Why Most Habit Change Fails (And How to Break the Addiction Cycle)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Welcome to two percent. I'm your host, Michael Easter. Last night,
me and one of my good friends, Ryan Swave, we
went and saw the band Fish at the Las Vegas Sphere.
So I want you to picture two sober guys in
a sea of hippies who are all smoking weed, all
probably on psychedelics, and there we are having an amazing

(00:40):
time despite the fact that we weren't on any substances. Now,
Ryan's background is he's one of the top therapists in
the country. He started in addiction medicine after he himself
got sober, but he has sense pivoted to working with
high performers in all different areas, helping them get their
mind rights, helping them get that our habits on track

(01:01):
in order to live a better life, have better relationships,
make more money, just be better people in general. So
this morning, after the show, running on three hours of
sleep each, I dragged Ryan into the studio, I sat
him down, and I stole as much of his wisdom
as I could for all of you. So we had
a long, sweeping conversation. We talked about habit change. We

(01:24):
talked about the real underlying reasons people do things that
seem to be counterproductive and hurt them in the long run.
We talked about how to improve your life, how to
improve your mindset, and a lot of different things that
will help you the listener and leave you with tools
to act better in the real world. Right now, so
let's bring on Ryan. Ryan, thanks for coming on the show.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Man, Thanks for having me. This is great, all right.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
We went to fish last night at the Sphere. How
did it feel to be one of the only sober
human beings in the building in addition to me and
maybe three to four others, I think.

Speaker 3 (01:59):
There might have been some more than that, but it
was definitely ah well, I think first off, it was
started at eight o'clock. I think both of us agreed
that we probably would have been close to in bed
by then.

Speaker 4 (02:09):
I went to bed.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
At seven thirty the night before, if that gives you
any context.

Speaker 3 (02:13):
Right, and I flew from the East coast, so it
was like eleven pm start time, you know.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
And but I think the uh it was it was great.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
You know, it's a it's a really cool psychedelic experience
without the psychedelics.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
Yeah, I will say we were surrounded in a fog
of actual burned marijuana smoke, and vaped marijuana smoke. The
people in front of us were clinging to their vapens
like their you know, climbing everest and this is their
oxygen line.

Speaker 4 (02:45):
It was just like it was funny.

Speaker 3 (02:47):
So there's a lot of gummy bears being eaten. I
don't think they're the same ones that my kids eat.

Speaker 4 (02:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
I don't know if you saw, but at some point
in the second set, the lady next to me actually
like passed out for five minutes. Yeah, her beer can
kind of spills on my foot a little bit.

Speaker 4 (03:02):
I was saying, you're okay, you'll wake up eventually. It's
a good time.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
Yeah, it was awesome. It was what an experience.

Speaker 4 (03:10):
Yeah, it was right. So I got a question for you.
How long have you been sober?

Speaker 2 (03:16):
A little eighteen years.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
When you got sober, and in your process of sobriety,
have you had to relearn how to have fun.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
That's a great question, I think. I mean, the very
short answer to that is yes. But also, as I
look at the last few years of my drinking, it
wasn't fun. Yeah, I wasn't having fun.

Speaker 4 (03:40):
It starts fun.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
It started fun.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
It started and I think for a lot of people
it enhances their life.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
We were talking about this yesterday.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
You know, for most people it means conviviality and like
making things, you know, reducing inhibitions. But you know, for
me and people like me, and I'm like people like you,
I'll you say that, you people, it was you know,
it like crosses that line, and it wasn't you know.

(04:08):
You know, I used to think I was like I
needed to drink, and I was like Bukowski or Hemingway,
you know, or Fitzgerald and like this creative process. But
the thing was I didn't write, so I was just
doing the drinking part. And then I forgot that most
of those guys died either alcoholic deaths or killed themselves.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Right, So yeah, I had the same thing as a writer,
going like because I was I was still drinking when
I was working in magazines and writing professionally. I was like, well,
Hunter s Thompson, look at all you know, he drank,
he did drugs. Hemingway drank And then yeah, you go, well,
wait a minute, didn't they both shoot themselves. It's not

(04:46):
how we want this to end. I don't know, maybe
I should rethink that.

Speaker 3 (04:49):
One, yeah, but you know, I think probably I had
to learn how to have fun in general, you know,
And you know it was you know, I had a
mentor when I was you know, I was thirty two
when I got sober, and I had a mentor who
had been sober a long long time, and he used
to say to me, you know, the only difference between
me and you is I've been through more life experiences
without picking up a drink. And so, you know, it

(05:11):
was it was relearning a lot of things because you know,
so many, so many functions and dinners and weddings and
all this stuff have to do with drinking. And what
I also realized is most people didn't drink like I
thought they did, you know, especially as I was a
little bit older, like in my twenties.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
Of course you're in college or teens and they do.

Speaker 3 (05:32):
And I think you kind of touched on that yesterday
about talking about, you know, everybody ordering a drink and
wondering if you know the first time for yourself.

Speaker 4 (05:42):
Oh yeah, I'll tell the story.

Speaker 1 (05:43):
So I was maybe three weeks into sobriety and I'm
out of work trip. Long story short, I'm with all
these other journalists. We're out at this nice dinner and
there's probably fifteen people at the table. The waiter starts
asking for drink orders, and I'm going to be the
last person to give the order, and everyone I'll have
a martini, I'll have this beer, I'll have this wine.

(06:06):
And the whole time he's taken it, I'm going, Oh
my god, what are people gonna do? When I order water?
Everyone's gonna look at me and they're gonna say, why
aren't you drinking? And then I'm gonna have to explain
myself and then and so I'm like building the narrative
in my head, like, Okay, this is the story you're
gonna tell, blah blah blah blah blah. And then the
waiter gets many goes what do you have to drink?

(06:27):
And I say I'll just have a water, and nothing happened.
No one looked up from their menu. And it was like, oh,
maybe I care more about alcohol than the average person.

Speaker 3 (06:39):
Right, Yeah, what was worse that, you know, thinking that
everybody was gonna worry about you and concerned about you.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
Or when you ordered it that nobody really cared.

Speaker 4 (06:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:48):
Well, also the self obsession of thinking that like people
are really just like they're just waiting to see what
I ordered. This beal right, and then they're going to
wonder what am I getting for dinner because that's really
important to them.

Speaker 3 (07:00):
Yeah, you know, I when I had been I think
had been sober for about four years, and I got
invited to a wedding and I'd been to some stuff before,
but this was a wedding from somebody from high school
and it was out in the mountains out west, and
I was going and I knew a couple of the
people going there. This wasn't a big crew of friends
that I had, and the other people that I knew

(07:22):
were in the wedding and I wasn't, And so I
went out by myself. And even though I'd been sober
for a while, I'd kind of been in a community
and around people that were not drinking. And you know,
sobriety is a lot more than about not drinking. That's
maybe what it starts with. It's, you know, building a life,
at least for me, it's building a life where that
stuff doesn't have a place. And then, you know, it

(07:43):
was just saying I gave up everything for one thing,
and all I had to do was give up one
thing for everything, you know, the not drinking parts kind
of a gateway to something else. But you know, I
was thirty five years old at this point, and you know,
it was pretty you know, I was going to a
wedding with people that i'd been around be I and
that I knew from my history, and then a bunch

(08:05):
of people that I didn't know. And I got there
and I just made this decision. I was like, I'm
just gonna like go for it. And what that meant
to me was I'm going to be social. I'm going
to connect with other people even though I don't know them.
I like went down to the lobby and these other
people were before the wedding, were going whitewater rafting.

Speaker 2 (08:20):
I was like, can I come.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
I never would have done like gone up to strangers,
and I went and I had a great time. And
then I I didn't tell anybody, you know, the people
invited me to I was sober, but I didn't really
tell anybody that. But I obviously wasn't drinking. So I
had this whole dialogue like you did, what am I
going to say? And a lot of times it was
just like I've had enough, And you know, I drank
a bunch of you know, like Seltzer Waters or you know,

(08:44):
Club Soda Lime or something like that. And I just
had fun. I'm not like a dancer or anything, but
I danced at the wedding, was like super late at night.
We had we had. I had a blast. And about
eight months later, and I remember where I was in
a hotel room in Denver and I opened my phone

(09:05):
and I think it was like a Facebook message, you know,
as many years ago, and it was like a Facebook message,
and this guy who'd been at the wedding had found
found me and messaged me. And we'd met there, but
I'd never like, I didn't keep up with him. Yeah,
And he said to me, you know, I just want

(09:26):
to let you know. After that wedding, I stopped drinking.
And I've been sober for eight months. And the only
reason I was able to do it because I was
able to I noticed you weren't drinking, and I could
see that you had a great time and could actually
live your life.

Speaker 4 (09:36):
Oh wow, that's cool.

Speaker 3 (09:38):
And like I didn't go there to do that, you know,
it was just attractive to him in some way. I
had no idea that and I'm like totally absorbed in myself,
like you were talking not to diagnose you, but I.

Speaker 4 (09:52):
Don't diagnosis the spot on.

Speaker 3 (09:55):
But you know, it's self absorbed and worried about me.
And I was like, holy, you know, like I just
help somebody.

Speaker 4 (10:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:04):
And I had no idea as you're trying.

Speaker 3 (10:06):
It was just like and and and I've had so
many experiences like that over the years. And you know,
now I have a lot of friends. You know, I
was telling you yesterday, a lot of our friends are sober.
We didn't pick it that way. They're just the kind
of ones who were around and we have like we
have awesome times. You know, what I've learned about myself
is I don't need something to lower my inhibitions.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
I can get in enough trouble.

Speaker 3 (10:29):
And you know, like I only opened my mouth to
switch feet usually, and uh, I can do that without drinking.

Speaker 4 (10:35):
Yeah, there you go. I like it.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
Man, So walk us up to your sobriety. What happened
that led you to get sober?

Speaker 3 (10:45):
Drink too much?

Speaker 4 (10:47):
Next question?

Speaker 3 (10:48):
Now, you know I as a kid growing up, you know,
I I didn't ever like I was. I was involved
in a lot of stuff. I had a lot of friends.
I was voted most likely to succeed. I was president
of the student body. I was not voted most likely
to have to go to rehab and then get sober.

(11:08):
But that's the way it worked out, and I'm grateful.
I'm really grateful for that. But you know, I even
though like I was involved in a lot of things
and like on the outside, even in school it looked
like I could, you know, voted most likely to succeed,
It looked successful. Like I I always felt different.

Speaker 2 (11:33):
And nobody was like telling me that.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
I just I did.

Speaker 4 (11:37):
I felt like you couldn't connect with people.

Speaker 3 (11:41):
I don't know if I even thought of it like that,
but I but potentially I just kind of felt like
everybody else kind of had something going on or were
connected in a way that that I wasn't. I can't
get there even if I was on the inside, I
felt like I was on I remember, I don't know,
we're going to go into this, but when I was

(12:01):
in treatment, I had a lot of like loneliness. And
I remember the therapist that I had said, you know,
write a letter about when you remember you were most
like first time you felt lonely, and and I wrote
something about this time we had moved. I was probably
sixth grade. We'd moved from one neighborhood to another, and
it was like kind of across town. And that neighborhood

(12:21):
i'd been in was like all these kids that was
it was full of kids, and this one wasn't. And
I remember that I just no one was like calling
me to go play with them or you know, anything
like that, and of course I thought it was not,

(12:42):
of course, but I thought it was, you know, they
didn't want me. And I don't remember all the details,
but I actually reached out to my mom and I
said to her, you know, do you remember me ever
feeling lonely?

Speaker 2 (12:54):
And she described that exact moment or time.

Speaker 3 (12:59):
But then she said to me, you know, and I
don't know if she'd ever told me this, but she's like,
you know, I reached out to some of their moms
to see if you know, anything was going on, basically,
and she said they came back and were like, yeah,
they're just waiting for Ryan to call. Like, yeah, i'd
kind of been in the middle and maybe seen as
a leader in that, but I never I never felt

(13:22):
like that. And so I finished college and I went
and worked in a family business from my dad, and
then I started my own business, and I moved away
to a different part of Florida, and I was I
was in a new town, and I was in a
relationship and that relationship ended, and I was oriented in

(13:45):
this way for some reason that I didn't know how
to deal with really difficult emotions or failure and if
like a relationship would end, it would just crush me
and I would, you know. And I've worked with men,
young men over the years where you know, they're eighteen,
nineteen years old, and you know, they're like devastated by

(14:05):
a relationship that that ended, and like they're falling apart,
and I'll be like, how long are you together?

Speaker 2 (14:10):
That'll be three months? Yeah, And that's the reaction.

Speaker 3 (14:15):
But in the moment, but when you peel it back,
it's not that that relationship ended that it's that they
were projecting out that you know, this is who I'm
going to be with forever.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
Yeah, you know, they're grieving like the rest of their life.

Speaker 4 (14:26):
Right. They had a big story behind it.

Speaker 3 (14:28):
Right, And I realized I did that with a lot
of things. And you know, I also was not really
doing something that I wanted to do for my career.
And I'd had this orientation that you know, I always
wanted to kind of be like a teacher or something
where I could help people. And but I gotten this thing,
once I make enough money, then I'll do that. Like

(14:50):
I need to make a few million dollars and then
I can have a beat up pickup truck and live
in a small house.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
Well like it didn't even and and be a teacher.

Speaker 3 (14:58):
Not that you have to live in a small house
and be a pickup truck to be a teacher, but
that was kind of like this I needed some sort
of like safety net. What I've learned for me and
a lot of people I work with is like that
orientation of once I make enough, you know, once I've
got that, there's no dollar to stop on.

Speaker 1 (15:15):
Yeah, it's just the goalpost moves. Yeah, once you get
to whatever it is, two million, you're like maybe four.
You get to four, you go twelve, twelve.

Speaker 3 (15:24):
It's number, the number, and it was it just it
keeps going like that, you know, And and you know,
fortunately the universe had a different direction for me. You know,
I was in the in that I was building houses
and doing real estate stuff, and it was two thousand
and eight and everything started falling apart before that. And

(15:45):
you know, for me, it wasn't like one day, you know,
something happened and everything crashed for me financially. But it
started over a period of time. And I use that
as a great, great kind of excuse to kind of
all back. And I was drinking alone and you know,
didn't want to I found myself being suicidal. And what

(16:08):
I what I learned about that for me, it was
it wasn't that I didn't I didn't want to die.

