Saving My Marriage by Finally Being Real | John Delony

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Later on, yeah, by the time we moved to Nashville, it was pretty dicey. Things were really hanging on barely, and that's when we both sat down across the table and said, "All right, the marriage we had so," and she said, "What's the worst part of it is whether you're running from it or trying to get it, it's still leading your life, and it takes away. You never stop to look up and go, "What life do I actually want to live?" And it wasn't until, "Man, if I had had this job 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I would have already blown it all up." It wasn't until the fame and the money and the success when you say you would have blown it up. Because I would have played a part. It would have been an acting role. I'm not holding on to it anymore. Now I know there's a group of millions of moms and dads and young men and young women and aging men and women who do their good people, man, and they've been sold to build goods and they don't have a picture of what it looks like to do X, Y, Z. When I first started the show, man, old demons came out like, "I want to be the smartest guy, I want everyone to. " And real quick, like inside baseball, you know this, but like, there's a team of people that can tell you what people want to hear, what they don't want to hear, and when they click off, when they click on, and really quick, I learned, "John, nobody cares about you, you're diagnosed with information, nobody cares about you pulling apart the biochemistry of ADHD." They've never seen a big tall goofy tattooed up Texans sit with a woman who just blew her marriage up and say, "Hey, pull up a seat and let's figure this out." They've never seen a big tall out tattooed up Texan talk to a dad who's thinking of dying by suicide and saying, "Hey, come sit down, man, let's figure this out." They've never seen it. It was the interaction, right? And that was humbling. Nobody cares. They just want to picture what it looks like to love well and we don't have that anymore. We have a picture of what it means to yell out, right? That's been a blessing and a gift. When you're not chasing validation, being vulnerable is not hard. When you're not. I don't think it approved anybody. My wife loves me. My kids love me. I think I'm a pretty good dad now. And I've got some close friends. Why wouldn't I tell you that my marriage was struggling? Why wouldn't I tell you that I was really not doing well with anxiety? I'm not hiding anything anymore. And it's a free place to live. It's this huge weight off your shoulders, right? And now I sometimes struggle with it. I'm guessing your audience leans a little bit more female. That's the wild part is. We kept getting these demographic surveys back, saying it was largely female. Okay. And then as we dug in deeper, realized men don't fill out surveys and that there's a vast, just because I was a part of the victim services team, I deprotrolled my doubts. There's a whole whole other universe of military guys and first responders and police officers and blue collar guys that want to be their dad's man. And they're not allowed to ask. They're not allowed to say anything. And so there's a picture of what that looks like. They want to be better husbands and there's a picture of what that looks like. So it's pretty split, which has been awesome. Yeah, that's incredible. Because for me, I dealt with that same challenge. The thoughts I went through my head, I felt emotional responses towards things. But I felt like I could never really quite share them and even now, like me at 41 years old who has gotten to a good place in my life and doesn't have reason to be second-guessing myself or my masculinity, right? I put out a post this morning about my daughter's attending their first day of school and my eldest Ella, my five-year-old. She started kindergarten yesterday. Yesterday, my youngest Myla was her very first day of school. She started a transitionary kindergarten. And so after dropping them off, I came home and for the very first time, the hallways were empty. The rooms were quiet. There wasn't someone coming up to me and saying, "Dad, play with me, play with me," right? And that was such an emotional experience for me, it was hard. And so I decided to write about that in this Instagram caption for the post of their first day of school. And I have gone back to look at that caption probably 10 times. Like I'll even hit edit and I'll think about reducing the emotional level of it because I'm like, "Hey, what are other men going to think like seeing this when I talk about how my heart hurts?" And I was teary-eyed. I know I still have this part of me that tells me that I have to be more manly. I can't talk about emotions. I can't share these kinds of things because that is not what a real man does kind of a thing. And my audience does skew probably about 80% plus female on Instagram. It's probably because I do talk about these emotions openly and not everyone is there. But I love to see great role models such as yourself kind of helping to break that mold. So take me back to your childhood for a moment. What was it like growing up with your father being a homicide detective and later a hostage negotiator? What was that dinner table conversation like? When your dad's a SWAT hostage negotiator, he's always right. So if you can win an argument with him, you're pretty good. We had dinner at home a lot. I remember that. And that's something I'm grateful for now that I'm older and trying to wrangle my own kids or on the table. But I had an older sister and a younger brother and I remember there being, there was tension in the house and the older I've gotten, I think a lot of that was financial and a lot of that was just, my dad saw a lot of gnarly ugly stuff every day, which is tough. But I remember there being a lot of tension, but I do remember it was a big deal there. But I sat down and had dinner when we could. What was it like for you knowing that your dad was out there? Were you ever worried that is he going to come home tonight or some of maybe the emotional baggage that he was dealing with, that he'd bring to the dinner table and you felt like it spilled over to you? Yeah, my mom, one of the things when I was graduating college, I was going to, I wanted to go to the FBI. And that was a conversation she had with me, which was, for me, don't do that. Because she grew up with a husband that she never knew if he was going to come home or not, right? And that tension that was always in the house of, is my husband coming home, is he coming home, is he coming home? And then I think my dad, when you're dealing with the worst of the worst, right? The worst case situations, I think he did a pretty amazing job of not letting that stuff bleed out on us. But I learned, I got a ringside seat too, what it means to shove it all down. And in the 70s and 80s, and especially early 90s, men didn't go talk about stuff. And in fact, if you talked about it on the police force, they'd put you, they'd take you off the street and put you behind a desk, right? They'd call you a broken or whatever. And so the ethos was shove it down, fast forward all the way to this is just several years ago. I was really struggling to connect with my daughter. And she's nine now. I think she was five, six or seven at the time. It was pretty devastating. Because I had this show now that I'd taken off, I was giving other people advice on how to be good parents. But my own daughter wouldn't hug me, and my wife was like, oh, no, no, no, you're a great dad, but you have a nuclear reactor in your chest. And as I've worked with the therapist to unwind some of that, that's something I definitely picked up in the house, growing up, which was just the tension in the air. Again, that's not a knock on her parents, they do the best work they can, right? With the tools they got, anxiousness was the, was the operating strategy. Yeah, I can definitely relate to not being able to share emotions. I didn't even know I was trying to suppress them. I don't know, that was just like the standard, right? I didn't think that there was any other way of life until I wanted to fight everybody with normal, right? And I thought like, Pantara being like your, your gospel was right. I didn't know any different. It's amazing, like as a child, how, you know, we suppress all these feelings and then how when we become a parent that we start to see these patterns, right? Because then we can see it in our children. And I remember there was a point in time where someone had asked me such a simple question, and they said, "Dar, when's the last time you cried?" And at that point, I was like, "It's been over 10 years." And for a long time, this was primarily like my 20s and 30s. Like for a long time, I saw that with like, I said that was great level of pride. I haven't cried in years, right? I'm a tough guy. And then as I got older, I realized like, all right, well, maybe there is something that I'm covering up here, right, because I don't think that that's healthy. And then it wasn't after I had my first daughter. That was the first