Let's Chat with Will & Tony
Let's Chat with Will & Tony
The Lie of New Social Norms: SEG 1 of 2 - The Pursuit of Happiness Through Selflessness and Valued Relationships
During a recent scroll through my social media feed, I was struck by the stark contrast between the glossy images and the unspoken realities of life—prompting a deep dive into the facade of perfection we often present to the world. Alongside Tony and the provocative European author Corinne Maier, we confront the complexities of modern life, peeling back the layers on societal expectations and feminist myths. We ponder the pitfalls of a digitally-dominant existence and celebrate the true contentment found in the fabric of our real-world connections, from the bonds of family to the simple acts of kindness that define our humanity.
Experiencing a close friend's sudden passing and supporting my wife through her cancer journey has profoundly shifted my perspective on what truly matters. We delve into the essence of personal relationships and how they shape our legacies, challenging Corinne Maier's controversial advice which seems to tilt the scales towards self-interest. It's a candid conversation on the happiness we derive from our roles in our family's lives, with stories of love, loss, and the unwavering human spirit that seeks joy in the welfare of others, rather than in isolation.
The feeling of slipping on those tiny pink Crocs for my granddaughter brought an unexpected surge of joy, a moment of clarity in the chaos of our fast-paced lives. We riff on this emotion, discussing the profound impact of selflessness on our happiness and the fulfillment that comes with lifting others. As we share the joys of grandparenthood and successful partnerships, we underscore the invaluable role of women and the secret sauce to a harmonious marriage. Our listeners chime in, echoing sentiments that at life's twilight, it's not our self-centered achievements we hold dear, but the love and memories we've created for and with others.
Get out of your rut and into your groove.
Speaker 2:Let's chat with Will and Tony on News Talk 1079. Now here's Will Kesley and Tony Peck.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show. How's it going? Good to see you, Tony. Good to be back. I'm Will Kesley. That's my good friend, Tony, otherwise known as the Toner Peck here we are, what's Florida?
Speaker 2:So you got some sunshine? Yeah, we did. Here we are at the Florida, so you got some sunshine? Yeah, we did. It was funny. My kids get down there and it's like you know, 75 degrees and partly sunny and they're they're boiling in there. They're thinking they're about ready to die. All the Floridians are out there with their jackets and coats and stuff. My kids are just like I'm dying dad. It's so hot.
Speaker 1:I'm going to do crane again. Oh, that's awesome. This will be my fourth time back into the war zone, and so it was kind of like, well, I got this coming. I got that. Maybe I better stay home and not be gone for four months straight.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's probably good, probably a good choice.
Speaker 1:So today on, let's Chat with Will and Tony. By the way, you can check us out a podcast. Thanks for all those that have uh, yeah, any of this podcast services.
Speaker 1:Right, you know apple spotify, whatever it is out there, go find us and if you'd like to be on the show, uh, certainly, uh, give us a quick text at uh 607-414-CHAT, 607-414-chat, and then let's chat with will and tony at gmailcom. That's's how we go. So today this is kind of a weird one, yeah, and one of the things our theme in the show is that we talk about life, things of life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, everyday life, the challenges, Right, we're all experiences.
Speaker 1:We're here in a mortal existence, right, and the goal is to take these themes of life and really look at them as whether they're valuable or non-valuable, and we ditch the stuff that stinks and we try to put emphasis on the things we've learned and have evidential evidence that work.
Speaker 2:And actually bring a little bit of joy and peace to people, joy to people's hearts.
Speaker 1:Because one of the reasons we get out of sync with life and life has a way of like. For example, we've had this conversation many times about technology and we're not anti-technology, but we are very clear that if you let technology control you, you are falling for the things of the world today and it will drag you into a hole.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it'll take you down a place of addiction, depression, anxiety, all those things. If you use it incorrectly. If you use the tool for good, it can bring you great joy and happiness. It can connect people across the world. You know it's wonderful, wonderful stuff. You know, these great devices we have in our hands, but if you use it, if you use it wrong or get sucked into certain aspects of it, it can completely destroy you and in simplicity, by the way of technology, talking about like your cell phone and watching too much YouTube or Facebook or whatever it's really about learning how to put it down and walk away.