Speaker 2 (16:11):
I just didn't want to live in this way that
I was living.

Speaker 3 (16:14):
And I didn't see another way out, which was crazy
because I was not a stupid person and I had resources,
but I just I never talked to anybody about it.
I kept it all inside, you know, and not that
other people probably didn't see it. But you know, it's
also like you know, you know, in your at least
for me, and I think a lot of people in

(16:35):
their teens twenties, you know, your people are partying and
the like, they start to grow up and move out
of it. And I wasn't doing that. But it wasn't
like I was living this big party. It was like, oh,
I'd go to the party or like a wedding and
then everybody would go back to work on Monday, and
I would just keep going.

Speaker 4 (16:55):
Keep going. Yeah, party didn't stop for you.

Speaker 2 (16:58):
Yeah, and it wasn't a party. This was like alone.

Speaker 4 (17:01):
Yeah, you know, party of one.

Speaker 3 (17:02):
Party one party of one. You know. Of course I
would you know, try to you know. I would sometimes
go out to bars and stuff like that cause I
need it. I was like, I wanted connection with others,
but I just you know, and and so fortunately, you know,
I had a business partner who could really see what

(17:23):
was happening, and he grabbed me one day and was like,
I don't want to talk to you to to get
some help. And it called my parents. And you know,
I used to watch that show Intervention when it first
came out.

Speaker 4 (17:32):
Yeah it is not Doctor Drew. I don't remember if.

Speaker 3 (17:35):
That was Doctor Drew. Was it was something like that,
but it was like where they would do an intervention.
I remember. I think it was like the first season,
and I was sitting there and I was wishing and
hoping somebody would do that for me. Oh interesting, obviously
not enough to do it for myself. Yeah, but like right,
and I didn't want to go somewhere I wanted it
to like not interrupt this life that I thought I

(17:56):
was living. And you know, I I so once they
kind of said, you know, I thought I was hiding
all this stuff.

Speaker 2 (18:03):
Once they said, you know, you need to get some help,
I said yes.

Speaker 1 (18:05):
And do you think most people who have a problem
with whether it be a substance or a behavior, what's
the Is there a ratio of people who go, I
know I have a problem, but I'm not doing it.
I'm waiting for something to happen, versus those who are
totally like, no, I don't have a problem at all,
but everyone around them is going, you have a problem.

Speaker 4 (18:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:26):
I mean I don't know percentages, but I think I
think deep down he denials a very powerful drug.

Speaker 4 (18:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:33):
I mean I heard a guy recently say, he goes,
you know, I had no problem accepting the fact that
I was going to die in alcoholic death. He just
totally accepted it. I just thought that was the path
he was on. But even in that, you know that
there's like something not right, But yeah, you kind of
become okay with it.

Speaker 1 (18:51):
Right, and you just can't see another path out. Yeah,
Or it's like you're in the forest, there's just trees everywhere.
You're like, well, this is the only way to go down.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
And just surviving, you know. And but I think, you
know that's I have a lot of people that will
you know, call me and say we need to you know,
we need to do this big thing to try to
get someone in treatment and stuff, and some that I'll
just ask it. Have you asked them, you know, like
a family, And a lot of times they haven't. Interesting
I'm not saying every time you ask somebody they're going
to say yes. But you know, there's like sometimes these

(19:21):
family dynamics that's not people from even addressing the problem.
They're just like moving around this giant elephant in the
room and they don't know how how to deal with it,
or they think if I say it, you know, they're
going to say no, and you know.

Speaker 4 (19:34):
It's going to break the relationship that the world's going
to blow up.

Speaker 3 (19:37):
And a no today isn't a no forever, even if
they you know, even if they said that. And so
I don't know, I mean, I think, you know, not
all drinking is problem drinking. You know, I could say
not all drug uses problem drug use for people, it's
going to be what's happening for the individual. But I
think at a certain point when we're talking about people
like you know me and what what you've shared about

(19:59):
you and a lot of the people that you know,
I've worked with in treatment or you know, at a
certain point they've become you know, the the drugs or
the alcohol becomes like a medicine. So you know, they're
using that thing to solve something, right if they you know,
I say all the time, you know, addiction is not

(20:19):
the problem.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
It's the solution right to the underlying problem, to.

Speaker 3 (20:23):
The underlying problem, whatever that is for somebody, you know,
And even if it just started with I'm gonna you know,
I started taking these pills because I had a surgery.
At a certain point, you know, and they become addicted
and it's causing all these challenges in the world, and
there's that in their world that creates its own underlying stress. Right.
So a lot of people, you know, you take away

(20:45):
that they start getting so they gets over you take
away the medicine, life gets worse emotionally right away. For
a lot of people.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
I think that gets missed so often and especially by
the people around them. It's like, no, if you just
stop your life is going to immediately get better. It's like, no,
it doesn't, because you just took away the only thing
that could make the person feel like they could function
and live in the world. Yeah, and there's going to
be this period where you're like, well, I still have

(21:15):
this problem. The problem doesn't immediately go away that you
were using substance or doing the behavior solve that problem.
So the problem is still there. But now you're like,
I have no tools to figure this thing out. What
the hell do I do? And that sucks.

Speaker 3 (21:30):
Yeah. I mean, I can't tell you how many like
families I've had at times that like they they want
the person their loved one to get sober or clean
so bad and they've been and then they do, and
you know, a few weeks into it, they're like they're
easy to deal with when they were smoking pot. You know,
they don't really want them to go back to that.
But you know, they're running around kind of like a

(21:53):
live wire, you know. With my story, Like you knows,
as I'm telling you this, it's not this. You know.
I hear people tell these really super dramatic, amazing stories
and they're you know, end up in with a cartel
and you know, almost dead or kidnapped or something. I don't.
I don't really have that, you know. It was just
kind of this throw I think in maybe it was

(22:15):
in Walden said most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Yeah,
and I was in this quiet desperation for a long time,
and I just felt really stuck.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
And what you said. I used to sit there going.

Speaker 3 (22:26):
I actually said one time to a friend, I think
I'm gonna make a T shirt that says I'm just
waiting for something to happen. So I was like observing
life and that's its own kind of suffering. Unfortunately, that
desperation got turned up loud enough that it was like, oh,
I need some help. And that's where I think the

(22:47):
people that you know end up needing help for addiction
and alcoholism. You know, sometimes they're the real fortunate ones
because they don't have to settle anymore. Like they get
this gift of desperation. Because I was like, I'm gonna die. Well,
we're all gonna die, you know, you pointed that out
to me.

Speaker 4 (23:03):
But ideally let's not make that, you know, too soon.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
Not too soon, and to be able to live well.

Speaker 1 (23:08):
Yeah, and let's ride out those the rest of the
years we have in a way that is helpful and
not in miserable.

Speaker 3 (23:14):
That one percent people are looking for some sort of solution,
almost like a sense of mindfulness or even a spiritual
solution when using drugs and alcohol. When it gets to
that point for those people, again, this is not everybody,
but you know they're people will say, you know, in recovery,
we'll say, live one day at a time. Well, a
lot of people in addiction we're living one day at

(23:36):
a time, you know, and you know, looking for some
sort of thing that you know, we hear it even
in the in with regular people that I see regular
people like people that are not know where to them.

Speaker 4 (23:48):
I'm okay with considering us irregular irregular people.

Speaker 3 (23:51):
Well, I know, I am, you know, I mean, it's
in it's in our language, like I'm gonna go. We're
gonna go to the bar and take the edge off, right,
We're gonna you know, And and you know, it's kind
of like a guy, old guy used to know, you say,
three martinis works a lot faster than a prayer.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah, it just doesn't work long and it doesn't work well.

Speaker 3 (24:09):
But I mean people are using it in a way
and I think to almost find mindfulness. Yeah, it's just
not something that over time, if you're using it too much,
to be too mindful in that way, can cause problems.

Speaker 1 (24:22):
I feel like for me, I was like you in
the sense I just felt like I was different, somehow different.
I couldn't put a finger on it, like I had
a hard time connecting with people. But to that guy's
point about three martinis, if I have two drinks, all
of a sudden, I'm like, oh, I can open up. No,
I can actually connect with people. I just need to
have a couple of drinks. Problem is is that once

(24:44):
I have too, I go, yeah, but if this is good,
what would a third be like? What would a fourth
be like? And what would insert any number be like?

Speaker 3 (24:52):
Yeah, just going over the falls.

Speaker 1 (24:54):
Yeah, But then you start to go, all right, well,
if I have to connect with people, and if I
want to feel this way, which makes me feel more
connected to everyone around me in the world, I'm going
to have to use this thing. And then you keep
repeating that over time it works until it doesn't effectively. Yeah,
what did you do after you decided you're like, all right,

(25:18):
I got to do something. What did you do and
what was what were the hardest parts?

Speaker 3 (25:23):
You know, then I was thirty two years old and
I didn't have I wasn't married, wasn't in a relationship,
and have kids, you know, so it was business had
fallen apart, and I recognized all that. You know, it
was kind of like I was holding it together until
someone like pierced this little like you know, like a

(25:43):
little pinprick in the veil, and I was like, you know,
I actually felt some relief. And I went to a
treatment center and I stayed in treatment for like four months,
and you know, I think what was the hardest part.
I remember I had a therapist who I was telling this.
I was like, man, I'm doing the hard work. And

(26:03):
he was kind of a rough, old junkie from the
streets of New York that was just like it had
helped thousands of people, and I was like, man, I'm
really doing the hard work today.

Speaker 2 (26:12):
It was would you would you dig ditches today?

Speaker 3 (26:15):
Like like wrote a letter about your past? And I
was like, oh, okay, fair enough. So but I mean
I think it was, you know, I for better or worse.
You know, life wasn't maybe moving in the direction that
I wanted to or you know, I was barreling down
the river to go off the falls, but I knew

(26:40):
how to live that life, you know, and we become
oriented to the lives that we're in. And even when
something's we're going to improve something or do something, you know,
there's a real sense of disorientation, you know, and that's
not a bad thing, but I found in my life,
and you know when I work with clients too, that
you know, we'll fight that disorder, you know, being disoriented,

(27:01):
when sometimes that's just where we need to be. Like
it's it's okay to be lost and not know the
direction that we want to go yet, and and there's
a season to kind of sit in that and as
we reorient.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
So it was, you know, it was kind of like
what you just talked about.

Speaker 3 (27:16):
It was like figuring out how to be in social situations,
you know, figuring out how to you know, be in
a relationship. And I had a mentor that would say,
you know, you're not going to know how to work
till your work. You're not going to go out, how
to date till you date. You're not going to know
how to go to a wedding till you go to
a wedding and but you're going to have support in
doing that.

Speaker 4 (27:33):
Yeah, and to begin begin.

Speaker 3 (27:39):
Yeah. And I found like and I you know, found
real community in other folks. And it wasn't about sitting
around going I can't drink. It was like, let's go
build these you know, let's go build lives. I didn't
think that at first. Of course, I was like, my
life is over, you know, I'm not going to have
fun anymore. And it was like and and and it's
just over the last you know, almost twenty years. It's

(28:00):
really opened my eyes that you know, you can really
lean into life. You know, I've got to have some
amazing experiences and work all over the world and you know,
do things like this and go to a fish show
with somebody that I with you who I met through
this is going to sound weird through a DM on
Instagram after you were both on a podcast.

Speaker 1 (28:19):
And like exactly, I had a guy who told me
when I was first getting sober around social situations and alcohol,
it was like, look, if you feel like your sobriety
is at risk and you feel like, you know, that
is not a good place for you to go to

(28:39):
break that, you can just leave. Yeah, you don't have
to make You don't have to sit there and struggle.
You can just go, oh, I got to go. Something
came up. You can just leave a situation and you'll
immediately be out of it. And that had never occurred
to me. No, I was like, oh, and then so
that that helped me. Now I never had to do that, thankfully,
but it was like that allowed me to sort of

(29:00):
get into place. So I go, all right, if this
feels weird to me, I can just sleep. I got
a text from my mom whatever she said, I gotta go.
You know what, what's some of the best advice you've
heard from working with people and other people who are sober?
Like life advice?

Speaker 3 (29:15):
I mean it's it's usually very simple things like that,
you know, like you can start your day over at anytime. Yeah,
I mean that that like blew my mind, Like, okay,
I can reorient I can. I'm like it used to
be like I think of it like the when you're
driving down the road they call them rumble strips the highway,

(29:36):
you know, and you're like you kind of go over
and it goes, you know, you're meant to kind of
ease back on the road. I think the way that
I kind of lived my life is like there's a
rumble strips, like, next set of tires hit them. Now
I'm in the ditch. It's like I'm flipped over. The
jaws of life are coming, the car's on fire, and
then I'll go.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
Oh, can I get some help?

Speaker 3 (29:55):
Like you don't have to do that, Like you can
kind of set up your own rumble strips guardrails in
life to kind of ease back back onto it or
things like what you just said, like you can, you can,
you can leave it any time. Like I thought, Okay,
I'm going to be the sober driver and drive everybody
around while our partying. And that was like the most
annoying thing I could ever do. And it wasn't like
I wanted to go drink, but it's like it's annoying.

Speaker 2 (30:17):
A friend of mine that I.

Speaker 3 (30:18):
Went to college with got sober a while after I did,
and he had gone to some wedding with a bunch
of friends and he's like, you know, I realized that
after ten o'clock, there's only one joke, and that joke
was like, look how wasted I am? Yeah, you know,
So I found myself in situations like that you leave
at ten, that everyone's out till two, and the next
day they didn't even realize I left.

Speaker 4 (30:38):
Right totally, totally.

Speaker 3 (30:40):
You know. So I mean, you know, you know, no,
there are no emergencies, right. The only crisis is a
crisis unless we have to call nine one one. There's
nothing that we can't wait or slow down to deal with.
I mean, just very simple, you know, things like that.
I mean, you know, it gets maybe overused, but living
one day at time, you know, and that's not something

(31:02):
that's I think was invented by twelve step programs. I
mean we you know, when we look at uh, I
think that was at the Greeks at Carpe dm seize
the day that that sounds very familiar, you know, if
you look even I'm not a biblical scholar by any means,
but I know that I think it's in the Beatitudes.
Jesus is quote is saying, don't have anxiety for tomorrow,

(31:25):
for tomorrow will have its own anxieties.

Speaker 4 (31:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
I mean, these are things that I think man has
been dealing with for a long time where we'll get
like wrapped up in the this universe that we create
up here that doesn't exist.

