Unconditional Love and Second Chances

Get ready for a captivating exploration of self-discovery and transformation in this episode of Comeback Stories. Join your hosts, Darren Waller and Donny Starkins, along with their special guest, Zach Skow, as they uncover the incredible story of Zach's redemption, a journey profoundly shaped by the life-altering power of rescue dogs. As the co-founder of Marley's Mutts, Zach's personal experience with addiction inspired the creation of a transformative organization connecting dogs and incarcerated individuals.

During their discussion, Darren and Zach emphasize the search for purpose in life, spotlighting how Zach's devotion to rescue dogs has grown into his life's core mission. They take a deep dive into the transformative potential of dog rehabilitation and its profoundly positive impact on the dogs and the individuals participating in the program.

Take advantage of this inspiring conversation filled with raw emotion and heartfelt moments. Tune in to learn how Zach's story of redemption and the love of rescue dogs have become a beacon of hope and a catalyst for change. 

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DARREN WALLER

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DONNY STARKINS  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Comeback Stories is a production of Inflection Network and iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
All Right, welcome back, everybody. We are here for another
episode of Comeback Stories. I am always here with my
guy for life, Darren Waller. How you doing, my man.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
I'm blessed, bro. I'm excited for this episode.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Man, I'm so excited for this episode. So today's guest.
He's the co founder of Marley's Mutt's Dog Rescue and
Positive Change program. This dude has a story that I
absolutely love and I can relate to so much. And
when I think about the service work that he's doing,
it really makes me realize that I need to step

(00:49):
up my game. The work he's doing is incredible. So
we're here with Zach scou Zach has a story where
dogs actually rescued Zach from addiction. Then he took that
experience to start Marlee's Mutts, taking rescued dogs to help
rescue people, and from there he started Positive Change program,
pairing death row dogs with incarcerated people. So, Zach, welcome

(01:14):
to the show.

Speaker 4 (01:15):
My man. Mo Man, it is great to see my brother,
you too, Darren, Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Hey, We're always getting right into it here on the show.
And we want to know for you. Tell us a
little bit what it was like.

Speaker 4 (01:30):
Growing up for you. Let's get vulnerable towny life. Growing
up for me was was kind of quintessential when I
think about it, I grew up. I'm actually down here
in Manhattan Beach right now. I grew up in Hermosa Beach,
California and what's called the South Bay, Redondo, Manhattan, Hermosa Torrents.

(01:50):
And it was an incredible place to grow up, you know,
an absolutely incredible place to grow up. We were baby
sat by the beach, you know, we were all latch
key kids. We have this little incubated bubble that is
the South Bay where pH and the refinery to the
north and other kind of barricades created this this really
incredible place to grow up. Just a very unique place

(02:12):
where we surfed and we skated and we got into trouble.
It had a very drinking, heavy, drug heavy culture, that's
to be certain. I grew up in a broken home.
You know. My parents separated when my twin brother and
I were very young. They got divorced right when we
got out of the hospital. Both my brother and I
were very ill when we were born. So yeah, life

(02:32):
started out that way in a broken home with a
lot of different you know, advantages to that as well.
I don't want to just say there were disadvantages. I
got to grow up in two beautiful homes. My mom
was my primary, and we grew up in a house
with another single family, another female lead family, And that
was how I kind of eased into two adulthood, which

(02:54):
was that beach culture. I was inundated with beach culture
and all that that implies.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
When you look back on your childhood, is there an
early memory of pain that really stands out to you?

Speaker 4 (03:08):
Yeah? There are. There are some some definite painful moments
that stand out from my childhood. Some of those would
manifest and become real issues as I got older. Some
of us had to do with you know, inappropriate contact,
that contact and conduct as a child, things that I
that I received and went through as a kid in

(03:28):
terms of you know, inappropriate sexual contact and things that
I didn't know at the time would affect me like
they would in adulthood. I think I was a lot
like everybody else man. I really wanted to to fit in,
I really wanted to be a part of and I
think some of my earliest memories of in terms of
painful memories, were not feeling a part of and certainly
not feeling as connecting to my parents as I wanted to.

(03:49):
My parents were both working professionals, so they were gone
all the time, you know, and much of my childhood
was spent with you know, with sitters and with caretakers,
So I didn't get to spend much time with my mom,
didn't get to send as much time with my dad
as I would have wanted, you because they were hustling,
you know, trying to make a living to support us kids.
So that's one of the things that I think about now,
you know, in adulthood that that kind of pained me

(04:12):
when I was younger, was just wanting a deeper connection,
you know, as a child, and.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
A deeper connection with specifically your mom or was it
just yearning for something deeper?

Speaker 4 (04:25):
Definitely with my mom, for sure. My mom was a
professional at ABC. She was an executive, one of the
youngest female executives ever at ABC and Disney. So you
know that that time, were you looking back on it,
Where I really craved when I was younger was just
that feeling safe, feeling supported, and feeling safe within that
family structure, and I and we were very much children

(04:45):
of the streets, very much running amock kind of constantly,
and I didn't and we had Like I said, you know,
these were wonderful people that helped raise us, you know,
Isabelle and Juan and Sadie or it were and still
are family members, but they weren't my parents, and so
I look about older in life. That's something that I
that I definitely have tried to make up for in

(05:05):
adulthood in terms of kind of recreating that narrative, recreating
the relationship, and kind of also just accepting that my
parents did their absolute best. We tend to hold our
parents to this unreachable standard and we tend to not
view them as just normal people who are doing their best.
They were single parents too, just like I am now
and a single dad, and that's a tough life to

(05:26):
try to figure out. You got two twin babies, you know.
Like I said, my brother and I were extremely sick.
My brother was at Cedar Sinai Medical Center for four
months before he got to come home. So it was
a tough time to come into the world and have
our family kind of split apart. But they absolutely did
their best with what they had, and I'm trying to
give them credit as opposed to just kind of, you know,
knock them as I'm in my.

Speaker 5 (05:47):
Forties, Zach, I appreciate your vulnerability first and foremost, something
that we appreciate and try to hold space for on
this platform. And the fact that you're leading off with
it is amazing. And I know you talked about wanting
to feel safe for me when I was fifteen years old.
I think I started to feel safe via percocets and

(06:11):
people pleasing. Where do you feel like you first started
to turn tours to start to feel safe or feel
some sort of peace.