time that I had cried in like over a decade. And then having children allowed me to sort of bring my emotions out. And I could see, you know, by me being vulnerable, how much more I'm able to connect with my own kids. But, you know, and maybe this is a little bit hard to talk about, but do you remember maybe a moment that you had kind of felt like things were not okay, you know, at that dinner table, you could feel like the tension in the air or that your dad was maybe having a hard time and not expressing it. Any moments like that that you can recall? Halfway through my childhood, he left the police force over a weekend and started becoming the minister. of a large church in Houston. And I mean, you can talk about walking into a therapist office now and being like, "Hey, my dad was a cop and a minister and they're like, "Aw, sweet." Like, we got a client for life, but it was getting into high school. I was a big kid, I was an athlete. And my sister was a savant. When the smartest people I've ever been around and very, very fast, think Robin Williams, just very quick, very, very smart. And my little brother, I think he missed two questions on the ACT or something like that. So here I was in the middle. I was a good kid, but I was a dumb jock. And I wasn't as smart as them. And I knew it, everybody knew it. And my dad had gone from this very purpose-driven justice-oriented life to kind of an unbound, just ministering, right? Which, there's no metrics for it. It's tough, right? It's a tough transition. And back then, especially, there was no schooling for it. You just kind of did it, right? So as I got into high school, there was a ton of tension in my house. There was two bulls in the China shop, right? Yeah, we pulled way apart. My, as high school went on, and my solution was just to not be around. It was to always be doing something, always be busy, and always be running, right? And so going straight from this season to I had a punk rock band that I loved and going from that to another season, and then going back to playing music. But the goal was to roll right in at night when it was time to lay down and go to bed. And that was just a void conflict, right? Just avoid it. Envoid conflict with who? Your, your parents? It's just the electricity in the air. Yeah, it was just tense. You go into your siblings with everybody. Well, my sister was older, so she was gone. My little brother, I didn't have a good relationship because he was so much younger than me. And my mom had gone back to school at that point. So there was just a lot of things happening. And again, I don't know any family that sat down back then and was like, let's talk about what's going on, you know what I mean? Right. It was act right, get this number on a report card, and then they'll leave me alone, right? So I think the main goal was be left alone. So I need to get this grade. I need to act this way in this setting and then not get in trouble, right? Now, that's, but it was an avoidance strategy, right? I know you've talked openly about, there was times that, you know, you would have to lie. Not just whole things in, but also lies, right? If you can lie around a world class, hostage negotiator and detective and a minister, you can get, right, you can get away with anything. But again, it was all about avoidance. Like, I don't have the tools and I didn't at that age feel like anybody was interested in that engagement. So I'm just gonna, I'm gonna back out of signal, lie. I would steal all the time as a kid, I would cheat on everything as a kid. Everything was about, let me back out of here, right? And it kind of a sense that the rules don't apply. Right, right. So was the cheating kind of stem from, okay, I have these overachieving siblings that I need to show like, and keep up with. So I'm gonna cheat in school or like, where, what kind of lies would you tell? Gosh, dude, I was, do you remember the first time you lied? - No, dude, I mean, it was just a way of being, it was a way of being, it was wired into, it was about everything, right? And I have this memory and we've laughed about it since, but I have this memory of being very young and going to little league practice. And I left the back door open. My dad came home, he takes me to practice, and maybe we're gone an hour or two. I don't know. And it's a very chill suburban out of the way neighborhood, right? And we get home and the back door is still open. - This is in Texas. - This is in Texas, in Houston, North Houston. I left the back door, staying in wide open whole practice. The main concern there should have been that the house was quite full of mosquitoes. And mosquitoes in Houston are no joke, right? But my dad, I remember, he looked at me and he said, I knew it and he gritted his teeth and he had a jacket on. He pulls his firearm out and goes in and clears the house. And I remember at a really young age being like, that's a bit of an overreaction, right? I remember being young going, whoa, as I've gotten older, I realized, man, when your whole life is dealing with things that never happen, right? There's a million marital fights tonight. One of them will end in a murder. Well, that was my dad's whole Tuesday, right? And the next day was all day Wednesday, dealing with another murder and it shifts your bell curve. And so he had a everyday drum beat of what happens when you don't make your grades in high school. You had a drum beat on, if this kid is in this much trouble at this age, then I know I'm sure I was going to be in this age. And so for me, school isn't about learning at all. And that never even occurred to me till grad school, to be honest with you. School is about get that number this grade on that piece of paper by any means necessary and then nobody will mess with you. It never occurred to me how beautiful math can be if you actually dig into our literature. Like, man, how amazing some of these old books could be. That wasn't the point, man. It was, you will get this grade on this paper because the grade was a proxy for, right? For safety, for everything's going to be okay. That was another tension. I remember at a very young age, like, my dad puts on a bulletproof vest every day and groceries are like a tense time and we have to go get groceries. That math didn't work for me as a kid. He's out there saving the world and you can't even afford it. And we can't afford groceries, man. Like, it was a single income household. Yeah. And then my mom would work part-time but she didn't have a college education and in her particular religious background, like they had said, women have no business going to college. And so my dad was always encouraging her, you know, but that was also back when your dad said something that's stamped in concrete fraternity, right? So, yeah. But finances was a big tension point. Not to mention my mom, when she got married to my dad, women were not allowed to get a credit card. To get a checking account, she had to have my dad signature on it. That's my mom. That was federal law. That didn't change till '73 till they'd been married three years. That's crazy, right? But so even expecting her to, like you need to go be pulling your way and getting a job, that was such a transition. Growing up in a world where I want to get a checking account, but I need my husband to come sign off on it for me. Forget a mortgage or anything like that. It was very much a finances were tense, but my dad's a hero. Everyone in the community is like, man, you're dead. People were always calling the house in the middle of the night to say, hey, my kid's in trouble. My kid's struggling with alcohol. My daughter just was assaulted, what I do. - I'm asking your dad for advice. - Yeah. And so he was kind of the go-to guy. I sometimes joke that the skills on the show I have now, my bedroom shared a sheet rock wall with his little bit of closet and he had a long cord to the phone that when somebody would call, he'd pull it in the closet and shut the door and talk. And I'd just lay there and bed at night. If I listened really carefully, I could hear his side of a conversation. And I learned at that age, man, there's some guys at my church that smile real big and they're not good people. Or there's some people that I see on Sunday morning at my local church and they are going to hell right now and they're just smiling away. I just learned that there was a lot of paradox and a lot of what you see here isn't really what's going on here. And I also saw my whole community calls my dad. Like, why can't I afford, like, everyone's got Jordans. Why can't I afford a pair of shoes that I want, right? And that never worked out in my head. I remember the young age thinking, if this is what the public thinks of public service, I'm out. I'm going to go make money. I'm going to go, I don't ever want this tension in the house. So of course, I went and created the opposite tension, right? Which is I was always going to working, but it was just an electric thing. And I imagine, this is my experience. I can't imagine actually being the guy who puts on the pool of protest. Being the guy who's trying to encourage his wife to go, like, fulfill all these amazing talents she