the media at large. Like, what did I?

• 29:20Speaker 01

  I don't know why everybody doesn't like me. That's probably the most common question I get. Why doesn't my wife like me? What is it about me that's so inherently wrong?

• 29:31Speaker 01

  And there's a litany of, of reasons why. You don't do this. You're to this. You fill in the blank, but

• 29:39Speaker 01

  that's the ultimate question is, why don't people like me?

• 29:41Chris Williamson?

  Belonging?

• 29:44Speaker 01

  No, it's worth, man. It's worth. It's that question of worth. I don't know many men, and I don't, I don't live in the red pill sphere, right? Or the whatever. But like, I don't know many men who don't want to be a net positive. I just don't know them. They just get the message at a very early age, hey, quit wiggling in class or something wrong with your brain. Hey, don't say that so loud. Hey, don't be so aggressive. Don't be so running around. Don't be so, don't be so you. And ultimately, that message, it becomes part of your nervous system, which you walk into every situation like, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a burden on this room. I'm a burden on this family. I'm a burden on this workplace. I'm a burden on this culture. And

• 30:30Speaker 01

  We're at, we're at the tail end of a world where men can say, okay, I'll just, I'll opt out. And then now we're blaming you for opting out, right?

• 30:39Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  And so

• 30:42Speaker 01

  it, it's, it's a privilege to be able to opt out that that's quickly coming to an end. But yeah, there's this idea that um, I don't want to cause everybody around me all this pain. I'll just step out and that's not, that's not a good solution either.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  But, but think about that worth question. I'm not worth going to the gym. I'm not worth going to see a therapist. I'm not worth going back to school to get more education and get a new job. I'm not worth any of these other, the efforts it's gonna take to um, go do something better, to go be something different. I'll just be quiet.

• 31:17Chris Williamson?

  No one try.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Why, why would I try? I'm not even worth the effort. And every time I, I I think many domesticated men, I don't know if you can say that. Their homes are a failure factory, right? I want to help. Well, that's not how you do that. You need to do it like this and you need to do it like that. I remember a conversation with my wife, like about helping. And it occurred to me, oh, here's the, the, the underlying problem is I sleep just fine with a dish, with a, with a sink full of dishes.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Like I'll do the dishes when we're all out of dishes. And so she can count, like I did the dishes five times this week. You did them once. And then she can rightfully say, I'm doing so much more work around here. And I could say, oh, I didn't know that. It didn't occur to me that work needed to be done. So we have to do the alignment stuff up, up front. But if I'm walking around all the time, I can feel when I'm a burden in my house, when I'm in the way, right? And then I start to imagine them in the way everywhere. And so if we're looking at masculinity as an illness, or if we're looking at men's problems as an illness, then at least be compassionate enough to treat it that way. Right? You and I were talking last night, like um, men won't share their emotions. Now there's a whole new thing, like men are too emotional. We're the only ones who have to care.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Like at some point, man, people just start to say, I'm out, I'm out. And it's, that will be the, that would be not a good result.

• 32:44Chris Williamson?

  What would your advice be to women on how they can make their partners feel more worthy?

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Man, it's a trope as old as time, but it's Brene Brown that says, what you go looking for in the world, you're sure to find. And I love the way she says that. Find one thing on a day to day basis. Dude, I made an app for that. Just a day to day practice. Find one thing that you can see. Like, hey, I really see how hard you're working last night. Thank you for that. Or you came to bed at 10 instead of 2 a.m. Like, man, you feel lighter today. Like, find one thing, begin to practice admiration, even if you gotta search for it, man. But it begins to send a message. I like you. I like you. Sometimes it's as gentle as just putting your hand on somebody's arm, right? When you're driving, instead

• 33:38Speaker 01

  of, hey, look, there's a, there's a red light. Look out, stop, slow down, we gotta go left. Why aren't you going left? Turn the radio down. Just a gentle, like, man, or a hand behind your neck, man. Just something that says, I'm glad you're here. I think we overdramatized. It's so small. It can be so small. Or thinking, that's not how I would have emptied the dishwasher, but he's a good man. You know what I mean? Or I can see, thank you for that. Or that's not where the drying rack goes, or that's not how you pack those kids lunches, or at this particular school, that school's nut free and this one's not, and you put the granola bar in there. Man, I'm so glad he's making lunches. And then when I'm, I've

• 34:21Speaker 01

  exhaled, I can say, quick reminder. You know what I mean? But it's just, I don't know. It's just, it's just saying, hey, I appreciate you. I appreciate you. And then having the courage to say, here's, here's a better way, or here's another way.

• 34:38Chris Williamson?

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• 35:20Chris Williamson?

  hundred dollars off, meaning it's only 400 bucks to get the exact same blood panel that I use. Just go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com/ModernWisdom. That's functionhealth.com/ModernWisdom. If you want to go on an adventure, if you want all of the things in your life to be fixed, just start telling the truth. And every time that I end up having a conversation about like relating within a couple, it just comes back to that.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think there's a, there's another arc to it. I have to see you. And I can't see you through the lens that is my life. And I think true relationship is I'm taking off the glasses that I see the world and I'm going to see you. And then I'm, that's going to allow me to practice knowing you. And if you'll, if you will see and know that person and then tell the truth, because I think you can weaponize truth also. Like I feel, I feel you are. Um, telling the truth is, let's just get there culturally. That'd be awesome, right? If we could just be honest with each other. But relationally, I have to see.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Not the wet towels on the floor. I have to see her. And then I have to know her and know she did not put those towels there as a stab to the patriarchy. Like what must have her day been like? I'm pick up those towels. You know what I mean? Cause if you came and stayed at my house for two weeks and you left towels on the floor, I just pick them up because we're friends. Like I'll just pick them up and I bet, God, Chris, do pick up towels. But because she's my romantic partner, it has to be this big existential dramatic.

• 36:51Chris Williamson?

  How much of it's compounding as well? That this is building up over time? This is the towels.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're right. It goes back to telling the truth.

• 36:58Chris Williamson?

  Issues last week, the thing the week before and it's unspoken expectations.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  And also just pick up the towels, man. You know what I mean?

• 37:06Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so question on that. This sounds great, but I think a lot of people, especially that are in longer term relationships will feel like this sounds wonderful when you're setting the tone. Three months in or six months in.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  You're always setting the tone.

• 37:23Chris Williamson?

  But how do you have some sort of a breakwater if you've got a mountain sized amount of unspoken expectations? Words that haven't been said, premeditated resentments that you need to somehow get out. And you go, okay, you had this conversation with your wife. This is a breakwater. We need to move forward, build something.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  This marriage is over.

• 37:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  You want to build a new one? Yeah.

• 37:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What does that look like? Someone says, I feel like this is the sort of relationship that I want inside of the relationship that I'm in, but it's not the relationship we have. And there is a big backlog of stuff that neither of us have said to each other.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:06Chris Williamson?

  How does someone navigate that?

• 38:07Speaker 01

  They, I think you start by writing down all the I's, all the stuff that I brought to that mountain. Cause it's really easy to go to that mountain and be like, you've been doing this, you've been doing this. I'm going to sit down and say, I have become a person that I don't like inside of my own marriage, inside of my own long-term relationship. And I want to work with you to build something new. And then you have to hope so that they're willing to put their stuff on the table too. Instead of weaponizing when you just put on the table. That's a, that's a tough, scary place to be. But I think the reality is.

• 38:37Chris Williamson?

  Is they're gonna say, well, you remember what you told me that you did this thing? Like, that's a thing, right?

• 38:42Speaker 01

  But here's the thing, that marriage is over. That relationship's over. When you get that mountain backlog, when you have that moment, it has, we have to, it has to be different. That thing's got a period at the end of it. And so you may let it run out of gas until the, the volcano explodes. It's gonna explode, right? So I can do it now with I and you can weaponize the I and then we're gonna end up in a, in a divorce court somewhere. Or we can just let it do its thing. But it's, it's, it's there now. And so you might as well be a person of integrity while the thing's happening.

• 39:16Chris Williamson?

  What about the opposite? What should men know about how women operate? What are the things that women are calling in and saying to you most frequently?

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Some of my women colleagues disagree with me on this.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  And so I'll caveat this with that, but I think women were sold to bill of goods also. And the question that pops into my head is, why won't he change? But I think the deeper question is, I did all of these things that they said. And why don't I feel better about me or my world or my, the life I've constructed for myself?

• 40:05Chris Williamson?

  And what are the most common things that they have done that have not borne?