Speaker 1:Don't carry that little binky with you everywhere you go. Look at it the last minute you go to bed wake up to the first thing you look at, and particularly in your children. They've got to have time away from this oxytocin kicker in your brain because they will get stuck on it and I promise you they are not going to find joy and happiness and fulfillment in life in it. In fact, if you look at them, when's the last time, tony, you looked at a real and you looked at 5, 10, 15, 20, 25. Next hour and a half is gone.
Speaker 2:You walk away, going man, I am so happy. This is awesome. When's the last?
Speaker 1:time you've ever felt that? Never there.
Speaker 2:There's your test. Never once, right Never once. You know that first one's really funny, you know, I hey.
Speaker 1:I'm like everybody gets sucked into.
Speaker 2:you know the fail videos, people doing dumb things. The first one might be funny, but yeah, half hour in, you're not feeling better, you're not feeling better by yourself.
Speaker 1:It takes that away from you, but we get stuck. We get stuck flipping, flipping flipping and you don't feel better. So I have a couple other ones I want to go after today, that kind of debunk, this idea that's becoming more and more popular. It's hard to put our head around this idea that civilization as a whole is failing in several ways. And yet you see some areas where it's thriving Like I see some young kids that are thriving, that are thriving and they're they, just they just amazing.
Speaker 2:They have something about them that's very, very special, but culturally we're doing things that are really, really dumb or scary right, it's scary the if you play out the some of these cultural things to their end their end game it's like wait a second, the end game falls apart and it gets scary and and the way we talk about them today, you know they start to get celebrated and ultimately, the end game you go. Hmm, is that really where we want to go as a society.
Speaker 1:Let me talk about one of these, If we can. I want to kind of get your feelings on this. Her name is Corinne Mayer.
Speaker 2:Corinne Mayer.
Speaker 1:And Corinne May Mayor, by the way, is a. She's calling herself an author now because she's sold out on what it says in here. How many hundreds of thousands of books she's in the bestseller list.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'm okay, classifying, yeah, classifying Right.
Speaker 1:So she's she's like an author because she sold so many books and in Europe she's a big stinking deal. Uh, it says Big stinking deal. It says here that was awarded a spot on the coveted BBC 100 women's list. She's being celebrated as a top woman in the world. Okay, Okay.
Speaker 2:So let's just start there, that sounds successful, right.
Speaker 1:Sounds very successful. All right, here's why she's successful. Okay, she has written a book that teaches women how to be selfish, self-absorbed, and get out of the pitfalls that the world has taught a woman should be Hmm, yep, all right, so Let me go deeper.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's go a little deeper on that. She says that she has written the Manifesto for Female Selfishness. It's how to manage to get away from being a mother, being a wife and having to cook or clean. That's kind of the self parts of this thing. She says that it's part of feminist thesis. It's a self-help manual, a book denouncing marriage, coupledom as a bad deal, motherhood as a trap and traditional female qualities such as empathy as constructive divisicism. That totally enslaves a woman. So if a woman has empathy, she's a slave. That's what she says.
Speaker 2:If she's selfless, she's a slave Selfish, selfless. If she's selfless, she's a slave Selfish. If she's selfless, she's a slave, but if she's selfish, she's free.
Speaker 1:Right, right. And so I look at the lady and I think you know I wonder what her secret is. I'll bet, by looking at her picture I'm going to be a bit judgmental. I'm guessing she's never been loved.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'm going to guess she's probably never had anybody take her out on a date.
Speaker 1:I'm hitting a little hard here I know but what I'm trying to say is I'm not trying to condemn her for some of the things that she was born with, that she didn't have a lot of control over. What I'm trying to say is most likely she's had a rough life as a woman and has decided that this is the way to find happiness right, yeah, she's striving, like everybody, for happiness and she's putting this out as this is the way.
Speaker 1:So we are now celebrating all kinds of things. As unique and bizarre as you can be, that's what we now celebrate as a woman. So womanhood as we know it is now becoming definitely not on the top 100 list. If you want to be a mother or a wife, you're now a dirtbag, according to her, or at least you're a slave. You're a slave to society that's made you into something that you should selfishly get out of and say look, I am not going to stay married. She does. She does not. She does not believe in marriage. She doesn't believe in having children. She goes deeply into why you should never have children. Okay, she doesn't believe in having children.