Speaker 4 (06:20):
Yeah, people pleasing is my big one. I always grew
up very quickly, so I was an eighteen year old
when I was ten. I was always running around with parents.
I grew up in a household that out of a
lot of other kids that I sort of had to
keep an eye out. My twin brother included. He kind
of just how we were raised. He was sort of
my little brother. So I was doing a tremendous amount

(06:41):
of parenting and trying to just keep the vibe tolerable.
I was trying to put out fires and not create,
not feed into the chaos that is a single mother
household with all the comings and goings, and yeah, I
started to medicate very early on, very early on, like
ten years old, eleven years old is when I remember
first getting into my mom's wine. A lot of that

(07:05):
was just related to wanting to be an adult. Was
just seeing what all the adults did every single night,
and wanting to be considered an adult, wanting to be
a grown up, and wanting to do the things that
the people I admired did. But that you know, I think,
throughout my entire life, if I'm being honest, I always
felt different. I always felt a level of anxiety maybe
maybe like a simmering level of anxiety might not even

(07:30):
be the right word, but just uneasiness. I always felt
a little bit uneasy. And when I found alcohol and drugs,
I found acceptance of myself. I found being accepted by others,
you know, I found it gave me a lot of
the things that I thought you needed to be a
successful person. Right. I was funnier, I was more affable,
I could kind of fall I could slide into that

(07:50):
role and portray myself as older than I was. I
thought that was one of the ways you grew up
was by learning how to drink. And I took that
very seriously. All my heroes were you know, I don't
want to say functioning alcoholics, they were just alcoholics. I
set my sights early on to try to, I mean
literally try to integrate that into my life. I knew
drinking was I knew drinking was important. I mean it

(08:12):
was prioritized in terms of my social circles and my culture.
That was something that it helped if you were really
good at And I started to bury a whole lot
of discomfort, uneasiness, anxiety. I also had this you know,
they called me Golden Boy when I was a kid.
That was the moniker I had. It was everybody had
this idea of me that I was this golden child,

(08:34):
that I was this handsome kid that could do really
well in school. And I played every sport very well.
So I was good at everything. And I peaked when
I was like twelve. So as soon as I started
to not make those expectations and I started to do
less good in school, I started to have get into fights,
I started to do whatever. You know, it really facilitated
a spiral because I couldn't meet up to those expectations.

(08:56):
And I think a lot of us fight meeting expectations
of ourselves at a young age and then never really
being able to catch up with and accept who we
atually are and love that person. You know, I've always
thought people loved the idea of me and the expectation
of me as opposed to who I actually am. You
know what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (09:13):
Oh man, I know I know too much of what
you're saying.

Speaker 5 (09:15):
I felt that way three years into the NFL, with
every goal, every dream on my list checked off as
far as what would be the blueprint to happiness and success,
and I just like this, this ain't it Because from
when I was a kid, you know, I wasn't black
enough around the kids I was growing.

Speaker 3 (09:32):
Up around, and I had no identity in that.

Speaker 5 (09:35):
But I found identity in how many peels I could
pop or how many how many beers I could drink.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
And it's like that, you know.

Speaker 5 (09:44):
That that identity around alcohol is real because nothing ever
made me feel good, but we told me I could
out drink people that made me feel great, and I.

Speaker 4 (09:52):
Started to get Yeah, I started to get that credibility
as like a social facilitator, right too. You get that
credibility for how much you can drink, how much you
can use Do you got the hookups? Do you and
know all the different kids and how the different prayers
hook up so that you can facilitate party time? Do
you know all the different phone numbers to call? And
I became that party facilitator, that social coordinator early on.

(10:13):
And that's another way that I got a lot of
my like worth and my value was like facilitating a
good time. Yeah, how long did it go on for?

Speaker 2 (10:22):
So you started drinking, your experimenting at ten or eleven?
Where did that end up?

Speaker 4 (10:29):
Like?

Speaker 2 (10:30):
What was I mean? Walk us through a little bit
of the path and the progression of the drinking and
what else it led to and ultimately to your lowest point.

Speaker 4 (10:42):
Well, I think culturally I was always striving towards some
level of alcoholism. That sounds strange, but where I come from,
You know, you were kind of your adolescents in your
early adulthood are spent kind of like honing your social capability,
which means how you drink, how you use drugs, et cetera.
So I got into daily drinking, you know, drinking as
often as I could really when I was fifteen six,

(11:04):
see always drinking at parties, drinking every weekend. That progressed
into you know, weed and cocaine and other things nitrous oxide, acid, mushrooms,
things like that at a at a young age, all
through high school, and then by the time I went
up to college at San Diego State University, I was
a you know, I drank as often as you can
put it in front of me, So any excuse to

(11:26):
consume alcohol or drugs, I would gravitate towards and pursue,
and that quickly I became enslaved to alcohol. By the
time I was eighteen, I knew I was an alcoholic.
I used to listen to the alcoholics of the Rat
group that was like my we we would party to
the alcoholics, and all they do is sing anthems about
you know, grotesque consumption of alcohol and just overt alcoholism,

(11:49):
and those are our those are our theme songs. You know.
I really pursued that level of oblivion as often as
I could because I needed it internally, and because it
was a status symbol, Like that was acceptance where I
was running, and you know, your access to drugs and
alcohol and your ability to consume, to do to be
the life of the party, was how you found acceptance.

(12:10):
So I felt like I really needed those things in
order to be participating in society and to gain any acceptance.
But I made a decision really early on. I knew
I was an alcoholic, and I knew I was physically
addicted too, because I went, like one weekend tried out
to drink when I was in college, and I thought,
all right, I'm just going to commit myself just like
my parents do, to drinking every night. That's what everybody
else does. I can make the adjustment. I'll figure out

(12:33):
how to drink, you know, even to oblivion on the regular,
and we'll just figure it out. We'll be okay. And
that that gave way to sell and weed at first
to try to, you know, support my habits. I didn't
have any money, you know, I've not had any money
up until recently, to be honest, in terms of saving
because of you, A lot of my wife my life
has spent giving back.

