Checking In On The Men In Our Lives w/ Dr. John Delony

Kylie Larson:
Welcome back to Far From Perfect. I am your host, Kylie Larson, and today, I cannot believe I had the opportunity to connect one-on-one with Dr. John Delony. John is a mental health expert and we talk all things mental health in regards to how to communicate with each other, with our partners, with our children. I mainly wanted to get his take on how the collective men are doing. I work a lot with women, but I also know that our men are also hurting.

Not all of you have men in your lives, right? Your partners may not be men, but you probably have some male friends, and I think we need to acknowledge what the men in the world and in our lives are currently dealing with. I also asked him about how our kids are doing. And I don't want to spoil it with his answers, but I will say this, we have some work to do. We all need to get a little curious and a little compassionate as to what everyone is dealing with in their lives right now.

Dr. John, which he'll probably kill me for calling him Dr. John, John is a bestselling author, a mental health expert, and the host of the Dr. John Delony Show. Make sure you check it out. He's got two PhDs and over two decades of experience in counseling, crisis response, and higher education. He was a pure joy to talk to. His energy comes through and he just helps you do life. That's what I appreciate about him so much. He's a regular guy. He reminds me a lot of my husband, but they've figured some things out. They're not perfect. They also struggle, but they open up. He opens up about what his struggles are and helps guide you through your struggles. Whether you have a man in your life or not, this is definitely an episode worth tuning into. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Far From Perfect. I am your host, Kylie Larson, and today we are joined by Dr. John Delony. He is a mental health expert, the host of the John Delony Show, which I'm sure most of you are already listening to, and bestselling author of Redefining Anxiety and Own Your Past, change Your Future. Welcome to the show, John.

Dr. John Delony:
What's up Kylie?

Kylie Larson:
Or is it Dr. John? Do I need to call you doctor?

Dr. John Delony:
No. The fact that you just called me about my first name is way nicer than what my friends call me, so we're good. Yeah, John is great.

Kylie Larson:
Oh, my gosh, I love it. Give us a little, how did you get here? How'd you get to be this mental health expert?

Dr. John Delony:
Dude, I don't know. I'm still trying to figure this out. I have no idea. I was working in universities and so I worked at several universities in Texas. The last one I was at was at Texas Tech. Then I was working at the law school at Texas Tech, and then I ended up as the Dean of Students at Belmont University here in Nashville. Then I ran into Dave Ramsey's people, and then I decided to make quite the left turn and become a YouTuber. That's kind of the story there.

Kylie Larson:
What a wild ride. When you were working at those universities, who were you working with? Undergraduates? I don't know.

Dr. John Delony:
All across the board, all of them, depending on what role I was and what university. I always had my foot in housing, always had my foot in student conduct stuff. Then all of that ended up in student mental health challenges, and then it ended up in family systems issues, and mom and dad calling and saying, "Hey, we're struggling," and it's dealing with crisis.

While I was in Lubbock in West Texas, I spent some time with working with the police department also doing crisis response. Showing up and helping with death notifications and just in the messiest of messy situations. The majority of my career has been spent sitting with folks when the wheels have fallen off and then trying to figure out what do we do next?

Kylie Larson:
The reason I ask is because I always find it so interesting, I remember being in college, like it was yesterday, and they want you to pick a major. You feel you have to figure out your entire life by the time you start, I don't know if it's your sophomore year, your junior. I'm like, "How on earth am I supposed to know what I'm doing?" What I ended up doing has nothing to do with what I'm doing now.

Dr. John Delony:

That's right. No, I had five majors and good grief, my academic journey is a disaster. It's all good.

Kylie Larson:
The reason I bring it up is because I feel like we put all these pressure on these kids to feel like they need to figure out the rest of their life when really it doesn't matter.

Dr. John Delony:
Well, and I think I can't get away from the data that says going to college is important. It just continues to say, "It's important. It's important." It can be important. I've seen some studies that say it's important because you're around a bunch of people who just do life differently than you. It gives you a perspective that when you enter the workforce as a salesperson or as whatever you're doing, it's going to enrich that. I've seen some studies about just the academics. If you get with the right professors, in the right situation, it's really helpful. I think going is important.

I think the tracks and the obsession, and, again, this is my world, that my colleagues have, "I want everyone to love this thing as much as I love this thing. I've dedicated my whole life to this thing. You need to be this dedicated. It's just so important. It's just unmooring to a 20-year-old to be told, "Well, if everything's important, then nothing's important, and I'm just going to go to the bar." I do think going to college is super important.

I also think, man, having a common sense that... Well, that's a politicized word. Now, I shouldn't have said that, when it comes to education. Having a general understanding of how the world works and a unified set of skills, I think is incredibly important. But I would do it a little bit differently if I was king for a day.

Kylie Larson:
Oh, yeah, 100%. One of the reasons I really wanted to chat with you is because in my role and in my company, I'm mostly working with women, mostly high performing women. I know what women are dealing with. I know what they've been dealing with for the last-

Dr. John Delony:
Oh, are you going to tell me? Please tell me. Please tell me. It would really be super helpful, Kylie.

Kylie Larson:
It's a lot. You can have me on your podcast and we'll talk about it.

Dr. John Delony:
Oh, gosh. Okay, geez.

Kylie Larson:
I want to know how are the collective men doing? And here's why. I feel like sometimes we get tunnel vision and we think we're the only ones dealing with something. I think, also, the men who are in our lives are dealing with something. But we're not talking to each other understanding that, "Hey, I got this going on." "Hey, I got this going on. I have this going on and I'm not sharing it with you, but I'm resentful for you, because you don't notice." I want to know how are the collective men doing right now.