Speaker 2:She goes deeply into why you should never have children. Okay.
Speaker 1:And basically the purpose of being a woman has been completely fraudulently taught upon women of the world and they needed to announce this and change. And it wouldn't be so bad if it was just some person's opinion. She's a number one bestseller.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's at least enough of a following that uh what does that say?
Speaker 2:yeah, she's making money on it. So you know, there's a lot to unpack for me in that one right. Um, well, to start out, let's let's talk about a number of different things. You know, just ahead of the show we were talking about, um, how fragile life is, right, yeah, talking about, you know, whether onset of illness or a tragic accident that takes somebody away. We had a a mutual friend, uh, a while back that suddenly passed away, very healthy, suddenly passed away, right. So we were talking about this fragility of life and I one of the things we talked about. Um, you know, back in years ago I was first married, probably three years into my marriage and you know, my wife came home from the doctor and she had a diagnosis of melanoma, and so I heard the big C word, right, cancer. My wife has cancer.
Speaker 1:I'm three years in yeah.
Speaker 2:We have Yikes. We just had our first child, your wife's got cancer, and now my wife's has cancer. I'm three years in. Yeah, we have Yikes. We just had our first child and your wife's got cancer, and now my wife's got cancer, and so all the craziness that that brings right. The funny thing is is the moment that you know your life becomes a wow, this might end. Yeah, and the very last thing I was thinking about was man, I wish I was a little more selfish in life and had a truck and didn't have my son and didn't have you know, all these things that she is saying is the you know the things that we need to go away from. Those are actually all of the things that were the only things that mattered. That day I came home and heard that my wife had cancer. It was the only thing that mattered, and so I, you know, so I'd have to challenge this premise right.
Speaker 1:When she gets to that point, she's in her deathbed in the ER. And both of you you know you wife, you've been, I've been there, right, you know my story. I've been there in the ER, where I'm minutes away from death, and I can tell you I can concur with you the last thing you think about is any of those things. Those things, never, things of the world, never, ever crossed my mind. You know what was in my mind? My relationship with my wife, my relationship with my children, and literally in my standing with God, nothing mattered at the moment I was about to die. I mean, you weren't thinking back, oh man.
Speaker 2:I should have been more selfish. I should have been more selfish, I should have gone more golf trips. Didn't happen, didn't happen, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean every single time I think of you know the— I've never heard.
Speaker 1:By the way, I've never met anybody that's ever said, who's ever had that near-death experience, has ever said to me I wish I'd worked more, I wish I'd been more selfish, I wish I'd taken advantage of people more. Look, look, let me just add one little point before I got to take a break, okay, tony. And then I come back to what your thought was there. She goes on further to say this is her quote here she says women need to be more negligent and casual, and being casual and lazy that's an interesting phrase Negligent and casual and lazy to minimize the time you devote to others, including including elderly.
Speaker 1:So she says you need to stop devoting so much time to, and it says and not only just the elderly, but in particular elderly family members you need to give up trying to maximize your child's potential. Stop helping children and escape the role your mother was trapped into playing.
Speaker 2:Oh my goodness, that's that's. There's a lot to talk about lots of talk about back to it. We'll get back to it because I I really think that this is misguided information by everything I've experienced in life.
Speaker 1:She's a best-selling author. She's praised as the top 100 woman in Europe. She's on all the major TV shows. People are celebrating her. What in the world is going on?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we need to get back to what will really bring you joy in life All right, we're going to talk about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's do it. A couple other things about divorce coming up too, I know. Let's do it A couple other things about divorce coming up too.
Speaker 2:I know it's so depressing, right? No, it's not depressing. We're going to turn this around and tell you how to actually find joy in life and not become a selfish hollow wretch at the end of your life.