Speaker 6 (12:54):
But yeah, my, my, my relationship with alcohol and drugs
completely overtook my life very early on, and it totally
occupied my transom, my son up to sun down until
I got somewhere.

Speaker 4 (13:07):
I mean, I was completely enveloped by the devils of
addiction in every way, shape and form, every place that
that leads you everything that it just to you physically, emotionally,
relationship wise. It completely took over my life and took
it took my body completely failing. In order for me
to have that the realization I needed to, I tried, man,

(13:30):
I tried to go to meetings, I tried to link
up with people. I tried to go cold turkey. I
tried everything to eliminate alcohol and drugs for my life,
or to drink like a gentleman, or to do this,
that and the other, and it just wasn't possible for me.
I needed that absolute rock bottom in order to facilitate
any kind of recovery.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
So what were the physical ramifications of that much drinking
for you?

Speaker 4 (13:54):
Well, it was interesting. You know, I was drinking twenty
four hours a day. I got in a car accident
in two thousand and three. I broke my chest and
my shoulder. I broke my sternum and my shoulder got
and you know, I got knocked out, and I was
I was driving intoxicated. I rolled my truck off a cliff,
like off a cliff and rolled down the cliff and

(14:14):
got knocked out and hurt myself severely, and that, you know,
that experience. Just healing from that experience, I had to
drink to get through that. I had to drink a
lot to get through that. I'm now I was drinking
a box of wine a day just to get through
the physical pain of healing from that injury. And that's
what initiated twenty four hours a day drinking. That was like,
there's this there's this fine edge when you get when

(14:37):
you commit yourself to alcoholic, to alcoholism, and just the
danger of doing that dance where it can push you
over into twenty four hours a day to that physical dependency,
not just emotional, but true physical dependency. And after I
healed from that injury, I tried to go cold tricky,
and I my the physical, emotional, every that kind of
withdraw was brutal, was brutal. And I again, before I

(14:59):
got really sick, I committed myself to alcoholism. I had
another conversation with my after that crash, and I said,
all right, well, I guess I'm addicted to alcohol, and
I guess we're just going to have to figure out
how to live addicted to alcohol as opposed to trying
to pull the ripcord, ask for help figure out away.
It was just too daunting. Trying to come up against
society's norms. How well wellbn alcohol and alcoholism is to

(15:22):
our social fabric was just overwhelming to me. I couldn't
contemplate fitting into my skin, fitting into society, fitting into
my family as a sober individual, and underneath at all.
I think the main part was that I couldn't tolerate myself.
You know, when those voices would creep in. As soon
as alcohol drugs would seep out of my system, and
those voices would start to creep in, is a overwhelming

(15:44):
panic that would take over my body. If I got
to run away for myself, I got to run away
from myself, I can't. I can't tolerate you. I just
cannot tolerate you, dude. And the only way I could
get myself out of my head is through alcohol. So
it just facilitated this brutal, brutal cycle until my liver
finally failed. You know, I went into full blown alcoholic

(16:05):
liver failure, and I tried every with all of my
power to avoid getting that diagnosis. And to the part
I just wouldn't go to the doctor. I mean, I
was leaking blood from both ends of my body. And
by the time I finally went to the doctor and
got you know, blood tests and checked up on I'll
never forget she came. The nurse came out and sat
down next to me. She put her hands on my

(16:26):
hand and she said, honey, you know these are your
your blood test results, and you're in liver failure and
you need to go to a hospital right now. And
I was at a hospital, but not a very good one,
and she said, you know, this is very serious, and
I said okay, and I just completely brushed it off.
I went home alied to my dad. I started wearing baggy.
I was turning yellow, so I started to turn bright yellow.

(16:49):
Had my belly started to fill up with blood and bile.
So I was like nine months pregnant. I had these
varicose veins feeding this huge mass inside of my stomach.
My belly button was her head, and my ankles were
full of liquid. My feet were full of liquid. And
I couldn't come to grip with that diagnosis because I
knew it meant no more alcohol for me forever, so
I just avoided it. I just lied and avoided it,

(17:11):
and then finally I started to have ammonia build up
on my brain, where you really you forget where you are,
You lose your balance, you don't understand who you are.
Sometimes you kind of vacillate between coherence and total incoherence.
And it was at that point that my dad took
me to the hospital to Bakershield Memorial Hospital for long
term stay and I stayed there for almost six weeks.

(17:35):
The first thing the doctor said when after they got
me stabilized, was, you know, your son needs a liver
transplant and he's not going to get one. Period. I
was given, you know, an eighty percent chance of dying
within ninety days if I didn't have a liver transplant.
So it was very cutting, you know, cutt and dry.
It was, you need a liver transplant immediately or you're
going to die. And they don't give alcoholics liver transplants. Period.

(17:57):
You needs six months of recovery just to apply, just
to be considered for the transplant program. I didn't have
six hours of sobriety, you know. It was it was
a terribly dire situation, you know.

Speaker 2 (18:10):
So do you end up getting the transplant or what
happens next.

Speaker 4 (18:18):
So there's only seven hospitals in the state of California
that do liver transplant, and I was not at one
of them, and I was not in a transplant program,
So there was no chance and no hope of me
getting a liver transplant. The only hope was to get
into one of those hospitals, and my dad is in there.
This is so much of my sobriety story. So much
of my comeback story is really a love story between

(18:39):
a dad and his son. You know, a dad who
just refused to give up on his son and refused
to say, this is our lot in life. You know,
he's not going to make it, and we just have
to accept that. He just never entered his mind for
a second that I wasn't gonna make it, and he
did everything in his power to get me to a
hospital that would care for me. And we finally got

(18:59):
a meeting through a very child, through a nurse who
worked for our insurance company, and she got us a
very chance interview with the Cedar Sinai Comprehensive Transplant Center.
So that's the best transplant center in America. It's at
the hospital I was born at and they said, if
you can get here within the next two days, we
will get you a meeting with doctor Tram, trans the
head of transplant. So my dad said, we're going, you know,

(19:21):
pull all this shit out of your body. We're going.
And the doctor said, no, you're not. You can't leave here.
He'll he'll die if you leave here. I mean, I
was the sickest the sick person could get. You know,
I'd gone through alcohol withdrow in the hospital. I got
addicted to delauded in the hospital. That's a whole other story.
I got heavily addicted to opiates that six weeks that
I was in the hospital, So I was I was