Speaker 4 (31:40):
The story making everything up.

Speaker 3 (31:44):
And that's not a bad thing, you know. I think
we want to know. One of the things we work
with is like events are neutral. You know, they're all neutral.
We bring the meaning to them. And the goal isn't
to stop bringing meaning to events, you know, otherwise, like
last night, we'd be sitting there having a blast going,
you know, like I want to love my wife and

(32:06):
you know, find joy in my children and them with me,
Like we want to bring But I think the point
is to recognize we are bringing the meaning. Yeah, so
what meaning are we going to bring to it? Yeah,
that it doesn't we don't have to be a victim
of circumstance and the world, you know, kind of driving
us that we can actually figure out ways to get
in the driver's seat.

Speaker 1 (32:25):
Yeah, it's a you know, what story are you going
to tell yourself about an event? And there's ways to
use that for good and there's ways that you can
get trapped in the story that ultimately hurts you. But
if you can go what narrative am I telling myself
around this?

Speaker 4 (32:40):
Could there be other.

Speaker 1 (32:40):
Ways to interpret this can be useful? How do you
how do you define addiction? What is it?

Speaker 4 (32:48):
What is addiction?

Speaker 1 (32:50):
You know.

Speaker 3 (32:50):
I mean, I think and we were we were talking
about this. I mean, there's clinical terms that we can
look at. You know, there's you know, substance use disorder,
alcohol use disorder. There's then there's kind of the what
we use in our language. People say, I'm adicted to
my iPhone, I'm addicted to this I you know, And
I think it's it's more nuanced than that, you know.

(33:11):
I think a question to ask is, you know, do
I have it or does it have me? You know,
am I am? I? Am I in control over whatever
is happening or or or is it kind of in control?

Speaker 1 (33:23):
What are the signs that something is out of a
person's control. I think we like people can inherently know,
but what are some of some of like the guideline.

Speaker 3 (33:33):
I mean, you can look at the things that are
happening with them, you know, and they're physically you know,
is there it is it harming them and their bodies
in some way? Psychologically, how they're kind of thinking and
relating to the world socially, Is it having an impact
on their relationships or their work or legal situation. So
there's those kind of things we can we can look at.

(33:55):
I think even in the face of repeated consequences. And
that's a big word sometimes because people go, I haven't
had consequences. But I like that word consequences, like con
is with and sequence. So it's like, because of this
in sequence, right, if I'm doing this, this is happening.
And I think a lot of the consequences are for

(34:16):
people are internal, like and how are they viewing themselves
the world and their and their place in it?

Speaker 4 (34:23):
So do I like myself when I do this?

Speaker 2 (34:26):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (34:27):
And what are my big life goals? And is it
helping those or hurting those?

Speaker 3 (34:32):
Right? I think everybody kind of can have a little
bit different definition of what it is. But when we're
working with somebody one on one or even in groups,
it's like it's an end of one like how is
it impacting your life?

Speaker 4 (34:43):
Right?

Speaker 2 (34:43):
And or not?

Speaker 3 (34:45):
I don't know if that answers your question.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
That answers my question you. I mean, we've kind of
been focusing on substances up till now, but you today
mostly work with people who are not addicted to substances.

Speaker 4 (34:57):
Yeah, and so what does that look like and how
as a play out?

Speaker 3 (35:01):
Well, you know, I think, and this is where we
come back to I'll come back to addiction for a second.
So I I like to kind of broaden the definition
of that, like, what is it that we're using to
kind of as a crutch, What is it that we're
using to get outside of ourselves? What is it that
And it doesn't have to be in a way that
that's ruining our lives completely. But you know, I think

(35:24):
that when people will come to ask for help, something's
not going something's not going the way that they want.
Even if it's somebody's like I want to get better
at this thing, or I'm afraid of taking you know,
life is great, but I don't really know how to
deepen my relationship with you know, a romantic relationship or

(35:47):
take on this new risk. Something's not going right. They're saying,
I want therapy or I want coaching. Yeah, I think
that's kind of in the that's on the surface, kind
of in the behavior I say, in the behavioral realm,
how they're acting in the world is they want it
to be different. But what we need to do often

(36:10):
is we look underneath. So if there's a behavior that
they have that they don't like, you know, I always
like say, we got to intervene on that behavior. So
if it was addiction, we're going to have them stop drinking.
If it's you know, something else, we can have them
stop doing that, or an intervention of their they're just
coming to ask for help. And then we want to
be able to look underneath that to see what are
the emotions that are driving that, What are the kind
of negative the ones that we frame is negative or

(36:32):
or limiting, So fear, regret or fear, guilt, shame, things
like that, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (36:37):
What is it? What is it?

Speaker 2 (36:38):
The solution for right?

Speaker 3 (36:39):
And but what's interesting is that to me anyway, is
that when we can understand their emotions that are driving
and it's not that people are only in this emotion,
but if they've got like overwhelming fear or they might
say it's like anxiety or or frustration or anger, that
it's misplaced, right, they're they're afraid. Fear is a is

(37:01):
a good emotion if there's something to be afraid of.
But if they're you know, laying in bed on a
Saturday night, worried about what's going to happen at a
meeting at work on Wednesday, that's not that's not useful.
But when we can understand that kind of emotional state,
especially the more limiting negative ones. We can see that
the behaviors are almost always in alignment with that. If
you're living in fear, you're gonna fear based behaviors. If

(37:23):
you're living in shame, shame based.

Speaker 4 (37:24):
Behaviors, do those behaviors play out.

Speaker 3 (37:28):
Well, it's going to depend. But like you know, if
someone's uh, you know, constantly avoiding situations or you know,
running from situations or even sometimes fighting you know, in
relationships or something like that, that might be that they're
they're terrified of, you know, of whatever the result is
going to be, you know, or you know, I think
some people will act out in in secret behaviors that

(37:51):
they're that go against their own morals or their own principles.
You know, if they're feeling a lot of shame, they
have these shame based behaviors that sometimes help them make
of this kind of existential you know, I kind of
break these like like like shame for example, And some
people might argue this, I think it's a it's a
beneficial emotion like shame if I if I did something
to hurt your feelings or somebody else that I I

(38:15):
did something, even if I wasn't aware of it, and
it brought I was brought to my attention that feeling
of shame is going to give me the energy to
come make amends or make it right with my friend.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
It's a signal that you did something wrong. Right, very useful.
I mean, there's a there's a reason that we have
bad feelings. I typically, you know, there's an evolutionary context there.
It's like, shame is useful because it tells the individual, Hey,
you probably shouldn't have done that thing, like maybe don't
do that again.

Speaker 3 (38:42):
Yeah, and and so that's beneficial. It's when people are
walking around with what I'll call it existential shame, just
like shame for who I am.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
Yeah, like that's not helpful, right, And so.

Speaker 3 (38:57):
You know, or they're they're walking around in fear all
the time that they're going to be exposed or they're
going to be hurt. And if you're in a situation
where you might be hurt, that fear is good. But
if you're walking around with that all the time, now
you're reacting, you know, you're seeing, you're seeing the situations
through that lens and then then reacting in that way.
And that goes to kind of what's the level deeper

(39:18):
than that, which is their beliefs about themselves, the world
and their place in it. And these are generally these
kind of fixed beliefs. And you know, when I do
work with people, we look back at history, not to
blame family or you know, where they came from or
their ancestors, but to understand how they were shaped and

(39:40):
what are these kind of fixed beliefs that they developed
in a way that that helped them navigate the world,
to navigate the world their world, not even the world,
the world, their their world. So if someone grew up
in a in a family where and it doesn't always
have to be this dramatic, but I'm going to use
something more dramatic where they're dad was abusive or controlling.

(40:03):
You know, they had brothers that were really tough, and
they were fighting all the time. You know, maybe they
got bullied at school by other men or boys. You know,
there may be this underlying belief that men are dangerous.
That would make sense. You know, if all the men
around them are dangerous and they get this men are dangerous,
that's going to help them navigate the world. They're going

(40:24):
to be one a hyper vigilant state. They're going to
be aware when that happens if that's not resolved in
some way, and often it's not because they're not even
aware of this. This is we're putting words to this
after the fact. You know, what's going to happen when
they want to they grow up. They're not in that
environment where men are dangerous all the time. They're in
an environment where you know, some men may be dangerous,

(40:46):
but the majority probably aren't. And they want to work
in an environment with men. They want to be on
a sports team with men, they want to have friends
that are men. They have a son. And if they
still kind of are filtering through this and this is
happening unconsciously and automatically, we'll see them maybe not get
not get close, or become really afraid and then avoid situations,

(41:07):
or you know, have kind of repressed anger and other
things like that. And you don't want to go the
other way and go, okay, all men are safe, because
now you're walking, you know, at three am in a
dark alley and you hear someone running up behind you,
and instead of running away, you're going to turn around
and hug them.

Speaker 2 (41:24):
Hey man, how's it going like?

Speaker 3 (41:25):
That's not the that you know, we want to be
able to get to where we don't have these kind
of fixed beliefs about ourselves. And that's what you know,
really impactful trauma ultimately does, is it creates this, you know,
it it can when someone has a really impactful traumatic
event that they end up with PTSD, it kind of
you know, I think Andrew Heberman always says this, like,

(41:48):
you know, the quickest way to neuroplasticity is a is
a traumatic event, you know, And and it's beneficial because
it's going to change the way that we see the
world so that we can survive it. But that's really
when we look at it underneath, it's about this kind
of belief system about who I am, what the world is,
and how I fit in it. So when we can
understand those the beliefs that they care, it makes sense

(42:12):
that's in alignment with those emotions. So if you believe
the world is dangerous, and that's the lens through which
you see the world, I mean you think you're going
to be walking around with like confidence and joy and
stuff all the time. No, you're going to be people
are going to be afraid. And if they're afraid, then
they're gonna have fear based behaviors. And so what I
think is helpful that for folks is that it can

(42:34):
see that it makes sense. We can make sense of
almost any behavior, the craziest stuff. That doesn't mean it's okay.
It doesn't mean that they don't have accountability or responsibility
for things that harm other people.

Speaker 2 (42:45):
But we can make sense of it. And then when
they can understand that, it.

Speaker 3 (42:50):
Doesn't mean, like I said last night, it doesn't mean
that you discover this happened on a Tuesday in nineteen
eighty two. So we know that, and I'm going to
be better. But it can help people see like what
they're kind of throwing, especially under stress, you know how
life flows through the vessel that they are, and they
kind of will return to when you know, and stress

(43:10):
isn't always a bad thing.

Speaker 2 (43:11):
It's like when you take on I was telling somebody yesterday.

Speaker 3 (43:14):
When I you know, in the without naming the twelve
step program, but in that I had heard guys say
that we're twenty five years sober, like I need this
program more today than they did the day I came in,
And I used to think, what are they doing something wrong?
Like this should be easy for them, And now that

(43:35):
I'm there, I realized what they meant, which was, like
I was thirty two years old, I was living like
a boy.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
I didn't have any responsibilities.

Speaker 3 (43:42):
The people that I did have responsibilities to just wanted
me to like stop drinking.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
And then I built a life. And now I've got
you know, a wife.

Speaker 3 (43:52):
Three kids, a dog, a home, a career, friends, all
the stuff I wanted. But there's more stuff and there
for all of my fears to bump up against. Yeah, right,
there's more responsibility. There's more and so under stress. You know,
I can see myself and stress being good, Like I
want the stress of leaning into life, but I can

(44:14):
easily get into situations where it kind of throws me
back to those old kind of unconscious patterns and behaviors.
And to be able to be aware of those isn't
going to change them right away, but it can make
sense of oh yeah, this makes sense.

Speaker 4 (44:27):
You know, when you work.

Speaker 1 (44:28):
With people, is it easy for them to see those
patterns and where they might have come from or does
that take a lot of work or is it probably
taste by terse.

Speaker 3 (44:36):
It's case by case. But I think, you know, we're
actually not that complicated. I don't think, you know. I
mean it's complicated sometimes because a lot of people will
come in and you know, they haven't had a lot
of education around this or not aware, and they're looking
at like how the world is doing this to them?
And in a lot of cases, the world did stuff
to them. They might have been victims of something, you know.

(44:58):
And but when they can start talking understand, you know,
I'm the one now making like we were talking about,
bringing the meaning to all of this, and they can
start to get an understanding of Okay, where where are
these patterns? Where did I pick them up from? You know,
because we kind of inherit. We're all downstream of the

(45:18):
generations before us, right, and that doesn't mean we don't
have any sort of control. But we call them our
as I said yesterday, we call them our formative years
for a reason. We reforming our brains, performing like our
ego development is happening. We're kind of learning how to
navigate this this small, tiny little part of the universe
that we live in, and we all become very good

(45:39):
at it.

Speaker 2 (45:40):
I think we're all.

Speaker 3 (45:42):
The best in the world at navigating our own lives,
as evidenced by the fact that we've survived everything that
we've been through up to and including this moment.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
Yeah, it's like to use your example of someone who
fears men, if all the men around you were harmful,
if you didn't have a response to that, that was
like I should probably avoid that, be vigilant. That wouldn't
help you at all. That would be very strange. That
would hurt you. Yeah, but you developed that. And then
to your point, once you move into another phase of life,

(46:11):
carrying that all of a sudden, although it was useful
in the past, it's not going to be quite as
useful in the present, right.

Speaker 3 (46:18):
And we learned to play the game of life our game. Yeah,
and we all have different games. So I mean, I'm
I grew up, you know, in the eighties and nineties,
born in the seventies and getting old, which is a
good thing. I guess it's better than the all happens.

(46:38):
I'm not getting young, but not also stopping getting old.

Speaker 4 (46:42):
You know.

Speaker 3 (46:43):
Michael Jordan was like the best you know, I mean,
like you know, and there's all these debates on whether
he's the best basketball player ever or not.

Speaker 4 (46:50):
But we'll just settle it. Who's the best basketball But you.

Speaker 3 (46:53):
Also, don't you know people would say, like that guy's
the Michael Jordan of accounting, like they like it defines
who the best. His name defined who the best was right,
So if we can like suspend our disbelief for a
moment and imagine that the only thing, the only game
Michael knew was basketball. That's all he knew. He knew

(47:16):
basketball court, basketball basketball rules. He didn't know football field, football,
football team, he didn't even know it existed. This is
all he knew. Okay, And he's the best in the
world and one of the most competitive people on the planet.
And then we take him and we put him on
a football field in a football uniform, and he goes
out and they throw the ball to him, he catches it.