• 40:09Speaker 01

  I waited this many years to have kids. I waited till I was financially secure. I waited till I had a career. I waited until I was on my own two feet. I got this level of success. I, or the opposite, I went all in on this relationship at a very young age. I went fully all in.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  I think the meta message has been if you will do these things or the trad wife thing, or the full CEO thing, whichever one it is, that somehow you're going to feel complete on the other end of this deal. And that feeling is elusive. It just keeps moving. And so there's a, there's a partner in your life and it's constantly, you just need to, you just need to, you just need to. But really the thing is I'm desperately seeking this feeling that this is going to be okay. This rooted sense of anchored in. And it's, it's a constant, constant, constant. The other one is honestly is, are all men scumbags? Is every man out cheating? Is every man filling up his life with video games and pornography? Is every man? And it's been, it's, it's harder and harder to defend when you look at the data.

• 41:13Chris Williamson?

  And

• 41:14Speaker 01

  But it's, it's, it's a, it's a recursive problem, right? I don't feel like I have any worth. My home is a failure factory.

• 41:21Chris Williamson?

  Porn and video games don't reject me.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  That's, I'm just gonna, yeah. Then I am going to take the exit ramp where I don't bother anybody and I'll just burn a hole in my head.

• 41:29Chris Williamson?

  Dude, that sucks. It sucks to hear and it must be rough to, the least popular opinion for a guy to give on the internet with a mostly male audience is it must be tough for a woman to navigate dating at the moment because guys see all of the ways that it's way easier for women than it is for men.

• 41:46Chris Williamson?

  But the thing that I would say to guys that this is a huge, huge like blue ocean for them for is

• 41:56Chris Williamson?

  You have somebody that's been in counselling for like fucking forever and does a call in show with millions and millions of people that watch it. And this is one of the biggest problems. Look at how low the bar is.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Dude, I tell my son that he's fifteen.

• 42:08Chris Williamson?

  Look at how low the bar is.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  I tell him all the time, you can, you, you, you can have it all.

• 42:14Chris Williamson?

  It really is not. I get it. You watch enough like content on YouTube and you can think that because you're five, six, or because you're not earning six figures or because you're whatever. Hey, that's, those are some real things and there's some challenges out there. But Jesus fuck, like how many women are calling in and saying, you know what the problem is? These guys just don't earn enough. These guys just don't do this, that and the other. It's like, I don't know if he's going to.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  I've gotten that question zero times.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  There's just too many short men out there. I've never got that.

• 42:46Chris Williamson?

  To caveat this, how many women do you think are calling in and saying, uh,

• 42:53Chris Williamson?

  this guy doesn't commit or isn't romantic enough or isn't whatever, as a way to hide the more base, shallow, he's not tall enough, he doesn't earn enough.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe. And I've been called naive before. I like to just take people at their word. Like if you're calling in and we can get to, hey, that's not why you're really calling, but um, yeah, man, I like to just, maybe, maybe. Yeah, maybe. And I do get like, hey, my husband's gained a hundred and fifty pounds over the last few years. But as you dig into that, it's almost always, I'm watching my husband die in front of me. Right? And that's, that's usually the question. Like, how do I keep my, I'm watching him die and I can't be a part of this anymore. And yes, he's not attractive anymore. And yes, he walks around his waddy tidies and he's, it's like, it's not a pretty sight. But the deeper question is, I'm watching, I'm becoming someone I don't want to be because that guy at work thinks my jokes are hilarious.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  And I'm starting to think up jokes all day so that maybe that guy at work, I'm becoming somebody I don't want to be because I'm watching the person I love wither away underneath me and I don't, I don't know how to prop them up.

• 43:57Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 44:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the bar is set so fucking low, dude.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  It is.

• 44:04Chris Williamson?

  It's.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  But, but you know what? I think that's an important thing. The dating apps have screwed up everything. Like, no question about that. It's a train wreck. But personally, I've never had somebody call and say, there's just too many short men out there. I've not had anybody call and say, this person doesn't make this much money.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  I haven't, I haven't got that call. And maybe it's, maybe it's veiled and, and people are being, whatever.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  But most of the time it's, I'm with somebody. Why won't they? Can they just stop cheating? Can they just plug back in?

• 44:39Speaker 01

  How do I let them know that they're worth something?

• 44:42Chris Williamson?

  I speak to so many people about when or how they should forgive their partner after an affair.

• 44:48Chris Williamson?

  Is that even a question that has an answer?

• 44:53Speaker 01

  You know, this has come up a ton recently.

• 44:57Chris Williamson?

  Endemic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love watching your show.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  But, but I tell you what, man, the, the place I always have people start is you gotta forgive yourself.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Because almost every time, either they'd created a world where they were so blindsided that there was a part of them way down that knew, I don't know everything going on in this house. Or it's the opposite. I didn't listen to my gut. And I knew they were spending too much time with so and so. I knew they were hiding their phone. I knew that these, I had a sense that. And most people that experience infidelity go through a period of, I can't trust myself. I can't, because I ignored myself or I didn't even see it coming. And so before you start trying to offer, before you start trying to forgive somebody else, you have to forgive yourself.

• 45:41Chris Williamson?

  That's a huge hurdle to get over.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  It's a massive hurdle.

• 45:45Chris Williamson?

  Because you've got to forgive two people.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  The sidewalk you walk on no longer exists.

• 45:49Chris Williamson?

  There's only two people in this relationship and you have to forgive both of them.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:52Chris Williamson?

  And you have to forgive, forgive yourself first.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  You gotta start with you first.

• 45:54Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 45:55Speaker 01

  And it's not as though you did anything wrong. Like, that's not what the forgiveness is, but forgiveness is about reestablishing trust. I gotta learn to trust myself again. And then I gotta ask myself, okay, what must be true for me to reestablish trust with you? And that's a tough, that's a tough thing. Because then you have to ask, what if, what if he or she says no?

• 46:14Speaker 01

  And that's a scary proposition to find yourself. But I've also seen people experience infidelity and go on to have, build something amazing and new. And it's just, are y'all willing to put in the work?

• 46:25Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's the proportion of that?

• 46:27Speaker 01

  I don't know. I honestly don't know because I don't know.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Then it's, uh, gosh, this is a horrific example that just popped into my mind.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  I remember when my wife and I, when she had our first miscarriage, I found myself part of a secret club that I didn't know existed. People came out of the woodwork to be like, yeah, us too, us too, us too. And so infidelity is often worked the same way. That I don't know how much of it goes unreported.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  They wouldn't fill out a survey or wouldn't, you know?

• 47:01Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the ways that you see infidelity showing up that isn't just about sex?

• 47:08Chris Williamson?

  You've got a broader definition of infidelity than most people, I think.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  I do, yeah. I

• 47:16Speaker 01

  it's the place where you go to hide from the life that you've co-created with somebody. So I think you can cheat on somebody with money. I think you can cheat on somebody with a golf course. I think you can cheat on with somebody with work. It'd be, who's your mistress? All right. Where are you putting your passion and your time and your efforts and your energy? And if your work isn't a means to an end that supports this thing you're co-creating with somebody else, as far as I'm concerned, that's infidelity. If I hide from my family or from my romantic partner on a golf course or on a fishing boat, that's infidelity. I am, I am taking my vitality and I'm channeling it elsewhere to avoid this. And that's different. Like, I like to go to punk rock shows, dude. I like to, like, I don't know. I live over in the comedy club by my house.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  I have passion about those things, but I'm not hiding from my family. They're hobbies. They're, they're, they enrich me so that every year, um, where I work, they, they throw a big battle of the bands. It's in Nashville. Like, everybody goes to Nashville to make it in the music industry. Then they all have to get real jobs at some point. So every year they, they throw a big battle of the bands. One year I had a book coming out. I was on the road and so I was going to skip it. And my wife said this, she said, I get a better version of you when you're playing music with your friends. And so it's not a matter of hiding, not doing hobbies, not, not that. But if you're hiding from, if you're numbing out with.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  I think infidelity is easily distilled down into intercourse with somebody else. And I think that's too narrow of a view.

• 48:46Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  It's escape.

• 48:50Chris Williamson?

  What about financial infidelity?

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the way people, that's the way people control their, their partners in a major way. Or the way they, they hide money. Um, yeah, it's devastating.

• 49:03Chris Williamson?

  How common is that?

• 49:04Speaker 01

  No, it's extremely common. But it goes back to the thing you asked me at the very beginning, like, uh, with, if I want to share your codes. Man, the, the other way I get beat up on the internet all the time by the, by the internet warriors is saying, dude, if you're married, share a checking account. Like that just.

• 49:21Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen the difference in divorce rate between couples that do and don't share a savings account?

• 49:27Speaker 01

  It's madness.

• 49:27Chris Williamson?

  It's, I think it's like multiples of likelihood difference.

• 49:34Chris Williamson?