(19:41):
in a very delicate state to be moved period, but
my dad didn't, and he signed me out against doctor's orders.
We did a burnout in the parking lot to get
as far away from that place seemingly possible because I
was dying there. They were not doing anything to help me.
I was simply diet and making life a living hell
for the nurses that were there because I'd even dope,
you know, every four hours. And we got meeting with

(20:04):
the Comprehensive transplant Center, doctor Tram tram, sat me down,
went over all my information and she said, look, if
we check you into this hospital, you're going to die here.
And this is very touch and go, but we're going
to send you home. You've been admitted to the Comprehensive
transplant program. If you can get sorry it's emotional, If

(20:26):
you can get six months sober, we will get you
a liver transplant. But you have to get six We
have to survive six months. And you know, the numbers
said I wasn't going to make it ninety days, much
last six months, so there wasn't a lot of hope,
you know. And they sent us home and they said, look,
he's going to have to kick dope, so stay near
an emergency room. You're going to need it, and you're

(20:46):
on your own. You're going to have to check in
with us, you know, every twenty four hours. And they
sent me home, and my dad's thinking to himself, you know,
you just released him to the care of our dogs.
And instead of a you know, a medical facility, you
want our dogs and me to take care of a
drug addicted, recovering alcoholic with zero sobriety who needs a

(21:07):
liver transplant. And that's like you got to be kidding me.
What am I going to do with this kid? You know?
And as I'm sure that both of you can imagine,
I convinced him to take me to the hospital for shock.
You know. That was how we spent the first two weeks,
was me trying to go through OPI withdrawal but to
chicken ship, to kiss the dragon on the nose, and
struggling through every second of it. You know, I mean,

(21:29):
you know it is your central preoccupation. You can't help
but have your central preoccupation be drugs. When you're addicted
to drugs, nothing else can really enter, nothing else can
permeate that boundary layer. And that was my focus. And
to tell so long story short, we finally got through that.
We got through that OPIE withdrawal. That was the first
big miracle. My dogs helped me get through. You know.
I had three rescue dogs that I'd gotten from the

(21:51):
Mohabby Animals well, that I had gotten through from our community,
a couple of them from the Mahabi Animal Shelter and
kicking the lauded going through OPI withdrawal with those dogs
helped me to a tremendous degree because that was one
of the scariest things I've ever been through. That was
like two days of hallucinations and now being able to
trust what I was hearing seeing, you know, a full

(22:11):
body fear too, like a full spiritual fear that the
life of which you can't imagine. I just remember going
through that and rooting down in my dog, feeling my
big Rottweiler pitbull, Marley, and just just touching him to
try to get through it and try to remind me
what was real and what was not real, you know
what I mean. That was the first big miracle that
helped kind of facilitate my life. Was getting offed out. Man.

Speaker 3 (22:34):
This wow.

Speaker 4 (22:37):
And obviously there's a lot more to this story. It
keeps kicking on as as the recovery happened. So after
I got home, we were able to kick, you know,
get through the opiate withdrawal process. And after I got
through that, you know, I had soiled myself in the bed.
I couldn't control my bowels. I was on a whole
lot of very intense medication and how they keep ammonia

(22:57):
build up off your brain when you're liver failures, This
medication called angulo. So I had gone to the bathroom
in bed, which happened regularly, and rather than wake my
dad up, I went into the mirror into the bathroom
to clean myself off. And I'll never forget walking past
the mirror and looking at myself and seeing this, this
like hollowed out human being that I did not recognize

(23:20):
at all. I was completely naked, you know, because I
had to take all my clothes off to clean myself up.
And I was totally yellow, and every part of my
body was purple. Was bruised from needles going in and
from bumping into things. You bruise really easily when you're
in river failure. I didn't recognize my eyes. I didn't
recognize who was looking back. I mean quite literally, you know.

(23:41):
I looked much much older, and I looked like a
person I didn't recognize. And I just started to cry,
like just that this is the end to cry, like
soul crushing, defeated, sob of I can't believe this is
what I've done to myself, you know, I cannot believe
I've done this to myself and I and I mean
the way I looked, and I'll never forget it. The

(24:03):
veins and my stomach or the most intimidating, and you
could see them on my throat too. And I look
over my dogs in this like terrible moment of just
self loathing and pity, and all my dogs are looking
at that me next to the toilet, because I'd always
like sit around the toilet, and they're looking up at
me like I'm the world's greatest human beings, like like
they see all of the nuke everything innate to me.

(24:27):
Oh the love, the compassion and empathy, the potential, like
all the human potential that was still locked inside of me,
and all the things that were good about me that
I did know we're in there. They lashed on too,
Like they looked at me with all that adoration and
that love and that and maybe even a little bit
of sympathy, but like this attitude of we're good, you're good,
you're good, right now, you're good. And I didn't see

(24:49):
any of that. Man, I saw it. I saw this
is time to let it go, like this is time
to pull the plug. And they saw it. You're good,
you know, you're all right. And I'll never forget looking
at them and thinking, first of all, what's going to
happen to my dogs if something happens to me. And two,
you know, just feeling what they were giving me, feeling
the emotions that they were sending me. This ultimate except

(25:12):
unconditional love, unconditional love for us in recovery. Unconditional love
is the north star, you know. It's something we're always
striding towards this, that unconditional love. And our dogs give
us that medicine in a form that is so digestible
and so relatable and so warm and so imperturbed by
other variables or other qualifications. It's just there. It's raw,

(25:36):
it's real, and if you let it in, it will
help you rebuild yourself, you know. So just that little
bit of confidence they gave me in that they they
knew everything could be okay and that it would be okay,
and that kind of facilitated the first day of the
rest of our life. Just that experience with my dogs
at that really low moment catalyze me to say, all right,

(25:58):
we're going to give it a shot, man, We're going
to try to figure this out, and we're going to
try to put one foot in front of the other literally,
And that morning I didn't go back to sleep. I
took a picture of the sunrise. I journaled in my
journal and I remember thinking to myself on that first
journal entry, he guys, I love this. I remember thinking
on that first journal entry, I'm probably still going to die,