(47:37):
What's he going to do?

Speaker 1 (47:39):
I'm going to say, like a lane back jumper, probably
back jumper.

Speaker 3 (47:42):
He's going to try to dribble it right a tongue
right on the football field. How do you think he's
going to look and how do you think He's probably
going to feel like it doesn't fit in in that environment.

Speaker 2 (47:53):
So then you know he's he's not being successful in this.

Speaker 3 (47:57):
So he goes back and I don't know Michael's So
I'm this is all kind of guessing, but you know,
I think they're going to make another play.

Speaker 2 (48:05):
And you know, he's got a couple options.

Speaker 3 (48:08):
He could quit, fight, flee, or he could fight and
play harder. One of the most competitive people on the planet,
and he's probably gonna try it again.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
They throw him the ball. Now he's dribbling the football.

Speaker 3 (48:20):
He's and doing it, playing basketball better than he's ever
played on a football field, doing the thing that he's
the best at at and he's making less sense.

Speaker 2 (48:29):
He's feeling crazier and looking crazier.

Speaker 3 (48:31):
Right, So now we pull him back and we go
where I will say, hey, Mike, this is football.

Speaker 2 (48:36):
This is what it is.

Speaker 3 (48:37):
Look, this is the field, these are the rules, this
is the ball, this is how we play. So now
he can start to see that there's another game and
he goes out, Is he going to be the best
in the world right away? No chance. But at least
he can play, and some of the things that he
developed as a basketball player can transfer. Right He's got athleticism,

(48:59):
he can and see a field, he knows teamwork, he's
got hand eye coordination, all that stuff. And he may
never be the best in the world, but he can play. Yeah,
And I think that that's that's what happens a lot
with folks, you know, when they're coming into either whether
it's sobriety or or healing from other mental mental health conditions.

(49:20):
It's like, you're the best at the game you've been playing.
It might not be you might not be winning in
the way that you want, but we're going to introduce
you to a new game and help you develop that game.
And it doesn't mean you have to throw everything away
that you know you've got. You you won made it here.

Speaker 1 (49:41):
What are the first things you have people do when
you're working with them?

Speaker 3 (49:45):
Is there a playbook there or is it just casey
case It's it's a bit case by case, but I
think you know pretty quickly. I want to understand, you
know what their goals are and what success is for them.
So if you look at it, going back to a
sports metaphor, you know, if you're playing basketball or playing

(50:06):
you know, people know the game, they know the rules, right.
The purpose of the coach, which could be like the
therapist in my situation, the purpose of the coach is
to have the team win, and they know what winning is.
It's scored more points than the other team, and to
do that in a higher percentage over a season than
anybody else. We don't know what that is for each individual.
You know, even people that look like you know, everyone sees, well,

(50:28):
they're using heroin. They need to stop using heroin. Maybe
that's a part of it. But what's the life that
they want to move toward and build such that Heroin's
not going to have a place. Yeah, you know and
understand that. So we can define in a way what
winning is for them because we can't give You can't
take people from You got to take people from where

(50:49):
they are to where they aren't. You can't take people
from where they aren't to where they aren't. You know,
when I was flying coming out here, I called you
and I said, hey, Michael, I need to get to
Las Vegas. And you know, you thought I was in
New York And I said, give me directions, And you
started giving me directions to you know, drive down ninety five,
get on the Highway to head west.

Speaker 1 (51:11):
Across the bridge, Yeah, go through Jersey.

Speaker 2 (51:13):
Yeah, but that's not going to help me.

Speaker 3 (51:15):
And even if you knew I was in Florida, and
you're like Okay, you drive here, Well you didn't know
that I need to be there by tomorrow. I'm not
going to get there. So then you go, okay, go
to the airport, buy a first class ticket. What I
only have two hundred dollars? Like, we have to understand
kind of where they want to go, where they are,
and then what are the obstacles in the way, what's
the territory that they need to travel? And this this

(51:37):
is different for each person. Yeah, not completely. I think
a lot of people are in the same vein and direction.
But if we don't have aim, we're aimless.

Speaker 4 (51:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:48):
You mentioned how stress these sorts of past behaviors that
don't help often come out under stress. What are things
people can do in the moment, because I know you
do a lot of stuff with breath work and other things.
What do you what do you think is helpful for
a lot of people?

Speaker 3 (52:03):
I think now we're we're getting into into your world too,
you know. I mean it's training ourselves to be able
to be in those uncomfortable, emotionally uncomfortable moments, you know,
And you know, as I really you know, looking from
a perspective of the nervous system, I think that we
often confuse discomfort emotional discomfort with threat, and then we

(52:26):
react to it as if it's threatening to us, and
we fight flight or or or freeze in some some way.
You know, that's the very simple the three f's that
people talk about. But you know, we'll try to avoid it,
we'll try to run through it, try to you know, just.

Speaker 2 (52:43):
Completely shut down.

Speaker 3 (52:46):
And so I think in the moment, first off, it's
understanding what are the conditions that you know, we help
people understand, like how do you recognize when you're in
one of these reactions?

Speaker 2 (53:02):
And then what is it that's driving it?

Speaker 4 (53:04):
You know?

Speaker 3 (53:04):
And I think it's often some sort of stress around
the system, not external but internal just the way that
they're thinking or believing or and you know, I often
tell people a very simple question, ask yourself, is like,
am I or is anyone around me in this moment
in immediate physical danger? If you can ask yourself that question,

(53:26):
chances are you're probably not. And most of us, most
of the situations we're in on a daily basis, like
all day yesterday, The most like I was at threat
was when we were driving in a car or when
I flew in a.

Speaker 4 (53:39):
Plane, Especially because I'm a shitty driver, so I was.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
Driving part of the day too.

Speaker 3 (53:43):
But I mean, like that's probably the most dangerous thing
most of us do in a day, and most people
aren't afraid of that, right, But like a look from
my wife or you know, a phone call that doesn't
go my way can throw me, you know, throw me
into it. And most people, so it's like being able
to recognize those that that that's happening and it's going
to happen. You know. Frankel, Victor Frankel, who wrote Man

(54:05):
Search for Meeting, would say, did you ever read that book?

Speaker 4 (54:09):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (54:09):
Yeah, so you know, he was a psychiatrist or psychologists
psychiatrist who was in the in the Holocaust, and I
think his book is like required reading for everybody. But
you know, one of his quotes was, and I don't
know if it was actually in this book, but was
in between the stimulus and response, there's a space, and
in that space is our ability to choose, and in

(54:29):
that choice lies our power and our freedom. The stoics
would say that we had an there's like an impression
and then a response, right, and what and I'm getting
back to your question, is we can't control the stimulus,
we can't control the impression. And I think first working
with people to say, let's stop trying to let's stop

(54:52):
trying to stop having those things happen, because they're going
to happen.

Speaker 2 (54:56):
You're going to get pissed, you're going to get upset.

Speaker 1 (54:59):
If you do that too much, you end up living
in like a hermetically sealed bubble. And then that comes
with its own.

Speaker 2 (55:03):
So then that has its its own stuff.

Speaker 3 (55:06):
So all right, So how do we build that space,
that space between the stimulus and response rather than going
from you know, trigger to reaction, and a lot of
that is we look back at I think very simple things,
like it was saying yesterday, if you're in the office
and somebody really pisses you off, you're probably not going

(55:27):
to lay down on the floor and do a yoga
nidra or you're not going to run to a cold
plunge and jump into it.

Speaker 2 (55:33):
So what are some things that can quickly help us act?

Speaker 3 (55:36):
You know, when we're in a stress response, our sympathetic
nervous system is activated. That's a part of our automatic
nervous system that kind of controls the fight or flight
right for very simple terms, the parasympathetic is what activates
and kind of controls the rest and digest. So, you know,
we don't want to If you ever tell someone who's
upset or someone you're upset to remember city, you just

(55:58):
like just relax.

Speaker 2 (55:59):
Calm down.

Speaker 3 (56:01):
I don't know about you.

Speaker 2 (56:02):
It never does has the opposite effect on me.

Speaker 3 (56:06):
It has the opposite effect because it's not a deactivation
of the sympathetic nervousness. If it's not a deactivation of
the stress response, it's an activation of the relaxation response.
So it's an action to activate that part of the nervousness.
So how do we do that? Long slow exhales, other

(56:27):
forms of breath can do that very quickly, I think,
And I'm not I'm not a scientist, but I think,
you know, when we're under stress, we have kind of
a certain breathing pattern in our bodies getting ready to
you know, chances are people aren't taking long, slow, deep
breaths and exhales and they're or they're holding their breath
or whatever they're doing.

Speaker 1 (56:43):
Yeah, Like, think about when people get nervous. If you're
on let's say you're on a stage, given a talk,
what is your podcast, or on a podcast.

Speaker 4 (56:52):
After three hours of sleep, like both of us are.

Speaker 1 (56:56):
You don't go when you're stressed, you don't go, No,
you're going, and your heart rates going like that, and
so you need to almost trigger the outside.

Speaker 3 (57:04):
Right, So that's sending a signal somewhere that's saying we're
not okay.

Speaker 2 (57:08):
Yeah, without changing what you're thinking.

Speaker 3 (57:12):
If you just change that breath and do the physiological
sigh or the the a long slow exhale, I think
that sends another signal that goes, wow, if we can
do this, we're probably not in danger.

Speaker 4 (57:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:28):
Yeah, And I think too, to your point, whether it's
having outside perspective, whether it's a therapist, whether it's even
a wise friend, I think that can be useful too.
I remember one time I was I had I can't
remember what the event was. It was like an interpersonal
relationship thing, and I thought someone had slighted me.

Speaker 4 (57:48):
I was convinced and this was you know, and.

Speaker 1 (57:52):
I tell my friend about this and he just looks
at me and goes, you ever wonder if you're ever
just too damned sensitive? And I was like, I had
not thought of that. You may be onto something there,
you know. I was like, this is another big deal. Yeah,
it's like having those outside perspectives too.

Speaker 4 (58:09):
And I think that.

Speaker 1 (58:12):
I would I'm making a generalization, but I feel like
for men in particular, we don't just talk about stuff, right,
you know. And but if we don't talk about stuff,
then we don't get those moments where someone goes you
ever think you're too damned sensitive, and you just go huh.
And I also think there's differences in what people need,
so having someone that you can trust to bounce things

(58:34):
off of. Another guy who helped me a lot, said
some people need to kick in the ass and some
need a pat on the back. Yeah, And he's like,
you know, you seem like a person needs on pad
on the back. But other people I've worked with, I'm
much different with them, they didn't kick in the ass.

Speaker 4 (58:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (58:51):
I mean, if we think about what if we were
really in a situation that we needed to survive that moment,
you know, we really become myopic. You know, we're focused
on you know, when they're talking in twelve sup recovery,
like the selfishness and self centeredness that's the root of
our problem. Well, if someone was in our biology, like

(59:13):
if we're like our evolution, I'm sure, or even in
the animal world, if you watch an animal running from
a predator, they're not thinking about every They're just the
survival of the faust, right, They're just going That's like
a survival in those moments is really like a selfishness
and self centeredness. So if we're in survival mode, that's
what's going to come out for people become we become

(59:33):
myopic and being able to get perspective in some ways,
which is that perspective could be a simple breath that
allows us to kind of relax back from what we're experiencing.
I mean literally sometimes it's I'll tell people to lean
literally lean back in your chair and imagine that like
whatever you're experiencing is in front of you. That might
seem a little esoteric for people, but you know, it

(59:55):
could be going outside. And I had a guy a
mentor that used to say, you know, go outside and
get small, like look at everything else, get you know, uh,
get off like perspective. Well yeah, and also get your
vision wide angle. I mean, there's some exercises to be
able to do where you can like take your thumbs
and like literally just try to follow them as they

(01:00:16):
come back and you know, our brain. Our our brain
is like, what is it forty percent visual or something
like that, Like that can start to even give us
perspective there, or.

Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
You know, talking to a friend, talking to a mentor
or a therapist.

Speaker 4 (01:00:32):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:33):
A few years ago, something was going on.

Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
It was with my my therapist and she's she's this
like old school psychoanalyst and like kind of no bullshit,
and something had happened and I was I was like,
I was telling her I was angry, and she was like,
I said it, and she's like, well, I told her
what was going on. She goes, well, that makes sense.

(01:00:56):
You're angry, Like I think probably most people would be
angry about this. And I said, yeah, well, but I
don't like the way I'm acting. I'm not being I
wasn't being nice and I was really beating myself up
for this, you know, and she goes Ryan, most people
when they're angry, they're not nice. And I was like, like,

(01:01:16):
that didn't mean that I didn't need to intervene on
some of those behaviors. But it was like, oh, okay,
this makes this makes sense. Yeah I can look at
it and do something with it. But being able to
get that perspective, you know, I, you know I, And
I think it's also important to have good perspective and
have people in relationship with people that know you, whether
that's a therapist or a coach, but also just friends

(01:01:37):
that understand what's important to you. I don't mind sharing this,
but like one of my mentors, like he knows what's
important to me in my marriage and with my children,
and you know, and I could call them and be like,
forgive me, Stephanie, but like because I'm sure she gets
like this with me, but you know, like I can't
believe she's doing this, and I'm starting to like, you know,

(01:01:58):
maybe I'm not that dramatic, And he'll just stop me
and go, do you lover? And he knows I do,
and I'm like yeah, and he's like all right, and
he takes a breath and nothing else matters after that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:08):
Yeah, totally, Like I can let most of the stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:02:11):
Was like, if we've had a fight or an argument
a week later, I can never even remember what it
was so how important was it? But in that moment
it can be like the whole universe.

Speaker 4 (01:02:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
I remember someone told me in a similar situation, do
you want to be right? Or do you want to
be happy?

Speaker 3 (01:02:30):
I mean, listen, I think I'm more I'm far more
addicted to being right than I was alcohol or drugs like.

Speaker 1 (01:02:38):
That might be the most common addiction in the world.
So back to addiction. Do you think people can be
addicted to something that otherwise was publicly seen as healthy,
like exercise?