  And there'll be some selection effect there.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Of course, of course, of course. But, but seriously, again, going back, if I don't, if, we will share DNA. But we won't share.

• 49:45Chris Williamson?

  Bank account or our social media.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  You make sixty five grand and I make seventy five grand. We won't share that. And we have to say like, well, that's mine.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Again, it goes all the way back to trust and safety.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  And if I feel like I have to say, no, no, no, that's mine. Well, we need to put that on the table and have that conversation.

• 50:05Chris Williamson?

  Tell you one of the patterns that I learned from your show, which I now use in my day to day life.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  And. Uh oh, I can't wait to hear this.

• 50:15Chris Williamson?

  It is, I, I saw you do this. I think I saw you do this twice separately. And I was like, that seems like a pattern. I'm just gonna start maybe mentioning this if I see this come up. People partway through a relationship where one partner lightly floats the.

• 50:35Chris Williamson?

  Suggestion of starting to open things up just a little bit.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Hmm. The number. Open things up with another partner?

• 50:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 50:43Chris Williamson?

  So we're still, you know, like, we've been together for however long. And I just think, you know, like, wouldn't it be? The number of times that that person has already been in.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:54Chris Williamson?

  An extramarital, extra partner, and they're now trying to retroactively create conditions to make the thing that they did when you hadn't agreed it agreeable, so that they can continue it in future. And I've pattern matched that. I'm not kidding. I've pattern matched that incorrectly, like a hundred percent of the time.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 51:14Chris Williamson?

  And it's come back into land. Someone said, ah, dude, like such and such things happened and, you know, sort of suggesting this, like.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  It's already happened.

• 51:22Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna tell you.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:24Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna tell you something that you're really not gonna wanna hear. And I'm probably wrong. Inside, I'm like, I'm right.

• 51:33Chris Williamson?

  John said, I'm right. And it's, it's happened a few times now. And each time I've been correct.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  I. Can you seek a sense of aliveness with the person you're with?

• 51:46Chris Williamson?

  No, we need someone new.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  And. But again, if I.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  If I, man, if I need to go sleep with somebody else to save this.

• 52:07Chris Williamson?

  It does sound insane. It does sound.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  I was with someone recently. They're, they're a comedian there in Nashville. And he said, I've accidentally become a Dave Ramsey apologist. Like, all these young comedians now are coming up, like, how do you do this? And he said, if you're trying to make art and you owe somebody money, you'll never make the art you were meant to make. Because you're always gonna have to ask yourself, will this joke, the one that would be the one right over the line, what will my boss think? Or what will, like, I've got, I got a hedge. And he asked me, like, my thoughts on the death stuff. And I was like, hey, if we are arguing on, like, spend less than you make, we're, I'm, I'm probably not the guy to argue with you.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Because the ma, like, it's just such a basic, if you think sleeping with her will solve. Your intimate relationship with the, I could, it's just the, the math doesn't work. And I think we have so many intellectual gymnastics nowadays that we can, we can justify anything. But I think going back to simplicity, peace, all for peace, man. It's just all for peace. And I, I honestly don't know why we can't do that other than, um, I mean, there's the psychology of, uh, of conspiracy theories, there's the psychology of complexity.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  I just don't think we have a psychology for boredom. Or Lane says, we step over a hundred dollar bills to pick up pennies. Like, man, just mostly eat healthy and exercise.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  And then worry about red number 40 and like, whatever, like do that later. You know what I mean?

• 53:47Speaker 01

  It's just, it's a strange place we found ourselves in. And I think it's a luxury.

• 53:51Chris Williamson?

  Well, we spoke about this.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  It's a luxury.

• 53:53Chris Williamson?

  We spoke about this over dinner last night, that there isn't a particularly good, uh, matter in the world for reinjecting excitement. And there is one for increasing peace. That you say, we need more commitment, we need more loyalty, we need more downtime, more regulation. You should be, you know, nervous systems should be in a, in a line, all this stuff. But it's much scarier to say, I'm bored in this. This is too mundane because it sounds an awful lot, it, it's perilously close to, I want more novelty, which is straying, eyes lingering on somebody else, extramarital stuff.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  But, but, but that's because we've made every, and we may have talked about this the last time, but we've made every sexual encounter of the Super Bowl. We've made every, everything has to be this eruption and it's insane, right? Like, you gotta see the, like, in my world, you gotta see the relief when I tell a parents who have two kids under the age of three, like, hey, you're, you're gonna have 13 minutes to get this done.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  And they'll look at each other and be like, like, nobody talks about survival sex with a young couple.

• 55:10Chris Williamson?

  Survival sex.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Dude, we got thirteen minutes between that nap and this feeding. Are you in? Right? That's, that's, that's in no movie, that's in no TV show. In fact, they'll tell you if that's what it's reduced to, then your marriage is probably run its course. This relationship's probably over.

• 55:24Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to just a practical reality.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Yes, just traffic in reality, man. Traffic in peace.

• 55:31Chris Williamson?

  Your air traffic control.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  And, and by the way, you can create novelty in this funny little moment. We can create play and laughter and silliness. And you want to give this a shot? All right, we got six minutes left. Are you in? Like, you can, while you're on vacation with your family at a, at a, at a cheap hotel, while they're asleep, y'all can try to figure it out in the hotel bathroom that you can barely turn around and like, that is tiny ways that you can inject novelty and fun and play. And that next morning when your kid's like, I want pancakes and you just cut eyes across the hotel room at your spouse and you're like,

• 56:03Speaker 01

  like, that becomes,

• 56:07Speaker 01

  that becomes good, man. It's, it's, that's the good stuff. And if you try to make the fireworks show bigger every time, I just think that's a, that's a, that's how you end up overdosing, man.

• 56:18Chris Williamson?

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• 56:58Chris Williamson?

  And in the Texas heat, this lemonade flavor in a cold glass of water is unbelievably good. Best of all, they've got a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. So you can buy it and try it for as long as you want. And if you don't like it for any reason, they'll give you your money back. You don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom.

• 57:30Chris Williamson?

  I got a bunch of guy friends that are first time dads. One's kid is two months old, no, less, less six weeks. Another is six months old, another is one year old. What is your survival kit of the most important strategies or realizations for new adults?

• 57:54Speaker 01

  I may have told you this, the greatest parenting advice I ever heard in my life was from Jack Black, which is

• 57:59Chris Williamson?

  No, you haven't told me.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  When he said this, I was like, that's, that's it. That's all of my graduate school distilled into one sentence. Don't try to make a happy get happier.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  Like, and the story he went on to tell was, and again, I'm going to bastardize it, but his son was playing in the mud with a stick or something and he was like, I'm just not my kid. Like, and you end up six, six, six hours later, sugared up, exhausted, fried. You spent $300 on a thing and then you went to this, it's like, man, I should have just gotten a hose out and sat in the mud and got another stick. And that's stuff he's going to tell at his funeral. Remember that time, Dad, you rolled me around in the mud versus yet another. So, man, if your kids are happy, get on the floor and have fun. And then the other thing is you have to be intentional about your relationship. And it just shifts, man, and that's okay. It's a season, it's winter, man, it's cold, put on a coat. Like, we don't stand out in the, out in the street here in December and just.

• 58:55Chris Williamson?

  What's the shift?

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Curse the sky. You, you got any responsibilities? I, I had a grad school colleague once that he had four kids and I was in, man, that was maybe two or three years into marriage. It was rocky, it was tough. And I was like, I don't know how you do this. And he said this, it's just a different kind of awesome. And he goes, you know, when you first meet somebody and you're like, cannot sleep and it's amazing? That's awesome. And then you kind of get real serious together and you'll start getting like, that's awesome. He goes, you get kids for, it's just a different kind of awesome. He's like, you can't just, you know, swipe off the kitchen table and just get after it like at four in the afternoon like you used to be able to. Cause you got kids running around. It's a different kind of awesome. And also you don't know what it's like to see your, your middle school kid run across the finish line and just feel kind of big, right?

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Or I watched my daughter, she's nine, out at a, at a lemonade stand on a Saturday. But dude, it was hot. And I was like, man, drive by and buy some lip, you know what I mean? I was like rooting for her from the, you know what I mean? My neighbor texted, I'm like, dude, go, like, I'll reimburse you, brother. And he's like, no, we got this. But it's like, I want her to succeed. It's like, it's a different kind of awesome. But it's trying to drag that old relationship, that old freedom, the old excitement into this present thing. That's what kills folks, man. So that when you have baby one, that marriage is over. It's over. Awesome. Build a new one. When my wife got pregnant, I was like, okay, I got nine months till I get my wife back. And then when Hank was born, I was like, all right, so maybe it's gonna be nine more after this, like in a year.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Then slowly, it took me for, it took me 15 years to realize that marriage was over. And it was awesome. And now we get to build a new one with a kid involved.