Dr. John Delony:
It's an absolute dumpster fire, and very few things... I'm just an optimist by nature, just stuff works out. My dad was a homicide detective, so it either works out or then you just die. That's a pretty dark way to do the world, but it, I'm pretty optimistic about most things. When it comes to the trajectory of men, especially in the United States, I'm really terrified of the end result, if we don't get some stuff real quick.

Kylie Larson:
I agree with you, and I am super, super hashtag blessed, lucky, whatever, that I have a partner who's into this stuff, right?

Dr. John Delony:
Yeah.

Kylie Larson:
Goes to therapy, talks. You guys would get along so well. I know that's not the reality for a lot of men. What would you suggest? If a dude listens to this and he is like, "Yeah, my life is a dumpster fire. I don't talk about it." What do they do?

Dr. John Delony:
Let's back out a minute. My dad's still a professor. My mom is still a professor there in Texas. They're not... This is an ancient history. They're still just teaching undergraduates. My mom, when they got married, they were married three years before she was legally allowed to get a checking account without my dad's signature. This is federal law in the early '70s. It was '73 I think when the law changed that allowed my mom to get her own checking account without my dad's signature, to get a mortgage without a man's signature, without either your husband or your dad.

We have to understand, this isn't ancient. Like, "We just got to get with the times." This is my parents. The world has shifted underneath them so fast. In that shift that happened super fast, and it started in the '50s and '60s and really accelerated, women were told, "You now don't need anybody. You have economic independence. That last hook, you've been dealing with crummy, crappy, abusive, awful men for eons. You're free. You don't need anybody. Go run with the wolves."

They looked at men and told men, "You know what, if things would just get back to the way they were, then everything would be fine." You've got two people operating on not truthful scripts. Now 50 years later, we're watching women circle back and say... I mean, the data just came out the other day about women execs just quitting. They're like, "I got all the way up to here for this. This sucks. I thought this was where life fulfillment was. This is awful."

Then you've got a group of men who are diseases of despair and you've seen the data, it's upper class men who are dying. They're dying of heart attack and disease and suicide, organ disease failures, because they bought into a script that just said, "Just suck it up and keep going. Just suck it up and keep going. Suck it up and keep going." Most of the men I talk to want to know why their wives just don't like them so much, and they don't know what to do.

The only thing they can double down on is to be loud, to be vulgar, to go back to shame, to swing, to puff their chest up. It was the great Terry Real that once, I mean, he peeled back the curtain for me that if you look at mental health diagnostics, women have always been depressed, more depressed and more anxious than men. What he said was, "No, no, no. It's just how we define anxiety and depression. Men often express depression and anxiety by puffing their chest up and swinging. If you look at people in prison, which is mostly men, if you look at people who die in violent interactions, which is mostly men, the numbers almost completely flatten out."

Everybody's fried. Everybody's fried. Men just show it differently. Then there's the narrative, like Scott Galloway talks a lot, "We've outsourced all of the jobs that most men would just go get." They would go get jobs at a warehouse or a factory. Those jobs don't exist anymore. Then there's a leveling effect, where women are smarter, they're better at school, and they can... Not smarter, you know what I'm talking about. They're better at school. Schools are designed... Anyway, there's just a trajectory.

Now you have a generation of men going, "I have no purpose here. I've got no role here. Everybody says every problem in the world is my fault. I'm out. I'm out." There is a privilege to being a guy that I can just say, "I'm out." There's a checkout happening. If you look overseas at countries where men have checked out, it never ends well for anybody. That's a lot., but that's why when I say, "Few things keep me up at night," that one does. That one does.

Kylie Larson:
Well, it keeps me up at night too, because I see it,. I see it from the female's perspective. I see them trying to change their husbands and then making... I'm the most passive-aggressive person you'll ever meet saying these things that we need to actually have a conversation about it. It's just, I feel like the divide is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. My question for you is like, where do we go from here?

Dr. John Delony:
Man, I've said this probably too much, but I'll say it again. I think there's two competing narratives.One narrative is, I'm going to overgeneralize this, so hopefully the internet warriors won't get mad, but there is one what I would call a feminine narrative, which is, "Feelings are everything. Go with your truth. Go with how you feel." You see this language, "Well, our relationship just ran its course. It just ran out of gas, and it's time to move on to the next. I feel this way. I understand the world this way." That's first narrative.

The second one, which I'll say is a traditionally masculine narrative, is, "If you have any feelings at all, you are weak and you are a sucker and you are a coward, suck it up. Nobody cares about your feelings. Get on with your day. You have people to kill, you've got things to do. You've got meat to drag home to your family," because everyone's still on a cave, I guess.

Obviously there are overlap. There's a lot of men who are overwhelmed with feelings and they don't know what to do with it. They don't understand that what happened to them when they was kids was abuse, and that their bodies are trying to get their attention. There is a generation of women who saw the power that very few men hold and said, "I want that," and they've spent their life chasing it. I said, they're getting there and being like, "Hey, this kind of sucks." That's not everybody, but that's just a general thing. What I'm calling for is a new third way, where we have to get to a place where we acknowledge, "Hey, that hurt."

Kylie Larson:
Yes.

Dr. John Delony:
"I don't feel right. I'm sad." This is men and women across the board. "I'm choosing to have my feelings hurt, because of what you said. You can't make me feel anything. I'm choosing to have my feelings hurt over this and here's why." And also, "Our feelings don't always tell us the truth. I might feel sad and I got to go to work. I might feel this way and I've got to go do the next right thing. I feel like you're stepping out, but it doesn't give me a license to treat you like crap."