Speaker 3 (01:02:55):
Well, this goes back again to that question, you know,
depending on how we addiction. Yes, I think it can
can people if we if we rephrase your question to
be something like, can people be harmed or you know,
can their lives be affected negatively by their relationship with

(01:03:17):
things that everybody sees as healthy? If if it's like,
of course people we should we should exercise, we should
eat right, But if you're doing that at the expense
of enjoying your life or the expense of the people
you're in relationships, or if you can't exercise today it
you know, you're a miserable person, then there's something to

(01:03:42):
look at there.

Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
Does that mean that it's addiction in the way that
someone's addicted to heroin? You know, probably not.

Speaker 3 (01:03:52):
But it goes back to throw saying most men lead
lives of quiet desperation, Like Okay, what is it blocking
you from Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
Here's an extreme example. The Wall Street Journal, and this
was years ago. They ran a story about men who
got so into triathlons like Iron Man's, which requires hours
and hours of training a week, that these guys would
work all day and then they'd get home and they'd
go out for like a four hour bike ride. Meanwhile,

(01:04:22):
they're not seeing their family at all. And it interviewed
a lot of the wives that are like, I never
see my husband because they want to do this iron
Man and I'm having to take on all this work.
And even the men were like, I just have to
do the Iron Man. I want to see my fan,
but I got to do the Iron Man and train.
And so I think it's like, what are you giving
up by that? And to your point, what's the underlying

(01:04:46):
reason you're doing the thing? It can anything can become
an escape anything. Yeah, yeah, of course. And and that
doesn't mean that you have to stop doing those things either.
It's like how do you find balance?

Speaker 2 (01:04:59):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:05:00):
Know, and people tend to not maybe it's not all people,
but maybe the subset of people that are coming for
help or the people that I'm around, but they tend
to be like all like very binary.

Speaker 2 (01:05:11):
It's like I got to be all into this or
all out of it.

Speaker 3 (01:05:13):
And that's just not It's not black or white like
life is in the life is in the gray.

Speaker 4 (01:05:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:20):
So first off, you know, why why am I doing
the triathlon? And and and you don't even have to
have a big reason to do it. But what's this
need that I have? This what you're describing is like
a compulsion. And I think that's where the challenge was.
And this can go back to, you know, anything like
how are we using it and what are we using

(01:05:41):
it for? We were talking last night, like you know, we've
got the opioids that people are abusing. You know, we've
got heroin, We've got opium that's started. I mean, this
is this is not a new problem, by the way.
I mean opium dens have been around for a long time,
very long time. It was also very legal. It was
the Bear Heroin company. It was like take heroin for
a stomach ache, you know, like.

Speaker 1 (01:06:00):
Coca Colas has the word cocon.

Speaker 3 (01:06:03):
So you know. But then there's the other side where
we've been able to make medicines from it that that
help people have surgeries during pain. I think there's an
argument that we've made that more people have been able
to like lengthen their life and survive things because of opioids. Yeah, totally,
both directions, and then we trace it back. It all

(01:06:25):
came from a poppy, which was a flower. So it's
just a flower. How do we manipulate it to make
the compounds? And then how are we using it? Or
as the greatest philosophever Homer Simpson said, beer the cause
of and solution to all the world's problems.

Speaker 2 (01:06:42):
Totally, what are you using it for?

Speaker 4 (01:06:44):
Right?

Speaker 3 (01:06:45):
And this is where it's hard because sometimes people aren't
They don't see that yet, and it takes a level
of honesty and reflection to be able to do that.
But also people are you know, these are the strategies
that they've developed to survive, whether they are realize it
or not. They might not be thinking I'm going to
die if I don't do a triathlon, but if someone's thinking, like,
if I don't do this thing, I'm not going to

(01:07:06):
be okay. Right, I'm not going to be okay? Is
in the direction of I'm going to die? Yeah, It's
like almost all anxiety is a death anxiety.

Speaker 1 (01:07:16):
Right, what you said about the Wonderful Homes quote. It
reminds me of that. We had this guy, Dean Staateman
on recently and he wrote this piece for GQ about
how his New Year's resolution was to drink more because
he'd done you know, he'd listened to too many hell podcasts,

(01:07:37):
read too many stories, and stopped drinking.

Speaker 3 (01:07:40):
I listened to it. I love what you said. His
goal was to get on the way. No, maybe it
was to fall off the fall off the y.

Speaker 4 (01:07:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:07:48):
So he was a moderate drinker though, and so he
goes sober for I think it was three or four months,
and he realized that his life got worse because he
wasn't going out and socializing, and so we started to
drink again. And again he's a moderate drinker. I think
that is the key. And he realized, oh, like, this
is helping me be social, It's putting me in situations

(01:08:10):
that are enhancing my life. Alcohol for me is ultimately
something that overall, big picture improves my life. Yes, he
could be like, oh if I have a beer, my
whip score goes down five points whatever, but he goes overall,
I think this is a good thing for me.

Speaker 4 (01:08:26):
What are your thoughts on that.

Speaker 3 (01:08:28):
I mean, listen, we see people now we're in continuous
glucose monitors, right, which is they many of them probably
aren't diabetic. They're managing they want but they're they're doing
this for a reason that they want to see what
they're I mean, I don't know why everybody's doing it,
but I think generally it's to see how certain food
infects that infects them affects them. I guess some food

(01:08:49):
can infect you, but see how some food affects them
and optimizing their their health in some way. So but
if they're not diabetic and they're doing that, like, okay,
they can they could probably have some dessert and see
it go up and it's not gonna impact them.

Speaker 2 (01:09:06):
And I know not all diabetics can't have dessert.

Speaker 3 (01:09:08):
But if you're diabetic, on the other hand, and your
insulin is out your blood sugar's out of control, and
you haven't been able to manage your insulin and you're
eating a pint of ice cream every night, I mean,
those are two very different things. Where the person that's
trying to optimize their health, like if all their friends
are going out for ice cream and their kids are
with them, and they want to have ice cream to

(01:09:28):
enjoy it. Then they all be by all means go
do it.

Speaker 4 (01:09:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:09:32):
I don't know if that's the exact correlation, but you know,
I think for even in some of the writings in
the in Alcoholics, Anonymous and I can talk about from
like an academic perspective, you know, they they don't say
this is what you have to do.

Speaker 2 (01:09:47):
They say, you know, we don't have a monopoly on this.

Speaker 3 (01:09:49):
If you, if you, if you don't think you're an alcoholic,
go out and try some control drinking.

Speaker 2 (01:09:53):
If you can do it, our hats are off to you.

Speaker 3 (01:09:55):
You know that. You know that for most people, it says,
you know, drink means conviviality, released from boredom and fear,
and it's adding to their life. You know, And what
is alcohol? Even like it's called spirits right, raises people's spirits,
lowers or ambitions of doing that for years. If it's
something that's a problem for you, then it's a problem

(01:10:17):
for you, and it's not doing that.

Speaker 2 (01:10:19):
I reached a point. Sounds like you reached a point.

Speaker 3 (01:10:21):
A lot of other people I know reached a point
where it wasn't helping anymore. In fact, it was making it,
it was making it worse. But I also know in
my history, I believe I had a spiritual relationship with
alcohol because we talk about a power greater than yourself,
Like I was.

Speaker 2 (01:10:40):
Turning to alcohol as a power greater than myself.

Speaker 3 (01:10:42):
It was the thing that I was using as like
to raise my spirit to be okay. Like I could
literally be in a place where I wanted to I
was suicidal, wasn't drinking, was like, I can't do this
life anymore. And then I would have some drinks and
two hours later I'd be in a bar trying to
convince some girl how great that was, Like it worked.

Speaker 4 (01:11:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:11:03):
I think people people who aren't familiar with people like us.
I guess I would say us people. Yeah, us people.

Speaker 4 (01:11:12):
Is that.

Speaker 1 (01:11:15):
The addictive behavior or substance, it immediately solves all your
problems if you're having a shitty day, things are wrong,
Like I know, for me, at least, the best place
in the world is like a smoky bar that has
a jukebox that plays George Shones and a bartender who
is just like we'll keep lining them up and just

(01:11:35):
you get in there, and I'm just like, everything is
perfect with the world, no matter what is going on
in my life. Eventually, though, that stops working. Although those
first handful of drinks, life is perfect in that moment,
but then the cost of what happens afterwards start to
outweigh things, and you go, yes, I can still in
my mind go, if I were to go out and

(01:11:57):
drink right now, I can tell you my life, life
would be fucking awesome those first four or five drinks.
But then it's like I get the idea, oh, maybe
you can do this, and you keep doing and then
you know five months later it's like, well, the bank's
coming for the house, honey, I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 (01:12:14):
Well, and so for you, right, it's like, okay, you
have a recognition and that statement that you know it
might be the eighth or tenth or twentieth drink that
does that, but you've said you don't have a governor
on it that you can stop from getting there, or
you can't predict. That's another part, like some people will
have this illusion of control, but if you can't predict
the times that you're going to have control, then you

(01:12:35):
really don't have control. So what you're describing is I
can't control once I start whether I'm going to get
to twelve or not. Yeah, So the solution is stay
away from the first one. It's not the if you're
going to get hit by a train, it's not the
caboose that kills you, it's the engine. Yeah, it's the
first one, which is also a very freeing thing because

(01:12:58):
four people that recognize that they don't have to not
drink like all the alcohol. They just have to stay
away from one. That's another thing, Like you just have
to stay away from the first one. Yeah, the thing
that opens the door into the next, you know, into
the like what's the what's the if it's our Comedi's lever, Like,
what's gonna get you your biggest results? Right? You know?

(01:13:21):
And same thing for not drinking, Like, Okay, I have
to stay away from this one thing, but it's gonna
have it's a lever that's gonna impact the rest of
my life greatly. And I think it's not just around alcohol,
it's not just around drugs. It's around whatever people identify.
If that guy realizes or the guys in the I
think you said it was a Wall Street Journal realized
that their lives are falling apart because of these triathlons,

(01:13:45):
then maybe it's stopping the triathlon or doing it differently
or having a different viewpoint that you know, I'm a
guy that's gonna enjoy triathlons.

Speaker 2 (01:13:52):
I'm never gonna like be the champion of the world.

Speaker 3 (01:13:54):
But so how do I how do I fit and
get enjoyment out of life being.

Speaker 2 (01:14:00):
Mediocre?

Speaker 3 (01:14:00):
Sometimes?

Speaker 4 (01:14:01):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:14:02):
I think you know, I always I am somewhat grateful
that if I'm going to pick a problem to have
in this domain, that mine was alcohol because I can
just not drink, right, that's very black or white, just
don't drink. But I always wonder with people who have
a problem with like food or these things that you

(01:14:25):
need to do in order to survive. Have you ever
worked with people like that? Like, what the hell? How
the hell does that even work?

Speaker 3 (01:14:36):
Well, I mean it's it's it's interesting with things we
call them, like the process addictions a lot. But you know,
things that fit in there, like you know, food, so
eating disorders or disorder eating, things around sex and love,
things around money or gambling.

Speaker 2 (01:14:52):
You know, there's other ones that fit in there, gaming.

Speaker 3 (01:14:54):
Stuff like that, But like especially with anything around sex,
food and money, like you can't I mean, the sex
isn't always about I suppose people can live without sex,
but like a healthy intimate relationship is going to have that.

Speaker 2 (01:15:05):
But it's really not always about the sex.

Speaker 3 (01:15:07):
It's about something, you know, the intimacy or connection or
not being able to get it.

Speaker 2 (01:15:12):
But those are things that we need.

Speaker 3 (01:15:15):
Like you said, you know, how hard would it be
for you if in order to cure your alcoholism you
had to take a half a shot of whiskey every day?
It would be miserable, right, because you want a lot
more than a half a shot you take that.

Speaker 4 (01:15:32):
Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 (01:15:33):
I remember when I was trying, I wouldn't even drink.
I was cognizant enough about my drinking that I would
never just have one. If it was a situation where
like I wasn't going to be able to have ten
many more, you know, I would just not not going
to be real because if you can just have one,
if it was just one only once that one is done,

(01:15:56):
I'm like the most uncomfortable person.

Speaker 4 (01:15:57):
I'm just like just so.

Speaker 3 (01:16:02):
But I mean this is oversimplifying it, But I mean,
like people have to eat, right, So, like if their
relationship is with food, which it's more than about the food.
It might for many people it's about like things that
we're out of control in their life, and this is
the area, the thing that they can they can control.
It's not like that forever. That's not the same for everybody.
But they have to be able to develop behaviors if

(01:16:23):
they in recovery.

Speaker 2 (01:16:24):
What we have them do is develop behaviors that you know.

Speaker 3 (01:16:27):
There's not like an abstinence model around that, right, right,
So some of the things in like sex addiction recovery,
they'll talk about like you know, kind of red light,
yellow light, green light behaviors, you know, and those are
going to be different for everybody. You have to define
what your sobriety is, you have to define what recovery is.
And I think that's the same thing for things with
you know, eating and with money.

Speaker 2 (01:16:48):
We were talking a lot about gambling yesterday.

Speaker 3 (01:16:51):
Not everybody that gambles, I mean, we're in Las Vegas
going through the casinos would. I don't think the majority
of that people we saw aren't like losing their houses
and their lives are falling apart. But there's a subset
of people that will that will and it's a actually
with that one is a very high suicide rate compared
to other addictions. It's a it's a very interesting one

(01:17:12):
to me because like it's the next hit can solve
all your problems.

Speaker 4 (01:17:19):
Yeah, that's a really unique aspect of it.

Speaker 1 (01:17:22):
Like for me, it's not like if I could go,
oh maybe if I take the tenth drink, everything in
my life is just gonna change immediately.

Speaker 4 (01:17:31):
Right yea?

Speaker 3 (01:17:33):
Or or you're like, I know this isn't you know,
if someone's going to the crackhouse, they're not like thinking
this is going to change my life forever. They know
it's going to change their life right then, right that,
and they're not really looking at that you know, long
term thing. But you know people I have people like that,
he's you know, he's one hundred thousand dollars in debt.
And when I talk to the often talk to the
person that's one hundred thousand dollars in debt and gambling,

(01:17:53):
it's not it's not even real money. It's like a
like that's just one bet, and then it sometimes a.

Speaker 1 (01:18:01):
Week later they're like, hey, swings or swings, I'm up
two hundred grand.