(26:20):
and if they're going to find this journal and they're
going to be like Jesus Christ, this guy can't spell
for shit and his handwriting is terrible. Like that's what
I was thinking, is that when I die, and this
will be the only record of my last few months
and people are going to make fun of me instead
of you know, that's just how sick we are in
the mind and how self absorbed, and you know we

(26:40):
can be. But that really did. It kicked off the
first day of the rest of our life. And every
day for years after that, several times a day we
just went for a walk. So every morning was walking
in the mountains with those dogs, tried to put one
foot in front of the other towards wellness and whatever
happened on the road right And through just that simple

(27:03):
process of focusing on those rescue dogs and that walk,
it started to give me. One was very important was
the concept of divinity in a relationship with God. I
started to recognize my surroundings. I started to see God
in my dogs and started to feel God in myself.
I started to see it in the mountains, and then
the people I interacted with. It was all around me.
It was all around me. This loving and this unconditional

(27:26):
loving energy that I always pushed away as atheists was
around me everywhere. And another really cool thing about recovery
is that you get you get to create and adapt
and your own idea of what God means to you.
I was so uplifting and fulfilling and exciting to me
and even creative about recovery is that you get to

(27:46):
come up with and manifest a God of your understanding,
no one else's, it's mine. It's my understanding. You don't
have to ascribe to it. But you know, my God
gets to consist of a whole lot of ideas essences
that aren't associated with conventional really and dogma, you know.
And I really really appreciated that about recovery. But just

(28:10):
that process of working with my dogs led to more
working with dogs, led to bringing in foster dogs into
my pack. I've been working with the Humane Society a
couple of local organizations before I got sick. I started
to volunteer with them again. I started to totally dedicate
my life to these animals. So while I'm in recovery,
it's very interesting. What dogs need in rehabilitation is exactly

(28:34):
what people need in recovery. Dogs need exercise, discipline, affection, rules, boundaries, limitations. Right,
those are the prayers we need to set up for
a dog's rehabilitation. A human being likewise needs all those
same things in order to re establish and reboot their
life and refocus it on healthy living and sobriety and

(28:56):
the principles of the program. And so that it just
started to naturally happen. As I rehabilitated, the dogs started
to rehabilitate, and I also got to get create native
for the first time. This is really neat. I got
to write their stories, I got to tick their pictures.
So all of a sudden, I got this purpose. All
of a sudden, all my purpose has been has been
hoarding alcohol and drugs and ingesting it as much as possible.

(29:19):
It's been my central preoccupation for as long as I
can imagine. Drugs and alcohol were my God. They were
my everything, right, they were my purpose. They were my
reason to wake up in the morning. They were central
to every part of my existence, and that got replaced
by dogs, that got replaced by rehabilitating dogs and rescue work.
And holy shit, was that transformative? You know, because you'll

(29:42):
never recover unless you find a purpose. You can't. Recovery
is so fickle unless you have something to hang your
hat on, unless you have a purpose to plug yourself into.
And then it becomes different. You know, it really becomes
different once you found service, Darren.

Speaker 2 (29:56):
I got to say, Man, I'm loving how you've really
made yourself at home in the big city. I'm curious,
how are you getting around? You a subway guy, cab uber.

Speaker 5 (30:06):
I'm glad you're asked, Donnie Man, I'm a got the
honor to partner with All American Forward over in New Jersey.
They've been taking really good care of me since I
got out here, and that's why I love the most
about it. Man. They treat me like I'm family, not
just a customer trying to get a deal or just
a statistic. You know, they give me great service. You
could tell they got to commitment to quality. The innovation
is unmatched, and just so if anybody's you know, like me,

(30:29):
trying to get around in New Jersey, don't know where
to go. I'm telling you go check out All American
Forward here in Jersey. They're gonna take real good care
of you.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
When we come back, you'll hear more of this inspiring
comeback story.

Speaker 5 (30:43):
Wow, man, I can't you know, get the image of
when you were talking about the dogs looking at you
as you were like in the bathroom and seeing the
good in you? What was you know, as you started
to go on the walks and you started to find
purpose and you started to things started to change, Like,
what was some of that good that you started to

(31:04):
see in yourself that was always there that just had
to kind of be you know, dug up.

Speaker 4 (31:10):
Yeah, yeah, it was really interesting. So what happened was,
you know, all along, I'm trying to get six months
of sobriety just to get this slipper transplant. But I'm
now out and about in my community. I was very
terrified to get out into public. I couldn't have done
it on my own, but I had my dogs with me,
So I start venturing out into public. I start putting
up all these adoption posters for advertisement all over town.

(31:32):
So people start to notice this yellow, sick guy with
a black pit bull that is schlepping all over town
talking to everybody, and I looked very significant, I looked
very ill. So people took a big notice of me,
and I started to see the positive. You know, I
started to feel myself moved through the world with a
positive frequency, with an energy and a vibe that people

(31:54):
were recepted to. I never had a sober No one
moved towards me like receptive to my positive energy when
I was drinking, or maybe they did it. They were
drinking and I was drinking. You were using drugs together.
But people on the streets never felt my positivity. People
on the streets didn't absorb the positive streak I was
trying to leave back. So what animals did for me

(32:15):
is help me leave a positive streak wherever I went.
Wherever I went, I left a positive streak, and the
people that walked through that streak, they could pick up
that energy and take it with them wherever they went.
So I started to notice this concrete, this wonderful interaction
that we'd have with virtually everybody we came in contact with,
because I would always have at least one dog with me,

(32:36):
and that would facilitate and you know, if anything in
the early days, it was very very concerned being in public.
It was very hard for me. I had tremendous social anxiety,
and so to not only get used to that and
address that social anxiety, but to push through it and
recognize yourself as an asset, as a societal asset, and
start thinking of yourself as having this really wonderful frequency

(32:59):
to share with the wold. I started to get excited
to leave. I started to get excited to go out
in public. That was considering how I looked, that would
have been unthinkable. But I was in my sobriety, in
this new uh, this new vibe I was able to inherit,
you know, had the ability to positively affect anybody I
came in contact with. And that was just critically important.
And that really gave me this like catalyzed me to

(33:21):
keep going and to just keep trying to figure out
who this new person is. Who is this purser of
service Zach scout, you know, who is this? Who is this?
Am I a dog rescueer? I got to also pick
I got to find several things that presented themselves as
places to put my energy, you know, animal rescue being one,
and then and then people rescue being another. So by