has but she's still, like, hurting from some of the messaging she got as a kid. I can imagine a frustrating that would have been. And then to have this big loud knuckleheaded teenager that's just was just like this all the time. I mean, I have a lot of compassion. I was just tough season. And there was no language for emotional IQ back then. There was language for compliance. And there was language for you will get these grades. And there's language for you will go to college. Those were the three unspoken. And so for me, you do what you got to do, man. I'm going to make up a story. I'm going to look on this person's test. I'm going to turn in this homework. Whatever I got to do so that I can be left alone. Everything was about survival. You know, you have to get in a non-dramatic way, right? I have other-- my first job out of college was teaching in high school across the river at a very different experience, right? Very challenging situation for all these students. There's was about survival, right? So I never want to suggest that my experience was like theirs. But I think all young people are trying to figure out how to survive in whatever ecosystem they get dropped in. I never missed a meal. I always had shoes, right? So it wasn't like that. But we did have a family's break into our house at Christmas and put stuff under our tree. OK. And it was one of those, like, that's awesome. I wanted that shirt. And also, it's kind of embarrassing. Yeah, right? So it's both in. But it was never a matter of not surviving. But it was very much a matter of checking these boxes so you can go to the thing that you want to do. Right. And what would the consequences be if you did not get that grade? They're pretty tough. Yeah, they're pretty costic. Yeah. Those tough. Was it like physical? Was it verbal? It was tough. Yeah, it was tough. OK. Yeah. It was, um, yeah, it was pretty tough. Yeah, yeah. Imagine setting your makeup. Then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all-day comfy grip. Just plump, dewy, hydrated skin. That still feels like your skin. Try new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York. Maybe it's Mabelie. I definitely relate. I came, I grew up, you know, with very conservative Indian parents. And there was things that were very acceptable in India that you know. Very stuff very acceptable in Texas, yeah. Right. You know, you talk about you don't know what it's like having to put on a bulletproof vest every day. But in some ways, I kind of wonder if you do, because you're a public persona, right? You give the world advice. And in a way, you kind of have to put on this vest to show that you're harder to the outside world, right, with this big spotlight on you. And then you also just like every other human on this planet are dealing with your own demons and your own challenges, right? And you don't, I mean, most people would not want to show those, but you're one of the rare people that I think actually do and make you so relatable, which we'll get to as this journey continues, in talking about sort of wearing this mask and having to be almost two different people at times. I think one of your earlier goals when you were in high school was you weren't to be famous, right? Like a lot of young people do. I think at that point, maybe like music and punk rock, that was your calling. If it was my calling, I would have done it. I didn't have two. I had like six or seven different, yeah, masks to wear. I was really active in my local church and I was good at public speaking from a young age. And so I would have that guy. I was a frontman for a rock and roll band. We thought we're heavy metal. We weren't, but we tried so hard. But those guys are still my close friends, but it would be like, yeah, hollering, screaming and acting really tough and trying to get whenever a mosh, but I could get into. And then I was a Texas high school football player, right, a two year varsity starter. So there's that whole beef cake macho, like snap into a slim gym. And then I was a track. I was best at run a track. And so there was multiple, different personalities. And I think that's the beauty of childhood. You get to try all these things on, but the ones I was trying on were very much in conflict with each other. And so you kind of lose the sense of who are you? Did I remember it like it was yesterday back when MTV played music on Sunday? I mean, on Saturday nights at 1030, there was this program called headbangers ball. They would have all the heavy metal stuff if they didn't play during the day. And I had a friend and we'd get together and watch it every Saturday, a band called Pantera came out and the guy had his head shaved and he had no shirt on. But it was this sense of strength and power that I didn't, I'd never seen before. And I remember thinking that is it. And man, I, I followed the band around and now that I'm older, I'm like, oh my gosh, I pumped a lot of nonsense into my head, right? For a lot of years. But there was just something about that strength and that sense of self confidence that I didn't have. And it really spoke to me. And then there's always a dark side of chasing self confidence, man, because you look to and inflate your ego wherever you can. And that's where a lot of the dishonesty came from too was wanting so desperately to be something I wasn't. I wasn't tough, but I wanted to be tough, man. And I wasn't elite. I was pretty good. And I wanted to be elite, right? And I was pretty smart. I wasn't real smart like my sister, brother. So everything was almost. And so being dishonest, let me bridge that gap. Right. Right. And I was close enough to people just be like, oh, cool. But everything had to be a little bit exaggerated a little bit more. And yeah, it became a, it became a curse. I know now chasing graduate school, trying to move up in, in the Academy in higher education, getting two PhDs. A lot of that, dude, was in my smart now. Do you like me now? And when I didn't get it after the first one, it was like, I'm a good, another one, right? And obviously I wanted to learn some skills, right? You know, that was about 2010, 1112 when I was falling apart, the world felt like it was falling apart. And we had just handed every student an iPhone. So overnight, in my work as a dean of students, it went from, hey, I want to get this job. Hey, my mom and dad aren't well to, hey, I don't want to be alive anymore. Hey, I've got debilitating depression, anxiety. I just got assaulted and I'm allowed to say it out loud now. So I was faced with a set of skills I didn't have, right? And so a lot of that was going, I want to go get some more skills, but underneath it all, I just want to be able to be like that guy smart. And I was so desperate to chase that. You wanted that validation from your dad, specifically, or just like the community in general. I don't know any young man that isn't constantly dreaming of the day their dad calls him on the phone and says, I'm proud of you. Yeah. Right. Again, this is over generalization, but I think every daughter wants their dad to go. You're the most beautiful person I've ever seen except your mom. And I think every young boy wants dad to call say, I'm really proud of you. I like to have your blessing, right? And I think, I think, I don't know many men, my age that didn't spend some significant time either chasing that or running from it. But yeah, it's allowed a loud voice. Yeah, sure. So just kind of catching back up to where we were in the story of, now you're in college, you have this experience where you see this guitar player, you're realizing like, hey, I could do that. So at that part of your journey, you still think like music, fame, that is all about fame. Okay. All about fame. It's all about music or something else. And then for my understanding, there was one pivotal moment, like a movie you saw, a Good Will Hunting, that made you realize that you had a different calling in life. That was the first breadcrumb, if you will. So I always thought, okay, I got to get this degree. That's what my parents said I got to do. I got to, and it's the safe thing, right? And so I'm gonna get this degree. And man, I switched majors every other weekend. Yeah, then one weekend, I went and saw Good Will Hunting. And everyone was really drawn to Matt Damon. And that was awesome. The two things I walked away from that movie, there's one scene where they're sitting there at the construction yard. And Ben Affleck's character says like, it's insulting to us as your friends if you're still here. Like we love you more than you love yourself. Get out of here and go make something for yourself. And I remember thinking that's what my friends, my friends are doing that for me. Like, hey, you've got some pretty unique. Get out of here. Go to your thing. And the second part was I was really drawn to that Robin Williams character, which in retrospect is a lot like my dad, which is not a lot of flash, but when something goes down, I know a guy I can call. And so I went to switch my major to, I tried to change it to psychology. I was getting close to graduation. I think I was a junior and poor college administrative person was like, man, you've