• 1:00:30Chris Williamson?

  Does that suggest that people who are together and intending on becoming parents and aren't yet at the point where they're about to should lean in and make the most of that time? Because you are not, it's

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  It's that kind of awesome. It's finite. Yeah. And if you are constantly comparing it to this and this, it's, it's like, um, like, if I have a, I'm not gonna measure from here to the end of that wall in gallons. Those are both valid measurements, just the wrong measure. And so that time we were together, before we had kids and before they took all our money and our time and our bodies and our exhaustion, it was amazing. And now we're gonna measure this new time in our life in gallons. And we're gonna measure this one in meters. We're gonna measure this time in our life in, in hours, right? Those are all good measurements. You just gotta use the right measurement for the right season.

• 1:01:16Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned before about instinct versus rationality, gut or head or heart. How do you come to think about making decisions in a relationship when it comes to gut versus head? How do you sort of stress test each of these?

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  I've just come to learn with, this is n equals one here. I get over emotional about things. And I make very emotional decisions. And so I've got a few people in my life, both professionally and Long-term buddies, long-term men in my life that I will sit down with and say, here's what I'm experiencing and here's what I'm seeing, here's what I'm about to do. And I, I mean, I wish I had a better way, better answer for you, but I outsourced that. Cause I'm not a reliable, I'm not a reliable person in the thick of it. And I just learned that about myself. I make up really remarkable stories about why somebody else's. My fundamental attribution errors is brutal, dude. The stories I make up are extraordinary.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  About the dude in the square Kia that like cut me off. The story I make up about that guy, dude, it's, it's, it's an abomination. So I outsourced it because I'm not a good judge of it. And I think anyone who says, go with all your feelings or go with all fact, both of them are, those are pathologies on either side of the bell curve.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  How do you handle it?

• 1:02:37Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I tend to be too head dominant.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:02:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So I need to actually listen to my gut much more.

• 1:02:45Chris Williamson?

  My.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Is that a learned response? Has your gut led you astray or was listening to you? How you feel about stuff, not, not.

• 1:02:54Chris Williamson?

  Certainly not encouraged.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:02:56Chris Williamson?

  Uh, so, uh, everything would be sort of controlled. Um, very important to have a measured response, hypervigilance, that kind of thing. So yeah, learning to actually trust instincts and to know how, what's an appropriate threshold for something that isn't your rational brain to be screaming to go do this thing or to not do this thing. Yo, that's pretty loud, but is it loud enough?

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:23Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, that's where it comes back to the trust thing, like self-trust.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:03:27Chris Williamson?

  It's a very interesting situation to get into. I wonder how much of that, you know, is borne out. I think a lot of my friends have this too, that we're all trying to now listen to the fleeting thoughts that are coming up from our gut as opposed to the really loud, sophisticated ones that are coming down from our head. Because. My Adult Awakening was built around Farnham Street blog, mental models and Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger and Taleb and Robert Greene. And so much Peterson and so much of this is dictating top down like rote learning. Ah, the ways to operate.

• 1:04:09Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. That are trying to compensate for the fact that you never actually allowed that to emerge in the first place.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:14Chris Williamson?

  But that's just more top down, right?

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 1:04:17Chris Williamson?

  Now in a, in the right direction.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 1:04:19Chris Williamson?

  Hopefully it's one that's a little bit more aligned.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 1:04:21Chris Williamson?

  But it's still not just allowing yourself to sit with, I, I, I don't think this is working.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:04:27Chris Williamson?

  Or I think that that's a really fucking good idea.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Okay, so let me try out a hypothesis. I think we do not have a, a cultural psychology. We don't have a roadmap for grief.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  And grief is a communal experience and we've extracted all of that. The great David Kessler, I think he's just the grief guru, but says that grief demands a witness. And I don't think we have a witness anymore. And so we, we distill grief into sad. And then we go on and try to solve sad and we pathologize sad. But I don't think we have a cultural, I don't, I, I struggle with just like, I went all in on this thing and didn't work. And I'm supposed to want to stay under my covers for a few days and not crush and grind. And I'm supposed to just want to mainline whatever fat or sugary or salty substances are like.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  There's some basic biological mechanisms for dealing with grief. We used to have a parlor in our house. That was the, and we changed it to the living room. But they had a parlor where they held bodies until we outsourced that to funeral professionals, right? Like we have no ability to sit with this ended. And I think that's, that's unhealthy.

• 1:05:42Chris Williamson?

  What do people want to hear? The situation like that, there's been a, a loss.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 1:05:47Chris Williamson?

  Large or small.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Presence.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  That's my lived experience, sitting with people who have lost children, uh, which I can't think of a worse, a worse loss.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Makes me wonder how like how AI is gonna take over everything. There's a biology to presence and it is not found in an answer. It is found in a guy coming and sitting by you. And bringing half a casserole or a bag of Taco Bell and a couple of drinks like I'll be here. And anybody who tries to come up with a bunch, there's, there's in the, in the grief world, there's a whole bunch of things to not say.

• 1:06:25Chris Williamson?

  What are the things to not say?

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  God needed another angel. Everything happens for a reason, like nonsense like that. It's just like a knife in your soul, right?

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  But just, I'm coming over. Or, or the worst, the worst text, uh, let me know if you need anything. Well, my kid died. I need a whole, right? Which I'm gonna put the burden on you to let me know how I can take care of you, right? It's not, I'm just coming.

• 1:06:49Chris Williamson?

  Instead of just showing.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  I'm coming over.

• 1:06:50Chris Williamson?

  With some shit taco.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  I'm coming over and I'll sit here. We may throw all those tacos away. I'll be right here. And there's something. It's, it's biology. It's presence. Yeah. Which is like, hey, me and my wife are going through a rough time. Coming over, dude. I don't have any answers for it. I'll listen to you, right? And that's being comfortable enough. I, in this new job, I've just decided I'm gonna stop trying to answer questions I'm not asked. I'll just, I'll just be here. You know what I mean? Which I've had to wrestle with because my purpose was always like, give an answer.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Nah, now my purpose is I'll, I'll show up. I'll come.

• 1:07:29Chris Williamson?

  There's a kind of a bit of a narcissism in that too. I'm aware that it's a lovely thing to do. You're there for your friend, but there is a little bit of a narcissism because it centralizes you as the helper in the person's situation.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  As a presence or as with words?

• 1:07:44Chris Williamson?

  When you're coming up with a solution. I know that this is your problem, but allow me, like, no, no, no, no, I, I will step down from on high and allow me to bestow on you.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  It uses a hurting person. It, it, they become a Xanax for you. I'm uncomfortable with your loss. Ask anybody who's, who's been diagnosed with cancer. They spend most of their energy making sure the people around them are okay. And that's madness, right? Because now I'm uncomfortable because I'm staring at.

• 1:08:10Chris Williamson?

  My discomfort is making you uncomfortable. I'm sorry. I'll fix it.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. Like, hey, I just got diagnosed with cancer. I'll be right over. I'm gonna sit here.

• 1:08:20Chris Williamson?

  I just got diagnosed with cancer. Sorry.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, let me know if I can do anything. So cool. I just gave you a chore. Now that you got this, this terrible diagnosis, I'll give you a chore to make me feel better.

• 1:08:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if man, if I can tell anybody, if somebody's hurting, just show up. Or someone says, hey, I need to go grab something to eat. I'll be there. Right. And I just learned that from a group of West Texas, like, no therapist, man, it was just West Texas guys that I saw almost come to blows over who's gonna pick up the check. It's like, oh, that's what friendship looks like. Like, not like, bro, you Venmo me 425 for that. No, dude, I got it. I got it. We'll figure it out later. There's just something about that, man. And I think even, you know, talked about like Perkins has written about like,

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  but again, all that's all for peace, man. It's all for peace.

• 1:09:12Chris Williamson?

  The big difference between an abundance mindset and the scarcity mindset, I don't think you need to get into Rhonda Byrne, the secret woo energy attraction territory. To just kind of understand that going through life, assuming that things will go okay, is just a better way to exist. Bill Burr's got this wonderful bit where he says,

• 1:09:35Chris Williamson?

  things are going to be fine. And even if things aren't going to be fine, is it not better to assume that things are going to be fine? And if they're not, you'll deal with it when the time comes?

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's Amos Tversky. He's Daniel Kahneman's research partner had that great line like, being pessimistic is stupid because if it comes true, you experience it twice. I love that. Yeah, man. Let's just assume it's gonna work out. I'm gonna do the best I possibly can. And if it doesn't, if like we get hit by a meteorite, we'll deal with that then.

• 1:10:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  But I'm gonna, we're gonna plow ahead as though, but I think we're trying to hedge grief because we don't know what to do if it actually comes true.

• 1:10:09Chris Williamson?

  Because it's such an overwhelming emotion.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  And we have no, we're not designed to handle grief alone and we don't have anybody else to call.

• 1:10:16Chris Williamson?

  Which the people that we do call, we feel like we need to manage their.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  We end up having to take care of them.

• 1:10:20Chris Williamson?

  Sorry that I'm a burden.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:10:23Chris Williamson?

  There's a great piece in the Kardashians that Charlie Hooper broke down, which was one of the girls has gone through a breakup and the mom is there and they're talking. And the mom says the line, I really need you to get over this.

• 1:10:40Chris Williamson?

  And it's the Charlie explains it perfectly. And he's like, that literally says your discomfort is making me uncomfortable.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:49Chris Williamson?

  I need you to sort yourself so that I can be okay.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  I don't have time for your discomfort. Yeah.

• 1:10:54Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's tough.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:55Chris Williamson?

  As a kid to feel that is fucking rough.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I think parents like sometimes.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  Going back to what you said about your buddies having young kids, never lie to your kids. A buddy of mine, uh, and here here's what I mean by that, not just on big stuff. A buddy of mine, um.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  He had a neighbor whose boat fell off the trailer. And so he called all these neighborhood guys to come over and help with the boat back on the trailer. And he's had a young son, maybe seven or eight, and he's like, come on over, we're gonna go do something. All these guys helped three, two, and they got the boat back on the trailer and they did all the stuff. On the way home, he said, man, we helped that guy out. And he said, Daddy, I didn't do anything. And already he knew, like, I just lied to my kid. Like, I was using the proverbial we and I kept moving him out of the way. Hold on, back up, back up, we're gonna pick this thing up. And so don't lie to your kids, man. If they come in seventh place, don't say, great job. Or don't say, man, you did so good. You got seventh place. Your kid knows you're lying. Say, man, that really stinks. You gave it your all and you got seventh place.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Or if they didn't give it your all, you can ask them, like, do you feel good about your performance on that one? Um, but it's telling your kids the truth, but it's, man, yeah.

• 1:12:09Chris Williamson?

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• 1:12:53Chris Williamson?

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• 1:13:19Chris Williamson?

  How often do you see relationships where there hasn't been that sort of honest, open

• 1:13:27Chris Williamson?

  transparency between the partners be fixed or made worse by the presence of kids? Because I imagine that there must be some couples that have a child and it just galvanizes in them this, oh, we have a project, like we need to get really, really serious now. But the question of, do you think you had kids and started being truthful? Or you started being truthful and then had kids? To me, it seems more likely that the increased difficulty of having kids around is just gonna make that problem.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I think there's always a temptation to make the person in front of you feel good. And yeah, I don't know. It's a great question. I don't know. But I know that every stage along the way, at least in my kid, I have a 15 year old who's a sophomore in high school. And I have a, my daughter's nine, she's in fourth grade.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  Every stage has been a, there's been some sort of GPS pin in my Wi Fi that's gone off. That's tethers all the way back. High school was not a great time for my wife. I peaked at 18. It's been downhill ever since, man. High school was the greatest time of my life. I was a Texas high school football player. Like it was, it was, it was, I loved all of high school. And so as my son was heading into his freshman year. Everything about me was like, this is it, man. And

• 1:14:50Chris Williamson?

  Championship.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  This is good. Yeah, I was gonna live vicariously. It's like, dude, if you just, that was Uncle Rico, man. If you just work even harder. And for her, it was just get small, get small, get small. And so I think that happens at every stage along the way. I didn't know what I

• 1:15:05Chris Williamson?

  So interesting.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  I didn't know what I didn't know when I had a kid and it made me feel super inept. And I have, I have a script for when I feel inept, which is put your head down and go work more, which then took me away from my house more, which made me harder to be around because I knew my house was, every time I showed up, I didn't do the diaper right, I didn't do the time right. So it just started this thing. So it's just now we know enough to know, hey, we're getting ready for college and the, the, the, starting to already, the, the, the schools are already circling. All right, the sharks are circling. What college are you gonna go to? If you don't know your major, you're gonna, you're gonna be a failure, all that. That wasn't a good time for me. That was a great time for her, right? And so we, I now know that. So now we can sit down and have that conversation like, man, this makes me uncomfortable. Like, I can't wait for this, which make, which brings us back to the table. But that's a great question. I don't know.

• 1:15:49Chris Williamson?

  How much healing gets done through raising kids? Like revisiting, reparenting yourself, seeing the patterns that you, imagining what you were like at that age. Cause not that many people have gone and done their inner child work or their narrative therapy or their internal family systems or whatever, and have pieced together the arc of, wow, that's what it was like to be seven and me. And shit, I wonder how many.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  It's made me wake more compassionate for my parents and at the same time way.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  I was just with my sister this morning and I've got an anger too that I didn't know was there. And so, yeah, I don't know.

• 1:16:30Chris Williamson?

  It made you more compassionate for yourself?

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:35Chris Williamson?

  For the, oh, the younger version of you that did the whatever.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  Like, oh, dad was going through stuff. That wasn't me. I was dying. Yeah, it's made me a lot more compassionate with myself. I was 16, man. I didn't know. You know what I mean? Like I was being a 16 year old and I got a lot of compassion for that kid. Yeah, a lot more compassion. And then I think the challenge for me is how do I extend that compassion yet also know that my son lives in a world now that the world that doesn't have any compassion for that. He can, he could text something that makes him unemployable forever now, right? I had the privilege of being a 16 year old and he doesn't have that. And so there's a different level of. Oversight that makes me more nervous, but I'm confident that every generation apparent has some sort of, it wasn't when I was, it wasn't when I, I'm sure.

• 1:17:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This infinite regress of it wasn't like that in my day.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. Which is, I mean, at some point I sat down with him the other day and I was like, hey, there's, we're at a stage now where um, there's certain things you can get into that I, I can't stop. I can't. I mean, I literally can't. Um, and you're gonna have to make some decisions at 16 that I didn't have to make until I was older about what I want in my head, what I want to experience, what I want to see. Um, he's in a world where the wrong Adderall, the wrong party will kill him.

• 1:17:52Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. There's a billboard near the gym that I go to.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  I saw that the other day.

• 1:17:56Chris Williamson?

  Fentanyl thing.

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  With a, with a young boy on that.

• 1:17:58Chris Williamson?

  Oh, this was, this is a kind of like a lineup, I guess, of, there must be 30 people, 40 people, young, old, men, women, and uh, fentanyl kills.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:11Chris Williamson?

  On that presumably, it, some of them will have been, you know, maybe treading the line a little bit more closely than others, but definitely in that lineup, there'll have been someone that just, oh, I'll just take a little sniff of this or whatever and.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  That's it, right? Or it was a, it was a like, it was a Navy SEAL-esque adventure to find a Playboy when I was a kid. And he's got, and he's on, and even, we're pretty, um, I'm, I'm pretty much a Luddite. I was born in the wrong century, my wife says, but um, every human he interacts with has a phone, right? With.

• 1:18:45Chris Williamson?

  You went phone free with your kid, right?

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  We're not phone free, but I'm, I'm, I'm pretty, pretty dark ages. Yeah. We've taken everything off of it.

• 1:18:53Chris Williamson?

  It took a while to get even dumb phone.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. His parents are nerds, so my son had to give us a, I'll tell you all this, he had, he had to, when he was, when he was 14, over Christmas break in eighth grade, he actually, he had a great point that paused me. He said, at least when you were a kid, because we had no, no cell phones at all. And we lived out in the country and he said, at least when you were a kid, there was a phone on the wall with one of those little squiggly cords and you got to call your friends. And he said, I'm getting left out of everything. No birthdays, no nothing. And I said, that's, you're actually right. And so um we he had to draft the first round of the contract. And then me and my wife, it was basically like Shark Tank with me and my wife.

• 1:19:32Chris Williamson?

  Did you ask so fucking Dave Ramsey coded?

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  It was fun.

• 1:19:36Chris Williamson?

  It is unbelievable how Dave Ramsey coded you are.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  How so?

• 1:19:40Chris Williamson?

  You've drawn it, you've had to draw up this con- did he have to do a presentation? Did he do a?

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  Oh, he absolutely did. But that's because we're academics. That's where we got it from like.

• 1:19:47Chris Williamson?

  Fucking nerd.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  You have to, oh, his, both of his parents are nerds. But like, I want to talk through now what happens when this, if this thing goes sideways. But it was good, like, and um. Yeah, we slowly, I mean, now he's about to be 16, he's about to be driving. They're down the highway in Nashville, so.