I think it's the new third way is we got to own these feelings and then go do the next right thing. That's going to require a new language for everybody. I think basically we've figured out that whatever language we were speaking doesn't work anymore. Great, we just need to learn a new one.

Kylie Larson:
Yeah we definitely have our work cut out for us. That's why I think it's so great the work that you do. I noticed you have both male and female followers. Maybe-

Dr. John Delony:
It's kind of wild actually. Yeah, it's really wild.

Kylie Larson:
It is wild. Maybe there wasn't a male voice delivering your message before, I don't know.

Dr. John Delony:
I think that's a lot. I'm fortunate to have, I mean, my whole background is working with police officers. That was just the culture I grew up with. A lot of my friends and students were military guys. I spent years training mixed martial arts. There's that culture, and I don't mind looking at a 14-year veteran of a police department and saying, "If you don't go to counseling today, your wife is the one who's going to end up on the bottom end of this deal. Stop hurting your children." I don't mind telling a grownup that or telling my friends who are just getting out of the military, "You got to go see somebody, man."

Kylie Larson:
Oh my gosh.

Dr. John Delony:
I think it's a matter of looking at other people in the eye and telling the truth. It's not for everybody, and that's okay. That's okay. At some point some of us have to look around and say, "Hey, what we're doing is not working. It's just not." More people are in therapy than ever before in human history. More people are on meds than ever before in human history. The trend line is directly vertical with anxiety and depression. We got to do something else. We got to do something different.

Kylie Larson:

The other thing that just came to my mind, too, I feel like maybe in the past, the men that were delivering this message or maybe just a little too woowoo or out there. You're like a guy's guy and that's why it lands really well coming from you.

Dr. John Delony:
Gotcha. I guess I ever thought of myself that way. I guess it just works out that way. The first time I ever went deer hunting with my son, I shot a big giant buck, but I'd driven my wife's Prius. We had to shove this huge deer in the back of a Prius, and that was a whole... I guess I just don't care about much stuff. I have my same five friends, and my wife likes me most of the time. I just don't care a lot about that. I'm way more interested in telling the truth than having people be well. I really am.

Kylie Larson:
Speaking of being, well, the other day you were talking about sleep and I loved it. I talk about sleep all day every day. If people just got some sleep, I feel like that` would solve half their problems, right?

Dr. John Delony:
More than that probably, but yes.

Kylie Larson:
There you said, love yourself enough to get at least seven hours of sleep a night. I don't know if you looked at the comment section. I was like, "People have all the excuses as to why they cannot get sleep." I understand kids and newborns, that's a phase. Did you notice that?

Dr. John Delony:
Sometimes, unless I'm picking a fight, like what I posted last night, I was just picking a fight. Usually I don't spend a lot of time in the comment section. Here's the deal, man, I've made every excuse you have. I've been so broke I can't breathe. I've got to work a bunch. I have a job that's 24/7 on call. I was on call for 20 years. I just simply don't care. You're not being honest with yourself. If you choose to not get sleep, great, you are choosing to be less effective. You're choosing to be a less present husband or wife. You're choosing to be a less present father or mother. You're choosing to be a less effective employee, a less effective citizen. It's just a choice you're making.

You're also choosing to probably accelerate your path into Alzheimer's or into dementia or into some of these other downstream things. You're also deciding, "Hey, you know what kids, I'm going to make sure your 40s and 50s and 60s are awful, because you're going to be having to deal..." Those are just choices you get to make, right? You can say what you want. The most common pushback I get is, "I got little kids." Okay, that's a phase, like you mentioned. It's a terrible, hellacious part of life. It just is. It sucks. It's the worst.

Let's back out a little bit. Those are three or four or seven or whatever hard years. Then there is one more Netflix series that you get to decide whether you're going to watch or not or there's one more scrolling thing or one more conversation I'm not going to have with my wife or whatever, which is just a bananas way to do life.

Kylie Larson:
Absolutely. Well, and I find, too, there's always one partner that takes over, and then they're resentful, again, for the other partner, because they're the only one getting up. Again, if y'all would just talk about this and divide and conquer. It was like, "Okay, I got them on Tuesdays. I got them on Wednesdays." But yeah, I love that you were talking about that. Because again-

Dr. John Delony:
Can I just say this? What you just said is... Can we just...

Kylie Larson:
Yeah,

Dr. John Delony:
We, literally, I was just having lunch with somebody in town and we're just talking about this. We will make a human with somebody else. We will make a person, and we will not talk about what we like or don't like sexually. We will make a human, and we will not talk about our finances together. We will share a human, and we will not say, "I really need you to be a part of bedtime, because I need a break because I can't breathe anymore." I don't understand that disconnect. My wife tells me I'm just weird.

don't understand... I guess the only thing I can think is we just didn't see our parents doing that. Most of our parents were trained to go have your fights and disagreements in the back room, so that you don't scare the kids. And what they ended up doing is robbing us of an actual image of people disagreeing and staying together and disagreeing and still loving each other. We don't know what to do.We think conflict means things are over.

We have to start having those conversations. By the way, it can be really fun to have those conversations. It can be so clarifying and peaceful on the other side of those conversations, if you'll just practice having them.

Kylie Larson:
Yeah, I know. Again, when I work with women and I hear the work that they're dealing with and the burden, I'm like, "Well, did you ask your husband to unload the dishwasher? He doesn't know."

Dr. John Delony:
If I ask a husband, "Hey, why don't you do the dishes?" You know the number one answer I get? "Because I do it wrong."

Kylie Larson:
I knew it. Yep.