changed so many times. We can get you just enough classes so you can go to graduate school and such a psychology. And so I focused everything on that till I left. But the idea was still to go to Hollywood and become famous. And I wrote a screenplay for my senior thesis and said like, I was obsessed with that. And that was a cool golden era of movies. Like American History X came out then and Good Will Hunting came out then and recommend for Dreamers. All these really powerful emotionally driven movies as a young guy. It meant a lot. The key was not to be good at a craft, but to be recognized as something special. It was in a session, right? And even psychology as a young kid, I didn't realize I wanted to be the guy that everyone in the community knew, well, that guy can help. Well, none of us can help that guy can help, right? And it was all ego driven, which makes the worst kind of therapist, right? But everything was, if you draw all the way down, do I have any value? Is anybody actually like me? Right? Do I have any worth at all here? And those have been haunting, haunting questions I've chased forever. Same. And I thought a spotlight would validate it. And it doesn't. It just exposes it even more, right? There was a moment that I read about where you realized that you weren't giving the correct advice to people that were seeking your guidance. Maybe you were asking questions that you shouldn't ask or, and, you know, first off, that you openly talk about this is probably not something that you hear therapists talking about, right? That I had this misstep in my career. But what was that moment that you realized that you were doing something wrong? The nature of my job was sitting with young people who were caught up with drugs at a really young age or selling drugs in a residence hall or had just been sexually assaulted or had just been accused of doing that or students who were thinking of dying by suicide, whatever the situation was or parents. And I had a lot of, a lot of experience doing that. But it wasn't until I started digging in and taking, doing, actually being trained on how to have those hard conversations, what empathy feels like, sitting with hurting people, not from a position of hierarchy and power of, I'm the dean of students, she will do it. I say, or I'm gonna, it was more like, dude, what's going on? Right? Some of the shifts are sometimes major, sometimes they're subtle. It's the difference between asking, hey, why do you keep drinking? You're 20 versus, dude, what in the world happened in your life that this is the best way your body's figured out to get through a day? One of those is really accusational. One of those is an invitation. It's compassionate. The end result might be you got to go rehab. But one of those is, I'm going to kick you out to rehab and the other one is, I'm going to take you there. And I'll be here, I'll be here when you're done, right? And it was just a, it was a shift in, how do you love somebody? Well, but that came from when I started training and realized, oh my gosh, I wish I had those conversations back. I don't know that there's many, I'm sure they'll emerge in the comment section here. I don't know that there's many students across my experience that would ever doubt that I cared about them. Right. It's just your approach. Yeah. That was what you knew growing. That's what I knew. That's what I knew. That's what I saw. And then you get thrown into systems. And that's just the way the system says to do it, right? How did you realize that you weren't approaching these conversations the correct way to try new ways? Oh, just try. Okay. So just through trial and error. It wasn't like someone sat in on a session and heard you say something. It was more about like, here's a good example of one. It's a personal one. My wife, we had this big like, what do we want our life to look like? I wasn't well. I was going to take a new job in a new city working with a new group of students. There's much smaller group of students. And my wife said, Hey, I think I've got this calling to she was a really high pollutant fancy professor. And she was phenomenal what she did. She said, I think I'm called to stay at home and like, take these talents and maybe work locally at a local school again, have some more kids and which was a big sacrifice for her. A big sacrifice for all. It was just a chef. And right away, boom. and pregnant, miscarriage one, boom, miscarriage two. And then it was one year, and then two years, and so it was a lot more challenging than we thought. My wife had some health challenges, and it was just not how we do it up. And then my son comes along, and prior to that, where the miscarriages was that hard on you emotionally? - Well, that's how it's getting at, when you're talking about how did I learn? I just took a very biology scientific approach, and like, were you trying to numb out those emotions, so that was just how your brain was wired, yeah. - Like, I've talked to my dad since, like, I remember coming home from a crisis event one night. I worked for a crisis team, which was adjunct to the police department, where I just get a text message, and it would say, 10, 8, 7, which was the code for somebody who died in an address. You show up, it could be a four-year-old, it could be an 89-year-old, it could be a 22-year-old, and I remember driving home one night, and I called my dad, which is really odd for me, but I called him and said, "Hey, here's what I just saw." It was the first time I'd seen a really gory situation, and he said, "You shouldn't have seen that." And he said it in a way, and it was compassionate. And I said, "I know, that's what I'm doing now." I would be the dean of students by day, and then I would take these calls at night, and I said, "What are you supposed to do, Dad, when the greatest gift you have is giving people really bad news?" And he said, he got quiet, and he said, "You think God that you found your thing, and you better get really good at that." 'Cause that's a holy moment, when you tell somebody their child is passed away, or their husband just died, or whatever. And so that was around the time that we had miscarriage, when I miscarriage, too. And when things get crazy, it's just, I didn't train for this. My body just gets real still. It everything just gets real calm, and real still. And that night, I'll be like, no way that, but in the moment, it gets still. And so I found myself lecturing my wife on, well, this is what happened with your body, and it may be this gene thing, and it's probably this. And what I came to realize was, I was taking this woman who was hurting at a level I didn't comprehend. And I was, too, I just didn't know it. And I was just rubbing her nose in my charts and my graphs, man. And that was one of those, you don't know how to sit with hurting people. You need to lecture them. You need to be right. You don't know how to enter into somebody's pain, and be compassionate, and be with, right? And that's probably the biggest shift. If you ask me what the biggest shift was, being at or over versus being with somebody. And that was the big shift for me. I'll never forget the moment. It's a private moment, so I won't share all of it, but on the front porch, it was pouring down rain, and we had it out. And I heard her say things and experience and feel things that I did not know was there. She heard it from me, and that was a hard, heavy moment. And she got pregnant again, and then that was an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured, and she almost blood out in the house, and then accidentally here comes Josephine, right? So I don't know how it all works, but it was my personal experience at home, and then I'd go to work and just deal with all these hurting students and then their families, and then parents would hear me take care of their kid, and they would call until he got an hour for me, and so I take that call, and so it just kind of became, accidentally what my dad was doing, which is people in the neighborhood and community calling. And at the same time, I was getting some good training at the graduate level, and it kind of all came together of this is kind of your thing, and the world is to show up, and then it's not about you anymore. - It was about 30, 31. - And at this stage, so you had your first child one, how old were you? - I don't know, 28, 32, somewhere in there, somewhere. - Okay. - So your first child is born? - Yeah, 32, 32 is when I'm a first kid. Yeah, yeah, 32. - And that had been a journey because you had done through, you know, how about when the child was first there, what was that feeling like? - That part was awesome. - Yeah. - I didn't have the, oh my gosh, what are we gonna do? I didn't have any of that stuff. - I probably was pretty self-absorbed. He was healthy, I knew I had the greatest wife of all time. The challenges we had early on was, I wanted to be a plugged in present dad. I wanted to be one of these new modern dads who was like, could do it all, but I didn't know what I didn't know. And very quickly, my house became a failure factory. Every time I'd walk in the door, it was, hey, why didn't you, like, you put