• 1:20:05Chris Williamson?

  Driving, but still not texting.

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  I mean, you can text now, yeah, you can text.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can, but but it's that like, hey, the the wrong text thread.

• 1:20:13Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  And it's over, man, it's over. And so, and I know that because, dude, I spent 20 years with screenshot text messages and Snapchats and WhatsApps getting during sexual assault investigations and during this and all of a sudden, man, like, dude, I just, I just experienced it on the other side of that thing, man. It scares me for him. But I have to sit down with a 16 year old and say, man, at some point, you have to make some choices. And I'll do the best I can, but um to love you through it and always sit here with you.

• 1:20:43Chris Williamson?

  There isn't really a good archetype for the danger of a young person making a digital error.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  There's not.

• 1:20:53Chris Williamson?

  You know, because.

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  Full protectionism isn't helpful because they're gonna walk out and just get, it's like showing up to, it's like showing up to a, like, Town Square your first time, like, at midnight. It's just so much, right? That will, that will be the day he walks out of the house. So you can't do that to your kid.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  But also, man, then Sean Ryan says that great quote about, uh, you're not, you're not giving your kid access to the world, you're giving the world access to your kid. And I think that's, there's some, there's some truth to that.

• 1:21:21Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  When you hand your kid a smartphone, tell him to walk out the door. Best of luck to you, make good choices. You just gave the world access to your child and they're better than than all of us. There's too much money and experts and now it's, now it's not even real people, man.

• 1:21:35Chris Williamson?

  It's an unfair fight.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  It's a way unfair fight. If you're an adult, fine, take on an unfair fight if you want to. If you're at the bar and you want to fight all four of those dudes, I mean, you get to live with the consequences. I can't, you can't put a child in that, it's just not fair. It's not fair.

• 1:21:53Chris Williamson?

  What do you, as you've got to the stage now, son's sixteen, soon will be eighteen,

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  Gone, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:01Chris Williamson?

  Some sort of college thing. What, how does that make you reflect on the upbringing of a kid and kind of the arc of being a parent, I suppose?

• 1:22:11Chris Williamson?

  Because I remember when I moved out, I was eighteen and I went to university and I didn't realize that, you know, the most amount of time I was probably going to spend back in that house in any one go was five days over Christmas for the rest of my life.

• 1:22:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:25Chris Williamson?

  And you're just fired up. I just wanted to go. I couldn't be bothered the fact that I didn't have a clothes haul so that there wasn't a fucking iron like ready. I was like, I don't care. Fuck, I'm not going to iron my clothes in any case. You know, it doesn't matter. I just want to go. I want to go, go, go. It's just so exciting. I'm going to move to a big city. I'm going to go to university. I'm going to make new friends. I'm going to be living on my own. It's going to be so. And that's, yeah, you're not there to regulate your parents feeling like this huge deceleration is about to happen in their life.

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  I'm having to work really hard not to pre mourn him being gone. My wife had a great

• 1:22:59Chris Williamson?

  Ruining the remaining time that you do have with him, thinking about

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  This is the last one. Yeah, man, just got to be with it. And I've got to be ready to grieve on the other end of it. There's a shift that happens when a kid's twenty four, twenty five and when you, it's actually much earlier than that, but when the kid leaves your payroll, you can't tell them what to do anymore. Your parents shift to an encourager, right? Or, you know, and so what I want to do now is to model a, you need to know this, not intellectually, but you need to know this in your chest, you can always come back home. And if you find yourself over your head, you can always come back home. And the fun for me and my wife is, let's make this a place they want to come home. And that when they're thinking, man, let's go to, wow, let's go see mom and

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  dad. And that's, I don't know if that's even possible, but that's a fun thing to try to put out into the universe. And also, man, you got to go have adventures. And I'll say this. I don't know many kids, in fact, I know very few, if any, that are foaming at the mouth to get their license like my son is. That's a thing that's gone away. Like when, when I was a kid, turning sixteen was like, give me my car key so I can get out of here. But I have to believe that constricting so much time on social media or video games or just creating a digital bubble in our home. And he can't wait to get out, which means he can't wait to go to college. And he's already done the math. He's like, man, I need to be at least this far from you at university because it'll be too easy to come home and I need to go out and learn.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  And I hate that, but I love it, right? I don't, I don't, I want him to come home every weekend, but I don't. I want him to go out and have adventures because that's how you learn, man. That's how you end up in a whole other continent with a whole, with a job that didn't exist when you were at university, right?

• 1:24:44Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  That's how, that's how that happens.

• 1:24:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, dude, when I did a, I did two business degrees and neither of them had social media in. No one talked about, nothing. The year that I went to university, two thousand and six, was the year that Facebook became available in the UK if you had a university email address.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  That was, yeah, you had to have a university email address. I remember when my grandpa friend requested me, it was like, bloop, and we're out. Like I'm off this thing. Yeah, I'm out, I'm out, I'm out. Yeah.

• 1:25:14Chris Williamson?

  Get me back in my.

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  I remember you had to have an edu.edu address.

• 1:25:17Chris Williamson?

  Ac.uk for the UK. And, uh, yeah, it, five years at university and nothing about social media. So, yeah, we still don't have a good way of communicating that to people that are way younger. I mean, you don't know how to use social media. We don't know how to mediate our own use. I use my phone too much. So do you.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have it on a separate phone.

• 1:25:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  That's all I can do it.

• 1:25:38Chris Williamson?

  Cocaine phone and ale.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:25:41Chris Williamson?

  George Mac solution.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  I've never heard of that.

• 1:25:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:47Chris Williamson?

  Just going back to something that I think is really important, that if business is your drug, rest will feel like stress.

• 1:25:56Chris Williamson?

  For the people who are like hard charging, type A, insecure overachievers.

• 1:26:05Chris Williamson?

  What is your advice for someone learning to sort of let go of that chaos a little bit? And deriving a better sense of wellbeing from somewhere outside of that? How have you done it yourself? Cause you're someone that kind of lives for the chaos. And when faced with a problem defaults to the same thing I do, which I'll just grip the bar harder.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I'll solve it.

• 1:26:23Chris Williamson?

  I'll just rip this sucker off.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll hit that dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's all solve it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's wired in there.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  An important exercise for me was writing a letter to myself 10 years from now. And it was that for what? So you're here and you got this thing. And that was an important exhale.

• 1:26:40Chris Williamson?

  Can you elaborate on that?

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had given myself a number that I had to be making in a salary. By the age of, I think it was 35 was my big one. And when I blew through that and I felt more insecure than ever and more exposed. It was sitting down and having an honest conversation with my 45 year old self. Like, and it goes back to for what? Like, what is this gonna have for us, right? And so I think when you start decoupling yourself from how busy you are as a, as an identity, you just have to know it's gonna be painful. Being bored is gonna feel like, feel painful and that's okay. And not being productive in every moment, it's gonna feel like you're losing something.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  Resting is gonna feel silly. Calling a friend just to see what's up is gonna feel awkward. And it's letting yourself know those things are okay.

• 1:27:34Chris Williamson?

  Is that worthwhile pursuit? Why not just keep crushing it?

• 1:27:38Speaker 01

  You can, but for what? I mean, for what? I mean, how much higher in the hills do you need to move, man? That goes back to solving for peace. If you wanna solve for ROI, you can. You can do that. And my problem is I like working. It's a fun thing for me. And so even the busyness is like, I enjoy it. I enjoy finding the next project and always text, I was texting my manager earlier like, hey, what about this and this? And he's like, okay, man. Like, it's always like, what's the next thing? I like that. I don't think it comes from a pathological place or an insecurity. I just like it. But it's just don't, if you're redlining, you're redlining, you're redlining. It's like, man, we talked last night. You're like, hey, how's your sleep?

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  And it's like, ah, jeez, man. I don't wanna, I don't wanna fix.

• 1:28:25Chris Williamson?

  Don't bring up the ask.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  I don't wanna fix testosterone with sleep, man. I want it to like be a supplement. It's like, do you sleep? And so.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  You can, or let me ask you, like, write, write your letter to your forty five year old self. What would you tell him?

• 1:28:39Chris Williamson?

  I don't understand. So with that, I don't understand how that exercise works. You're, I'm now thirty seven, writing it to my forty seven.

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  I'm doing these things now for the life you're gonna have at forty five, at forty seven.

• 1:28:53Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting.

• 1:28:57Chris Williamson?

  I'd say I'm, I'm working really hard at, at letting go of the coping mechanisms that I used to, uh, hide a lot of the, uh, senses of ins- insufficiency that I had for a very long time.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:11Chris Williamson?

  That if I can make myself sufficiently impressive, or statusful, or charming, or enigmatic, or aloof, right, in distance, in absence.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:22Chris Williamson?