(33:42):
the time I finally got six months of sobriety, by
the time I finally qualified for a liver transplant, I
no longer needed a liver transplant. All of this walking
in the in the mountains every single day, all of
this work. By throwing myself into the work I was doing,
I was able to really change everything about my life.
I changed when I put my body, everything I ate,

(34:03):
everything I put in my body. I changed all of
my habits before you know it, through this process of
rehabilitating my dogs, of just walking these dogs in the
mountains and trying to get them adoptable, trying to teach
them rules, boundary structure, exercise, all those things I had
taught myself. And so I'm rehabilitating these rescue dogs while
rehabilitating myself in my body. The resiliency of the body

(34:27):
is remarkable. I was twenty eight years old when I
got sick. I was twenty nine when I got all
the hospital, and my body bounced back to a degree,
which is incredibly surprising and really miraculous. So yeah, by
the time I got my six months sober and qualified
for that transplant, I no longer needed one. Now I'm
still enrolled in the comprehensive transplant program. I'm your a

(34:48):
patients for life. Once you are end to stage and
when you're in liver failure, it's not even called like
stage four or five, they call it e n D
end to stage liver disease because you get a liver
transplant or you die. That is, those are your outcomes.
So for my outcome, for my liver to have actually
healed itself and regressed from stage four sorosis was completely miraculous,

(35:11):
and I'll never forget that meeting at six months where
trans said my doctor said that, look, man, I don't
know what you're doing up there in the mountains, but
keep doing it. You know, you need to keep doing it.
Keep doing it because there's a chance your body will
be resilient enough for you to continue and not need
a liver transplant. So here we are now, fourteen years later,
almost fifteen years later, after I got out of the hospital,
and I still have my same liver, but actually regressed

(35:34):
to what's called stage three five process, so I don't
even have sorosis anymore, which is again it's completely miraculous.
Part of a couple of studies at cedars On a
medical center for those who have who have come back
from end stage failure without a liver transplant. So I'm
involved in trying to help give some insight and some
guidance to those who are suffering with this disease and

(35:54):
need some hope, and hopefully some they'll come up with
some answers within that program. But yeah, it's even just
talking to you guys about it this far on, it's
really remarkable to recount. It's really been almost feels like
it happened to somebody else.

Speaker 2 (36:06):
As I heard you explain, I could hear the and
feel the emotion come up when you were talking about
your dad, and I couldn't help but get emotional also
just thinking about my dad and how he would do
anything like you know, it's almost like it was part
of his purpose where he would really felt like he
was in his purpose trying to help me, you know,

(36:27):
do anything he could to get me out of this disease.
And so that was a big piece I wanted to
circle back to. And then also that you know, I
remember my rock bottom. I mean the image that I
have of myself lying on a couch in Cincinnati, Ohio
completely isolated, not wanting to be around anybody, nobody wanting
to be around me. And my dog would come up

(36:49):
with She was a rescue boxer named Roxy, and she
would come up with a with a ball in her
mouth and she would I would I couldn't even get
off my couch and she would sit there and nudge
me with the ball and then eventually give up. I
can remember her licking the tears off of my face
and I couldn't even step foot outside to go throw
the ball with her. And that unconditional love. And she

(37:10):
lived till about thirteen. She passed away about five years ago,
but super emotional for me because she saw both sides
of me and that unconditional love. Man, I mean, we
can learn, we can learn a lot from our dogs.
As you're explaining, I'd like to know now, like, how then,
how do you get into working with incarcerated people.

Speaker 4 (37:33):
Yeah. So the way we got into the Positive into
creating the Positive Change program was I had a dog
that I was fostering that had been shot as a
pitbull mix, and we paired that with a gentleman who
had just been released from prison. He had been incarcerated
since he was thirty since he was seventeen for thirteen years,
and we paired him with that dog, and it fundamentally

(37:55):
changed the entire trajectory of his life. He was kind
of a a lot of people when they get released
from prison are somewhat feral to the cultural standards that
we kind of abide by. They have been living in
a very different system for a very long time, so
trying to for him to reinterer society was very challenging.
But once we got him that dog. For the same
reasons that it is for us in recovery, right, you're

(38:16):
nervous about getting out of the world, you're nervousing, you
know you're going to be sizing up a dude or
feeling like you're being sized up. He's going to not
understand how to interact potentially with people of the opposite sex.
So he hasn't really interacted with properly in decades, right,
So there's all these things that make it different, difficult
to assimilate. And we adopted him that dog, and it
just changed everything. He started to give his testimonial with me.

(38:38):
He started to share at the mission at Kerrent County
where my mom was getting sober at the time, and
he became one of our employees. He then got hired
to work as a shelter manager for another organization at Oklahoma.
So it's just this simple dog adoption with this individual
created this positive trajectory that is still beneficial today. He
has his own dog riscue organization up in Linke, Isabella

(39:00):
and it's called Strength the Shadow, and it's a big deal,
you know. So that I saw it, had a kind
of an Aha moment there, and I started researching dog
programs and I thought out how incredibly difficult it is
to get in the prison system. So spent four years
trying to find a way and just trying to shoehorn
my way in write emails, and nobody was having it
until finally, January of twenty sixteen, Warden David Long at

(39:25):
California City Correctional Facility took a chance on us and
he piloted our program at their prison, and the rest
is sort of history. We started off that program somewhat slow,
and then we quickly went to thirty students, ten dogs
at a time. So it's a fourteen week long program,
three months of which the dogs these are dogs straight
from the shelter, almost all ethan asilist young large dogs.