the diaper on wrong and now it's leaked everywhere? Or we were just laughing the other night, she wasn't laughing as much as I was. She left me, she went to do something, she went to teach one of her classes and she left me a list. And whatever it was, get the bottle out of the fridge and feed Hank. She'd pumped and there was this bottle in there and I got it and she gave it to him. - I didn't even post a warming up. I had no idea. - I had this baby that's just shivering. I didn't know what to do. And I was like, I don't think this is good. Or maybe he loves it, right? But there were things like that that I just didn't know. And it wasn't in her world view of how could you be an adult and not know. - Right. - I just never been around babies, I never have. And so really early on I learned, I don't know how this works, I just know I keep messing it up. The greatest thing I can give my family is, I can go make some more money. And so I started taking on adjunct jobs and I started teaching at multiple universities at night and I started teaching Sunday school class and I started doing all this other work and then there's a pastor in Nashville, Ian Simkins and he gave me this quote that's awesome. He says, "If busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress." And that became me. Man, if I sat down for two seconds, I thought man, I started getting angsty. But what that meant was, I wasn't sleeping. And I also started doing this and I think this is a big part of the lead into anxiety. I was always a loudmouth guy. A big, tough, sounding loudmouth, but I was kind of a wimp. And I grew up with some crazy friends who loved getting altercations. And I really wanted to know like something happened with me and my wife's in a parking lot somewhere and I bowed up to somebody and I remember thinking to myself, "What are you actually gonna do?" Like you talk all hard like, "What are you gonna do?" So it was before the UFC exploded. I literally opened up a phone book which to some of your younger listeners they used to print off part of the internet and just drop it on your front porch. It was a phone book and I found a fight gym and I showed up and I started going and I went every day for years. I got obsessed with it. First it was, "What are you actually gonna do if somebody hits you or kicks you?" And then it became, I was pretty good at it. And then these world class fighters started coming through. It became an amazing place to go hide but practice was over at 10 o'clock at night, 10.30 at night. And that's right when this amazing new sleep meds came out on the market. Lou Nesta's in the ambiance and stuff. And so I could just go guns a blazing till right up until bedtime. Just take some sleep meds. And I've heard a doctor say, "You're not asleep, you're unconscious." So I didn't get good room sleep and I ended up taking those things for years because I could just run really hard and then go into a black hole, get up next day, go to work and call it. So I didn't have, I didn't sleep for years. And then you put on top of that opening my eyes one day and we owe 110, 120,000 dollars in student loans. We just bought a house so we can't afford. I got car payments and now we got a little kid and my career is, there was a presidential transition at the university and I was like, "Man, new president can come do anything." And that's when I started feeling, "Oh, if I get fired, we're done." Like we're done done. And then I started seeing cracks everywhere in my house. I thought the house was collapsed. I mean, right after the 2008, 2009 financial collapse, I mean, everything happened all at once for me. You're seeing cracks physically, but also-- There's settling in our house and every house in America. But it was like, "Oh, my house is falling apart." But you obsessively-- I went bananas, yeah, yeah, yeah. Compulsive, like it was rough. Yeah, it was not compulsive obsession, but obsessively. Like I would bring contractors out and they'd be like, "Dude, I'm not even gonna take your money. Your house is great. It's awesome." And I'd be like, "You don't see it, man." Right? I remember I went and met with a CFO. At the time, it was $150 million dollar company, which would be about a $400 million dollar company today. And I said, "Hey, here's what I'm about to see. What's about to happen to the market again? I'm about to pull out all my retirement. I'm gonna do this in this." I remember him saying he was a sweet guy. He said, "I don't fully understand what you're talking about here. Don't do what you're about to do with your personal money. Don't do that." And I left thinking he didn't get what's coming. Right? I always had my mind. It was lack of sleep, which then started a bunch of unhealthy habits around working, around avoiding conflict. I started re-creating my home, child at home. Never had enough money. We owed so much money. We had no margin. And then I stopped exercising. I stopped doing all these things, right? That just give you a whole life. And then at work, I was always the doomsday guy. Like, what about this? And I was reading doomsday stuff. And again, this is before I just got pumped in everyone's head with Instagram. So I was having to go find it and then I'd bring it. And they'd be like, "What do you talk about?" Right. I was just that guy, man. But I was an electric and third rail all the time. Meet new groupie setting mist from Mavily New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours with flexible all-day comfy grip. Try new groupie setting mist from Mavily New York. Maybe it's Mavily. So it sounds like you bought a house so you couldn't quite afford. And so what was it to try to impress people? Was it because you needed that space? No, it was just, I remember the, it was my wife really wanted to buy a house, wanted to buy a house, wanted to buy a house. And I remember about six months into owning that house, a conversation we had in the backyard. I said, "I feel like you're building a life without me with this house with our son." And she said, "John, I have to." And that was a big wake up call for me. 'Cause she was right, I was unstable. I wasn't cheating on her, I wasn't, right. Didn't have gambling debts, I was absolute mess. Looking to fight everybody, looking to challenge everybody. I was trying to always try to get a new job 'cause I thought this job was, it was just this kind of mess, which ironically enough is the way almost everyone lives nowadays. I was in the minority at the time. But it, now everybody, it's not. I being overexcited. understanding your finance. Being completely over extended, being completely fried, being glued to the next bad news, being obsessed with what the government is going to do to come save me. It was just all of it. Yeah. And at the time, I was on the front end of what is now just the chaos that's our life. But she called a friend, and I didn't know. He just had a little boy, too, he's one of my college roommates, one of my closest friends in the world. And he drove down and him and his wife and their little baby under the guise of our boys are going to meet for the first time. They're both one or two. And I took him on the tour of Lucas. It's happening to the house and all this and he's just as West Texas as they come. And he very stoically said, Hey, none of this is true. And you're not all right. I don't know what the deal is, but you're not okay. You need to talk to somebody. And that was a very first time in my life. I thought this might be me because I trust that I can trust that in time. Yeah. All these hard experts. You're a partner, right? But what couldn't you have a partner? Couldn't hear from contractors. Couldn't hear from CFOs. I couldn't hear from anybody. He had permission to speak in and I was like, All right, I'll talk to somebody. Yeah. And it was still six months later before I finally did that even. Right. And also must be tough that, you know, you again, have all these accolades degrees. You're the person that people call, right? Like, but you feel coming apart. Yeah. It's like being a seamstress, but your clothes are falling apart as you're walking. It's immense what it felt like. Yeah. I just wanted to take a second to say, like, your vulnerability is so commendable. It's so rare, especially somebody, you know, successful as you are that can openly talk about these types of challenges, you know, like many people even listening to this, you're dealing with a lot, right? Like you were dealing with financial problems. You're new dad. Everybody's right. Right. Everybody. Yeah. Everything else is dealing with that. Right. And, but there's a lot of people that are like still stuck there, right? Like that was my whole mission for why I started creating content to help that person. That felt stuck. That felt like they, the days in front of them where you're going to be just as bad as the days behind them. And they were never going to climb out of this hole that they're in. So how did you start to turn your life around at that point? Like what happens next? It started with a fateful car drive, I mean, at that university, I walked, I sold, we sold our house, moved into a residence hall. So at that point, you