Speaker 1:Amen, all right, here we go. Go and take a quick break. Back in two. Let's chat with here's will kesley and tony peck. All right, welcome back to the show, will kesley, tony peck? Here I am, it's called let's chat. Today we're chatting about, uh, just disastrous things we see in the world, yeah, that are so horribly misguided and what's so bizarre to me, and the reason we're bringing them up is because they become so popular.
Speaker 2:They're like there's this mad rush to this craziness yeah, everybody's running to it like, oh, this is the thing to jump on, this is the thing that's going to bring me happiness, and they're all becoming like part of this movement, right? So let me tell you one thing. Sign of the times.
Speaker 1:Okay, I was just going to follow up with by the way when we left for the break. I just want to remind you what this lady said right Again. This is an author, corinne Mayer, and she's sold a gazillion books and she's now named one of the top 100 women and she's on all kinds of TV shows and is just being celebrated all over the place. I want to remind you what we left with. We left with her saying that women, it's time for women to become negligent, casual and lazy.
Speaker 2:That's what she says To minimize your time you devote to others, particularly the elderly, oh my goodness.
Speaker 1:And to give up trying to maximize your child's potential. Just stop. And she says and quote you need to learn how to escape the role your mothers were trapped into. Quote. And it wouldn't be so bad if this was some knucklehead that wrote some stupid book, that's you know. I don't really care. Yeah, five people. This is a best-selling book and being celebrated as a top 100 woman in the world. She's got the angle, and the angle is women. It's time to become selfish.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's just so, it's so bizarre to me it's just wrong in so many ways.
Speaker 2:So the other day in my company I was doing a leadership training and one of the one of the icebreakers we were doing, we had each person go around and say if you could be anywhere other than here, where would you be? Just to, you know, get the conversation going. So we were about to do this training, so that was the thing. So each person went around, took 30 seconds to say you know, my name is tony peck, I'm the chief operating officer, and if I could be anywhere than here, here's where it'd be. Now my answer was I was being, you know, light. I said I'd be at the airport. I would be at the golf course with my boys and my family, because I love interacting in that environment, enjoying all my family. Right, that was my statement. Okay, so we go around.
Speaker 2:Picture 35, 40 people in the room. I tell you, 95% of this diverse population said something about their family. I'd want to be hunting with my boys. I'd want to be hunting with my boys. I'd want to be going to my watching my girls dance, dance competitions. I would. I would want to be home with my, my mother, and, and that's where I want to be. If I could be anywhere, I'd be on a beach with my wife. Clearly, the vast majority 90, 95% of them said something about family, either a marital relationship, a child relationship or a parental relationship. Where, if they could be anywhere in the world at that time that's where it'd be, that person would be part of that thing or activity, right?
Speaker 2:Sure, it's all about their personal connections with their family, their loved ones. That is where they have joy.
Speaker 1:It's about relationships.
Speaker 2:That's what they're willing to die for. That's what they're willing to die for. That's what they're willing to, you know, go to work for. That's what they're willing to sacrifice for, because that's what brings the greatest joy in life.
Speaker 1:I'm telling you, it isn't interesting, though this now becoming a very vocal, very loud screaming audience that's saying stop being a woman, stop doing womanhood, stop doing family, stop having, she says. Don't have children, they'll only cause you grief. Stop being a wife Stop, that's what she's trying to. Stop being a mother, mother, all these things. What happened that womanhood? I'm not a woman, so I guess I I'm not the proper person to have to come and say what happened, that somehow we feel that now that doesn't matter. Somehow you're lesser of a person because you're a woman. I don't know how do you synthesize that?
Speaker 2:I know the pressure's real. My own wife, bless her heart. She's always wanted to be a mother, from the time she was little. She loves her boys I mean that's the joy of her life, right, and she feels the pressure. She feels the pressure from society of like hey, and she's very educated, she's a nutritionist, but everybody's passionate.
Speaker 1:She could have a career.
Speaker 2:She could have a career Outside the home, very intelligent, she could have a career, but I mean my wife's very intelligent, she's an amazing woman, and so she has chosen, not for she's not in slavery, but she has chosen to be at home, to be at home and that's brought her this great joy. But she feels that pressure, right, she feels the pressure from society like, hey, you need to, you're not enough until you do this.