(39:49):
So young large dogs are the most youuthanized. They have
the smallest chance of being adopted because their adoption liabilities.
They don't have the skills to be adopted, right, So
we rehabilitate those dogs in that prison setup. They work
on their canaan Good Citizen certification and with that certification
graduate and then they can roll again in that program.
So Positive Change really took the blessing and the acceptance

(40:12):
of a warden who is down and an administrative staff
who's down as well. And then truly are our staff
the trainers that we had running that program. Positive Change
is all about the trainers, the people that give of
themselves in the institution and share dog psychology and all
the things that we've learned over the last fifteen years.
And the program has just been it's been magical. I

(40:33):
mean it has been. It has been my life's work,
to say the least. Like I feel so lucky to
be involved in Positive Change work, to get to go
into prisons all over the state of California, juvenile facilities,
female federal prisons and really do the Lord's work, like
do God's work. It's we're now in six facilities. We

(40:54):
have three men's state prison programs, we have a women's
federal prison program, and we have two juvenile programs, both
the boys and the girls, one in Los Angeles at
Camp Kilpatrick, which is actually taught by two of our
formerly incarcerated trainers. And over in that time, in the
seven and a half almost eight years we've been going,
we've rehabilitated, We've graduated more than a thousand students and

(41:15):
I think it's six hundred plus dogs, so a tremendous
amount of lives have been saved. And with that program,
we've been able to facilitate professional careers for twenty six
formally incarcerated dog trainers. So we have twenty six of
our former students. Many of them, if not most of them,
are you know, black and brown, former gang members who

(41:36):
have now entered the pet industry, which is one hundred
billion dollar recession proof industry, to have tremendous opportunity as
kennel technicians, trainers, behaviorists, pet walkers, daycare and facilitators. There
is so much opportunity within this industry and it just
fills me up with a tremendous amount of joy and
pride to be able to showcase the potential that our

(41:58):
students have to make a difference in the world. And
to know that several dozen of our dudes are out
there making it work and making a difference and contributing
to not only our society and culture, but their own
more particular societies and cultures where they come from, is
just the best thing in the world.

Speaker 3 (42:14):
Man.

Speaker 5 (42:15):
I think you're painting an incredible picture of a blueprint
for purpose for so many people, especially people that are
listening because you, as young Zach, as you described earlier,
just trying to feel safe, trying to figure out what
life was all about through consuming like drugs and alcohol,
consuming everything, when really all it took was finding something

(42:36):
to contribute to finding something to give to the world
is what ultimately filled you up. And just how ass
backwards our world and our culture has those things as
far as what life really means men, And I just
think it's amazing, and I want to know now, like
now that you have such an incredible purpose in your life, like,
how do you balance that what's still taking care of

(42:58):
yourself and not allowing that area of your life to
maybe slack or drift.

Speaker 4 (43:05):
Yeah, that's a good one, man, it's it's it's very
The self care element of service is tough, right, because
that tends to happen. We go from throttled just to
addiction and alcoholism or whatever else, to them throttling ourself
in service, right, you know, and before you know it,
you're you've aged yourself twenty years and three years and

(43:26):
all the rest of it because you're you know, you're
you're going at an unsustainable rate. That's a very good question.
And I don't know that I do the greatest job
balancing my self care with you know, all that I
have happening around me. I will tell you that one
of one of the variables I use for self care
in my life is literally sitting next to you, connecting

(43:50):
myself with with people like Dontie and communities like Donnie
has has created of like minded people that you feel
accepted by without any effort has done the world for me.
Just having that group of people that you feel radical
acceptance with is so so important in terms of my

(44:10):
spiritual wellness, in terms of feeling okay with me. My
recovery community, you know, the Donnie's community, and other you know,
and even my prison graduate community. The thing that works
best for me in terms of my mental health is
staying close to those people. Staying close to people no
love me and appreciate me for the right reasons, so
I have no alteriar motives and who can always remind

(44:33):
me of the worth that I have, you know, if
I need it, because I have that lingering worthlessness that
is just always like always beneath the surface, just waiting
to breach, you know, with vengeance. And I think the
other thing is are kind of the basic, man, the
things that we all know what we have to do
to keep ourselves well, we really do. It doesn't take

(44:56):
reading the Daily Stoic or going through seventeen different you know,
Instagram posts to understand how to take care of yourself.
For me, it's about prayer, meditation, and exercise. If I'm
doing those things, if I'm meditating and praying and exercising daily,
I'm okay. You know, I'm okay. And then obviously I

(45:17):
have the whole new component with my kids. That's a
big for me. Rooting into my kids. Man, the best
thing I can do for self, the best thing I
can do for me and the people around me, is
are root into my kids. Because every every second of
time I spend with them is money in the bank.
And because it constantly reminds me to be childlike, It
constantly reminds me to have wonder and to be on

(45:39):
inspiring and to be and to be buffoonical, like to
just be a dipshit sometimes, to just like have a
care free attitude and to be playful. You know, we
forget how to be playful man. So I would say
one of the best things for my spiritual state and
my spiritual sort of easiness is really rooting into my

(45:59):
kids and not just taking care of them or setting
guy or this that idea, but really getting involved in
how they you know what I mean, no doubt.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
I'll never forget the story you told me about a
prisoner who hadn't seen a dog in forty two years,
and I I'm just curious, and you can tell the
story or maybe just share, like what do you see,
what are you observing? What are you getting to witness
in those moments when because you know, I don't, I

(46:28):
wouldn't even think about that, and to be able to witness,
you know, a human being that has been locked away
since they were a teenager for a dumb decision that
they made when they didn't know better, hasn't seen a dog.

Speaker 3 (46:41):
What do you get to see?

Speaker 4 (46:45):
Wow, it's when I get to see When I bring
dogs into prison is one of the greatest instantaneous transformations
you can view. I get to see hardened incarcerated individuals
who've been locked behind concrete walls for decades. I get
to see them return to being unconditioned. We loved children.