Dr. John Delony:
"I do it wrong." I just told somebody on my show earlier today, "Hey, you're going to have to be really at peace with when he does the dishes that he didn't do it like you wanted him to do it or you would've done it. Be at peace together." That's just a choice. I don't want to choose to be right... That's old Dr. Phil thing, "Do you want to be right or do you want to be in relationship? You get to pick."

Kylie Larson:
So true. Oh, my gosh. One day when I was living in Dallas, I saw Dr. Phil at the grocery store. It was awesome.

Dr. John Delony:
He's the goat.

Kylie Larson:
It was the Tom Thumb in Las Colinas. I'll never forget. Speaking of, okay, these choices and these conversations, when we don't have them, I feel like we're giving away our power. You were talking about this, there's not a lot we have control over the economy, whatever, never. We do have control over some things. Can you talk about what do we actually have control over in our lives?

Dr. John Delony:
The only things on planet Earth anybody controls, it's a lot and it's nothing, it's our thoughts and our actions, and that's it. Full stop. There's nothing else I control. I can't control if my wife is seeing somebody else. I can't control if my wife comes home. I can't control if my kid gets in trouble at school. I control my thoughts and my actions, and that's it. And that's a scary proposition. That also should be a tremendous ray of hope for all of us who are stuck. I get to decide something different.

Now, of course there are people who are being abused. Of course there are people that society's kick to the margins, 100%. But for the majority of us, we get to decide most of the challenging things that are happening to us within our life. Let's be honest, you work with women, the data says, women who finally say enough with the abuse and leave, their net worth goes down and his goes up. That's a data point. That doesn't mean you're not worth being safe and you're not being worth being well, right?

Kylie Larson:
Yeah.

Dr. John Delony:
Everyone's got hard choices to make. Everyone's got some really messy things, but all we can control is our thoughts and our actions, and that's it. If we would spend all of the energy we spend trying to control everybody else on that, dude, you're talking about a transformed world right there.

Kylie Larson:
I was just thinking about that as you were saying that out loud. If that's really what all I have control over, that's where I'm going to put all of my energy.

Dr. John Delony:
Why wouldn't you? Right?

Kylie Larson:
Yeah. It's got the best return.

Dr. John Delony:
Exactly. But then you have to do something. And that sucks, "I don't want to actually do something."

Kylie Larson:
It's the action that gets us. "I'm just going to read another book. I'm just going to read another book about it."

Dr. John Delony:
Oh, geez. That's a whole other soapbox for me. Data has become the brand new Xanax. I just need some more data. I need some more info. Let's have another conversation. Let's have another cup of coffee. Let's go out. Yes, go do something. Just go do it. Go do it.

Kylie Larson:
I know it. You're talking about where we should put our energy. The other day, you were also talking about space and looking for space in your calendar. Can you just expand on that space in your life? Why is that so important?

Dr. John Delony:
There's some really remarkable literature about the role clutter plays in anxiety. That got me interested. I had never considered that before. I'm a pretty anxious guy. My dad was raised by a World War II vet who straightened out nails during the Great Depression, because they had to. They couldn't just go to the store and get more nails, because they didn't have any money. Before World War II, you're talking about an entire human history where we were designed for when there is a problem, get more, because the world was based on scarcity. All of our brain chemistry is designed for consumption, to go get.

You have brain chemistry and then you've got those of us raised one or two generations removed from the Great Depression, and we consume like crazy. I look around my house and I have 5,000 books on my bookshelves, half of which I read. And I just ordered some more. I just ordered more, Kylie. There's a great old Japanese proverb. The guy talks about, "Every inanimate object you have in your home is having a conversation with you at all times." You walk into your closet, those clothes are talking to you, "Hey, why aren't you wearing us? Did you put on too much weight? Oh," or, "You're not wearing us because he doesn't like us. Is that why?" "Hey, are you not exercising anymore? Just let us know and we'll just be quiet."

Then you go into your bookshelves and you're just like, "Oh, you're just not going to read us, because you want to be stupid. Is that it?" Or, "You're just too smart for us." Our inanimate objects, our dishes are talking to us. "Oh, you're just going to leave us here because you're a lazy mom and you're too tired. Is that the deal?" We are surrounded by so much crap, and it just buries us.

Then as I went down the margin rabbit hole, obviously I work at Ramsey Solutions, and debt buries people and financial margin is negative. It's zero. I am convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt, in fact, that I'm working with some doctoral students on these studies, your frontal lobe can know, "I got a great deal on this car. It's 0% financing for seven years. It's a great deal." Your amygdala and knows that Toyota Motor Company is deciding what you do tomorrow, not you. If you miss one payment, they take your car. If they take your car, you don't eat, and we are not safe.

Your body's not going to let you sleep, because it knows you can't fully go under, because you are this close. You are one inch away from being homeless. We don't think about that when we just go put it on the card and put it on the card and get a great APR. Go try to buy a house we can't afford. Then I got to margins into the calendars, man. I mean, you've probably experienced a little bit of it just trying to schedule, "Well, he's available in October of 2026."

This is insane. This is insane. Where it got insane for me is I need to go see a counselor. I've got some stuff I need to talk through and I didn't have any room for the next month and a half. I'm talking like an hour. I've created a world where my body is constantly rattling. I've got no margin. I've got no space. I have no room for a flat tire, because if I get one flat tire, the domino falls and knocks everything over for the next few months.

There's this search for freedom. It's this choice. I'm going to choose freedom over making sure my kid is in 14 different travel sports. I'm going to choose freedom over making sure I don't have the latest depreciating asset sitting in my driveway, 23 out of the 24 hours a day. Losing value while it just sits there. But it sure looks shiny for the neighbors. I'm going to choose freedom over a 4500 square foot house, when a 2500 square foot house will do great. I'm just choosing freedom.