  Um, and.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  That's a good one. That's one of my favorites.

• 1:29:25Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm working really, really hard to not appear like I'm working. I'm working really, really hard to not be.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  I spent six, yeah, it's the, uh, it's the bad hair day punks.

• 1:29:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  That work six hours on their hair to make it look like they didn't work on their hair. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:38Chris Williamson?

  Red sneaker effect.

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:39Chris Williamson?

  Um, yeah, a lot of it, a lot of it's that. I, I really hope, I really hope that I look back in ten years' time and go, fuck, like, I'm so glad of the work that that guy put in.

• 1:29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:47Chris Williamson?

  And this is, you know, I'm, I'm chirping on this a lot at the moment. This entire podcast is a thinly veiled autobiography, dude. Like, the whole thing is, the whole body of work is just, what am I thinking about at the moment? What do I care about? What's important to me? And I'm fortunate that, even though I'm, I'm a pretty weird guy, but I face questions that a significant cohort of people do as well.

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:12Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, what that means is that if there's something that I'm thinking about or struggling with, a non-insignificant number of other people are also thinking about it or struggling with it too.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:21Chris Williamson?

  And it means that if I just pursue my own instincts and follow sort of what, to me, feels like a challenge or something that I'm interested in.

• 1:30:29Chris Williamson?

  In the tailwind behind me are all of these other people that are also, oh my god, never really, no one's ever asked that thing before. This, Mel Robbins, a good example, some of my favorite conversations that people have is when another person reveals something in them that you thought was a unique curse that only you have. And it's happened hundreds of times, slightly less so recently, maybe just because I've listened to a lot of other people talking, so I've picked up a lot of the low hanging fruit. But one of them was Mel Robbins, and I can't even remember who she was speaking to, it's a couple of years ago, I was researching for a guest, and Mel's talking, she says,

• 1:31:11Chris Williamson?

  throughout my entire life, I always had this sense that someone was mad at me. Somebody was, I'd done something wrong, and someone was mad. I always just felt like I had to sort of be on tenterhooks a little bit, and someone was going to find out whatever it was that I'd done that was wrong. I was in the wrong, that was like a bad goal. And I paused it, put it down, I said, holy fuck. That has just put a word to a thing that I'd never named, identified, even knew existed. Didn't know that, even if I'd known those things, didn't know that it wasn't just some weird, you know, random pathology that only my unique constitution has managed to create.

• 1:31:55Chris Williamson?

  Oh, this is some idiosyncrasy of just me. And to hear, oh fuck, somebody else is like that. That's, that's, it's the most, it's the reason that I'm continuing to try and lean into talking about relating, talking about emotions, talking about how people feel when, when, when stuff comes up, because so much of what we're doing is just trying to manage our emotional state. And one of the most reassuring things I think that you can hear as a human is, yeah, man.

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:32:22Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:22Chris Williamson?

  Me too.

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  Okay, so think about 10 years from now to a 47 year old Chris.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  So 10 years ago, you were a contestant on a game show.

• 1:32:34Chris Williamson?

  Dating show.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  Dating show, yeah.

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  I guess it wasn't The Price is Right, huh?

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  So let's assume podcasting doesn't exist. My wife found letters from her grandfather. While he was off fighting Nazis to her grandmother, who kept the dairy farm in eastern New Mexico going. While he was gone, it's a treasure trove of letters. Romantic letters, here's what's going on letters, the whole thing. And she's taken to making sure, I remember her saying like, I gotta make sure our kids know these letters, like know that. And so no matter what technology exists 10 years from now. What a great, like amazing gift you'll have be able to give to your kids is a library of.

• 1:33:17Chris Williamson?

  This is where I was at then.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  This is the arc of your dad, going from this guy to this guy. This is our human experience. I can think of no greater gift.

• 1:33:25Chris Williamson?

  That is, that is cool. Yeah, I, I would like to think that at least this podcast will become part of that. You know, it's done in the third person a lot of the time, but so many of the things that I'm talking about is, oh, fuck, that was a question that the dad or granddad was asking at that.

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  There, man. How cool is that?

• 1:33:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is. It's fun. You always do. We always get toward the end of one of these episodes and then you fucking turn it around. Okay, come on. What else is there? I'm sure that you've got other stuff.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  No, I'm just fascinated, but it goes like, if 47 year old Chris could put his head on the pillow. That to me, like, how fast can I go to sleep? That's, that's, that's my metric for. Suffer peace. Yeah, and I don't know why that's such a, you, you have a better grasp of psychology theories than I do. I don't know why that's, that's so hard these days. I don't know why that's such a foreign concept.

• 1:34:15Chris Williamson?

  That's a good question. I wonder as well, how many people, for how many people that's a priority? I get the sense for some, for someone like you, and certainly for somebody like me.

• 1:34:25Chris Williamson?

  I know that that is something that I need. I know it's something, it's when I feel my happiest is when things are.

• 1:34:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, peace, but that can be peace in the midst of chaos.

• 1:34:39Speaker 01

  Of course it can.

• 1:34:39Chris Williamson?

  But it can't be peace in the midst of war.

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:34:42Chris Williamson?

  Right? The difference between lots of things are happening and it's all high pressure. And I have uncertainty and unpredictability and ambivalence and ambiguity. And I really do not know who's got my back and who does it. That's not good.

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:57Chris Williamson?

  But I have lots of fights on lots of fronts and I'm prepared to go for all of them. And this is exciting and enthusing.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  Safety and autonomy, man.

• 1:35:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

  If I'm anchored in, I can rappel off the side and just go be crazy, man. And I get to rappel. War feels like I'm getting shoved into it.

• 1:35:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it's out of your control.

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:18Chris Williamson?

  Uh, but I think enoughness is a big part of that. You know, this, like you said before, this sense that you're enough as you are. You don't necessarily need to perform. You don't need to show up in any other way. You can be as whatever you are to me and I'll just be here and I'll just sit and I'll just listen.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  And the, the, the hard part of that algorithm is when you establish that, it allows you to go further and more powerfully than you could have ever imagined. And I think that's, that's the hard part of trying to, is we've been sold that if you hack around that, then you can get that thing that you want. And it's like, no, man. If you can establish I'm worth the work that I'm about to put in on this thing.

• 1:35:57Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  Then you can go, you can go forever. If you're chasing worth, you can't. Your body eventually says, I quit, I'm out.

• 1:36:05Chris Williamson?

  Interesting to think, people that you see that are very successful and in committed long-term relationships, how much of, in a different universe, if somebody had chose a partner that was worse for them or better than, better for them than this one, how

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 1:36:22Chris Williamson?

  divergent would those two worlds have been? You know, how much? Is the person that you are directly due to the fact that you chose a woman.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  One thousand percent.

• 1:36:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you know, if you'd chosen somebody who was, let's say that you chose a hundred and you could have chosen a fifty, a zero, or a minus fifty, minus a hundred. What did those different worlds look like? You know, how resilient are you to this? And how much of this is totally contingent on the fact that you had somebody that was a rocket ship that you were able to be refueled off?

• 1:36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's the wisest, like, marry well and tell the truth and be curious. Like, if you can establish those and then just go do the next right thing, man.

• 1:37:06Chris Williamson?

  I had this thought, I'm gonna bring it up with Scott Galloway the next time I sit down with him. He keeps having, he's got super famous for this same, the most important decision that you make in your life, it's not going to be where you work, it's not going to be where you live, it's going to be the person that you marry. Charlie Munger's got the same thing, the most important decision that you make in your life is your spouse, et cetera. And I understand why that's a talking point that people are pushing because people fall backward into relationships, they're not intentional about this stuff, they don't try and cultivate a practice of honesty, they don't even deal with their unspoken expectations, they don't, all of these things. I do wonder, though, whether it is putting even more undue pressure.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:37:49Chris Williamson?

  On people. And this is the problem of a one size fits all piece of advice for a very broad audience that some people, it's the same thing with some of the sort of post me too messaging around how guys should behave with women. Some of the messaging, lots of the messaging says basically, don't be pushy. The problem is, the men who really need to be told, don't be pushy.

• 1:38:19Chris Williamson?

  Won't take that to heart. They're just gonna plow through it.

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:38:22Chris Williamson?

  And the guys who really need to be encouraged are gonna really, really embody it.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:38:26Chris Williamson?

  You know, so.