(47:06):
And that is so powerful to get to witness because
you walk in on that yard and oftentimes I come
to our program on an off day, so I'm just
coming on with a couple of dogs, my two personal dogs,
to go check in on everybody. So I'll come in
on a Friday when we don't have program just to
be like, what up everybody? You know, surprise them, And
I'll always walk around the yard. I'll always take my
time and walk around the yard and go to other
housing units where they don't have programs, just so that

(47:28):
guys can come mess with the dogs. And what happens
when you see an these individual That individual in particular,
he had just gotten moved. So this gentleman had just
gotten moved to see yard at the Hatchbee and he'd
been incarcerated for forty two years or forty five years.
He hadn't seen a dog in forty two years. And
to watch this stone cold expression on his face of

(47:50):
and he had facial tattoos. Everything about him was stay back.
Everything about him was fear me, stay back, stay away
from me, and I'm definitely not going to let you in.
And then as soon as you greet them, I always
greet them with hugs. And I would always say and hug.
It's not really with prison policy, but for me, my
job in there is to love them. My job is

(48:10):
to go in there with bright energy, with that positive
streak just trailing behind me, and be as positive as
I can. When I walk up to an inmate who
hasn't seen a dog in decades and they get down
on a knee with Beto or with Cora, they change instantaneously.
They go from an individual in tremendous, unfathomable pain and
helplessness to a child who feels unconditionally loved. And you

(48:33):
see this just ear to ear, grim come on their face.
And they will oftentimes be guys in different races, you know,
rival prison gangs who are petting these dogs all together,
kind of looking at each other noticing one another going whatever,
let's just keep going. And so it really brings everybody
together in the most magical ways. And I think it
helps these guys feel loved, helps them feel accepted, and

(48:56):
helps them plug into like a hope and a childishness,
a positive childishness that they haven't felt, you know, a
kid like way about them that they haven't plugged into
it a very long time, you know, because everything about
being a kid is potential. When you're a kid, everything
is possible. Everything is possible, you know. And the other
thing that happens when you bring dogs into prison is

(49:16):
they feel one step closer to home. Nothing in that
place feels like home. Nothing there feels like home. But
when you bring dogs in, they all have this idea,
oh shit, we're a little closer to home. This is
a really good sign. We're doing good. We're one step
closer to home. And I think prison is about rehabilitation.
It shouldn't be about we know, the punitive model doesn't work.

(49:38):
This is scientifically. We don't need to have long drawn
out conversations about this. The punitive model of incarceration doesn't work.
And locking dudes, all locking human beings in inorganic concrete
cells and incubating them in a culture of negativity for
decades and then spitting them out the other end and
just throwing them into society to then reoffend and end

(49:58):
up back in prison is an absolutely terrible illogical system.
What we need to be doing is is is infiltrating
those those prisons with positive energy and that those programs
that positive energy has to come from without It does
not come from within the prison system. They don't have
their own indigenous prison programs. NGOs, nonprofit organizations have to

(50:19):
develop these mechanisms and then bring them into the usually
a great cost to themselves, and bring them into the
prison system. And when we do, you know, because you
can't rehabilitate until you get a person to a state.
Rehabilitation doesn't start until they start to love themselves, have
some sort of acceptance for themselves. It's very hard to
fight against someone when they're dealing with rampant fear and

(50:41):
a bunch of things that they're fundamentally hung up on.
But when you when you inject dogs into the system,
when you inject canine rehabilitation into their day to day,
it kind of puts you on this track of wellness
of improving yourself, you're also of service. So every day
at six o'clock, when those cells pop, your response, You've
got to go get your ass up, Go to that crate,

(51:01):
let that dog out, go evacuate, feedom, get them them
the CA. I'll get them walked before you go to chow,
and then you have to work with your teammate on
how that dog is going to be enriched for fourteen
hours that day while the hum drum of the prison
is going on all around you. So there's a you know,
with programs like positive Change, and by by infusing a
certain level of acceptance and love and hope into the

(51:24):
that kind of a system, then real change starts to
happen because guys start to think there's a way up
and there's a way out. And I what I One
of the reasons why I see the prison system fail
to the degree that it does is because there is
no hope. And when you have that many dudes, you
have that many l wops, you know, that many life
without parole individuals, it brings the entire frequency of that

(51:45):
place too hopeless, and you have to inject hope in
order to be successful and facilitate rehabilitation.

Speaker 5 (51:51):
And man, it was you and bn only have you
helped to inject hope into those environments, but you've definitely
helped inject hope and the people that are listening, because yeah,
I feel like you put them eyes everything that comeback
stories is and that's having an opportunity to rewrite your
story and starting from wherever it is that you are,

(52:13):
no matter how low it may be, there is an
opportunity for you not only to get your life back,
but to and the makings of giving somebody else theirs
back to man. So I just want to say thank
you to spit it hon her.

Speaker 4 (52:26):
Thank you brother. And that's what it is like what
you guys have done. You've made getting You guys have
made recovery cool. We got to make recovery cool again.
Fact you know what I mean? That out that it
ever wasn't But when you guys get out there and
lead with your stories and show what's possible. Because man,
let me think about it. When you guys we were
back in your addictions, it was unfathomable for me to
think about getting sober. It was just an impossibility for

(52:49):
me to merit it on. But then if I see,
if I see you out there getting after it. Then
I got some hope, and then I got I have
a you know, a couple of people I can emulate
and seek to, you know, seek to take a page
out of your books. Yeah, one of What a crazy
right it's been, man, I'm extremely proud of you guys.
I'm very proud to be on the show with you guys.

Speaker 2 (53:09):
Yeah, zach Man, it's been an honor. I mean, I
hear about your story and there's so many facets of
coming back, like your own comeback story and the dogs
and the prisoners, and it's like it's just really calling
me to step up my game when it comes to service.
I know I talk about it and have my own

(53:29):
ways of being of service, but it's like, man, I
doing shit compared to this guy. So thank you for
trying me, and thank you for showing up and sharing
your story. Man, I know a lot of people are
going to be inspired by your story. So where can
people find you? Where can they track you down? Where
can they donate?

Speaker 4 (53:47):
In terms of following the program, you guys can find
all about our organization at Marlesmonts dot org. You can
find us on social media at Marley's Mott's at Positive
Change Program. That's pa w s I t IB and
you can find me at zach Scout's the Ahskow and yeah,
Marley's Monscout organ Is that the main place for all
of our information into darnate and we get involved.

Speaker 2 (54:09):
Yeah, your your Instagram is you know, it's one of
the accounts that I enjoy following the most, not just
because I know you personally, just because of the content
and what you're putting out there. So man, thank you again.
We might have to go back for round two of
this with this went pretty deep and yeah, it's just
been it's been an honor to chop it up with you.

Speaker 4 (54:29):
My man. Yeah, YouTube brother, and a big shout out
as we touched on to my dad for helping me
be here, for having NB the integral variable to my
comeback story. And here's to dad, so don't.

Speaker 2 (54:42):
Yeah, all right, everybody, we're out.

Speaker 1 (54:53):
Comeback Stories is a production of Inflection Network and iHeartRadio.
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