realized you had to sell your house to relieve the debt or how did you finally decide to make that? I talked my wife into it. I mean, I pleaded, can we please, we lost money, had to bring $4,000 to close and just to get out, right? I couldn't, I could not breathe. And we sold that house and she was cool with it if we had a plan to pay off all the student loan stuff. And so by moving in there, we were able to take moving in, we moved into a dorm, I was over housing, was one of the things I was in charge of. And so there was an empty apartment, I moved us into that with a two year old and it sounds all dramatic. My son had 175 college girls at two years old, right? He won the lottery and there was like 50 guys lived there. It was amazing childhood for him. It was embarrassing for me, right? Because you're living amongst the students at this point, living in a dorm, right? My wife is a professor, I'm a associate dean and I'm a professor like I'm, we're supposed to have made it. And this is where we circled back to and that ended up being the moment that I exiled for the first time, walking into that dorm. Like you just, I don't know, I don't know how the house is off my shoulders, right? And then I started a, the general council's a close buddy and he's like, hey, I work out every morning at five. One should come with me. And at first I did it because he was high up in the university and I wanted to impress the higher ups and then he became a really regulated, safe, he was a deep man of faith. He's a great dad and everyone I started getting up at five o'clock, started to exercise. And another guy, he was a bioethics professor and a theology professor but he was a monk. He had no kids, no wife. And he would leave after school and go stay in a monastery until school started in. So we started meeting once a week. That was when I learned what peace felt like and you can talk about it all you want. You can do your meditation with your meditation apps, all by yourself, whatever. When you're in the presence of somebody who has peace and both from us, it's like a grandmother. Right. You just want to be around them, right? And he was that way for me, both of those guys were that way for me. So I knew what it felt like and then one day I was walking into work from my, my apartment on campus. I turned right back around and told my wife, I didn't tell my boss, I was over so much stuff at this point. I could have been gone a week from campus and no, no, and if I just answered myself, they would have all thought I was somewhere else. And I drove three hours and walked right into a buddies, he's a physician, walked right in. I walked right past his admin. She was like, sir, so you can go back and I just walked straight back and walked right in his office. And I was kind of the party guy back then like, hey, what's up? He was like, what are you doing? And he says to the state, he still gets goosebumps because I pointed at him and I said, hey, I'm not all right. And he spent two and a half hours with me that night. That was the very first time I said, I mean, I don't know what, I don't know what get helped me. And even with that meant, I was over the counseling center. I'd walk students to therapy all my, I just knew what it meant. That was the first time I was like, I'm not all right. And so I started a long path back, man. It's been way ups and way down since, but it's in search of, how can I be the most peaceful president of myself and bring joy to wherever I walk into? It's awesome. Wow. And what was the first step, like from that point to help get over your anxiety? First step, honestly, if I'm reflective, the very first step was looking at another man and saying the words, I'm not okay. And I had done that with my buddy. I had done that with those two gentlemen that I worked with. I did that with him. That became the practice, I think. I took anxiety meds for a while. I started seeing a counselor. I got off all sleep meds. There was, I kept working out. I mean, there was some natural things to do along the way. I got a new job and we moved. And so there was all some things that were just natural stuff. Yeah. I think if I go back, the most important thing was having the courage to just say a lot on our right. Yeah. And that didn't mean I was a bad Texan. Didn't mean I was a bad man. Didn't mean you're a bad son. In fact, it made me more of those things, right? Yeah. It didn't mean I was a, I was a failed dad. I remember sitting at the kitchen table looking at those anxiety meds sobbing. Like, I have failed my wife and my new son. I've let him down. And it was, it was the opposite. And what was your wife's opinion of you getting on anxiety meds? I mean, at that point, I could have said, hey, the doctor said to spray paint myself green. And I'll feel better. Shoot it. Let's go get it. Let's go. Yeah. Yeah. And I think she was at a point where, like, the fact that I had asked for professional help, I hadn't gone to the internet and Googled what's going on, like, and I have some conspiracy theory about something. But I actually met with someone I knew what they were doing. Was there a point that things got so bad that it felt like your marriage might end? Later on, yeah. So we had those three losses, we had our daughter, and then we moved here. And by the time we moved to Nashville, it was pretty dicey. We were packing up to move across the country and things were really hanging on barely. You moved to be and leave the house and go live in the dorm. That's why you moved to Nashville? No, no, no. I spent, I took a job at another university in Texas, and I was there for six years. And it was a good experience, but it was a pulling apart yet again, and we hadn't dealt with a lot of stuff personally. And then I took this new job as the head honcho guy of student affairs in Nashville at Belmont University, just amazing school, but that was the big revealer. When you start saying goodbye to your friends, saying goodbye to your family, our family lived around us, and it's just you too, that was the big, wide goal. And that's when we both sat down across the table and said, all right, the marriage we had is over. It's over. Do you want to build anyone? Because I'm not doing that anymore, and she's like, I'm for sure not doing that anymore. So that was us right there on the edge. So it was a long journey, even once you sought help, you got on medication, you started sleeping better, you start working out, waking up at 5 a.m., finding good mentors, finding people that are peaceful and spiritual guides for you. It was still almost a 10 year journey. I think the heart, that's the hardest thing for folks to wrap their head around, is you want instance. The day you're sober is the day you start, right? The day you say I'm so sorry, the days I've heard you, the day your spouse finds out about your gambling debts, or finds out about your infidelity over, that's the one. And it feels this relief, but man, that's when the work starts, right? So yeah, it took all those years for me to get to a place where I could have an honest open conversation about where our life's going to look like, and when same with her, right? So it was us sitting down saying, and I'll say this, after several hard, hard conversations, I remember being about two hours into a messy one. And we both at some point started laughing, and it was this big aha moment for both of us. We built a pretty ugly marriage. We built a pretty rough situation. That meant we could build something awesome. And that for us was the light bulb. Like we've co-created this, we can co-create that if we want to. And I hate to say it was that simple, but it was that simple. It was what must be true for, to just build something pretty amazing. And that has been the greatest adventure decade of my life, and it's been awesome. And so your drug was just busyness, I mean, would you say? I mean, and obviously feeling this childhood void, right, of wanting to matter, of wanting to be busy. Well, busy meant, if my inbox was always, if people were always texting, people were always calling. My inbox was full. That meant I was important. Yeah. And I didn't know how to do it at home. I could go do it for everybody else. And so yeah. There was a point, not too long ago, where when I would look at my calendar, and I mean, I could show you what it looks like today, but every single minute is accounted for. And there would be times where, because I had a meeting cancellation or something, that I'd have a half hour block. And I would just be stressing as to like, what am I going to do during that half hour block? That is a half hour that I'm not being productive. And so I would actively search out for things to occupy that time with, or like, some meeting I can have just to help move that forward. And now, it's actually quite the opposite, where I'm like, I don't have a break. What am I supposed to think? What am I supposed to be myself? But that's exactly the same mindset when someone who's struggling with. A cocaine addiction, when they really have to fly across the country, you get into kind of a panic about where am I going to get it, right, I mean, right, sure, it's the same exact thing. Yeah, right. It's just the problem is they put you in jail for this one and they give you a million dollars for this one. Right. And they'll both kill you. Right. And yeah, it's the curse of our era of our time that business is so heavily rewarded and it's so damaging. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'm very grateful to have a partner that even through my worst just never gave up on me. You do. Exactly. There were tough times, but yeah, I don't know if it's because Laura like she saw her parents, you know, they were together since they were like 15, 16 years old, but I'm so grateful to have such a partner. Why do you think your partner didn't give up on you? I don't know. Is that who she is? She's loyal to the death, which is awesome. And I can say with confidence now that I couldn't say back then, not because it wasn't true, but because I couldn't hear it. She loves me and she thinks I'm worth the work and I didn't, I wouldn't have believed that. And so, yeah, those, those two big ones and obviously her faith plays an important role in it. But I think there's a, there's a West Texas attitude. You don't give up. You figure it out. And then there was a since, since she was 18 years old, like that's my guy. And I'm going to write off the cliff together, right? And so I've learned a ton about fidelity and loyalty and repair and reconnecting. It's been pretty amazing. Yeah. She's been an incredible gift there. So what happens next? It was pretty awesome. Then it became pretty awesome. Like, um, and it was one of those things that the worst thing about stuff becomes the best thing. We didn't have anybody else. We just, we were in the process of and we just moving and so we were all we had. And that meant we were near two kids and her, right? Yeah. So we didn't have friends. We didn't have a lot of extended community. We didn't have our families. And so it was, we're going to figure this out a minute by minute, day by day and how can I love you today? And what does your picture of today look like, not how do I want today to go? But how can I most love you? And it became a, this idea of throw out fairness. That's, that's an American ideal. It's not real, dude. And marriage is about fair. Great friendships aren't about fair. It's about how can I love you right now? And it's not fair if my buddy malds off and some guy wants to fight him that I'm going to get punched. But that's what you do, right? It's not fair when my buddy comes over and leaves wet towels that I'm picking him up. That's what you do. And so why not extend that same grace to the most important person in my life? And so then it became about how can I love you? And if I don't have that skill set, then I started seeing somebody. She started seeing somebody. Seeing somebody in the sense of like a therapist or a counselor. Okay, gotcha. Yeah. And we bounced around to a couple here and there, but both of us have a pretty amazing person. Oh, wow. And it's awesome. And so how did you start to improve your finances? Man, that was all the way back to, once back to the dorm. Right. Right. So getting to zero. Zero was the heroic moment for us. We didn't know anybody who didn't know anybody. Do you remember the feeling of you paying off your debt? Oh, dude. Yeah. Not just the house crying. We were cheering. It was awesome. We were renting. It wasn't even about that. Not having a house payment. We just didn't know anybody anything. Yeah. We bought a house. We bought a house and got a mortgage, but it didn't even feel as bad as that. But again, I'll say this that year we lived in the apartment. The next house we bought was about half the size of what we would have bought. Because I realized what we needed to live on and what brought us joy and more importantly what brought us peace. And my friend of mine was the loan officer and she was like, why are you only looking at houses at this much money? And I was like, I don't need it, man. Yeah. I need it. This is awesome. And so it reshaped what we thought was important. We reshaped what, what, how we lived, it reshaped what we drove. Just stuff didn't matter. Right. You know what I mean? Doesn't matter. What matters is laughter. And what matters is life is really hard. Do we put in the work every day to go ahead and fix the dishes, go ahead and help with bed time, go ahead and call each other out and we see something that's one of us is heading on a tough path. So that when things are hard, we're, we're, we're in lockdown and man, it's, it's pretty awesome. And it's not perfect. But man, it's, it's just a radical transformation. But it starts with service. It starts with saying, trying to do marriage so that I'm fulfilled is a, it's a recipe for an ending. Doing marriage, saying, I'm going to go all in on you and I'm going to pray to God and you go all in on me and it meant that's literally unstoppable. Wow. That's death to death to you part. It's awesome. And so how do you get from this place where you get a new house now, life starting to get better, your marriage is improving, your health is improving. How did you land this opportunity with Dave Ramsey and then also how did you start to get into the spotlight? I mean, the, this is frustrating for folks who really want, want this job. And I know that it's annoying to hear it. I was speaking to a group of students and their parents and I thought it was going to be a couple hundred and I didn't put a lot of thought into it. I actually forgot about it and turns out it was about a thousand people in this beautiful old theater on the college campus. And I quickly scratched something out on my laptop and printed off the notes. I carried the notes in with me and gave a talk to these folks and it was probably one of the best talks I've ever given in my life. And Dave Ramsey's executive VP was in the audience and he had told them, I want to retire someday and so you only need to find some other people to take over the shows and just create new shows. And she said, I'm going to hire that guy and literally it's going to happen. I know what you're speaking about. I was being pretty direct. I was always had a good time talking to new students about, here's some pitfalls and talking to new parents, dropping their kids off of college and I'm pretty goofy on stage. And so it was silly and funny and pretty direct and but there was some spark there that she saw and then I went and did some stuff for them for the company, spoke at a few of their events. Before you had Dave Ramsey fan at that time, that had been how we got out of that. Okay. I didn't know. I'm going to be honest, I did not know what he was as famous as he was. I knew he was a guy that I listened to on the radio when I was painting dorm rooms in the summer to try to make extra money to pay off my student loans, but I didn't know the enterprise. I didn't know that there was a thousand plus employees, I didn't realize it was second big issue. I didn't know any of that stuff. So that got hired and I was so new, they had an 18 month plan to teach me how podcasting and radio and YouTube, all that works. I didn't know anything about it. I didn't know how the craft works. Like how to come in at a break, try to sit by a microphone and do that. Then, I mean, it was right. I got hired right before COVID hit and Dave said, "I hired you to help hurting people and so we're going to figure it out on there." So they threw me on air and we went from there and it just, it's just gone well. Right. Because when you were helping people, you were helping them more so with trauma, right? But now you're helping them more so with financial advice. Well, that's a whole other thing. So we started the Dr. John Deloney show, which is a call and show about mental and emotional health, right? I think old Dr. Phil stuff. In fact, my manager calls me Punk Rock Dr. Phil, but it's someone calls in or Dr. Laura old shows. And then I also co-host the Ramsey show with Dave and some of the other colleagues. And so some days I'll do record two of my shows where people are calling and about mental health and about trauma and about marriage stuff. And then I'll go to the other studio down the hall and do three hours on the Ramsey show, taking calls about money. And money is, money calls are rarely about money. Occasionally, they're like, what mutual funds should I use and should I use a 529 versus an HSX sometimes, but mostly it's, hey, my dad has an inheritance and he just cut me out of it or my husband's been hiding money or my wife's got a gambling debts. And so there's a whole bunch of behavioral and emotional health relationship challenges and amidst money, just the light on the dashboard for what's really going on under the hood. With all the advice that you've given, if you had to just choose one piece of advice that you wanted to share with the world that you feel like, you know, we need more than ever. And all the people who, you know, you've given marriage advice, financial advice, health advice, all kinds of advice. Like, what would that one message for the world be? Thank you. Be too. Sure. The first one is, you're worth being well, you're worth the work. And I say that all the time, I