Speaker 2:You're not enough until you go do work, you're not enough, and every once in a while that'll spin up in her and she'll think through it, but every single time her deep inside her comes back to no, my joy is with my family. Where I need to be is here, and it's not about slavery, it's not about selfishness, it's about where you find peace and happiness, and is that not what we're all seeking?
Speaker 1:That's what we're seeking. You want to wake up in the morning and feel fulfilled. Now, is it true? It is true you can be in marriage and have some hard times. You could have children and have some hard times. You could do all these things she's saying to get out of and you could have some hard times. The idea that we have hard times and that somehow destroys who you are because you're willing to be in those hard times is a misnomer, because that's where you actually find your grace. If you look at your life and have done hard things, it's after the hard thing and you conquer it. Isn't that not very fulfilling? That's the deepest joy, deepest joy. You know, I've got a little more time in my life than some people. I'm a little older than you, but not much, don't worry, I'm right on your heels.
Speaker 1:My wife was a stay-home mom with children on your heels.
Speaker 1:My wife was a stay-home mom with children. That's a decision we made early on. It came from lots of counsel, it came from watching neighbors who had chosen a different path. And I get, I get, my mom had to work my whole life but I had a very sick dad and he couldn't work. So dad became mom and mom became dad dad role, if you will. Dad, she went out and worked, dad took over the home. There's no shame. There's no shame in that. That's what families do. We find the way to make it work. What we found to be destructive and I think you're going to agree with me, tony is when we feel that we have to have mom and dad out of the home so that they can have that extra boat, because after all, that's going to be quality time with the family, or the bigger house, the bigger house or the nicer car, or live in the better neighborhood, or you name it La, la, la, la la.
Speaker 1:Right. So I started following counsel of people I knew that were older than me when I first got married. When you had talked, we had a neighbor in particular, we lived in Portland, oregon. We had a neighbor. He had so many regrets in his life. His kids were now teenagers moving out of the house, had so many regrets. Number one regret was I didn't spend enough time at home and my wife wasn't home and the kids got raised by the neighbors and the daycare center. That was his hugest regret. They can no longer go back in reverse. Yeah, that to me is a nightmare, and we started hearing more and more of this. We thought you know what? Here's the deal If we want to have children, which we chose to- do?
Speaker 1:we chose to do that we decided that the greatest gift we could give those children if we were going to have them is to have a mom. Is to have a mommy, and that that mommy could help and raise them and not somebody else raise them, and so we were blessed to have the opportunity to be able to do that. I can look back now and go that was worth that sacrifice. This lady over here would say oh no, don't have that kind of sacrifice.
Speaker 2:Hey, you could have had hey, Will, you could have a whole nother income. You could have had a bunch of bigger stuff.
Speaker 1:Why? Why Just don't have any of these things? But now that we have these children five of them they are our only, they are our joy. Honestly, when we, when we kneel down at night to have a prayer together my wife and I do that every night it's the priority of what we talk about to God is the hope for happiness in our children and the things that they're going through.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 80% of your prayer is please bless this child. Please bless this child. Please help them. We love them. We do this. How can we bless them? They?
Speaker 1:are the joy of our life right now. There's nothing that's more real, joyful, other than some very special things very close, my wife and I and our relationship with our Heavenly Father and things of that nature. But when it comes to anything else that matters, there is absolutely nothing. Nothing it's more pure and more special to us than the relationship we have with our children and now our grandchildren.
Speaker 2:My oldest son about to have their first child. Congratulations, I know, and it's uh and the thing about it is, you're exactly right I find myself in. We were on vacation in Orlando and I'm in the Crocs outlet store looking at little pink Crocs, talking to my wife about this new granddaughter.
Speaker 1:You wanted to wear the Crocs.
Speaker 2:Oh, look at these little Crocs. This will be the coolest thing you know, and and that was that was happiness right there. You know it's like you were looking at. You were looking at, oh, the grandchild's coming. This is going to be so awesome, right? Do you know it's a girl? Yeah, that was the gender reveal. We were down in Orlando. When they have the gender, they have this whole race and all this.