Speaker 3 (01:18:06):
Yeah, and and so you know the next thing can
solve all their problem, it's not actually solving all their
problems because there's probably something underneath that that's that's driving them,
but you know it. It also then when they do
lose everything, it can have like your whole world like
kind of collapse on it. And you know, I've you know,
with somebody like that, they might find that they have

(01:18:28):
to stay completely abstinate from that part, but also recognize
that other areas of life that might trigger that. I mean,
you drive down the road, you see what the lottery is,
you know, you investing in stocks or in crypto or
anything like that. I mean, people can approach that in
a way that's like a like like like gambling.

Speaker 1 (01:18:49):
Do you do you find that when people stop with
one addiction, it can transfer over to something else kind
of like you just mentioned, maybe not even in the
exact same domain, because you know, gambling and if you're
doing daily crypto trading that feels similar. Would you ever
find that like if someone gets sober from alcohol or

(01:19:11):
heroin or whatever it is, that then they pick up
something totally different, like whether it be exercise or whether
it be I don't know, something else.

Speaker 3 (01:19:20):
Yeah, I mean I think it's not like a thing
that like it moves over to something else right away.

Speaker 2 (01:19:27):
I think it's that.

Speaker 1 (01:19:29):
I think the question is do you believe there's addictive
personalities or not?

Speaker 3 (01:19:38):
Yes, you know, it's not a clinical definition or anything
like that.

Speaker 2 (01:19:43):
But I think.

Speaker 3 (01:19:45):
People who tend to be thrown to that or shaped
in that way, it's like they've got some sort of
anngst discomfort energy that they don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:19:53):
How to deal.

Speaker 3 (01:19:55):
With necessarily, right, I mean, and I think we've got
more of that than ever you write about that extensively.
We used to walk what was it, ten miles a
day and carry stuff. We don't do that, you know,
we we.

Speaker 4 (01:20:06):
Were more not expending that energy.

Speaker 2 (01:20:07):
We're not expending that somewhere. It's got to go somewhere.

Speaker 3 (01:20:10):
And if we looked at it from the perspective of,
at some point, for someone who recognizes that they've got
an addiction, if it's a substance use that they're using
it as a medicine, If you haven't really addressed the
underlying issue in this case might be the underlying angster
kind of existential view of yourself in the world, then
you might start finding other things to to medicate.

Speaker 2 (01:20:30):
You that, right, and then you know that can have.

Speaker 3 (01:20:34):
Its own uh, it can build it's it's it's its
own momentum, you know, especially if it's something that's you know,
really fun to do right or makes it easy to
win money or you know, I I recognize this. I
don't have a a I've never had an issue with gambling,
although I see that I probably could if I don't. Yeah,

(01:21:00):
I mean, I'll go, you know, I'll do some fun
stuff every once in a while, you know, with the
super Bowl or whatever. But here's one thing I reckon.
I'll be driving down the road and for me, like
anytime I'm under any sort of stress, like my my
focus and I know this about myself will go toward money.
It's like something I feel like I could control. And
the money's never almost never the issue in it. And
I know this because regardless of whether there's a bunch

(01:21:22):
of money in the bank or no money in the bank,
it can it's the it's the same thing. So it
can't be about the money. But if I'm driving down
the road and I see the power ball at like
a billion dollars, yeah, and I start thinking about it,
like I can actually feel in my body, Yeah, this
sense of like I'm fantasizing about it, and I'm like

(01:21:43):
holy cow.

Speaker 1 (01:21:45):
I'm going to get a yacht. I'm going to get
at what you start, like, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:21:49):
Right, and and that's that's very I start thinking first, Michael,
about all the good that I'm going to do in
the world and the foundations I'm going to start, and
then I'll buy a yacht.

Speaker 4 (01:21:58):
You can come hang out on my yacht. Took a
couple of bucks to your foundations too.

Speaker 2 (01:22:03):
I'm justifying it already inside of me. I like, I'm
a manipulator.

Speaker 3 (01:22:07):
But you know, so if I'm doing that, just like
recognizing that just kind of driving by something. I used
to actually do this meditation with these young guys that
I had in these groups.

Speaker 2 (01:22:18):
And I remember I were most of.

Speaker 3 (01:22:21):
The guys are like in their twenties, and they were
kind of oriented towards making money and stuff, and that
all of these guys were in this was in a
treatment center. And I have them closed their eyes and
imagine that they woke up in the morning and there
was a billion dollars in their bank account, and like
we I really walked them through it in their eyes
closed and I had them open their eyes and explain
what they were experiencing, and like, you know, my heart's opening,
I feel bigger, like I feel this feels all, you know,

(01:22:44):
like the same thing like me seeing the you know,
I'm gonna buy this. Then I had him close their
eyes and guided him through something again and said, all
right now, I want you to imagine that you wake
up the next morning and half of it is gone.

Speaker 2 (01:23:00):
And walk through that.

Speaker 3 (01:23:01):
And and like they woke up, they were like, I'm upset,
I'm angry. Like they literally their whole demeanor had changed.
They still had five hundred million dollars, right and most
of these guys had no thousands of dollars right like,
So it was like, you know, so the the I
I you know, I don't remember where this was was

(01:23:22):
coming from, but this is like the transferring.

Speaker 2 (01:23:25):
Like if we, you know, if we find something that we.

Speaker 3 (01:23:29):
Think is going to give us that that kind of
sense of ease and comfort, well I think we'll go
after it, especially people that have kind of been thrown
to that and in other.

Speaker 2 (01:23:41):
Ways, Yeah, we look for distractions.

Speaker 3 (01:23:44):
Michael Singer who wrote The Untethered Soul and Fever, and
he wrote The Surrender Experiment.

Speaker 2 (01:23:48):
It's a great book.

Speaker 3 (01:23:49):
I used to go to his place to Temple of
the universe, and it's it's outside of o'calla Florida in
the Latchua. And I'm not going to quote him exactly,
but I remember used to say, like when we fall
in love with somebody, he said something like this, when
we fall in love with somebody, No, it's we're like
we assign like our okayness or this feeling that we're

(01:24:10):
getting to that person. And he would describe what's really
happening is like they're enough of a distraction. Like he
would say that in the kind of from a Yogic perspective,
like we have this where we generate this like endless
love joy like within us, and that that's been like
clogged in some way, and this person that we meet

(01:24:32):
is like enough of a distraction for us to actually
fall in love with ourselves. That's interesting, and but we
assign it to them. So now we're leaning on them.
And so you know, three months later, when they you know,
chew their food a certain way that you don't like,
or they fart in bed or whatever whatever it is,
or they're they're not doing the thing that you think

(01:24:53):
they should be doing anymore, that now we assign that
to you know, the misery to them. And his argument
wasn't to not be in relationships, but it was more
And another example used to like you could be someone
could be like miserable in their job, you know, unhappy
where they live, they don't like them, and then they
meet her or they meet him and like everything's okay

(01:25:15):
for a period of time. It was like this distraction
to experience what flows within me. And I think his
argument wasn't to not get in relationships, but it was
to be able to really like clear out these In
alcoholics anonomus latters will talk about like these channels that
are filled with fear, frustration, anger. From a Yogic perspective,

(01:25:37):
they'll talk about us being like a tube a shashumna,
and we have these these experiences in life that kind
of they call natties, that kind of block the energy.
In psychological terms, we call them traumas or stressors. Right,
they would call them some scars like scars, and be
able to clear that out so that we can experience

(01:25:58):
the energy that we're generating and then share that with
this might. I'm sorry if this is sounding a little
bit too like out there, but like fall in love
with myself in a way that now I can share
that with you. I'm not falling.

Speaker 2 (01:26:12):
Maybe I am, but it's okay.

Speaker 4 (01:26:14):
It happens.

Speaker 2 (01:26:14):
We can do that, but we're sober.

Speaker 4 (01:26:16):
Yeah, but.

Speaker 3 (01:26:18):
Now I'm sharing that rather than taking that. You know
that I'm okay with falling in love with yourself? What
does that mean? Like whatever it means to the person,
But like I'm okay as I as I am. Yeah,
And now I can go share that with others rather
than I need you, I need this thing. I need
this substance in order to just be out.

Speaker 1 (01:26:36):
You've got your own foundation rather than using right someone
or something else's Yeah, what are your thoughts on social media?

Speaker 4 (01:26:43):
And that is a behavior is a cause a lot
of problem? Is it? Or is it? Just like we
talked about with alcohol. It depends on how you're using it?

Speaker 3 (01:26:55):
Does my Does the answer that I give depend on
how many followers I'll gain from this podcast?

Speaker 4 (01:27:00):
Uh, let's do two takes.

Speaker 5 (01:27:04):
We'll see what happens. We'll do an A B test
and see what what what goes? Because you know, I
won't be okay if I don't get X.

Speaker 3 (01:27:19):
You know, I think this is a This is an
interesting topic and probably.

Speaker 2 (01:27:27):
There's a lot of opinions on it strong ones, very
strong ones.

Speaker 3 (01:27:34):
Do I think that I think like anything else or
some kind of going back to the the poppy like
what it on one hand, what it's created is pretty incredible.
Like I wouldn't have been able to go to the
probably the Fish Show with you last night and have
a good time if there wasn't social media and we'd

(01:27:54):
met inst on Instagram after you know, I was on
Andrews podcast and then you were going on it, right, So,
like I've met people all over the world, you know,
I've got this this this kid who found me who
literally lived lives in India when he and he asked
me for help, and so I'll meet with him like

(01:28:15):
once a month. And when he turns on his screen,
it literally looks like he's in It looks like the
backdrop is like slum Dog Millionaire, right, Like I never
would have had this connection with him. I've had the
therapists in Nigeria reach out to me to talk about
what they're doing with addiction. I made these really cool connections.
I've been able to reconnect with friends from from his

(01:28:37):
I think, you know, the what the positives to it
are extremely positive? Now, is there a dark CD side
of it. I'm sure that you know these are for
profit companies there of course they want you using it.
Are there things that people are distracting them to themselves
with one hundred percent? Are they helping to create that?

(01:29:02):
I don't know. I mean, I think there's it is
something that's very compelling and people can use to completely
distract themselves.

Speaker 2 (01:29:14):
But I think is it creating the problem? I don't
know that it created the problem.

Speaker 3 (01:29:21):
I think it exacerbates whatever problems we're having if people
are using it in a way that's not the beneficial
way we talked about. And what I mean by that
is there's this quote I like from Pascal, the mathematician,
kind of a heavy thinker of his time. He was
like in the sixteen hundreds, and he said all of
humanity's problems stemmed from man's inability to sit alone in

(01:29:42):
a room by himself. There was no social media then,
right undred sixteen hundreds. You go back to the Yoga Sutras,
which is like this old yoga text. And I really
think a lot of the old yogis they were almost
like and I've talked to neuroscientists about this, or they're
like neuroscientists without studying the brain. I mean, they really
talked about. The things that they talked about were really

(01:30:04):
like neuropathways and understanding how we responded to things. But
in this document that's anywhere from twenty five hundred to
four thousand years old.

Speaker 2 (01:30:13):
He said, it starts off saying the purpose.

Speaker 3 (01:30:15):
For yoga is now. So what is yoga? It was union?
So he's saying the purpose for union is now, and
this is kind of like union of mind, body, spirit. Well,
if the time or sorry, the time, the purpose of
the time for union is now. If the time for
union is now, that must mean that you're in disunion.
You wouldn't need union if you weren't in disunion. Right,
So they're already saying four thousand years ago, we're in

(01:30:39):
some sort of disunion, and then went on to say
that the purpose of it is to still the fluctuations
of the mind. And the fluctuations of the mind. There's
five I'm going to give. The first four are right thinking,
wrong thinking, imagination, and memory. Right thinking and wrong thinking
is like everything we know or don't know. What we
know that we know, what we know that we don't know.

(01:30:59):
All of that stuff that's kind of like our ego development,
how we're seeing the world, our memory, everything from our history.
That that kind of programs how we see an event,
and you know, we're all going to see events differently.
Your lawyers will tell you that eyewitness testimony is the worst,
especially if you have more than one eyewitness, because they
can all see a completely different thing. And then our

(01:31:22):
memory everything that we're making up. So they're talking about
this four thousand years ago, This is not a social
media problem. And what were people using to distract themselves
throughout history? I think in some ways they didn't need
to distract themselves at certain points because they were just
working on the farm all day. I'm not suggesting that's
what we go back to, but I often wonder because

(01:31:47):
of this if social media, which I think has its
own problems and challenges. And I'm a dad of an
eighteen year old, a seven year old and a four
year old, and I don't, you know, I don't think
that they should like my seven and four year old
shouldn't be out there, you know, whatever, whatever, But but

(01:32:10):
is it sometimes the scapegoat? And I'm not saying this
to I'm not being this is I'm not a spokesman
for Meta. You know, like, I'm not saying that there
aren't those challenges, but is there something else that we're
not dealing with? And this becomes the thing that, oh,
we have to we have to fix this, and it
becomes this thing that it's not going anywhere. Right, So
now we're trying to control something that in many ways

(01:32:32):
we can't control or is so big, and it sets
up this like trap that we're never going to get
out of this. You know, I don't know that it's
the kids on the screens. It might be the parents
on the screens, and how are they distracted, you know, and.

Speaker 4 (01:32:46):
What are they not take using that time for especially
with their kids.

Speaker 3 (01:32:50):
Right, and and and then it lends this thing like Okay,
and I'm a gen X person, right, you know, I
grew up in that that we didn't have any sort
of trackers or you know, my parents until I was
like an hour late, they weren't worried at all, or
maybe even two hours later. We were talking last night.
There was the stuff on the news. They used to
literally say, it's ten o'clock to you or your children,
which is funny. They had to mind parents that they

(01:33:12):
had kids now it's like your phone has a tracker
on it, and if they're not where they are right away,
it's like creating this level of anxiety and emergency. And
it's very easy for me to think, like, Okay, my
generation was better than this, not not better generation, but
the way that we grew up was better than the

(01:33:33):
way that they were. Maybe true, but maybe not, maybe not,
And that's not going to happen. And so I think
as parents we can it can be easy to try
to get our kids to understand and live in the
world that we were in versus understanding the world that
they're that that they're in, yeah, and understanding their world.

(01:33:57):
And I don't know if this is answering your question
around social media. I think it's a I just think
there's more questions to be asked rather than saying this
is the problem we need to get rid of. That
may be the case, right, we may need to moderate
it in ways and.

Speaker 2 (01:34:11):
Shut it down for kids at certain ages.

Speaker 3 (01:34:15):
I mean, I think there's definitely I know, there's definitely
predatory behavior.