sound like a broken record. I think when the meta message in this world we've created, think about this morning, Uber to the airport, I don't want to bother anybody. I can just instacart food tonight. I don't want to bother anybody by barring eggs and sugar. The way we've curated our lives technologically is, I don't, I don't call my friends a textum, I don't bother them, is we've got this internal sense now really quickly as a culture that we're a burden. And when you have 85 pounds to lose, it's easy to think I'm not worth that work. When you have a marriage that's hanging on by a thread, it's easy to think I'm not worth that work. Or if you have six figures or student loan debt and you realize it's going to be six years before we get to zero, much less by house, you don't think you're worth that work. And everybody to know they're worth that work. And you tell in that story, you just spend 30 years, this doesn't happen fast. To get to zero, it took me and my wife about 15 years to get to zero. And we were both worth that work and I tell you on the other side of it, man, it's amazing. So that's the first one. So if you're a single mom, if you're a mom with three kids and your husband's absent, like whatever wherever you are, or if you're a police officer who picks us up and you're riding the beat and you're working nights again, you're worth the work. You're worth being well. And the second one is one that I was kind of shy to talk about early on just because it's such a personal thing. But I think in one fell swoop as a culture, we have cut tethers on every thing that bound us together. I think all of us new politicians were out for themselves or politicians. But I think we all deeply thought they want what's best for all of us. We all thought our doctors want us, we don't believe that anymore. We all thought our doctors wants to be well. We don't know if we believe that anymore. Instagram has plenty of accounts that will be like your doctors trying to kill you, right? We all thought, man, it's in your kids to school. And now we're like, you know the education, but the biggest one we've caught is every culture in human history has had a bound faith practice that where everybody had a role and it wasn't always good roles and some of the roles were oppressive, but everybody knew the boundaries. They took a knee to something bigger than them. And now we have running water and every building and we've got a button we can push and some kid and skinny jeans is going to come in here with a sandwich for us Like we've solved for these problems that have plagued humanity and in the process We've gotten really arrogant as though we've become our own gods and for all of human history People walked outside of their tents and look to this guy and said dear God or God's please rain or my family's gonna die Or please stop raining because we got too much and so the second most important thing is you've got to I'm my family's Christian That's our bound faith practice. You have to find something that's bigger than you that you take a need to and say dear God or God's please help And I've got friends who are they they give me a hard time. They're they're profound atheists But they believe in the birth and life and death resurrection cycle of nature. Great. I've got friends of all different faith practices Great the self can't hold and I think we're all finding that out that this idea of the self is supposed to be the center of universe It can't hold it and and so having a faith practice where you regularly submit yourself to it I think is a such a powerful relief the universe doesn't rest on your shoulders anymore And now you can repel off the side and go be the mom the dad the brother the husband the co-worker the citizen that we desperately need you to be Yeah, that's beautiful. I know growing up you spent so much of your life seeking the validation and even this time from your dad And now your father now Do you feel like you're doing a good job as a dad? Yeah, I am if I was to If my plane right home this evening if the plane goes down. I'll know that my kids know that their dad loved them. Yeah, and That's a that's been a highly intentional practice and my son's 15. He's taller than me now He's pretty big boy and so it's Awkward now to grab his face and to put my forehead on his forehead and tell him I love him and to make sure I hug him every day It's hard. It's just awkward and It's me pushing through that awkward so that there's never a doubt in his mind and with my nine-year-old daughter Right who comes in and says dad. Let's go fight in the yard. You want some of it like All right, I'll fight you in the yard man like it's but it's it's this kinetic powerful Yeah, they know they know that the role man loves him. That's amazing earlier. You would said that you know It's every boy's dream to make their father proud or to hear that their father says like I'm proud of you son Do you feel like you're at that place where your father if he's still around today? He's still around. Yeah. Has he told you that he's proud of you? No, he um I had this realization last year that I had cast him in a movie. He didn't know he was in and I'd gotten really mad at him for not knowing the lines Recently we went and visited we made a pilgrimage back to Texas and he had a whole list of things He put my son through some sort of grandpa camp We're like with all the woodworking and shooting get all the stuff and that was my dad saying I'm proud of gonna love you And so I think that onus on me now is hearing Not walking into I'm from Texas so not walking into a Mexican restaurant and being mad that everyone's not speaking English It's walking in and fully absorbing the beauty of This amazing restaurant in the culture that I just walked into and so yeah, I know my dad's proud of me I do and He also hasn't called and said I need you know you got my blessing and that's and that call is not gonna come and I'm at a place now I'm okay with that. It's my job now to hear it and see it and go. Oh, man. I got it I can walk around complaining and wanting about all day long. That doesn't solve any problems But I do I do rest knowing he's proud of me so much of what you talk about I can relate to so much and this last question as well because it's one that haunts me You know a lot of it is trying to think of We sort of got on this journey, right trying to maybe prove something to our family and then at some point We realized like we're trying to prove something to ourselves, right? So the last question is are you proud of yourself? I'm getting there not because of the money and the fame and all that but because I'm watching my kids Experience the world in a different way and that's where I'm proud of knowing that there were some things I wanted to be different and I'm doing the awkward hard scary awkward thing to see those things through and so Dude this thing happened this thing will end as spectacularly as it started I know that so it's not hanging onto that I'm not proud of that as much as I'm proud of having a small group of guys that I trust having a what like having a marriage that I would be Envious of if I wasn't in it and man watching my kids experience the world with compassion and having their eyes open for hurting people and also Just the other day like my I'm a let I don't we don't My kids don't have social media. They don't like especially my young kids They don't very very limited on technology stuff just because I've had the misfortune of being on the other side of that to an Investigation within stuff because my son doesn't have Snapchat He gets left out of a whole bunch of stuff and he was upset as he should be and he was frustrated with me as he should be And it's also my job to not seek to be liked by my teenage kid all the time and I finally said hey tell your friend your dad socks tell your friend your dad is the worst and That he is ruining your life and I'm okay with that Because I know this is hard and he threw his frustration and said I can't say that because I know it's not true And when he turned around I was like right, so that's I didn't get that level of being able to be angry and be Frustrated and not feel the need to peg that on somebody until like two years ago So the fact that he's able to already experience that I'm proud of that. Yeah. Well, I know you may not hear from your dad You may not hear from yourself, but I just want to say I'm super proud of you man Thanks, you know, it's really incredible what you've accomplished Truly a phoenix rising from the ashes with all the hardships that you've gone through and more importantly, you know You've turned your struggles into storytelling and you've turned your hurt into healing other people And I don't think there's any greater gift that we can give the world than that So yeah, thank you so much for sharing your story opening your heart and spying so many people around the world Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you. I appreciate it, man Imagine setting your makeup then forgetting it's even theirs Meet new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York. No tightness. No stickiness. No residue. Maybe it's Mabelie