Speaker 1:My wife and I. If we had known how fun grandkids were going to be, we would have had more kids. It's a true story. Like we're digging this grand kid thing. It's the best thing ever. You can spoil the snot out of them and send them home.
Speaker 2:It's the best, it's going to be great. That's where joy comes from.
Speaker 1:I would just say part of what we do here in the Will and Tony show is we debunk false information. I'm just telling you this lady and her book are absolutely false. It's self-absorbed. I've never met anybody, especially in my clinic I do. A lot of people are going through grief. I have never, ever, ever found anybody self-absorbed who is happy ever. Now they may be for a season, because they got rid of this grief and that grief and so on and so forth, but selfishness self-absorption never, turns into happiness.
Speaker 2:And whether you're a woman or a man, or married or non-married, or you name it, if you decide to go down a selfish lifestyle, you will not. It will be a hollow, horrible existence. Selfishness is not happiness.
Speaker 1:It's just fascinating that the world is now making this kind of noise. You get on Facebook all the time. You get on the internet all the time. You got these books, these people being celebrated for life. The world really is becoming a very, very funky place.
Speaker 2:Now I want to make a point. Traditional values are in the toilet. Selfishness is different than self-care. That's absolutely true, Right? We're not talking about taking care of yourself and or staying in an abusive situation or something like that. There's self-care, which is caring for oneself and taking care of oneself so that you can be there for others. That's completely different than selfishness, which is I'm in it for me and I could care less what else is happening outside of me. That's right.
Speaker 1:And in this case, families don't matter, children don't matter, grandparents don't matter. Like she says, ignore the elderly, ignore, just don't get it. I think you and I both established this. I'm going to tell you. If there's anybody in the listening audience who has had a near-death experience, I would love to hear from you. If you got to that, that pearly gate, and all you could think about was yourself and all the selfishness that you had in your life and that's all that mattered. I, I am, I'm I, I. Unless somebody's really bizarre, I don't think one person I don't know, right into us and say yes.
Speaker 1:I thought just I was about to die.
Speaker 2:I should have done more for me man I should have done, never gonna happen. Yeah, it's just not gonna happen because that's like that's the day reckoning right and you just sit there and go.
Speaker 1:Man, there's no place to hide, when that I'm telling you, when you're at that're, at that point you're stripped bare, you're ready to die. That is not the place to start lying. It's not the place to start. It's a very humble place. So it's a special place.
Speaker 2:Please All women, women, please be great, be awesome, continue to be amazing, nurturing, loving, caring individuals and blessing your families in whatever circumstance you're in, because you're truly amazing.
Speaker 1:We hope that your environment allows you to be able to be a mom. I can just tell you from the moms I know, sure it's hard, sure it can be frustrating, but at the end it is worth it. And I can see, now that we've had these children, we raised them, the joy they have with their mother, the children they adore their mother.
Speaker 2:Oh, the mother's central. That's why Disney always kills off the mom to get the emotional impact. Is that what it is? Yeah, they don't kill off the dad ever. The dad's just the thing. They always kill the mom off and then there's emotional connection Immediately.
Speaker 1:I never thought of that, Tony.
Speaker 2:Every Disney show you think of.
Speaker 1:they're all motherless and that's why it brings the emotion.
Speaker 1:Well, we brought it up today because we want to make sure we understand. Don't fall for these cultural things that seem to be populous. They are not true. They will not bring you joy. There's no evidence of it. In fact, all the evidence seeks against it.
Speaker 1:One last thing I've got to take a quick break. I hear the music. That is that when we talk about marriage right and I've said this many, many times I've counseled many, many couples. I've talked to many people who are successful and find and it's always the people in their elderly years we ask them, what is it in marriage that worked? And we always find these three things. They both had a heart of gratitude, learned how to be grateful for things. Secondly, they learned how to be adaptable and happy. They learned how to adapt and still be happy. And thirdly, they became selfless. Selfless. Their greatest joy was when they woke up and found that the other person was having joy and what they could do for the other person to have joy. When you become that selfless of a person, I promise you you will find a peace and harmony in your heart that nothing in the world will replace Nothing. Nothing can take it away. Nothing will take it away. Taking a break Back in two