Speaker 4 (01:34:18):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:34:20):
It's just also like I don't we weren't we don't.
I don't think any of us have really come to
a place where we know how to handle it. Yet
I think it's still very clunky. It. I don't know
if it's social media, but just this ability to be
connected to anyone in the world at any moment.

Speaker 4 (01:34:41):
Yeah, and any piece of information ever.

Speaker 3 (01:34:43):
Right, we were like, we're not that far away from
living in tribes that we like we didn't know what
was happening more than a couple miles away. And it's
really great. I mean, like I live in Florida. We
get hurricanes back then, and like whenever they'd be like,
oh it's going to rain today, they just get it

(01:35:06):
coming off the coast of Africa. But you know, the
downside of that is, like, you know, we we get
to we're very you know, I think many of the
statue we live in a less violent, more peaceful time
than any time in history, which doesn't seem like because
we see it all.

Speaker 1 (01:35:23):
Right, ninety percent of news is negative in general, and
even and that's held from So this really started in
the eighteen thirties. I believe there's a guy named Benjamin Day,
and before this, most newspapers in New York were covering
like business, basic stuff, boring. He comes in and he

(01:35:44):
goes and they were making money off of subscriptions. He goes,
I think I could make money off of attention, which
is all to say. I could get companies to put advertisements.
And the more people I get to read my newspaper,
the more I can charge for an ad spot. So
then the question is, well, how do I get people
to read my newspaper? And he starts running stories about murder, suicides, dramas,

(01:36:09):
all this shit, and it becomes the biggest newspaper in
New York in about a year, and that's been the
model ever since. It's like newspapers are not selling their news,
they're selling advertisers to get people to look at. The
more readers you have, the more money you can make.
And what do people focus on. It tends to be
negative stuff. And so that ninety percent rule has held

(01:36:32):
even as the world has become safer and better by
every metric overall.

Speaker 3 (01:36:41):
Yeah, I mean, and people say, well, I'm going to
addict it. We're addicted to ben. I think that's one
hundred percent true. And it makes sense because it's more
important for me to know where danger is than really
where safety is. Yeah, it's more important for me to
know if you're coming at me with a knife than
to hug me. Yeah, that part of our body is
way more or powerful because it's its job and only job,

(01:37:03):
is to keep us alive.

Speaker 2 (01:37:04):
And we look at the diagnosis of PTSD right at the.

Speaker 3 (01:37:09):
Far end of the spectrum of people who experience traumatic
events and how they're reacting to life. In the d
s M five, it says that the person was exposed
to actual or threatened, you know, death, danger, whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:37:22):
In the DSM four it said real or perceived.

Speaker 3 (01:37:25):
And what that meant was like, if it's really happening,
I'm going to If it was really happening to you,
actually you're going to have a certain reaction to it.

Speaker 2 (01:37:34):
If you thought it was going to happen, you can
have a very similar reaction.

Speaker 4 (01:37:38):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:37:39):
That's the quote unquote success of terrorism. It's not that
these two buildings came down. It's that now we think
every building is coming down. Right, It's very important for
us to understand where that threat is.

Speaker 2 (01:37:54):
You know, our legal.

Speaker 3 (01:37:55):
System recognizes that. You know, you can be arrested for
assault or battery. Battery is you beat the crap out
of me. Assault is you said you're going to beat
the crap out of me, or you're going to kill me,
you know. And I don't think we're we're not always
thinking about that, but we'll live under these and so
we our attention does get drawn to that, it's not
going to I don't think it's ever. I think we're

(01:38:16):
wired for that in a way that we're not going
to get pulled toward the other stuff, you know. And now,
so we'll see something that happens, you know, halfway around
the world, and a bomb goes off in a in
a mall in Africa, And that doesn't mean I shouldn't
have empathy and care and concern. But if a bomb
goes off in a mall in Africa and I go
into survival mode and start, you know, grabbing my kids

(01:38:38):
out of school and throwing them in a closet in
the United States, that's a problem, right, And so I
don't think we know how to handle that yet or
just from an evolutionary perspective, so like, I don't think
that helps for kids to be able when they're just
trying to figure out how to navigate the world and

(01:38:59):
be in really relationships that they have the entire world
to connect to in that moment. Now is that the
world they're going to live in, and we've got to
like expose them to it at some point probably, But
I don't know what the total answer for that is.

Speaker 1 (01:39:12):
Yeah, something correct me if I'm wrong. Something I've heard
you say is you help people be good at feeling bad.

Speaker 2 (01:39:21):
Yeah, I say that. I don't. Maybe I'll start putting
it on the website.

Speaker 3 (01:39:26):
But like, I think really at the core of when
people are in therapy or coaching, you know that, especially therapy,
it's about teaching them how to feel bad, to be
able to build emotional resilience and distress tolerance. I mean,
this is very much in line with like everything you
talk about in the comfort crisis. You know that, you

(01:39:47):
know that it's it's easier to deal with life when
things are going the way that we want them to go.
It's when they're not going the way that we want
them to go and we're having you know, because that's life.

Speaker 4 (01:39:57):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:39:57):
That's another thing I got in from them people in recovery.
It's like things break and people die, and we're going
to experience sadness, We're going to experience times of fear,
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:40:11):
I mean, I think this is where.

Speaker 3 (01:40:14):
We have you know, in the in the US anyway,
I forget what the number is, but the lions share
by far, probably upwards. I could be don't quote in
the numbers, but I mean it's like way above fifty
percent of like antidepressants are prescribed by general GPS, right,
So not saying none of them have the training, but

(01:40:35):
I would argue that even if they're prescribed by a psychiatrist,
the average psychiatric diagnosis in the US is like something
ridiculous like eighteen to twelve to eighteen minutes, Like how
could you know the whole person then and understand them
in that moment? And it's people are giving you their
symptoms based on their own perspective in that moment, which

(01:40:56):
people are poor historians, just based on you know, we're
looking back through the lens of now, looking back and
saying I'm depressed now, so you know, two weeks ago,
I was I was happier in my life, was great,
when that may not be the case. Or six weeks ago,
I've been depressed for twenty years, which may not be
the case, and so we're going to feel bad in life.

Speaker 2 (01:41:18):
It's it's it's it's part of it.

Speaker 1 (01:41:20):
I think life would be boring if you never felt
bad occasionally.

Speaker 3 (01:41:25):
Right, Well, when we're available for the depths of pain,
we become available for the heights of joy, you know.
And and so I think a lot of people that
you know will come in with, you know, maybe our
prescribed medications. And I'm not against medications. I think they
should be used. I don't think problem medications are the problem.
I think how diagnosis they are given, and how medications

(01:41:46):
are prescribed and given is a bigger problem. You know,
some people will say, welly am I, you will never
convince me otherwise that certain antidepressants haven't saved people's lives.
I've seen it again and again again. It doesn't mean,
though that they have to be on it forever. Right,
Maybe some people do have to be on stuff for
a long time. It's how do we think.

Speaker 1 (01:42:05):
It also doesn't mean that people who have just some
of the everyday problems of living need to be.

Speaker 2 (01:42:11):
One hundred percent.

Speaker 3 (01:42:12):
I think sometimes we look at will say I'm depressed,
and they're walking in with that diagnosis they've given themselves,
when in reality they're sad, And if you look at
the conditions of their life, it makes sense that they're sad.

Speaker 4 (01:42:22):
Right now.

Speaker 3 (01:42:23):
Now, does that not mean that having these if the sadness,
you know, and the depressive symptoms last for a while,
even if they might not qualify for major depressive disorder,
that doesn't mean that maybe for a period of time
something could help them. But there's different things that that
we can try, and we also want to look at,
you know, what's going on with the medically and other
things like that. But aside from that, you know, we're

(01:42:46):
going to experience worry, We're going to experience pain, We're
going to experience sadness. You know, I don't like I
love my parents. I have a great relationship with them.
They're awesome grandparents. You know, if everything goes the way
that we think it's gonna go, they'll pass away before me.
And I guess I suppose I could, but I mean,
if nothing drastic, I don't like when it happens, I'm

(01:43:10):
not gonna like it.

Speaker 2 (01:43:11):
Yeah, I'm going to be a mess, right and I
actually hope I am.

Speaker 3 (01:43:15):
In the moment, I'm gonna wish I wasn't a mess,
But I don't want to like these people that I've
loved my whole life and and mean so much to me.
My kids.

Speaker 2 (01:43:22):
I don't want to be like, eh, yeah, what's for lunch?

Speaker 1 (01:43:26):
Right, because if you're a mess would suggests it was meaningful.

Speaker 3 (01:43:30):
Yeah. And and so you know, what are the conditions
in our lives and the situations that might be leading
to some of these things.

Speaker 2 (01:43:37):
So that's that's getting back to like, we got to
learn how to feel bad.

Speaker 3 (01:43:41):
Yeah, you know, we got to learn to be able
to be in that space of discomfort so that we
can have the power to choose that we can move
from reacting to triggers and reacting to the impressions and
the stimulus and move to being able to respond to them.

Speaker 4 (01:43:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:43:55):
Do you think that some of what we societally we
societally would think of as negative, whether it be addiction
or other mental disorders, do you think those can sometimes
become superpowers if they're directed in the right area.

Speaker 4 (01:44:12):
I'll give you an example.

Speaker 1 (01:44:15):
A lot of definitions of addiction, but if we think
about it as persistence despite negative consequences. So when I
applied that to alcohol, not good. But when I applied
that to my writing life, the fact that I could
sit down at a keyboard at four am and it's
always hard, it always sucks, it's all negative for like

(01:44:36):
the first hour, but I can push that and persist
against that, and then eventually the words come out. And
so it's like sometimes if things can be sort of redirected,
that can be good for us in a way.

Speaker 2 (01:44:50):
Yeah, I mean, do you find that.

Speaker 3 (01:44:51):
I mean, when you look back at your history, were
you using alcohol in those periods of time to be
able to push through Well?

Speaker 4 (01:44:58):
I think if it's just.

Speaker 1 (01:45:00):
I knew there was downsides in a lot of ways,
but I kept doing that, you know, even though it
solved the problem in the short term. But it's like
that sort of persistence and just keeping going.

Speaker 3 (01:45:11):
Yeah, I mean, I think that it goes back to
a little bit of what we were talking around around
the energy that we have in our bodies and how
it's how it's kind of direct, you know, and if
we're not using it in ways that kind of fulfill
us or meet some sort of purpose or have some
sort of direction or aim.

Speaker 2 (01:45:27):
Again, if you don't have aim, you're aimless.

Speaker 3 (01:45:29):
So now you're walking around aimless and have all this energy,
and so we're looking at something to kind of to
level that, get out, to get it out, to level it,
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:45:37):
I mean it's great. It works, it works, really, it
works really fast.

Speaker 3 (01:45:41):
So I think being I think it's less about like
transferring the addictive personality to being able to use the
energies and recognize that we're generative beings and where are
we going to put what we're generating. I think a
lot of people will find that they were this was me.
I was doing something that I'm not blaming it on this,

(01:46:02):
but like I was also felt very down and stuck
because I wasn't. My life didn't feel like it had
any purpose to it, you know, and I wasn't. And
that doesn't mean everybody has to go out and you know,
become a therapist or become a teacher. You know. In fact,
a lot of what I'll work with people on is
and I see it a lot, is that people confuse

(01:46:24):
their purpose with what they do, and what we do
can be a great vehicle for our purpose. So, for
an example, if my purpose it was to be a
therapist and work with people and help them work through
their addictions and trauma, I mean, okay, so that's great.

Speaker 2 (01:46:41):
Now how many hours a week can I spend doing that?

Speaker 3 (01:46:45):
If that's my purpose is to do that, then almost
in that way, anything else that I'm doing that's not
that is in conflict with my purpose, like sitting on
the couch with my kids watching a kid's Netflix movie
for the alreaty fifth time, right, or watching They're Little
and they're you know, kids born in the twenty twenties

(01:47:09):
and we had to We've had to watch Home Alone
from the nineties like one hundred and fifty times.

Speaker 4 (01:47:13):
Right, heh, that's good.

Speaker 3 (01:47:15):
So uh you know then in a way that's in
conflict with my purpose and I and how anytime that
I'm not doing this, I'm not going to feel fulfilled.
You know if I look back and go, okay, what
is being a therapist and doing therapists and helping people?
What is that providing? What do I you know, who

(01:47:36):
am I in almost like an ontological study, which is
a study of a being, Like okay, you know I
get to be in service. I had to be you know,
a contribution, right, So maybe my purpose is to be
in service to my fellow man. Now that is not
tied to a destination like once I am in my

(01:47:58):
office or once I'm working with this many people, or
once I get this degree. That's something I can do
today and that's something I can do watching home alone
with my kids for the two hundred time I can
be in service to them. So now my purpose is
more about who I be rather than what I do.
But the things that I do can be a vehicle
for that.

Speaker 4 (01:48:14):
That makes sense.

Speaker 1 (01:48:16):
How important do you think community is for helping solve
these sorts of issues?

Speaker 3 (01:48:22):
Oh, I mean I think community is I think right
up there with sleep, nutrition, fitness. I mean I think
we're communal beings. I mean we're not the back in
our relation. We're not at the top of the food chain.
I mean we are now because you can live somewhere

(01:48:43):
now because of technology. And when I say technology, I
mean everything from you know, computers, but also the guns
and you know, running water, running water and other things
like that. But we didn't survive alone, you know, and
we were built to be in these tribes and we
feel safe in them, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:49:04):
I mean, I like I remember reading I think it
was which book was it?

Speaker 4 (01:49:09):
It was?

Speaker 3 (01:49:09):
Maybe it was tried by Sebastian where he talks about
people like missing war zones in England, which you know,
when they were all in the tunnels together or I
think it was after nine to eleven that like where
everybody kind.

Speaker 2 (01:49:25):
Of came together, came together.

Speaker 3 (01:49:26):
I mean, there was really interesting for in my personal
experiences long before the therapist. But you know, I was
in my early twenties and mid twenties when nine to
eleven happened, and like, I've never felt more like an
American and connected to everybody than probably the week after
that totally. And I'm I'm not suggesting that's what we

(01:49:48):
need to have happened or I want to happen, but
it was we had like this common ground, and.

Speaker 2 (01:49:58):
The common ground feels safe, it feels good.

Speaker 3 (01:50:01):
You know, we're we're.