Our body's alarm systems will stop ringing off the hook. That was my impulse. It ended up in a whole new book that I'm turning the manuscript in at the end of this week actually. It's about we've created anxious lives for ourselves and then we're pissed off that we're anxious all the time. Right?

Kylie Larson:
Yeah. Mm-hmm. We've don't it.

Dr. John Delony:
We have to change how we live, man.

Kylie Larson:
Yeah, totally. I know when people ask you, "What's your definition of success?" For me it is that space. I have to have space. I can't function if I don't have space. I'm a creator. I create things. I can't create if I'm jam-packed.

Dr. John Delony:
Right. Yeah.

Kylie Larson:
I've learned that for myself. But it's counterculture.

Dr. John Delony:
It's madness. We've created a world that our bodies can't exist in, and it's just madness.

Kylie Larson:
Well, and I feel like that was one of the gifts that COVID gave us. I had a lot of people that thrived. They didn't have to drive an hour to the office. They didn't have to pack all their food for the day. They didn't have to go to sports tournaments, travel. They reached their weight loss goals. They found freedom, until they had to go back to the office. Then everything moved double time. And-

Dr. John Delony:
I think there was definitely a time thing there, but can I tell you what I think the one of the big gifts was?

Kylie Larson:
What?

Dr. John Delony:
It was a quieting of the constant bombardment of comparison.

Kylie Larson:
Oh, yeah.

Dr. John Delony:
Nobody cares what my car is when it's parked in my driveway, because I don't go anywhere. Nobody cares what outfits I'm wearing or what clothes I'm wearing or what cell phone version I have or what, fill in the blank, or what kind of special cleats my kid has at whatever soccer game that we're playing five hours away from where we live, and my kid's nine or whatever nonsense we've dragged around in.

I think our bodies had a chance to breathe and to get out of this constant, are you enough? Are you enough? Are you enough? Are you enough? And then when we went back, man, it came on full force, man.

Kylie Larson:
Full force, yes.

Dr. John Delony:
It came on full force.

Kylie Larson:
You know this because of your work with Ramsey, I think I know the answer, but are people living beyond their means?

Dr. John Delony:
Yeah, in a absurdly catastrophic way. I think they said it's the lowest amount of household savings, except for one other time, in recorded history. What we saw at Christmas, was it the best Christmas ever, retail wise? People just went crazy, bought everything, but the amount of credit card debt increased exponentially. What that tells us is not that people aren't getting in more and more debt because of inflation, because things are more expensive. Things are for sure more expensive. We cut out bacon in my house. I would prefer to rub bacon on my face, Kylie. I love it. It's like $85 for half a pound now. We just took a break.

I got chickens. I live out in the woods. We got chickens. We got eggs. Stuff has gotten expensive. What people are doing is, they're using their credit cards to prop up a lifestyle. This idea that my scorecard for parenting is how many presents are under the tree or what vacations we went on.

The beaches are packed this week for spring break. I mean, people are not taking a break from spending, but they don't have the money. I mean, you know when your toddler just runs face-first into something, and you're like, "Ah, that sucked, but at least he learned"? Then the next morning he's just running face-first into that again. You're like, "Well, I guess he didn't learn," that's just what we're doing. I mean, we're just going to run ourselves right off into a ditch again. We're going to blame the government or blame the other political party. It's not, it's because, in mass, we have stopped taking reality into account.

Kylie Larson:
Yeah, that's wild. I'm feeling pretty good about myself right now, too, because I'm pretty conservative with my dollars. I would tell my husband, "No more bacon. There's no more bacon in this Pat. We got to cut back somewhere. It's going to be the bacon." yeah, that's so wild to me.

Dr. John Delony:
Think about this, think about the people you work with. We don't talk about this enough as a culture. Imagine your boss telling you, or the shareholders telling you, "You're going to do this." You're smiling going, "No, I'm not. I'm not doing that." If you don't owe anybody any money, that's the life we're talking about. It's not an outlandish, crazy thing. What I saw today, 50% of people in the United States, I think, have 50% or more equity in their homes. I didn't realize that many people had paid off so much of their house. Half of the people in the country have a mortgage, have either paid their mortgage off or they are 50% or more paid off.

These are your neighbors who don't owe any money on their cars. You just think they do. You think that everybody has a car payment. You think that everybody has credit card. They don't. They just don't. That's just not right. You're talking about a transformation of the ethos in your home. Imagine not owing anybody, when... Hey, listen, I'm just going to say this. I don't want to kick anybody while they're down. When our air conditioner broke, I think it was this past summer, and again, I worked for Dave Ramsey, my wife and I followed the plan and got out of debt, the most annoying thing we had to deal with was who had to make the phone call to call the air conditioning people. That was the fight. Not what are we going to cut? What are we not going to eat? Who's going to not drive?

It was, "You call." I was like, "You call, I don't want to call." That was the fight. That was it.

Kylie Larson:
I love it.

Dr. John Delony:
Think about that in your home. We're not rich. We're not crazy. We just lived idiots for a couple of years, and then just completely turned the ship in our house into a totally new harbor. All that to say is we carry on all this angst thinking it's normal and it's just not, it's insane. It's madness.

Kylie Larson:
I think you just hit the nail on the head. We think what we're experiencing is normal, but it's not. What actually is normal feels so much better and so much more free. We got a work cut out for us.

Dr. John Delony:
Oh, yeah. You're always going to be employed forever, Kylie. You've got work forever. Forever.

Kylie Larson:
Well, so the one thing, the other reason I totally started jiving with you, I already was, but then you had Layne Norton on, and I've worked with Layne for years.

Dr. John Delony:
Lane's the worst, the worst.

Kylie Larson:
The literal worst.

Dr. John Delony:
I'm kidding. No, Layne's awesome.

Kylie Larson:
You're a guy, you have all the responsibilities, but also you take care of yourself. Can you talk about your perspective on that and how you carve out time and how important it is, if you think it's important?

Dr. John Delony:
It's in reverse to what you just said. I have to do those things so that I can take care of the people I love. If I don't exercise, if you Google ADHD, my picture comes up next to it. It's just there. I got diagnosed with a OCD when I was young. I'm a mess. The path forward for me is one of choosing reality. Reality is, I have to exercise every day. I can't miss a day. I don't have to go Layne Norton style every day and grunt and scream and do all that yelling that he does. I have to do something every day, period. It's non-debatable for me.

One of my mantras when it comes to nutrition is. "I don't ever fall off the wagon. Sometimes I will park the wagon, climb off, and roll around in the mud. I'll be intentional." My son made some awesome, I don't know, he's going to be a chef someday, he made some awesome dessert the other night. Of course, I'm going to eat that. I put ice cream on it too. You know what I mean?

Kylie Larson:
Yeah.

Dr. John Delony:
I'm not going to be an idiot. I'm not just going to mindlessly inhale. Layne's been such a gift when it comes to that stuff, because I had a lot of faulty narratives in the fitness industry's nonsense. Again, it's like a lot of stuff we're figuring out. We've just been sold a bill of goods for a couple of people to make a whole bunch of money, and it's come at our expense.

I can't be the dad I need to be if I'm not exercising and eating and sleeping. I can't be a present husband. I can't be a good employee, if I'm not taking care of myself. It's not a matter of how do I find time in such a busy schedule? It's, I will do these things, so that I can live into this busy schedule.

Kylie Larson:
Was that ever not the case for you?

Dr. John Delony:
Yeah. I mean, I just pretended I could be all things to all people and just keep running and gunning forever. Then my body finally said, "I'm out." The story I tell, it's not a story, it's just what happened is, I grew up with not a lot. My wife grew up with not a lot. She was a professor and I was a professor and an administrator at a university in Abilene, Texas, there at Abilene Christian.

One day I was walking to the office and I just turned around and got in my car and I drove three hours away to Lubbock to a buddy of mine who's a medical doctor. I was really privileged at that moment to have a close friend that was also a medical doctor. I just went in and said, "I don't know what's happening, dude, but I'm not okay."

That was the first time I ever spoke out loud from my heart, I run my mouth a lot, but that was the first time I ever told somebody, "I'm not okay." My body just said, "Dude, we're out. We can't do this." I had to reverse engineer, what does a well life look like? What's a life I actually want to be living? Some of that was from Dr. Tia's work.

I want to go all the way out till I'm 85 and reverse engineer that. Who do I want to be at 85? I want to be that old man that's always going for walks and laughing and fishing with his grandkids and rolling around and karate fight. I want to be that guy. So that work starts when I'm 40, right?

Kylie Larson:
Yeah.

Dr. John Delony:
That work starts now. Not when I'm 82, and I'm like, "I think I should start doing squats." That's too late, man. Too late.

Kylie Larson:
I don't think people, they're not looking that far in the distance. I'm like, "You need to be, because it's going to be here, here before you know it, FYI."

Dr. John Delony:
Hey, it goes so fast. Here's the other important thing. I've had the great blessing and honor, and it's really hard to sit with people my whole career, but especially the last five or six years that they come home and the person they loved more than anything on earth is no longer alive. Or letting somebody know, holding a mom and saying, "I'm so sorry that your kid has passed away." I wouldn't wish that on anybody, but those are holy moments. We think we are hedging this bet. We think we're going to YOLO and live this best life now. We'll put this off till later. When later comes, it's never what you think it's going to be. It's never what you think it's going to be.

Do it right now. Choose the hard path now. It has such remarkable dividends as you move. The same as you hear this, we used to hear this when we're in high school, "If you just put a $100 in an account, it's 84 billion when you're 70." The same thing works with having a conversation with your husband right before you go to work. The same thing works with turning Netflix off and having sex, instead of just watching another Netflix episode and then rolling over. The same thing happens with, "Hey, we need to talk about how much travel sports our kids are doing. There's so much stuff going on." Have those conversations, and the compound interest on those conversations down the road are insane. They're just so incredible. They're incalculable. So do it.

Kylie Larson:
We've brought up this concept, well, concept of having sex, actually, that's a pretty great way to talk about it.

Dr. John Delony:
For some people, it's merely a concept. That's right.

Kylie Larson:
I know that's a big part of relationships and marriages, but I also know, I'll hear people say, even I've said it myself, "I could just go my whole life without it anymore." What's going on? Why? What's happening?

Dr. John Delony:
Oh, man. I think we could do a nine part episode on that, a nine part series. I think the best place to start is with what Esther Perel has talked about, which is, "We are asking more for the modern marriage than anybody has ever asked of it in human history." As we have left tribes and we've just pulled the string. There's no more core, I call them myths or core beliefs, and I don't mean that in a disparaging way, but there's no core religion that holds everybody together, a master narrative. Everyone's just off on their own, and they're on the internet or they just don't believe anything anymore. Or they go to church once a year. We're untethered as a people, let me put it that way.

We're untethered, we are all over the place, and we're a culture obsessed with how we feel. How we feel. How we feel. Sex is a place where Eros, where you can tap into the divine for just a second sometimes, and you can feel seen and you can feel experienced and you see and experience somebody else. There's something very special there. At the same time, we are putting everything onto our spouse. Fricking Tom Cruise ruined it with, "You complete me," right?

Kylie Larson:
Yeah.

Dr. John Delony:
I'm looking across the room and you have to be my best friend, a co-earner. We have to have wild sex into our 80s. You also have to be a great co-parent. You have to do everything perfectly, because my whole life depends on you, because all these other things are gone. Then you look at each other, it's a Tuesday, and you're like, "Well, you want to do it?" That whole thing just is awful.

Then the second thing she talks about, which is powerful, powerful, and was a game shifter for me, in relationships, when you're first dating, the romance part is there. All the body chemicals are firing and going. The attraction is there. What you're practicing then is safety. Is he going to call? Can I tell him this thing, and he's going to actually keep it a secret? Will she make fun of me? Or if she doesn't like how I'm kissing her, will she tell me the way she likes? We're practicing safety. Is this person safe? Is he safe? Is she safe?

When you get married, a couple years in, safety is established. But we don't have any sort of roadmap for practicing desire, for practicing sexuality, for practicing, for leaning into it. We just expect it to be there. I can't tell you how many couples I've met with over the years that are just heartbroken when I say, "You got to put sex on the calendar after the first kid, just to get back into the routine." It feels like something's been stolen from them. And it's like, "Dude, Hollywood's not a movie." I mean, Hollywood is a movie. Life isn't Hollywood.

You just got to be intentional about it. Most of the time, not always, but most of the time I hear people say, "Once I got into it, once it started happening, I was all in. I loved it. It was just the initial, 'I don't really want to, I'd just rather go to bed.'" Somebody has to have the courage to say, "I really am in, if you're in." It's like, "Okay, I'll do..." Right? I think we have to, as a culture, begin to practice desire. What does that look like? What does that feel like? Because we've got safety established and it's not a given on the other side of it.

Kylie Larson:
There's a book by two sisters, Emily and Amelia Nagoski.

Dr. John Delony:
Oh, yeah, they're incredible.

Kylie Larson:
Yeah, they're incredible. In that book, Burnout, they talk about it, right? It's a drive. You have to practice it. You're not just going to automatically-

Dr. John Delony:
Well, Emily's book Come as You Are, is the single greatest sex book ever. I recommend it to everybody. I think men and women should read. It's just a phenomenal read. Yeah, it's remarkable.

Kylie Larson:
Yeah, I totally agree with you. Oh, that's so good. We love that. The last thing I'll talk about, because I want to be mindful of your time, this idea that you're not a burden. The examples that you gave were spot on me. "No, I'm not going to ask him to take me to the airport. I'll just call an Uber." No, I'm not going to ask her if she could take my kid to school too." All of these things, so I just want to get your take on us not being burdens, or one not being a burden.

Dr. John Delony:
The original idea from that came from Thomas Joiner, who's a suicidologist out of Florida State. He's just a brilliant mind. He came up with a three-legged stool. It's when I was working with a lot of young people, and there's a lot of suicide and suicidal ideation with young people, especially, and college students. I was looking for a better way to know, "Hey, is this kid actually in danger? Are they just having a rough night? Or they just needed some sleep? Where are we?"

He had a three prong approach, and there's different approaches and there's some people who have pushed back on it, and that's fine. One of the things that stuck out to me was, you have to have means, do you have the ability to die by suicide? Have you practiced? Is this something that you could actually do? Because every cell in the human body is designed for one thing, and that's to get to tomorrow and get to tomorrow. If you die by suicide, you've got to override your entire system to get there. That's hard to do.

The third thing was the one that stopped me dead in my tracks, and it was what he called perceived burdensomeness. The idea that not only would the pain stop for you, but you in and of yourself are a burden to other people, because you exist, their life is worse. That sat with me, because, A, I realized I feel that way sometimes. I'm not suicidal in the least, but I feel sometimes that my wife's life would just be simpler if she had a husband that wasn't so scatterbrained and was on time most of the time. You know what I mean, didn't walk past an unmade bed.

I've thought that. I've thought, "Man, my kids would be better off with a dad that wasn't such a maniac." It's just not like, "Hey kid, did y'all want to go, ah?" If they had some more stability. A dad that just liked to watch The Office and prop his feet up. Then as I look back culturally, I was like, "Oh gosh, we don't even ask our neighbors for eggs. We don't want to bother them." That's the most..." I don't want to bother that dude." "Hey, have you called anyone and said you're not okay?" "I don't want to bother anybody. I know my mom's really struggling with this, or they're struggling with that."

We get into this comparative trauma. I heard that a lot in COVID, like, "I got really, really sick, but at least I didn't, fill in the blank." Then that person's like, "Well, I lost my job. But at least I..." Golly, dude, we've just created this culture where we think we are just bringing everybody down. I guess there are a few fewer gifts. How do I say this the right way? It is rare that a gift is more important than looking at somebody and saying, "Can you help me?" Then being able to smile and say, "I'm in."

It's a gift to ask a neighbor for help. It's a gift to ask somebody, "Hey, can I tell you, you about what I'm experiencing? I think I'm being abused. I need to talk to somebody." It's a gift. When you rob people of that gift... Now, if you ask me to help you move, not a gift, that sucks, right? That's not good.

Kylie Larson:
Yeah,.

Dr. John Delony:
Going to the airport, that's not great too. We have to stop thinking that our mere existence is a burden or that our needs are a burden. We have to begin to say our needs out loud. That goes back to the previous thing we were just talking about. I don't want someone to think I'm weird, if I'm like, "Hey, I want to try this weird sex thing." We created children together. You should be the one person, I should be like, "Hey, I want to try this thing."

You should also be the person to say, "I'm for sure not trying that, but tell me more. Tell me what about that feels exciting." We've got to be able to do that. That's not a burden, that's a relationship. That's connectivity. Right?

Kylie Larson:
Yeah.

Dr. John Delony:
Again, I want us to begin to walk around the world and think, "How can I give gifts to other people?" Sometimes that's through my time. Sometimes that's through asking their expertise. Instead of walking through the world saying, "How do I get really small and avoid contact? Because I don't want to be a burden."

Kylie Larson:
So relatable. I'm sure everyone can relate to that. Well, I lied, I have one more question. Because I worry about the kids and it seems like you're plugged in. How are our kids doing?

Dr. John Delony:
Awful.

Kylie Larson:
Their college? They're awful.

Dr. John Delony:
Awful. Yeah, because children absorb tension. They absorb tension. What they've seen over the last 36 months, is they've seen every pillar of a stable society crumble underneath them, because the adults in their lives have acted like idiots. There used to be no question, the medical folks are trying to take care of us. Well, I have an email in my inbox from somebody that I care about that's a friend, that's like, "Hey, my doctor told me this, but I don't really trust them." I'm like, "Okay, then you need to not have them be your doctor anymore."

We used to think collectively, "Hey, going to school is a good thing." Not anymore. These teachers are trying to kill you. These teachers are trying to give you bad curriculum. These teachers are trying to... Same with church, same with fill in the blank. We've got a group of kids that are just watching their parents unspool in front of them by yelling at the TV, screaming at these things, going on these...

It's not the issues that are unspooling our kids, contrary to popular belief, it's the fact that the adults in their lives have lost their minds. The greatest gift we can give our kids is peace. The greatest gift I can tell my son is not, "Hey, it's those stupid Democrats or Republicans." That's not it. The greatest gift I can give my son is to sit down and say, "Hey, man, there's some wild stuff in the economy. I know you don't fully understand it. I just need you to know I'm kind of nervous about it. We don't owe anybody any money. We have a small emergency fund, so we're going to be okay. But I want you to know I'm tense. I'm just tense. It's not you. It's not your mom. It's not your sister. It's just big things in the air, man. Everybody's hollering about it."

I tell you what, the world can implode and that kid's going to be okay, because he looks at the adults in his life or her life and says, "They got this. They're good. They're safe." The kids aren't okay, but it's not because of the kids. It's not because of the kids. You can look at all of the kids' mental health, and that's a huge issue right now. But I think we're forgetting a core facet of children's mental health, which is the stability of the adults in their lives. We're the ones who've gone mad.

Kylie Larson:
Well, and that just goes back to why you need to be getting seven hours of sleep. You need to be exercising. Do it for your kids, if you're not going to do it for you, do it for the kids. I know I have my son in therapy, it's preemptive. I'm sure I've already messed him up somehow, you know what I mean?

The other day, he had one of those sessions where, you know how you go in and you don't really have much to talk about, you've been okay. He's like, "Well, I learned something." And I was like, "What'd you learn about?" And he's like, "How to regulate my nervous system."

Dr. John Delony:
Sweet. Very cool.

Kylie Larson:
I was like, "I'm going to pat myself on the back for that one. Whatever I've done in the past, we got one. We had some progress." Oh, my gosh.

Dr. John Delony:
That's fantastic. Very cool.

Kylie Larson:
Well, I mean, thank you so much for your time. This has just been enlightening. I love all that you do, so thank you for doing it.

Dr. John Delony:
Well, thank you for your hospitality and for having me over. I really appreciate it. It's awesome.

Kylie Larson:
This new book you have, do you have a timeline?

Dr. John Delony:
Yeah, it'll come out in the fall. I'll probably be there in Dallas, so I'll let you know when I'm going to be in town. It comes out in the fall, I think August. Or I mean, I'm sorry, September, October, something like that. I'm pretty excited about this one. I'm most excited about this project than any of the other things I've been a part of.

Kylie Larson:
What's the topic? Can you share?

Dr. John Delony:
The title is Building a Non-Anxious Life, how to just recreate the system here, because what we're doing isn't working.

Kylie Larson:
Yeah, we need a system upgrade.

Dr. John Delony:
Yes, that's what it is.

Kylie Larson:
I'll be ready for that.

Dr. John Delony:
Excellent.

Kylie Larson:
Thank you so much. I'll make sure everyone knows exactly where to find you. And again, keep doing what you're doing.

Dr. John Delony:
Thank you, Kylie, you're awesome. Appreciate you.

Kylie Larson:
Anytime. Bye-bye.

Dr. John Delony:
Okay, bye.

Kylie Larson:
I had so much fun talking to John. I hope you guys enjoyed this as well. Definitely, gives us a lot to think about, along with last week's episode with Jayson Gaddis and then the episode that's going to come live after this one, it's also about mental health. You're going to see a recurring theme. This recurring theme of taking care of ourselves so that we can communicate with the other people in our lives. That is just going to help us be well overall.

This podcast is evolving, because I'm also evolving. I want to talk about more than just macros, more than just workouts. You guys, this stuff matters just as much. So make sure that you're giving your mental wellness just as much attention and care as you are your physical body. Again, look for John Delony on Instagram, on his website with the Ramsey Group. I've got the links to all of his stuff online. Look for his new book coming out. Check out his old books. And if you need anything or have another guest that you think would be an awesome interviewee, send them my way. Have an awesome day, and I'll talk to you soon.