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  Well, and the other side of it, the number of Texas women who are like, I just want a guy who, right? So it's, I get the one size fits all. I think the challenge to that, to the statement is, we take that, the most important person is, is the person you marry, right? Um, which I, I believe that, but I think we dump it on a person, not on the thing, not on the marriage. And so I need, I force this other person to carry it all, instead of saying, hey, can you and I carry this thing? And I think that's a different, totally different prospectus. You get what I'm saying? Otherwise, you're gonna give somebody a burden no human can carry. Like, the, you know, Brad stuff that says like, Wilcox says like, a good or great marriage, everything in your life ROI is this way.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  And a not great or bad marriage, everything like un-ROI is the other way, right? It's like, it's like a, a D ROI.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  But if I put that on a human being, man, nobody can carry that. But if I say, hey, you and me, can we pull this thing together? Man, those two horses can pull more together than they can individually. I like that. But it does put a lot of pressure on it. Okay, so if somebody who's thirty seven and not married, it's easy for me to run my mouth about this. I got married when I was twenty four, right? I was a child. And so tell me about the nature of that pressure.

• 1:39:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's, it's certainly palpable, um, especially if you take it to heart. And if you want, if you think, well, what's the sort of relationship? What's the sort of future that I want to have? What's the sort of marriage and family that I want to have? And I have a bunch of guys, there is no good archetype for this, but I have a bunch of guy friends who are unbelievably eligible. Like, like some of the most eligible men, maybe, maybe at least one of the most eligible men in America.

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  Oof, is he over six foot though? That's where.

• 1:40:10Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  I'm a toy kid.

• 1:40:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's true. And, and many, many, many figures. And, uh, he just wants a family. Like, he just can't wait to be a dad.

• 1:40:23Chris Williamson?

  But the fact that he has waited a little while is is making the pressure mount. And you see this in um women that have built up a career. There's a good example with a lamp that Louise Perry taught me about where if you're moving into a new house and you need to buy a lamp, it's a piece of piss. You've got nothing else in the house. There's a lamp that'll work and you build the house around the lamp. If you've done the opposite, you've built this very elaborate internal decor. You need to find the perfect lamp, right? That that comes in at this time, and it's one of the unseen costs that people who wait longer pay, both guys and girls. Um, you know, if you wait until you're in your thirties or your late thirties or your forties or your fifties, before you finally decide to settle down.

• 1:41:08Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:41:10Chris Williamson?

  Your life, you you have more preferences. You have a greater complexity. You have this sense that you know what you like and what you want and what you deserve and how this should. And it's more hard, it's more difficult to find.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  But it's so that's a. Can I pull that thread for a second? That essentially turns another person into the remaining puzzle piece for your puzzle. Instead of being, I had fewer things to dump out. My puzzle was jaggedy and small and trashy. So when we were like, hey, we have to build a new puzzle together. That was easy. I didn't own anything. I was right. It just means there's more at stake for you to swipe the table off.

• 1:41:51Chris Williamson?

  It feels like there's more at stake because you've spent all of this time building it up. You've spent all of this time creating this life that is yours.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  But it goes back to for why?

• 1:42:02Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Ultimately, if all of this was basically you in a holding pattern, waiting, and this is, what are you doing? Are you are you trying to create a life and a partnership and a family that is the thing?

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:42:16Chris Williamson?

  Or is it just a side dish to your career? And there is a big cohort of people for whom they, you know, the family thing is just the thing that they do. Like that's it's it's what people do, right? It's not their alchemy. It's it's not their um uh zenith.

• 1:42:33Speaker 01

  A rising for being.

• 1:42:34Chris Williamson?

  Of their contribution to this world, right? Uh, and again.

• 1:42:40Chris Williamson?

  The problem occurs when somebody from group one gets into a relationship with somebody from group two, that I want this thing to be everything and we can build our lives around this. But yeah, if you've spent a long time constructing a very elaborate cathedral, this wonderful orchestral life that's got these moving parts and it's all perfectly put together and it feels like you're giving away more, even if the end goal that you need to get to is the thing that you wanted all along, even if all you did was be in a holding pattern, waiting for this thing to start, you feel the deceleration, you feel the, the, um, imagine this, somebody's got a really big bank account and they need to give away

• 1:43:22Chris Williamson?

  50% of their net worth in order to be able to do a thing. If your bank account's got 10 million in it's way easier than if it's got $10.

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:43:28Chris Williamson?

  Right? Like if you've got $10, sorry, it's way harder than if you've got $10. If you've got $10 and you just give away five bucks, like, well, fucking like it's five bucks. What does that matter? Even if it's 50% of my wealth. But if you've got this huge bank account, you feel the amount that you've got to withdraw more. It's a bigger overall number.

• 1:43:51Speaker 01

  So what would feeling that feeling and then going doing the next right thing look like in real life?

• 1:43:56Chris Williamson?

  Commitment, I think, a reprioritization of

• 1:44:05Chris Williamson?

  this is that period of my life's over, right?

• 1:44:09Speaker 01

  It's a different kind of awesome.

• 1:44:10Chris Williamson?

  It's a different kind of awesome. I had an awesome where I lived for me. But eventually you just kind of get bored of yourself. And it's a choice between a familiar kind of awesome and an unfamiliar kind of awesome. And some people are not prepared to trade the former for the latter because they just don't know, they don't know what it is. People that were not good with uncertainty, good with unpredictability.

• 1:44:42Speaker 01

  It's fascinating that the things that we evolved to do. To prove worthiness to a mate are the things that end up trapping.

• 1:44:50Chris Williamson?

  The getting in the way of doing the thing. Yeah, the the the thing that you want.

• 1:44:55Speaker 01

  The peacock feathers are now like in front of our face and we can't even see the mate.

• 1:44:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the thing that you want is being sacrificed for the thing which is supposed to get the thing that you want. Yeah, I was supposed to be successful so that I could find a mate, so that I could start a family. And the reason that I can't start a family is because I'm so busy.

• 1:45:11Speaker 01

  Cause I'm so successful.

• 1:45:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. To try and find a mate. Yeah, yeah, dude, the bastards. I mean, that when you see, don't sacrifice the thing you want for the thing that's supposed to get it. It is. It is a universal rule. Don't sacrifice happiness in order to achieve success so that when you're finally sufficiently successful, you can allow yourself to be happy. Like so many people do that. People sacrifice freedom in order to be wealthy, right? They they think, well, if I turn to a life of crime, I can be wealthy. And it's like, why do you want to be wealthy? Well, so I can be free. You go, if you get caught, you're in jail.

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:43Chris Williamson?

  You're sacrificing the thing you want for the thing that's supposed to get the thing you want. And it it just appears everywhere. And it's a it's a misunderstanding of means and ends. And you've got them the wrong way around. You you keep confusing the, well, just I'll just keep saving. I'll just keep saving. I'll just keep working. I'll just keep building. And you go, for what?

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  That's it. But how much of that is a fear of of? Man, this is such a an abused word. How much of that is a fear of being vulnerable? Cause I can control all of these other things. But when it comes to building a life with somebody else, I can only I can only control me in that boat.

• 1:46:25Chris Williamson?

  Oh, a hundred percent. This is so much of it is about control. Like, the reason that people commit to careers over relationships is that a career can't leave them.

• 1:46:36Chris Williamson?

  And another person can.

• 1:46:39Chris Williamson?

  I think that's why you're ninety-five percent in on the relationship.

• 1:46:45Speaker 01

  But you can't see my texts.

• 1:46:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And I'm not, I'm not prepared to let go of that bit of the career. Because if I do that and you leave, I have no hedge, I have nowhere to hide. I haven't got anything that's just for me, that's just for me, it's my, my little secret, it's my little thing, it's not for you. It's the side account that you don't know about.

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  And I guess the hard part is you can't know how extraordinary the other side of that is.

• 1:47:11Chris Williamson?

  Without.

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  When you're all in on our, that, you can't know until you risk it all. Or you risk getting hurt really badly.

• 1:47:20Chris Williamson?

  Dr. John Deloney. Dude, you're fucking awesome.

• 1:47:23Speaker 01

  Dude, thanks for being my friend, dude.

• 1:47:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, thank you too.

• 1:47:26Speaker 01

  And man, can I just, can I plug Newtonic?

• 1:47:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  You don't even pay me.

• 1:47:29Chris Williamson?

  Do it.

• 1:47:29Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a laser, man.

• 1:47:32Chris Williamson?

  Shut.

• 1:47:32Speaker 01

  This has become my, so once a week, I, we have to do ads, it's, you know, and you've done that, like, I get to do ads, I'll say it that way. And you have to read them, read them, read them. Newtonic, man, it's my laser beam.

• 1:47:44Chris Williamson?

  Good.

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  It takes my chaotic mind and says, you can work for one focused hours, it's awesome.

• 1:47:50Chris Williamson?

  John Deloney, everyone should go and check out your show, your books, everything, you're awesome.

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  Appreciate you, man.

• 1:47:54Chris Williamson?

  And you.

• 1:47:55Speaker 02

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