Speaker 2 (01:50:04):
On the same mission.

Speaker 3 (01:50:05):
We're together, you know, I don't And and not only that,
but like the thing that you were talking about perspective,
I mean, two heads are better than one. We want
to talk about power grading yourself, just us having a
conversation and being able to see things from a different way,
to be able to disagree, and like invention only happens
through disagreement, right, Like we have to say I don't
agree with how it is. You know, I don't agree

(01:50:27):
that light can only come from fire, right, someone had
to say that, whether that was Tesla or Edison.

Speaker 2 (01:50:34):
I don't know, you can leave that up to you.
We can, we can do two takes on that, and
so your viewers do.

Speaker 3 (01:50:38):
But and even in like my work with in our
work as therapist, we're helping, you know, we're having people
kind of disagree with their their histories in a way
to invent a new way of living. But I think
being able to do stuff like that in community is
so important, and I think that's why, you know, I
heard you guys talking about this in one of your
other episodes with the Guy the GQ. Yeah, we were

(01:51:03):
like people finding common ground in bars, you know where.
Then you talked about your friend that wrote the book
where uh, you know, the political kind of people on
different sides of the aisle, which is weird to say
because most people in the bar aren't actually on the aisles.
But like I think people know what I mean, but
it kind of it kind of disappears like they had
this common You can walk into a bar and sit

(01:51:25):
next to a stranger and talk. You said that, like,
sit next to a stranger and it's not weird to
just start just start to start talking to them.

Speaker 1 (01:51:31):
I think that bar has like the context of it's
okay to just talk to a random stranger. Where if
I'm at Starbucks and sit next to someone and I
start talking to them, they're going to be like, if
it's a woman named.

Speaker 4 (01:51:42):
Person like hitting on me.

Speaker 1 (01:51:42):
If it's a guy, they're gonna be like this person
no drugs or homeless or like it's a little weirder.

Speaker 4 (01:51:47):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:51:47):
Yeah, but I mean I think we naturally seek those
things sports teams, right, Like, if you're wearing the same
football team hat as somebody on an airplane, you're probably
more like to talk to them, or you have something
totally to open that, just like the alcohol kind of
opens it in a bar. You know, we went to
see Fish last night. I'm not like one of the

(01:52:08):
guys that follows Fish around. I've been to a few
shows in my life. I wanted to see this fear
it was going to be a good experience. It was
a great experience, but a lot of the people in there,
you know, they're at all the shows that they're doing.
You know, we walked in I don't know if you
saw it, but when we walked in the seat, this guy,
like after we came back from the bathroom, this guy
hugged me. You know, might have been something, you know,

(01:52:31):
influenced by something out. But there was like this other
people I saw that seemingly didn't know each other, you know,
high fiving each other.

Speaker 4 (01:52:38):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:52:38):
I think we find this in spiritual communities. There's some
sort of common connection that we get that we can
open up. You know, Twelve Step you know, meetings have
been so valuable, and people will argue against this, and
because people like to argue against everything, but it provides
the the it provides the same sort of container as

(01:53:02):
the bar did.

Speaker 2 (01:53:07):
And people have this in some ways. We were talking
about this yesterday.

Speaker 3 (01:53:11):
In some ways, like that stigma that there is against
alcoholism and drug that kind of brings these people together,
and it's like a badge of honor, like oh, I
know you, like you see somebody walk out of there,
you say. You know, people in a will say to
other people, oh, are you a friend of Bill? Like
Bill Wilson, and so they know that, and it's kind
of like this.

Speaker 2 (01:53:27):
Language and then there's like this instant connection.

Speaker 3 (01:53:30):
And I'm not saying I'm not saying everybody has to
go to twelve step meetings, but finding a community and
a place to fit and be and be safe is
extremely important. Yeah, you know, alone, I will make up
the worst parts of the world and myself and I

(01:53:52):
need that connection with with others. I mean, I think,
I just I think we're built that way. I mean,
I I you know, I know there's a lot of
work around. The opposite of an addiction is connection, and
I don't know that. I always aspire, I always agree
with like it's the opposite thing. But I think connection
is so important now for some people. You can't just

(01:54:14):
throw people when they've been addicted or traumatized into those
types of environments because for them, connection or what they
believe is connection, may have been very dangerous.

Speaker 2 (01:54:22):
Somebody's been abused in their home.

Speaker 3 (01:54:24):
You know, I've worked with kids that are young men
that we were you know, people were telling to go
to like twelve step programs, you know, find a sponsor,
they tell them, you know, go through the steps with them,
which involves kind of an inventory, which is kind of
like go find an older, experienced guy and tell them
your secrets. Well, what this kid had never told us

(01:54:45):
and we found out in treatment, is that, you know,
he was abused by a scout master or a teacher.
So like going to an older guy and telling your
secrets wasn't really a source of safety. Now that doesn't
mean that that thing's the problem, but there were there
was work that sometimes we need to do with people
to be able to connect or find how you can
connect with one person and build community that way. It

(01:55:08):
doesn't have to be throwing yourself into you know, a
twenty thousand person arena where you're gonna get hugged by
a fish fan that you don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:55:17):
It would be a lot cooler if you did. You
know what it really really would you mentioned power greater
than yourself. How do you see that play out with
people you work with? How important is that? How does
it get defined?

Speaker 3 (01:55:28):
I mean, I think it's I think at the core
of everything, alcoholism, drug addiction, anything that kind of is
blocking us from who we are and our full expression
is a spiritual malady. Yeah, that pigs a question what
is spirituality? I don't for some people that they find
that in a religious context and practices, you know. I

(01:55:51):
think it's returning to the spirit that we we already are.
That a spiritual process is not going to get something
that we don't have. It's about returning to who we
already are. I think we're kind of born perfect, whole
and complete, and our experiences in life kind of start
to cover some of that up. You know. It's why

(01:56:13):
we see kids that, like, you know, they think they
can be and do anything. My friend's kid many years ago,
I remember she was four, and I said, what is
what is Calen want to be when she grows up?

Speaker 2 (01:56:25):
And they said a cheetah. Of course she can't be
a cheetah, right, but you.

Speaker 3 (01:56:34):
Know, she thought in her way that she could, you know,
and it'll be a point at which she realizes she can't,
and maybe we'll be crushed by that.

Speaker 4 (01:56:42):
She's older now joins a furry community, or.

Speaker 3 (01:56:44):
Joins a furry community. But you know, I see that
with my kids. But I think some people that stuff,
that innocence starts getting covered up very very early, maybe
even pre birth, you know, when they're in the womb
and their mother attached to their mother's nervous system. That
is very maybe if they're very scared or traumatized themselves.
You know, I think that's a lot of what we
see with you know, when I've worked in treatment centers

(01:57:07):
and things like that, we've had always you know, fifteen
to twenty percent of the people in there were adopted,
you know, and maybe even into good homes, but their
nervous system was kind of set in a way that
it didn't fit into the environment that they were in there.
Kind of this is a lot I my belief, probably

(01:57:28):
unsupported by evidence, which a lot of my beliefs might be,
is that our nervous system kind of develops to prepare
us for the environment that we're coming into. I think
we're very intuitive beings and we're not just like alive
the momentment we take that breath. I mean, there's a
lot going on before that as we're developing. But so

(01:57:49):
some sort of spiritual awakening, you know, to and in
that finding a power greater than yourself. Why is that
so important? Because if I'm not doing that, that's saying
that I'm the.

Speaker 2 (01:58:06):
Greatest power.

Speaker 3 (01:58:08):
Whether that's from like a selfish self, but a lot
of people, that means I have to control everything, I
have to manage everything, I have to do the impossible,
and that creates that's that's where so much of the
effects of trauma, anxiety, stress all come from. I'm trying
to manage stuff that I that I can't, you know,
and and the amount of things that we can control

(01:58:30):
are so small. Like I mean, I can control certain things,
like I can control knocking this cup off the table.
I even if it's falling on the tile floor, it's
still I might. I can't promise that it's going to break. Yeah,
you know, I can't force all of these things. So finding,
I think an addiction is a search for a power
greater themselves. I always will say alcohol is a power

(01:58:52):
greater than myself. Save my life, save my life. Many
times it just wasn't a power great enough. And you know,
so however, people find that, you know, just some people
will find it in the you know, the power of
the universe, the power of community, you know, the power
of being with one other person, and other people find

(01:59:15):
it in a relationship with God or whatever that means
to them. But I think that there's this it's a
it's a very important question to ask and route to
go go down. It's the biggest question. Yeah, yeah, all right,
final two questions. And I know we can't give everyone

(01:59:38):
the same thing. People are different.

Speaker 1 (01:59:41):
If someone is thinking, I overdo this thing, it's hurting me,
what is the first thing you would tell them?

Speaker 3 (01:59:49):
Setting aside where they're like actively suicidal or you know,
drinking or doing drugs in a way that they need
to be in the hospital.

Speaker 2 (01:59:57):
We'll set that aside for a second. Say the question again,
if they how do I.

Speaker 1 (02:00:02):
They feel like they're overdoing something and it's hurting them.

Speaker 3 (02:00:05):
Okay, we would you tell them stop it for thirty days,
make a commitment to stop it for thirty days, and
then be honest with yourself and be aware of what's
happening in that period of time.

Speaker 2 (02:00:17):
You know, are you able to stop for thirty days?

Speaker 3 (02:00:19):
That doesn't necessarily give you the answer that it's not
controlling you or a problem or you're overdoing it.

Speaker 2 (02:00:25):
But even if you were.

Speaker 3 (02:00:26):
Able to the whole time, were you waiting for day
thirty one? Are you thinking about it all the time?

Speaker 4 (02:00:32):
You know?

Speaker 3 (02:00:32):
We're you organizing your life in a way that you know.
I think a lot of people will fool themselves. I
used to fool myself with that. I used to I
got into even though I lived in Florida. I got
in this like high altitude mountaineering. First I had done
Mount Kilmanjaro, and then I went to like Mount Aconcagua
and I did ice climbing in Alaska, and this is
all when I was and then we talked about I

(02:00:53):
went to Bhutan and this was all during the period
of time I was drinking.

Speaker 2 (02:00:56):
But I would pull it together for a period of
time to train for.

Speaker 6 (02:00:59):
This thing, and then when it was over, dumped off
in Bangkok, you know, so I'm going to get.

Speaker 4 (02:01:09):
This flight to route through.

Speaker 3 (02:01:11):
Bangkok and that was that was that was actually after
Killim and jar and I'm just kidding and from Africa
to but I mean, recognize what your relationship is is
with it, you know. I think they also look at
am I overdoing it? Is it this thing and how
is it impacting my life negatively or or positively? And
being able to take an inventory of that, you know,

(02:01:34):
I think that's the stopping and seeing what can happen
over that period of time and how you're thinking about it.
It's kind of like the old Jeff remember Jeff Foxworthy,
like here's your sign, Like, yeah, totally, when drinking, you're
thinking about not drinking, and or when you're not drinking,
you're thinking about drinking. You might be an alcoholic type
of thing. So that's one way. The other way is

(02:01:55):
to you know, get in an assessment with somebody and
be honest with them and and you know, whether that's
a therapist or a doctor or whatever, whatever the thing
is to find out, you know, if they're overdoing they
think they're overdoing sugar, maybe they should go get some
blood tests and figure it out. You know. Sometimes people
are Sometimes people are saying I'm overdoing something because today

(02:02:16):
they didn't feel good about it, but when we look
at their history, they're not. Some people are saying I'm
not overdoing it because you know, three days a week
they're not doing it, but they can't control the days
that they do overdo it or not.

Speaker 4 (02:02:26):
Yeah, right, So yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 3 (02:02:28):
But I think that's a that's a great Thirty days
is not a magic number, but a period of time
to try to intervene on it, stop it and see
what happens.

Speaker 4 (02:02:36):
It happens. Yeah, all right. Final question.

Speaker 1 (02:02:38):
You could see any band or musician living or dead,
oh my god, live any point in their career.

Speaker 4 (02:02:45):
Who are you choosing come on Nirvana like nineteen ninety one?

Speaker 3 (02:02:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, like in a in a small bar.

Speaker 4 (02:02:55):
Just a shitty bar in like Seattle.

Speaker 2 (02:02:57):
Yeah, which I wouldn't have even remembered the show.

Speaker 1 (02:03:02):
That's the problem. I think I would My first answer
was the Dead in nineteen seventy two.

Speaker 2 (02:03:08):
Oh, that'd be great also.

Speaker 4 (02:03:10):
But then I was like, what if you what if
you saw Miles Davis and like right when he was
coming up like before kind of blue, that would be awesome.
Oh yeah, just melt your face. It's a hard question.

Speaker 2 (02:03:24):
I go back into uh remember the Back to the
Future when they were at the.

Speaker 3 (02:03:32):
At the dance from the movie Back to the Future
and he comes out and plays Johnny be good by
Chuck Berry.

Speaker 4 (02:03:37):
Because everyone stops.

Speaker 2 (02:03:39):
Yeah, he's like, ah, your kids will love it.

Speaker 4 (02:03:41):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (02:03:43):
But I think there's also something to going back and
back in time.

Speaker 3 (02:03:47):
I don't even know who it would be, but like
seeing hearing something that you we don't even have a
recording of. Ryan.

Speaker 4 (02:03:52):
Thanks for coming on the show, man, Thanks for having me.

Speaker 3 (02:03:54):
This has been This has been really great. I love
I'm a I started off as a fan, so I
love which you're right. I love the stories you tell.
I like how you weave that in and you're doing
really important work in the world. You are doing important work, man,
Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 1 (02:04:08):
Thanks to Ryan for coming on the show and let
me also note Ryan would like to revise his choice
for the band he would like to see live. He
came up with this idea right after we turned off
the recording. His answer has been revised to the Doors,
which I personally think is a better answer. Thank you
for listening. We earn your feeds twice a week, so
please keep an eye out for more. If you have

(02:04:28):
a question for our Ask Michael Anything section, please send
it to media at twopct dot com or drop it
in the comments. We will try to answer as many
questions as possible. If you want to send us an
audio version of your question, or even a video version,
we would love to run that and answer it on air.
As always, please don't forget to subscribe and have fun.

Speaker 4 (02:04:50):
Don't die

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;} Why Most Habit Change Fails (And How to Break the Addiction Cycle)

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

All Episodes

Why Most Habit Change Fails (And How to Break the Addiction Cycle)

Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb