Dhru Purohit Show - Break Free of People Pleasing, Sugar Addiction, and Limiting Beliefs that are Holding You Back From Living the Life You Desire with Dr. Adi Jaffe

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Momentous, Cozy Earth, and Levels. In today’s world, addiction takes many forms—whether it’s alcohol, drugs, social media, or people-pleasing. Certain key factors drive these behaviors and make breaking the cycle incredibly challenging. Today’s guest offers powerful insights into brain health and psychology, explaining why these patterns emerge and how we can begin to unhook from them. On this episode of The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with psychologist and addiction expert Dr. Adi Jaffe. Dr. Jaffe breaks down the “hook” that keeps us stuck in addictive behaviors and explores the root causes that draw us back to them. He takes a deep dive into shame—the true fuel behind addiction—and explains why people-pleasing is one of the hardest patterns to break. He also shares his own powerful journey of overcoming addiction and highlights the importance of holding onto beliefs that serve us—and letting go of those that don’t. Dr. Adi Jaffe is a UCLA-trained psychologist and a leading expert on mental health, addiction, and relationships. Once a meth addict and drug dealer, his life changed after a SWAT arrest and jail sentence. Now the author of The Abstinence Myth and Unhooked, Dr. Jaffe challenges traditional addiction treatment and leads IGNTD, an organization helping former inmates find support for addiction and mental health. His work has been featured on CNN, Fox, NBC, and Psychology Today. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Jaffe dive into: The hook beneath addiction (00:00) What you gain by holding onto your addiction (5:47) The deeper roots of people-pleasing (7:15) Dhru and Dr. Jaffe's personal stories with people-pleasing (11:58) The SPARO Method explained (19:38) Dr. Jaffe's personal addiction story and how Unhooked was created (24:40) Why shame is the true fuel behind addiction (36:02) The hooks and stimulants that fueled Dr. Jaffe's past addictions (41:22) Fixed mindset vs. growth mindset (50:21) The capacity for change: being reactive vs. proactive (55:01) How Dr. Jaffe overcame his addiction (58:30) Common habits that unknowingly lead to addiction (1:07:34) Understanding the addiction of self-criticism (1:22:21) Letting go of limiting beliefs and embracing self-evaluation (1:29:15) The power of celebrating small wins (1:37:30) Where to follow Dr. Jaffe’s work (1:44:08) Also mentioned in this episode: Unhooked: Free Yourself from Addiction Forever How to Heal Your Body and Manifest Reality with Bruce Lipton For more on Dr.Jaffe, follow him on Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter,  Apple Podcast, LinkedIn, his Website, and other platforms, such as IGNTD™. This episode is brought to you by Momentous, Cozy Earth, and Levels, Optimize your energy and mental clarity with the Momentous Three: Protein, Omega-3s, and Creatine made by and used by the best. Head to livemomentous.com and use code DHRU for 35% off your first subscription. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Right now, Levels is offering my listeners an additional 2 FREE months of the Levels annual Membership when you use my link, levels.link/DHRU. Make moves on your metabolic health with Levels today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Adi Jaffe, welcome to the podcast. Addiction in all its forms can quietly or sometimes loudly ruin our lives. And today you're here to talk about this conversation, but most importantly, help people break free. Whether somebody listening today is struggling with sugar addiction, people pleasing, which is an addiction as well, or something more severe like porn, gambling, or even drugs, you have an. important reminder for them. And the core reminder that you're here to present to us today is the problem is not the behavior. It's the hook underneath. Expand on this and give us an example of what you mean. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on, Drew. And I think sugar is a great example. Actually, you start with which you use because I think of sugar is almost one of the first drugs that we

have purified sugar, if you will. And here's the point, right? We all have access to purified sugar in society at large. And yet a subset of people find themselves having a hard time controlling their intake. And the question becomes, and people might come to me, the reason I call the book unhooked is people come and say, I'm hooked on sugar, I'm hooked on alcohol, I'm hooked on porn, I'm hooked on the show, whatever. Like, they use the thing that they're hooked on as the explanation for the behavior. And when I said, hold on, that is the symptom.

The reality is that the reason you are using the sugar, the reason you're stuck people pleasing. The reason you're drinking too much when you get home at night is because those things are used to mask underlying behaviors, struggles, early life experiences, traumas that you've had probably for a long time, like 10, 15 years at the least. That's kind of the average we get. And what happens to a lot of people is that finally explains to them why stopping the behavior has been so tough. Because everybody's tried. If you feel like you're hooked on sugar and you've try to cut down your sugar intake and you've been unsuccessful, you end up beating yourself up. You go, well, what's wrong with me? Why can't I control my behavior? And for a lot of people,

once they understand it, there's actually a whole C of underlying issues. It gives them a different frame and something else to start attacking in order to actually change their behavior. Let's talk about that C. For example, what are the common things that you see for somebody in that situation who might be hooked on sugar? What are the underlying behaviors that could be potentially present? Yeah. So I kind of named them quickly, but let's just break them down. Number one is actually early developmental modeling and behavioral development. So the environment you were born into taught you a lot about the world, a lot, but you were zero to eight, nine, ten years old.

Most of it you don't remember in terms of an explicit memory. And the vast majority of it, you would never actually understand the depths to which it predicts your future behavior. But your brain is conditioned to do the most of its learning, definitely before you hit age 12. and after that kind of just become more and more efficient in repeating that same model. So if you grew up in a household where,

I'm actually just thinking in my head, this is just off the top of my head, but let me just show, this is us. Yeah. There was a scene where the daughter kind of feels really alienated from the mom and the dad would always take her to ice cream when she was young.

That was their bonding moment. That's how they would bond. Every single time he wanted to bond with his daughter, he would take her to ice cream. Everybody else was watching that show and thinking to themselves, man, that's really nice. that he's got this moment with her.

And I'm thinking to myself, he's developing a pattern where she connects, connecting to dad, love, et cetera, to ice cream. Because that's the only time that they showed them connecting.

And so implicitly, without somebody actually being able to call it out, the connection between love, intimacy, appreciation, connection, and sugar and ice cream can be created. So these little tiny patterns,

that's one piece. Next are traumas, actual difficult big T, little T traumas, but difficult life experiences that create anxieties, fears, negative self-impression, et cetera, in a person. And again, we're talking normally pretty early, although for these,

I've definitely had clients where during college or later on in life that a substantial trauma. Think losing someone, almost dying a car accident, right? Being assaulted sexually, physically, emotionally. That's another piece. And then the last one that I really want to hit are all of us have negative

self-perception, negative struggles, kind of struggles that we have that may not be trauma-based self-judgment that can lead to something like people pleasing right or those components and so what we believe like I'm not good enough yeah I'm not good enough I'm always going to be alone the world is a dark place I got to be out for myself like I have a list of them actually in the in a whole section in the book that I've seen come up pretty frequently I'm not good enough nobody's going to love me I'm going to be alone and the world is dark I need to care for myself and not other people are very very common ones. And so if any of those three categories of things that I just mentioned are happening

to you regularly in your life, what you can end up finding is you can find yourself in anxiety, fear, depression, loneliness, isolation at different points. And what you learn to do is you learn to deal with those negative feelings because we don't live in a society. We're saying that to people around you is actually really easy and simple. So you learn to cover them up, but they're not easy to cover up. So you cover them up with behaviors, substances, et cetera, that allow you to at least pretend like you feel normal or maybe even numb the pain to an extent where you become unaware of it. Is part of what you're saying that no matter how destructive our patterns or behaviors are, there's always something that we're getting in return. And so part of the work,

or a huge part of the work in this instance that you talk about in your book, which is fantastic, is trying to figure out what do you get for keeping this thing alive? I think that's probably one of the best short ways to explain the underlying message. Jeff Cam, Joseph Campbell, sorry, has a quote that I quote in the book that I love. The cave you fear the most is the one that holds your treasure is from a hero of a thousand faces. And essentially what he's saying is it's a colloquial way to say what you just said right now, right? Drew, which is you've been running away from something. That thing is going to keep chasing you.

It's not going to let you go. There is no way to run away from it. You will take on whatever behavior, whatever habits, whatever relationships in your life. whatever ways of understanding the world to excuse running away from the discomfort. But the only thing to do is to stop, face it, deal with it, and resolve it. And once you do that, you find yourself not having to run anymore. Well, you're not just an expert in the space. You've actually lived this experience in your life.

We're going to be talking about your story in a second, a few things to cover. But just a little preview for people who are listening. Part of your story includes waking up one day to a shotgun in your face. We're going to get to that in a second. But first, we talked about sugar. I want to go a little bit further. We mentioned it. Let's talk about people pleasing, for example.

Sure. What would be some of the underlining aspects in this methodology that you've just broken down that would put somebody in a place where they know, they know that people pleasing is not serving them? They know that it's not just about being nice to people occasionally, but they're truly sabotaging, their goals and dreams in life on a regular basis, almost in a way, many people feel like, why am I doing this to harm myself?

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So let's break down for a second, at least so we have common language around what people-pleasing is. right people pleasing is behaving in ways that outwardly display personality habits likes and dislikes that you believe will make other people like you more get along with you more want you around more right it's kind of like projecting this outward mask saying yes to things that you really want to say no to or least you know not a vehement kind of like hell yes to um pretending that you like things food events whatever because other people that you want to associate with yourself. Now, a lot of people might not even consider that in the realm of addiction or compulsive behavior. So let me, I want to explain what I talk about in the book.

To me, addiction's compulsive behaviors are behaviors you engage in regularly. Whether you take a substance or not is almost meaningless in this, to my opinion. You engage in them regularly over a long period of time. And they cause you a disservice in disrupting your ability to live a full life that keeps you happy, joyful, purposeful, etc. So if your people pleasing is done to an extent where you're literally, I'm just going to make this metaphor up, right, but you're literally putting yourself in situations where you're hanging out with people you don't really like because you think it's the right thing to do for your social status, whatever.

You're eating food you don't like because the people that you want to spend time where they're eating that food. You're saying yes to commitments, things at work, et cetera, that you want to say no to because they're harming you or your ability to like yourself when you wake up in the morning. and you keep doing this over and over and over. It's causing your pain. You've tried to block it, but the desire to be like, the desire to people please is so high that you're unable to stop yourself.

That would qualify is this compulsive behavior pattern, right? The damage is not what people think of an addiction. You're not causing damage to your liver, even the sugar. You're not making yourself diabetic, right? It's not that kind of damage. The damage in your quality of life, you're waking up, anxious,

stressed out, afraid, you know, wondering about whether all the people you associate where they're going to continue to like you, want to be with you, et cetera. So any of these kinds of patterns to me could qualify is what we're talking about. And now hopefully when I say how damaging something like this could be, a lot of people, whether you're experiencing this right now or have or know somebody who is, you can recognize that you can have a life that on the outside looks beautiful and great, but be suffering in time. Intently. Sometimes even people celebrate you. Look at that person. They're so selfless. Look at what they do for everybody else and they celebrate your people pleasing. Or another one that you talk about in the book that isn't often recognized as an addiction for people is overworking. The addiction to overworking to the degree that it is sabotaging your life. So I love that point that you just made, which is that you can look not only normal, but sometimes people could be celebrating you. And quietly, this addiction is keeping you from

living the life that you're meant to live. Yeah, and I just want to, just for fairness, oftentimes a person in a situation like this will find themselves having to engage in behavioral patterns to deal without all that internal discomfort. That's just what I've found. And again, people come to me for transformational behavior change. So it could be that I'm very biased,

because those are the people that I see, right? I see people, but they may eat too much. They may actually completely control their eating, but they incredibly dissatisfied and then project that into, drinking or other behaviors that are damaging. So the problem is it's a little whack-a-mo kind of problem. If what you try to deal with is a symptom every single time,

you don't deal with the underlying issue. And for a person like that, the question I would ask is, what makes you think you're so worthless that everybody else's opinion of you is substantially more valuable than your willingness, your ability to live a life that serves you? Because that's what you're really doing, right? You're sacrificing self for the opinion and the liking of others.

Yeah, when you talk about at high level, it's easy for anybody to see that, okay, great, that doesn't make sense. Like, why are you putting people's opinions before you? But then when you go into that model that you cover, which I believe the acronym is eat, is that? Yeah, so a sparrow and eat. Yeah, sparrow and eat.

Yeah, but you mentioned eat. And I'll just share my own story as that in high school, I learned. I went to a school where I had friends and I fit in in some categories, but I didn't really feel like I found my tribe. Yeah. And as part of that, and moving around a lot as a kid,

which you also did as well too, I got really good at being the new kid in schools. I lived in like three, four different cities between the time that I was young, between the time that I was born, and then I finally ended up in high school. And one of the things that I learned very quickly is one of the ways to get over being the new kid

and be liked is do things. for other people. If you could be the resource guy, if you could do stuff, if you could pull strings or whatever, then people would like you. And if people would like you, you wouldn't be left alone. And if you weren't left alone, then you were okay. If you were alone, you didn't fit in. You're more likely to get picked on. You're more likely to have issues. So very quickly, I got into that habit, not sitting down one day at a table and saying, I'm going to be a people pleaser because people are going to like me. It's actually this fear of, oh my gosh, if I'm at this new school and I'm not liked, what's going to happen to me? What an example. I love that. First of all,

congratulations for figuring that out because when I was put in those situations as a young kid, I felt so lost, right, at 14, 15 years old. I didn't know, I mean, I knew why I wasn't accepted or liked. That was new. I didn't speak the language well, et cetera. But the reason I love the example you gave so well is exactly how you started this today. Being a people pleaser served you. It worked for you. I got something. That's why it became a thing. And that's what a lot of people missed is that chart in the book where I say a lot of people look at somebody's endpoint and they say, this makes no sense. And I promise you, if you follow the story to the beginning and you understand how this behavior began, I guarantee I'll put everything on this. It makes all the sense in the

world. You developed a behavior of giving to others, even to potentially sometimes at a cost to yourself, because the cost otherwise was isolation, loneliness, shame in a way, right? Because what is shame, but separating us from others? And so you had a, it was a brilliant method. And you came up with it on your own. That's what I love about addictive, compulsive tendencies, is they worked so well for a while that we actually over-relied on them because they served the purpose. And then I assume, I don't know if this is true because you didn't tell me this before, but I assume what ended up happening is at some point later and left, you're like, I'm surrounded by people. Everybody likes me. Everything looks good on the outside. Why am I not happy? And then you're like, oh, because I'm actually not reserving

enough of the resources, enough of the time, enough of what I have for myself. I'm giving it, even when I don't necessarily want to. Yeah. And the sublayer underneath that is that because I was very ambitious and I wanted to help people, I would over commit to things. And I would, I would create a little bit of a, you know, a small trail of devastation of saying yes to something. Yes to a nonprofit that I'd help out with a project. Yeah. Right. Yes to a teacher who needed to help with an additional thing.

Yes to a friend who needed help building a website. And because I was completely overwhelmed and no one person could do all these things, I would crash and burn every few months. And I would ghost people. And I would end up in a situation where it's like, why do I keep on running this pattern and not having an insight? And so as much as somebody from the outside would say, okay, what's the problem with a little bit of people policing? Well, it can, the problem can manifest in many different ways. And we'll talk about your own journey and how this showed up for you.

But the problem for me in that situation is that I was more committed to being liked out of the fear of being alone that I was out of having integrity to give somebody the truth, which would have saved everybody a lot of pain and heartache myself, first and foremost, later on. I love that. I love that because it serves. My main point in writing this book is to really broaden the lens. When we talk about compulsive behavior is addiction, almost everybody talks about drugs and alcohol, you know, that's a third of it, maybe even a quarter. Most compulsive patterns are actually behavioral, in my opinion.

I mean, look, think of all the people that are doom scrolling on their devices all the time. What is that but escapist behavior? But they can say to themselves, I'm not drinking, I'm not using drugs, I'm not doing anything bad. Why is this a problem? And you alluded to it, but I'll talk about in the book, I talk about in the book about a client of mine who reached out to me after they collapsed on the floor in front of their colleagues,

peers, and clients, they thought they were dying. That was the moment. And I won't kill the story for anybody who's going to read the book, but that was the moment they realized that was a problem. And I would argue, just like somebody who's had an alcohol addiction ends up being arrested or somebody's, you know, addicted to drugs and has an overdose, it's that moment back against the wall where most people change.

But you don't have to wait that long, right? The whole point of writing in the book is to try to help you do this longer, easier. So many people have that belief that your life has to hit rock bottom for things to change. Just expand on that a little bit further, right? You talked about it a little bit, but just continue that conversation. Yeah, and I use that example in my own. I'll actually end up where I talk about this in the book.

Most people in order to create real transformational change, at least to decide and then go do all the work for it, need what I call back against the wall moment. This is the come to Jesus, oh my gosh, my life can't continue the way that it's been going, right? The problem is those are high stress situations. You've been arrested.

Your wife says she's going to leave you. You've almost died. You've hurt yourself. You've ruined relationships. You know, really, really difficult sometimes to come out of those. Not only they're high stress, you've lost a lot, which means there's more room to make up.

You're also the most, the least recent or psychologically because of high stress, high uncontrollable stress. And I talk about chronic and acute stress in the book. So they are the best at creating motivation to change. But the amount of work that's required is actually greater if you take yourself there than if you can start earlier. So the whole premise of the book, the Sparrow and Eat model, and I'll double click on E because you mentioned it before.

Eat stands for explore, accept, transform. And the kind of joke or the thing that I just say to people is, look, we all know, I'm on your podcast. We all know we need to watch what we eat in order to keep our well-being in our health. We also need to watch what we eat in our head, right? So not just in our bodies, but also our brains. And so Explore except Transform says if you got a negative outcome, if something happened in your life that you don't like, most of us try to ignore it or change it. And I say you're not ready to change you yet because you don't know what drove that.

And so Explore is about identifying those underlying issues. And we'll get into the other parts of it later. For somebody who finds themselves in a situation with their back against the wall, pause, before you try to change a lot, before you try to brush it under, understand why you just found yourself there, right? Track back, like you just talked to us about starting out, moving as a child and having all these needs to be popular and be accepted. Track back why your behavior just took you to this endpoint.

Understand, and I give you a model how to do that in the book, understand what needs to be change because that's the best learning opportunity. You do that early, you will never end up in a situation where you're about to lose everything. You talked about Sparrow. So walk us through that process, right? You talk about it in the book, but walk us through that process and how people can think about it in their own life. All right, I got a question for you. What if you could track your food, sleep, exercise, blood sugar, and key biomarkers all in one place. Well, I have good news for you. With the Levels app, this is not only possible. It's actually needed if we're going to fix our broken health care system.

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interested in this, the app that tracks it all in one place, Levels is offering my listeners two free months of their annual membership when you sign up through my link. Levels. Dot link slash D-H-R-U. I don't know how long this offer will last. So if you've been thinking about learning more about your metabolic health and tracking all of your metrics in one place, now is the time to get started. Just go to levels.com. Levels.com slash D-H-R-U to get two free months of their annual membership today. Yeah. So the way I opened Sparrow, Sparrow stands for stimulus perception, activation, response,

and outcome. Sparrow. Most people come to me after a negative outcome. That's that back against the wall moment, right? Fight with the wife says she's going to leave them. They lost a job. One of my clients literally fell off a 30-foot retaining wall while drunk in the middle of the night, almost died.

Bad, bad experiences. And so they come to me at a negative outcome. in their head, so I'll go back to Sparrow, stimulus, perception, activation, response, outcome. Response comes right before I come. The response is the behavior. What did you do? So they say, I went drinking. I blacked out.

I almost killed myself. I need to stop drinking. Or my wife found out that I watched porn behind her back all the time. Or I cheated on her. The response was a cheating or the response with the porn. I need to stop doing the thing. What they miss is a stimulus perception activation piece that come before it. And so they get caught in the cycle.

I did something bad. I had a bad outcome. I tried to change the behavior. It doesn't succeed. I get the negative outcome again and they get caught and they don't understand why they're failing. I'm bad. The situation is bad. If I just stop being bad,

everything would fix itself. Yeah. Like in your situation, I'm overcommitting. I'm saying yes, too much to people. I need to say no. I need to say no to people more.

Sounds so simple. Yeah. It's like, oh, duh, thank you. Right. You just help. I'm best psychologist on the face of the planet, right?

I'm eating too much sugar. Stop eating sugar. Stop eating sugar. I mean, you don't even need 12 steps. I got one. This is it, right? It's a one step. Just stop doing the bad thing.

People keep failing. They don't understand why. The reason people are failing is that response, that behavior is not standing on its own. It's a response to an activation caused by a frame, caused by a perception. So the whole point of the book is to say when a negative outcome happens, and this is to me, I've learned this over the last 20 years of my own behavioral change. We'll get to my story. But in the last 23 years, I had to do essentially 100.

an 80 degree turn in my own life, right? And so I had to learn very, very quickly in order to save myself, how do I make sure that I do not keep ruining my life by making really, really wrong choices? But what I've learned through literature, through studying psychology, getting my PhD, all the stuff is you actually normally learn through failure. Avoiding failure is a bad idea. And I give examples in the book, but you know, you look at the most successful human beings on the face of the planet. And regardless how you feel politically, let's put Elon Musk in that category. Let's put Henry Ford. Let's put Steve Jobs. Let's put, you know, Michael George, like the biggest successes on the face of the planet are successes because they don't fear failure, or at least

they know how to leverage it once it happens, right? And so that those negative outcomes that people come to me for, they're great opportunities. But what most people try to do is they say, hey, tell me how to never end up in that situation again. They try to kind of brush it under the rug and avoid it. And I say, hold on. The way we're going to teach you how to not end up there again is to actually hyper-analyze it. We need to lean into the discomfort. We need to understand why did you end up finding yourself in that situation. There are a lot of specific pieces of how I talk about that in the book, but I really make people break down. Like, okay, you blacked out, woke up in the morning, had an horrible fight with your wife and she's throwing she's leaving you because you were

an a-hole yesterday while you were drunk and at a party with friends. You said some really, really horrible and inappropriate things. Can we all understand for a second why you would want to never talk about that event again and brush it under the rug? I mean, nobody would want the process. But I say, when did that start? What was the stimulus? What started that process?

Then perception is when a trigger, when something showed up in your life, how did the perception hit you? Like, for you, if I don't want to be lonely, if I want people to like me, if I want to be accepted, I need to say yes and contribute to others, right? The activation with that disappearing or not being there could be. fear, loneliness, negative self-perception, right? Things of like, I'm going to be, I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life and future projecting. And what you did at some point in your life in the past is you said, when I feel scared of being alone forever, I have responses. I look for

somebody to help. Right. When I feel scared, I'm going to be alone forever. I look at all my friends. I say, hey, do you need any help with anything right now? And that makes me feel better. It doesn't deal with your over-commitment. And so what you end up finding over and over and over is the main points of leverage that most people have are not in changing the behavior and they're not in avoiding the triggers. They're in shifting the perception

and or learning how to control the activation. Those are the two biggest leverage point that you really have. Huge. You know, you hinted at your story and I talked a little bit earlier. Let's talk about that. Does you mind sharing about your journey, which includes

your own addiction story, drugs, all-nighters, SWAT teams, I'm going to hand it over to you to talk about it in the context of where we are in the interview. Yeah, you know, I think we talk about this in graduate school all the time. Research is really me search, right?

As you try to understand, what the heck happened? And that was definitely true for me. I found myself, by the time I was a PhD in UCLA, I had this, that was like phase three of my life. So phase one was as a kid growing up up to 14 years old. Same exact apartment. Went to school across the street from my home. Like super chill, good upbringing, right?

You know, parents had issues, fought, not very emotional household, but I didn't have any big T trauma. It was pretty wholesome. 14 years old, I moved. Had the exact same experience you did, Drew, super lonely and isolated. I felt socially anxious. I didn't speak the language well. The thing is you found giving to other people.

people within three, four months of me being in the United States, I found alcohol. And so I went to a sleepaway camp, got introduced to vodka. Somebody handed me a disgusting, warm jug of vodka. And I took two swags off of it, just trying to be brave, look all cool in front of all the other kids. I had no idea what the vodka was going to do to me. But then 20 minutes later, I felt good. I wasn't afraid of being isolated at all. And you had a community of other people that you were drinking and smoking with.

They were all drinking. It was great. You know, I felt more secure and more comfortable than I ever remember feeling, to be honest, until that moment. Now, I didn't know what to call it anxiety, right? None of that stuff existed in my head. I just know I felt better. After that trip, I took every opportunity. Every time I could get invited to a party, I would go.

Now I got invited to parties where people are drinking. Alcohol became a thing. Then two years later, weed became a thing because a girl, I like gave me a joint. And I, again, people pleasing, wanting to fit in, said yes. By the time I got to college at 18, I was drinking. and smoking weed every single day. And it just kept progressing from there. And you already alluded to it, but I started out in upstate New York.

I ended up moving to Los Angeles by myself. I hated the cold in Buffalo. And so I moved myself out here. Still appreciate the weather like 20 some years later. But I was kind of disconnected from friends again. And I found harder drugs. The group I connected with here wasn't smoking weed and drinking, although they did some of that.

But it was Coke. I didn't really like Coke as much, but ecstasy. you know, a lot of hallucinogens, all that kind of stuff. Started using that a lot, but it was really expensive. You know, $25 a pill for ecstasy, I didn't have money. I was out of state. My parents paid tuition and said everything else is up to you. So I found a, I was entrepreneurial.

I found that if I can just collect everybody's money ahead of time and go buy together, then I got my pills for free. So now I got to do drugs for free. And then another little insight hit me. And I said, oh my gosh, if I can buy pills for the whole month for everybody, I may even make a little money out of this. Borrowed some money from a friend, three turns of that. I was not buying 50, 100 pills at a time, selling them to friends. I didn't think of myself as selling drugs.

I was just getting myself free drugs and then making a little bit of money off the top of them. And then it just blew up. I mean, all my friends were telling all their friends that I have drugs. Next thing, you know, I'll buy 300 pills, 400 pills, 500 pills, 500 pills, 1,000 pills at a thousand pills at a time. And by the time I graduated barely like squeaked out 1999, 2000 graduating college, I was just a drug dealer. But things come with drug dealing that you don't think about when you start on this journey. Like getting robbed. I got robbed at gunpoint a couple of times.

I got my place got broken into, you know, cartel deals, like all the stuff that you literally see in the movies. You know, when I live Breaking Bad, essentially at least the first season before I went completely insane. That was my life. But it happened so gradually, I didn't really think much of it, and I was high the entire time. The book opens with the scene that brought an abrupt end to that. I got in a motorcycle accident, broke my leg. The cops found a half a pound of Coke on me. I think it was about a half a pound.

And so they knew they needed to dig in deeper because that was pretty obvious. And for three months, everywhere I would go, they would try to get me to talk to them and give them connections, etc. I didn't. So three months later, the Beverly Hills SWAT team came to my house to pay me a visit. And that's how the book opens up. A wild journey. And inside of this process, too, you were also using some like very strong drugs, right? Like meth, I think at one point time. Meth was the drug that brought me down. I was a heavy, heavy user of meth, I'd say, for about three to four years. And it got introduced as a study aid, by the way. Yeah, you literally were taking it to stay up all night to study for an accounting test. Yep.

Once I discovered, I can just literally teach myself a quarter worth of a class in two days just being high on meth. In my ridiculous brain, I'll say at the time, was like, oh, now I'm never going to go study without this. So that meant midterms and finals. That meant papers. And then literally within three to four months I was using every day because I couldn't stay up if I didn't use meth. So a couple questions for you, zooming out for a second. and this part in your story. Yeah.

Separate from the people that reported to you, you know, you had other people dealing drugs with you, I think up to five people at one point in time. Did your family, does your mom, did the people around you who actually loved you, not just wanted something from you or were selling drugs for you, did they know what was going on? You know, it's a good question.

I didn't know the answer to that for a very long time. And if I'm honest, in my still compulsive brain that made a lot of excuses for my behavior, et cetera. When I got out of the haze, I was like, what the hell was wrong with the people around me? Why didn't they talk about it? But first of all, my family, look, they had to know. I was 124 pounds, Drew, when I got arrested, 124 pounds. Like, there's no way anybody can imagine that an adult male would be 124 pounds at whatever,

5 foot 9 and something. And my dad was a doctor. Like, obviously he knew something. up. They told me years later, they thought it was addicted to heroin. And the reason was because I wouldn't use meth when I was around them, so I would be tired all the time. So they saw me on the other side, and they thought it was heroin. But we never had a real conversation about it. And I think that's part of the reason why I write these books. It's part of the reason why I saw forward about my story. Too many people are scared to talk about this stuff. Too many people are

weirded out by having real. I mean, they would tell me I'm living a loser life. They'd have that conversation with, but nobody confronted me about the negative health consequences. Nobody confronted me about the fact that my life was looking pretty insane. To be fair, I'm not an idiot, so I'm also pretty good at covering it up. But I think the signs were unmistakable. I talked to my sister, Sophie and I used to have a podcast, my wife, and I actually interviewed my sister for the podcast because I wanted to know what it was like for her. And that was one of those moments where I really got to have a little self-reckoning because the thing, and I think we can say this with people pleasing, we can say this with sugar addiction, we can say this with alcoholism and those kinds of approaches.

You don't always see, you feel the devastation on yourself. You feel yourself burning out. You feel that impact to some extent. I don't think we're always aware of the impact we're having of other people. And I think that's where I talk about in the book. I split the world into like a half or a third of the people who struggle and the other half are the people who are affected by the people who struggle with these patterns. Because, and then maybe for them, people pleasing.

and codependency are kind of like their addiction, right? You know, even in your people pleasing, what does that not leave room for? Right? If you're in a relationship and you have somebody that you love and you care for, how are they being kind of forced out of spending time with you of intimacy, et cetera, if you're constantly looking for more and more people to like you and to feel like you're connected to them, right?

There's a consequence. There's always a consequence. And sometimes the biggest consequences is the silent life that you're not living. Yeah. that everybody inside knows that they are meant to do something or wants to start a business or give back or be more involved in their church or temple or synagogue or whatever it is, whatever your goals and dreams are, wants to start a family one day. And sometimes these, what I would call light, quote unquote, they're not light at all,

addicted behaviors. They're just silently keeping us from this life that we could be living. And every day we are hooked into these behaviors without having the awareness to understand why they're happening, where they're coming from. It's another day that we are kicking the can down the road of our true goals and dreams. Yeah. And look, we're, I consider us fortunate, right? We live in an area where self-expansion and exploration and understanding these underlying worlds. That's kind of a, that's the price of entry almost.

I feel like in living in LA, let alone, you know, being in a wellness community, et cetera. It's kind of like it's almost, there's almost competition in terms of like, how far have you gone in self-exploitation and self-development, right? But that's, I think that's a counterpoint to many, many other areas in the world. That's what I talk about in the book, a good bit is there are a lot of areas where the idea of talking about this internal turmoil, walking up to somebody that you kind of know, maybe I've just met and actually talking about what's going on in your life, creating open intimacy and exploration or just being transparent, right?

When somebody comes to you and says, hey, you know, we heard you do A, B, and C, could you help us with this project? To be able to pause and go, hey, you know what? That sounds great. It sounds like an amazing mission. To be honest, I'm stretched really, really thin right now. If you're okay, I have to say no right now. Check in with me in six months a year.

There's a couple of things that might wrap up by then. and then I'd be happy to talk about it again. Not even saying, but then I'd be happy to join. I'd be happy to explore it again. But right now, I just really have to protect my family, my time. There are probably people listening right now who cringe at the idea of saying that to another adult. And you have to think for a second sometimes about what have we done in this world where admitting to somebody else you're at the end of your rope, admitting to somebody else that you're overstretched,

that you're stressed, that you're, maybe they have a problem. I jumped on a call with a person I love. I really care about them a lot. We're doing a really cool project together. And as a call opened up, I was going through some personal stuff. And I said, hey, just FYI, there's a lot going on at home right now. Kids, wife, all this stuff that's like, I have three kids. You know, it's a complex life.

So just, you know, I'm about half here on this call right now today. So if you're okay with it, I know we're scheduled for 45 minutes. I'm probably going to need to cut in like 15, 20. Nobody was bothered by it. We picked it up next week. It was all good. But it took me probably through 15 years of work to get to a place. where I can open up a conversation like that and feel confident that I haven't shot those relationships,

right? That people aren't going to talk about me behind my back that I haven't screwed up somehow. You know, that's a perfect place to pivot into this idea that you go deep into, which is shame. You've said that shame is often the actual fuel behind addiction. Yeah. And that the way that we treat people who struggle often makes things worse. Why is shame so toxic in recovery and with just the spectrum of addiction? Sure. And talk about it in the context of your own personal journey as well.

Shame is when our internal representation of who we are, what we mean in the world, our value feels like it is in contrast, stands against what people expect of us of how we should behave. So I'm not as good. What I want to do is not as valued. is what society believes I should be, right? So think about people who have historically been shamed, right? It's like races, sexual orientation. Now there's a whole trans thing.

Like it's people who feel like who they are. It's not about what you do or what you like or what books you read. It's about who you are as an entity being less than or being looked down at by society at large, by the norm. Does that make sense? So a big part of the first third of the book, I would say, is about getting people to understand. that in order for shame to play such an prominent role in any struggle, forget just addiction, in any struggle that you have, you have to believe that what you are struggling with is abnormal. That is, it's a sign of your brokenness.

It's a sign of you being damaged. The reality is there's somewhere between 60 and 100. I know it's a large gap, but 60 and 100 million people struggling with compulsive addictive tendency in this country. The reason the gap is so big is, you know, 40 to 50 is probably the, drug and alcohol, the ones we keep track of because of research. But that doesn't include sex. That doesn't really include food addiction.

It doesn't include a lot of other behavioral interaction. So I would argue we're at least at the 60-70. If you're willing to be a little broader about it, 89 to 100 million. If you go to even just to the 60-70 million people, that's about a third of adults, a little less than a third of adults, a quarter of adults in the country who struggle. If you're willing to stretch the number to the higher numbers, that's about half of adults. How can we say that something is abnormal? where between a quarter to a half of the people in this country who are adults struggle with it right now.

And the reason I want to renormalize these struggles is when you feel shame, you feel like there's something wrong about who you are. It is really hard to put in the work for change when you believe you're broken, when you believe there's something that's not good about you. You alluded to my story. I fully believed that I had something kind of broken, something about my brain wasn't working appropriately. By the way, traditional treatment approaches repeated that to me over and over and over. Right. I'll use 12 steps just as an example because there's a 12 step group for everything, right?

There's probably overreaders anonymous or something. That might be a stretch. But like there's overeaters anonymous, right? There's gambling anonymous. There's all these for all these different issues that we talk about. So there's a really broad swath. But the understanding is that you have a disease that you've had your whole life and it's chronic and you're never going to leave it.

I think that's the absolute wrong take for a lot of people because a lot of people stay out. They don't get the help they need because they say, well, if I'm damaged, I'm broken forever, then why even put in the work? The way I see it is totally different. And I'll go back to the story you told us. If I can track somebody's starting point of their journey to today, their behavior makes all the sense in the world. And so why not take that time trip back, go address the underlying issues.

Sometimes they're difficult, true, right? I've dealt with people. I mean, I talk about some of these in the book. I've dealt with people who've had massive historical trauma. You don't have to have these issues, but a lot of people do. Let's go fix the damage created by these things. Let's go address them at a deep level. Not only do you get relief from these behavioral patterns that you're trying to change,

you get to be happy with yourself. And you know, you sound like somebody who's done some of this work once you found out that you have these patterns yourself. The relief is not only by not overcommitting. The relief is partially because you get to walk around knowing, not hoping, not believing that there is, knowing your own intrinsic value. And I think that's worth all the work in the world.

I want to come back to your story because I think there's a couple dots that I'd love to connect a little bit more for our audience. Sure. I know your story in depth because I've read about it. I've heard you on other podcasts. But for this context and this conversation, so far, people have heard that, hey, you had a pretty good life, you know, growing up. And yes, you moved a bunch.

Yeah. And you didn't fit in. At one point in time, you were mostly eating at lunch at the immigrants table. Right. Okay, that doesn't sound, you know, too bad. But you found your way through sort of combination of happenstance and other things. You didn't fit in. Alcohol was one of the vehicles of not just community, but also numbing out.

You didn't know to call it anxiety, but that you felt this sort of overwhelming sense of combination of emotions that were there. And that led to these cascading series of events. You never planned on being a drug dealer. You sort of fell into it. The part that I think that we didn't get a chance to touch on yet is help us. understand some of those additional components that were there. What are some of the hooks? What are some of the stimulances? What are some of the other things that were there in the background

that added fuel to the underlining fire that led to this situation? Yeah, 100%. And I'll fill in the story partially because, like I said, my story doesn't have big T traumas and yet it led to the kind of issues that it has. And I've done, you know, 15 years of work analyzing it. So I can talk about some very specific components. So I already mentioned this to some extent, but I lived in a, I lived with a family. Both my parents worked. My dad was gone all the time, actually. I mean, all the time. He worked two to three jobs at all times. I literally would see him for breakfast on Saturdays and then on family trips. And then every once in a while he would be home, you know, military service, all these other things rarely saw my father when we lived in Israel.

So I was raped by my mom and I was a latchkey kid. So I would come home. I would pick up my sister from work and I became really, really independent. One of the things that was just true, my family always, no discussion of emotion. This is true to this day other than my sister and I who have done a lot of work to get to the other side of this. But I've run an experiment. I feel bad if my mom ever listened to these podcasts because I've talked about this on multiple podcasts. But I've run now an experiment for eight to 10 years.

I think I have to look back, but I think it just flipped. It took about 10 years for what I'm about to say to flip. I had my first kid. He's now 14 years old. But I said to my wife to Sophie, how awkward it felt to say, I love you in Hebrew. An yo, Ivo, because it wasn't said to me. Ever.

Like, I did not know the words. I knew how they fit in sequence. I've seen other people say them. I understand what the sentence means. Nobody said that to me growing up. My parents just didn't come from that generation. It was, my mom was born to a Holocaust survivor, right? Her mom and three of her brothers and three of her siblings, I mean,

made it out of Poland during World War II. Half the rest of the family never made it home to Israel. They just didn't show up. They weren't the I Love You Generation. My dad, his family was Scandinavian. They were like, hey, if you checked your boxes, you're successful, you became a doctor, whatever, we're good, right? You got food.

That's how you know I love you. I grew up in that environment. There are a lot of people who grew up in that environment. it just didn't prepare me for any for dealing with any emotions. Then my dad left us to what I thought was the only experience that he had that was infidelity for my mom in the relationship. I found out after he passed that that was not true at all, which mirrors some aspects of my own life later.

But he left us. Like one day I woke up and my mom was like, you know, dad's gone. I was like, he's always gone. It's like, who cares? He's never home. She said, no, no, like he's gone. He's not coming back. lost it. My world kind of fell upside down. Now again, 50% of kids deal with divorces, right?

You create a worldview where everything is normal after it because it is for you. It's the new norm. My dad actually came back a couple, I think it was a couple of weeks later and just lived with us. Drew, nobody talked about it. Nobody was even like, hey, dad is back. Dad was just in his room one day again. And nobody mentioned it. It would mess with my head. My mom would talk to me a nauseam all the time when I was a kid. Maybe that's why I became a psychologist about all their struggles. I'm like eight or nine years old, right? So those were my internal, you know, I mentioned the habits of things you absorb from your

environment. That's what I absorbed. Deep resiliency and maybe overexposure to adulting as a young kid. Dealing with the betrayal for my dad, I hated him until I was 25 years old. No outlet to talk about emotions, right? I couldn't. There was nowhere to process. this stuff. And then in the face of all that, so by the way, I started rebelling against my dad

strongly when he was back. Because in my head, I won't swear on this show. In my head, I was like, you aho, right? Now why are you even back, right? You left us, look at what you did to my mom, all that kind of stuff. So that's the energy that I had when we moved to the States, really disconnect from my dad, et cetera. And then the last piece that I'll say, my dad was a very high achiever. My entire life, I was always told about how good he was, showing me like athletics, et cetera. and achievement was the number one thing in our household. And so I remember I think I was in third grade or something like that. It was eight or nine years old.

I came home with a 97 on a math test. And my dad's first question was what happened to the other three points. And in my head, up until he said that sentence, I walked in like, oh, my God, look, I got a 97. And when he said that, and he could have been joking, by the way, Drew. He could have said, oh, wow, he could have been thinking, 97 is great. Let's see what we can do even better. I don't know what he meant. what I heard was you didn't get 100, so I'm not celebrating it.

Let's figure out where we can make things better. And what landed in my head is perfection is the only good, everything other than perfection is not. And so I lived that way for a few years, but then when I started rebelling against my dad, I pulled a 180 man. I was like, oh, you want to see perfection? I'll show you the opposite, right? I was in the lower 50th percentile graduating from my high school.

I had like a 2.9 GPA graduating from UCLA and undergrad, which is like if you calculate, It's like a B minus C plus average. I kind of wanted to almost, you did people pleasing. I went the other way. I rebelled against everything that my dad found important. And I think that's part of how I got to drugs. You know, I think for a lot of people listening, even if their story isn't exactly your story, everybody can relate to some of those themes that are there. Maybe growing up with a family, I know my mom grew up with a family where people,

didn't say I love you. They don't really hug each other. Yeah. That wasn't something that she saw. And she's extremely affectionate now. But I remember being in high school sometimes as I was trying to get into self-development and learn about some things right, right as I was getting into college. And I would go up and I would just go and hold her for a long period of time and just like give her a hug. And she had never really had besides a great relationship with my dad who obviously gave her a lot of love and they, you know, really connected well together, well together and still to this day, they have a beautiful relationship. But she had never really had that. And she felt so uncomfortable, even from the idea of like her son holding her. She loved it.

Yeah. But it was, you could see that it's like, okay, okay, that's enough, right? That's enough. And so getting back to what I was sharing before, there's always themes in other people's stories that remind you and hopefully should put and plant a little seed in people's head that that's really interesting. Like, where did that come from? One day I was chatting with my wife. And I had opened up to her about something that was kind of a little bit tough for me. I was witnessing in the early part of our relationship that I would sit down.

She would ask me a question about something. Like, you know, hey, tell me about your day or, you know, what was that situation like? And I would start sharing with her. and I would kind of notice that she would check out a little bit. Okay, fine. You know, that's a common thing. It happens in conversations and stuff. And then I noticed a little bit more.

And then I would notice it more frequently. And then when day I sat down and she had asked me a question, you know, it was kind of on my mind and I kind of snapped a little bit. And I put myself back. I said, sweetie, listen, I love you. And I just want to say that when you ask me this question, I sometimes feel like, I don't even want to go into it because I'm not sure are you listening are you not listening and I'm just curious a little bit like where do you think that that did that come from someplace you know is that and she you know

to her credit Yasmin she's amazing she has a great podcast uh I talk about my wife a lot on here give her a lot of love she really said you know what I'm open to exploring I'm not sure and I'm sorry I didn't mean it you know but I can see that this is something that you know impacts and, you know, I don't want to leave you feeling that way. And one day we were chatting about something else, and I won't go into the exact specifics, but it was like that aha moment of like, oh my God, growing up, I would see this or I would perceive this. And it's so crazy, like I adopted that same type of behavior, which we all have done. We all have done those things.

And I think that those are very liberating moments because it goes from, I'm broken, and I'll always be this way to, wow, I was just a little kid trying to sort of vibe who adopted these behaviors because I thought it was the way to show up in the world. That's what people showed me. I mean, I love that you got to this place because I'm not saying that if you believe you're broken, you can't get better. That's not what I'm saying. But it makes it harder because, you know, so perception is a second step.

in my in my sparrow loop right stimulus perception i talk about the book man i hope i wish i would have found this book when i started doing this work instead of getting to it myself and then learning about carol dweck's book mindset but if you if this if what i'm about to talk about right now is difficult for you and and you don't struggle with addiction you just want to understand this concept alone carol dweck's book mindset which he's an amazing researcher doing this work will be really really good for you i allude to it in the book and i use citations from it etc lots of citations of the book, by the way, a lot of research if you want to follow up on stuff. The mindset book suggests that a lot of us have, it's a longer continuum, but we have fixed

mindsets or growth mindsets. Now, she picked growth versus changing mindsets on purpose because it biases you in a specific direction. But if you say to yourself, like, do, are you good at math or are you bad at math? I'm not great at math. Okay. So I set you up with that question on purpose. But a lot of people say, I'm good at math.

I'm bad at math. You're not great at it. I'm bad at English. I'm good at English. I hate this. I love that, right? We have preferences. We have biases.

We have leanings. Whether you say you're good at something or you're bad at something, what you're suggesting is a fixed mindset. I am this thing. I am. I struggle sometimes when I do math, right? I am bad at math. But whether you have a fixed mindset that you're good at something or bad at

something, what it creates. creates in your head is this notion that you're stuck. This is, this is where you are, this how you've been. And you hear sometimes people talking like this all the time, right? Where they declare what they're good at, what they're bad at, what they can do what they can't do. What that creates in your mind is a notion that you're like this static entity that just will always be the same in the world. And it's not true. So many things about us are changeable. I can't change your eye color, you know, without context. But I can with contacts, right?

I mean, look, there are people who have lost limbs, people who have had massive physical injuries and have come back. The same is possible for you psychologically and emotionally. But what you just pointed out about your mom and where she grew up, the problem is we developed this landscape of the world. And we now project ourselves into the world in that way. So your mom, I'm just going to use this example. of her not hugging and not being a big touch person, which wasn't true in my family either.

We didn't really hug at all. You then got into the world and you don't hug a lot of people because that's not something you're used to. Now, if you meet somebody who does, there may be like a clash. It may literally, you become uncomfortable because they want to touch you. They think you're not nice because you don't want to be hugged, right? Like, it creates conflict. Too many of us, when we live in the middle of one of these episodes, unfortunately,

in society, I feel like if more people understand what. what about what to say, maybe the world will become a slightly better place. We underappreciate how malleable we really are. So I give the sponge example in the book. You absorbed a lot of your reality about what is good, what is bad, what you should do, what you shouldn't do, who you should like, who you shouldn't like, all that stuff, politics, from an early age. And you absorbed it because that's what was available, that's where you could model. That doesn't mean you can't expose yourself to new information. That doesn't mean you can't meet new people and become a different version of yourself.

And when you understand this growth mindset idea, you don't feel stuck anymore. You don't feel broken. You may have learned how to do the wrong thing and that has led you to people pleasing or it led you to eating too much or it led you to drinking too much or watching too much porn, right? Whatever that is for you. Okay. Then learn new things. Immerse yourself in new environments.

Be with people who know how to behave. and you can model to become a slightly different version of yourself. We know change is the only constant. The exact same thing is true with who we are. You have this pretty profound and some would say maybe controversial idea in the book to piggyback off of what you shared. I don't have the quote in front of me, but I'll paraphrase and you'll finish it,

is that all you have to do to become someone who's not addicted. Yeah, I can do the quote. Anybody can beat their addiction to anything. you just have to be willing to become somebody who's not addicted. And when people hear that at first, they either get really, really angry or it gives a massive relief. Because if you don't believe you can change, the idea that you have to become somebody else can become really confrontational. But for people who understand, you know, what is the Gandhi quote?

Your values become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your, I think your reality or you're who you are. Sorry Gandhi for messing up your paraphrase quote. But how you see the world, the way you approach it, creates who you are. And we can change. We do change all the time. The question is, do you want to be reactive and change as the world tells you what it needs

from you? Or do you want to be proactive and spend some time thinking, Okay, I don't like where my life ended up. I'll go back to eat, explore. Why? Why do I not like this? Why do I end up in these fights with my wife? I love your wife's response, by the way, before.

That's great. And shows very self-assured conflict resolution within her, right? Because she didn't have to protect herself and defend herself. She just said, hold on, let me think about this. I appreciate you bringing this to my attention. But if you can sit there and say, I don't like the pattern my life is working out to showcase me and I don't like living in it. Why?

Explore. Oh, there are these things that I do. There are these patterns. This way I process information. This way I take things personally. This way I overcommit. Got it. That's the exploration phase.

Next, accept. I don't do these things because I'm broken. I don't do these things because there's something wrong with my head. Quite the opposite. I actually do these things because they worked for really, really long. My brain did exactly what it was meant to do when I was at risk, when I was isolated, when I needed friends and I kept moving. My brain did exactly what it would need it to do back then.

It's just that doesn't serve me anymore except, okay, I behaved in a way that was appropriate for when it started. It's not appropriate anymore. I need to change. How do I change? That's transformed. That's the last tea and eat. Okay.

I don't know how to do this. If I knew how to do this, I would stop eating the sugar. I would stop over committing, right? That would be easy. I need to learn new tools. But the tools are not to stop eating sugar. The tools are to deal with the discomfort that I discovered I have. And now one example that I give people,

you know, a lot of people that say if they're struggling with sugar, they may listen to health podcasts or read books about how to eat better. But if they're doing emotional eating, if what I'm saying is correct, you don't need a book on how to eat better. You need a book on how to feel like you're worthy. You need a book on how to fit in better. You need a book on how to feel more confident speaking in public.

I give an example in the book of somebody, She would throw up every time she would have to come speak in public. I think most people would try to figure out a way to deal with that. So now you're going to, I don't know, Andrew Huberman to read about self-assurance or to read about biological rhythms and how to have a better wake-up morning. You're not reading about the behavior that you came in struggling with for. And I think this is a big unlock for a lot of people. Yeah, that's a huge unlock.

Once you understand the motivations behind where your actions come from and the beliefs that they're tied to, all of a sudden, so much more. more opens. And it's still challenging. It's still challenging. You still have to put in the work and you'll forget every so often who you are. Talk about that in the context of your own journey. You know, you hit this moment in your life. And literally, I believe your lawyer was telling you, like, if you don't get your shit together and if we don't turn things around and have good behavior, I think a judge took seven years off your sentence at one point in time. They're literally going to throw the book at you. We need to get you to rehab. We need you to get your turn your

life around together. I'm sure like a lot of things in life, there was a little bit of a roller coaster situation in your journey to becoming the man you are today. A father, a husband, an author, an expert in your field. When you hit those periods and times, at various stages where you are faced with your new sense of self against your old identity. Yeah. And there's a clash. What helped you get through those difficult times? Yeah.

Great question, man. So, you know, when my lawyer said to me, if we don't get you to rehab, he was like, if I don't clean this up before we go to the judge, you're looking at decades in prison, like 15, 20 years in prison. And so he knew how to talk to me, not in a judgmental way that's, said, man, you're addicted badly. You need to go get help. He was very purpose driven. It was very utilitarian. He said, if we don't do this, you're going to really suffer the consequences. So I went to rehab. But speaking of the rollercross, you spoke to, I went to rehab because I wanted

to not spend time in prison. I still didn't know how to not use drugs. I still didn't know how to be humble. I still didn't know how to have an open mind. I still didn't understand growth mindset. I was stuck thinking, well, this is who I am. Let me get out of prison and figure out the rest later, right. I got eight years, but I got them in what's called a one plus seven. So one year that I had to serve and then I got a seven year suspended sentence, which meant if I screw up during that one year on probation, I get another seven years. So it's kind of, I call it the sort of Democles. It kind of just hung over my head to make sure I behaved properly. In the same manner that I say it's these back against the wall moments that serve you as growth opportunities, I still think that ends up being

true, right? The only caveat I give in the book is psychedelic experiences. That's the only thing that I've seen provide people the same frame shift, the same perspective change that a back against a wall moment opens up in you. Not everybody's comfortable with that. Ketamine is the only legal version of that to pursue right now in the country. So unless you're in an MDMA study or a solar cyber study. So we'll speak to the back against the wall moments. The thing is you get to choose how badly you get cornered, it could be a fight with your wife and not even a threat of leaving, just like a quick discomfort, you know, around a debate, a conversation that is uncomfortable. If you're willing, like your wife was in that conversation, I love that you gave that example,

right? Because how many people have that conversation with their partner saying, hey, sweetie, you know, every time you ask me the question about work, I feel like you check out and you don't really care, which makes me not want to answer you at all. how many people then turn that around and make it a fight. Oh, we've made it a fight many times too. I'm sure. I'm sure. But the ability to go, oh, I didn't realize that.

What is that by somebody being confronted and saying, hold on, let me think, explore, acceptance. Oh, my gosh, I do do the thing you mentioned. Let me figure out why this happens, right? And then get connected to, wait, I found the moment. I now know why I do it. I'm in acceptance of the fact that that's how I used to do it. Now let me learn how to change. It's the same cycle.

And I think most of us have behavioral change when it's long term. It happens that way. So for me, the first motivation was stay out of prison. I couldn't get a job to save my life through. I had nine felonies when I got out of my year in jail. I had nine felons in my record. Like I couldn't get a job at Domino's because there was that checkbox. Have you ever been?

Now, serendipitously, that ended up being a good thing because now I'm here. I got a PhD, all this other stuff. But at the time, it was a nightmare. Mall jobs, you know, the Apple store were open. I couldn't get anywhere that got to the past the interview to the background search. Nobody would even have turned my calls anymore. So about nine, 10 months in, I kind of threw my hands up. Thank God I'm very privileged.

I had a family that could help me pay renter in this time where I would go back to drug dealing like that. I just had no other option, which is why I now work with people coming out of prison and jail, by the way. But I went back to social. school literally Cal State Long Beach because have you ever been convicted of a felony was not on the application. So I got accepted, right? So I think early on, if you really back against the wall like I was, you know, coming out of jail, you do what is feasible. You do the next available step. But how do you connect that to something bigger than yourself? I feel very fortunate. I just took my advisor actually, my advisor from my master's program to dinner two nights ago. I haven't seen him in a few years.

But this is where there's a recommendation in the book for somebody, something I call a personal advisory board. And I think, again, whether you struggle with addiction or not, this is probably a good idea. You were talking to this men's group. You were like, we need people to run stuff in our lives by. But a lot of us, I don't know if this was ever true for you. It was true for me and a lot of people I work with. A lot of us, especially men, learn, we got to solve our challenges ourselves.

You show weakness if you rely on other people. You show weakness if you consult, if you get help. We have to fix everything ourselves. Yeah. And even if nobody ever taught you that, like on a chalkboard, like, man, don't do this, which in the case, most people never got that lesson. Yep. You just saw it.

You saw it. Right. Grin and bear it, stiff upper lip, walk it off. Those kinds of little idioms and stand by one-off sentences are the example of, hey, don't show weakness. So a lot of us, we don't have nuance. We don't understand what is weakness, what is? and we just stop showcasing anything, but hey, I'm great, how are you doing?

Personal advisory board is the following idea. Get a group of people you trust, people you admire, people you look up to. Now, one of them you could admire for their cooking, another one for their relationship, another one for their business acumen, another one for their athletic ability. These are the people you gather around you

that you can now talk to about individual struggles or questions you have, right? Hey, I had this thought last night. It was going to bed, and the thought kind of came through my head. I was really excited about this morning. How does that sound? When I say that to you, does it sound like something I should do?

Does it sound like something crazy? Am I missing something? You said this before, we're communal social animals. When you start living in your head too much, things can go awry. And so what I ended up finding throughout my life, the thing that allowed me to have success is I was so desperate. I had so much humility. I was willing to ask for help and support. And between that humility and the willing to understand that I didn't know how to live

a good life. I needed to learn, which was really hard for the 25-year-old version of me, right? I was so self-assured, but it was a lot. It was a front beforehand, but I was so self-assured. You know, I thought I knew everything. Humility helped a ton. And then what ended up happening with that specific advisor, that's why I took him out to dinner, he and his wife, was he just happened to do work on homeless injection drug users. I didn't really think I wanted to get in this line of work, but I ended up doing these interviews with people. And I really like talking. to them. I had no judgment. I just spent a year in jail. And so I found that I was really good at this work. And so that was the first time I found purpose. And I think I have this line in the book. If you don't know what your purpose is, make it your purpose to find your purpose. I know that's hard for a lot of people to take on, but your purpose doesn't have to be big. It doesn't have to be I want to feed all the hungry kids in Africa. But you should have something you really, really care about. Because then you don't need motivation on a daily basis.

you're on a mission. You have some reason to wake up. And I'm sure, you know, I'm sure this podcast is part of that for you, right? It's when you really care about what it is you do, everything else is just the stuff you have to do to get there. You know, I want to come back to this idea that we talked about in the beginning of the podcast, which is you have an incredible story. You know, you go into detail about it inside of the book. And not everybody's going to have that version of their own story. And that's a huge reason of why you are doing the work that you're doing is to help people understand.

that there's many different ways that addiction and addictive behaviors can come in and hijack your life. We talked about a few things. We talked about sugar, talked about people pleasing. What are some of the other common ones? We talked about work addiction that people don't think of as these hooks and addictive patterns that are in their life that maybe, maybe this conversation is the first time they're sort of zooming out and saying, you know what, I do have something there. Yeah.

Right? I'll go to a really broad category because there's probably a lot of places we have to drill down in order to really analyze this one. But I think technology use is a huge one right now. And where the difficulty is, right? You know, I have my email. I have my schedule. I have so much stuff on this device.

So there are things I rely on that device for that serve me and work. towards my purpose. But how many of us know, and I'll just use a couple of examples that I know, I don't do many of these things anymore, but how many people do we know who play like four hours of Candy Crush a day? Or I've met many men. You know, it's a crazy statistic. 30 to 35 percent, I think, of men hide their porn use from their partner.

We now have, how old you? Turning 43 this year? Okay, I'm 48 years old. We're roughly in the same age group. Like, you know, back in the day, getting explicit material, you had to go to a magazine store and need to steal a magazine or buy one if you were really, really brave. You had to find something. You had to find a tape.

Now it's all here. And so the danger with these devices, especially with how good they are capturing our attention, right? They are masterfully created for that. My idea for my company actually came after watching the social dilemma. You know, like, if you could be so good at capturing people's attention for marketing in sales, can we do it for helping people as well? But these machines are incredibly well made to capture our attention and hold it for as long as possible. And what I find more and more is when people get uncomfortable, they don't even need food. They don't even need drugs. They disappear

into the screen for hours. And my PhDs in psychology with emphasis in behavioral neuroscience, in case nobody's ever told you this, I urge you to mark this at some point, try this experiment that I'm about to talk about here. When you look at a screen and you start checking your email, go on it on Instagram, and whatever it is the sort of activity that you find yourself lost in sometimes, you lose all sense of time.

Your mind becomes so hyper-focused on what's happening. People will often think that they were looking at things for five to 10 minutes, but it's been 45 minutes or an hour. So there's this time dilation component that happens and you get so focused that you lose yourself. And that could be exactly the kind of example we were talking about earlier where a behavior or engagement in overtime for long periods prevents you or disrupt your ability to live your fullest life, right?

You're late to a meeting. You don't connect with your partner because when you're in the car, you're always on the phone and you literally can't even hear what they're saying because you're in this other world. You don't play with your kids, right? You stop going to events because you can just watch, like, does that make sense? It's like you're now locked, you're living this virtual life in your phone.

And many of us have tried to stop ourselves. We've tried to cut down. We put screen watch alerts on our phone, right, and all this other stuff. And then yet we end up spending eight to ten hours on this thing every day. So I think technology is one of the biggest future frontiers. And I talk about that, I think right in the first chapter of the book. Let's talk about some of the things that you do personally to help pull you out of that. And not just technology, although that's related.

I'm thinking of, you know, before you got here, I was looking at your stories just to see what you're up to. And I think you posted a screenshot of a journal. Is it the five-minute journal? It's my PDF copy of the financial. Yeah. Okay. Got it. So you posted that and you were writing things that you were grateful for, stuff that you wanted to see.

What would be a great day today? Yeah. I got a shout out inside of there. Thank you for including me. And you've been doing great. You've gotten tons of actionable insights was one of the things that you wanted to do is come on this podcast and give actual insights, which you've done a great job at that. Is that one practical example?

And I'm going to just share a little bit more to this. I've generally found that when my day is filled with richness and practice, sometimes it feels good. Sometimes it doesn't feel good, the things that you practice. That could be going for cryout therapy with my buddy Mark, who you met, you know, just when you first came in. It could be having a walk in the morning. with my men's group that's there.

It could be slowing down and having a phone-free breakfast with my wife. But my day is filled with richness, I'm less likely to want to abuse things like technology, sugar, other stuff. When my day is back to back, I haven't created some version of a morning routine that works for me that day, even if that's five minute of reading some sort of scripture or something inspirational.

I end up in a place where I'm reactionary, and now all of a sudden, everything around me is controlling the narrative. And I'm simply reacting to everything that's there. And what happens? I abuse technology. I'll be reaching for the things that don't make me feel good as much. So turning it back to you, what are the things that you do on a regular basis to bring that richness in your life so that you are not finding yourself abusing technology, which has a lot of great things that come along with it,

but it's really the abuse that we're talking about. Yeah, by the way, that's probably true for almost everything, right? There are benefits for it, like, we can argue whether alcohol is recreational use has any benefits. No, I feel like this literature is very clear on that. Like, alcohol has a lot of social benefits. That doesn't mean it's good for your body. 100%.

And then, you know, when you think about alcohol, when it first kind of came about, it was essentially anesthesia in the battlefield too, right? Like, great purposes for it. Maybe not regularly a good way to cope with your feelings and stress, right? So you asked what I do, and I want to double click on something you said, what you just expressed is the same thing everybody has, whether they're aware of it or not true. So what do I mean by that is put your best foot forward on a great day. Everybody's good, right?

The workout feels amazing, right? They can't wait to get their green juice. Like everything's great when it clicks. The problem is under stress, it's true for all of us. There's a whole section of the book about stress, especially uncontrollable chronic stress. But under stress,

your body is actually meant to go into this efficient fight-flight freeze mode if it gets extreme enough. At that point, you're not thinking logically. You're, I'll say, thinking how to survive, but you're trying to make it. I talk a lot about the book, in the book, about how many of the problems, practices that I'll share here at a moment for myself, play two purposes only. Really, like,

that's the main thrust of them. I give that thermometer example. I don't know if you got to in the book, but this thermometer example, we all have a safe zone of operation, an area within which we are making logical, sensical choices that are driven by explicit motivation. We're doing what we want to do, right? There's a zone for that. But you wake up in the morning with a certain level of stress. when I'm under high duress, when there's a lot going on at work, my kids are sick, I didn't sleep well, etc. Out of scale zero or 100, I make up at a 60. You know, I may wake up really, really stress. My wife and I had a fight and my kid has a cold and work is stressful.

I may be really, really activated. So I wake up at a 50 or 60. Now, threshold is what can I even handle in terms of stress? I give the example like Navy SEALs, Marines, right? Those guys are specifically trained men and women. They're specifically trained to handle the highest threshold. hold of stress, we could even fathom. Because, you know, Drew, like we can be as brave as we want.

We can play video games for a fight, you know, like World War II video games. But if I'm standing somewhere and a bunch of people are shooting at me with AK-47s and mortars from half a mile away, I don't even know that I can breathe. I'm probably screaming for my mommy and running home. Like, I haven't been trained in those environments, right? That's too much stress. I probably shut down. Most of us know what it's like to experience enough stress to shut down.

down. Well, you talked about cryotherapy. That's probably another version of what I'm about to say right now, but cryotherapy, cold plunges, extreme workouts, right? Like, you know, personal best liftings or like really, really hard runs. There are practices you take on to push your threshold up, to train yourself to handle more stress. Then my morning gratitude practice, meditation, calm breath work, swimming for me is one of these things to some extent. Are there to lower your broad activation level? I'm trying to buy myself more space, more space to operate within the confines of what I know

are good behaviors for me. Because once you get push paths, your threshold, your SOL, your shit out of luck, right? You're going to do the things that feel okay or good in the moment because you're just trying to survive. So your job is to try to keep yourself within that safe zone. what I do every morning and I actually share it on Instagram, partially for accountability, by the way.

But I now do it on, I have this pad. I don't like five minute journal is great. I love it. I probably own 40. I just at some point decided I wanted to go digital and I don't like an app. I don't want to type. I want to write my gratitude. So sorry, five minute journal people.

I'm sure a lot of people won't go through the work I'm about to suggest anyway. You're just doing your gratitude. Yeah, yeah. And so the five minute journal is a great gratitude. The joke is my wife gave that to me almost like it's like a gag. She's like, you're never going to do this. But you asked why about the practice. You know how hard of a time drew I had not going directly to my phone when I woke up?

I was like everybody else. You wake up, you go check your messages, your Instagram, your email. It was getting me stressed within 12 seconds of waking up. And I hated it and I knew I needed to change, but I couldn't control it. What I learned is about habit stacking. If you don't know what this is, B.J. Fogg is the original guy to write about it. but, you know, Atomic Habits has a lot of this too. The five-minute journal gave me a five-minute break from waking up to picking up my phone.

After that, I started doing more. I now have another journal that I organize my day and write what my top priorities are. Then I go work out. Then I start looking at my phone. I just bought myself 60, 70 minutes without my phone when I wake up in the morning. It's now sometimes 90 minutes. I go for a walk. Maybe I listen to something.

Put in whatever you can to allow yourself. That state when you wake up is a very important state. I don't know what to a extent. You've talked about this with other guests. I'm sure you have, though. You wake up in a theta state, brain activation. It's a really suggestible state. It's an open, it's like a meditative state.

Don't abuse that and go immediately into your phone. You're shortcutting one of the best moments you have in your life, which is this kind of highly creative, almost hypnotic kind of state. Do the things to feel good and serve you. And on the flip side at night, you know, we have red lights in our room to really try to knock out white and blue light. have a ritual that really brings you down. Those are the simple things. But in order to really be able to practice on a regular basis,

those breath practices you've learned, the exercise opportunities you have that really help you control your stress, you have to practice them regularly when you're in those really comfortable, proactive days. Because unless they're incredibly well practiced, when you're under duress, when you're under stress, you won't know how to do them well because your body will go back to other habitual behavior. So I have my morning practice and my evening practice, but when I'm really stressed through,

there may be 12 times in the middle of the day. I go to a side room or I go to the restroom or I go back to my bedroom if I'm working at home, I close my eyes and I do a one minute breath meditation just in order to bring down my activation level because going back to what we talked before, if you wait for back against the wall moments, you may not be resourced enough. You may not have the the ability to make the correct choice. The job is to stay as far away from that as possible. Yeah, those back against the wall moments are often the moments that bubble up into the zeitgeist the most because they make for including your own story,

these incredible stories. And they're easy for people to tell. And it's easy for it to show up on media and and, and they're real, right? They're real. and most of us will not, we'll face our relative versions of that. Yep. But what I'm really hearing from you is like,

sometimes people feel like, well, it's not bad enough that I have to get there. Yes. Right. But think about that sentence for a second. It's not bad enough that you have to change your behavior. Like, you wanted to get worse? This is what you're waiting for, right?

It's like you're, because if we don't change the patterns that make our life unhappy, make our life full dissatisfaction, create conflict with our partner. I mean, do we want to wait until we get to the fight and say, I don't know if I can be with you anymore? Is that when you want to change?

Why not change when you have the little fight? And sometimes to add to that, people feel like it's not that bad and that means also too, I don't have the strength to kind of get over this right now. Right? I'm not strong enough or I don't have enough willpower. I don't have anything else.

And for the person who thinks that way, I think I know what you would be saying to them is that you are still hyper focused on the thing itself. It's not about the thing. 100%. It's about so much more that you actually can take a look at that could help you see the entirety of what this is. You know, I used to have a mentor that said, take somebody that you really vehemently don't like or disagree with. even if it's a historical person or somebody like a politician right now or whatever. If I would show you a movie of their life, this goes back to something you shared earlier,

from the time that they were born, right, maybe even a little bit before they were born, a little bit of their parents' life, what they were born into. And you could see their entire life, even if they were 70 years old, 80 years old, you could watch their entire life get the true essence of it, everything that happened to them, the things that didn't work out, the wins, the losses, the traumas, everything. You may watch that movie, and at the end of it, you would still disagree with their view of the world, maybe even vehemently disagree. But there's no part of you that could say, I don't understand how they became who they are.

Yeah. You'd understand completely. That's important. That's important because lack of understanding breeds contempt in many, many ways for us, right? That's a psychological, well-known fact, right? the us versus them, right, in-group, our group, kind of ideas that have been in psychology since the beginning of time. And a lot of us, we don't want to put the work in, though, to understand people who are too

different from us. And that creates, like, we'll talk about why do people not want to confront that maybe their technology use or their eating is potentially compulsive and beyond a problem? It's because we've developed this idea that the people who struggle are out there, right? I'm not. I'm good. And I love what you say. said about, A, this might not be bad enough. B, I may not have the ability to change it,

because those are exactly the ideas that I'm trying to fight in this book. First of all, don't wait for it to get bad. There's no reason to wait. It's just going to be harder. It's easy right now to change. It's just you're right. It's not bad. Now, imagine, and this is to me, this is the sparrow eat cycle. If you just kind of keep doing it on repeat your whole life, the changes become smaller. The incremental improvement in your quality. quality of life overall become smaller, but you're iterating all the time. You're constantly just going, oh, let me, let me refine this. Let me refine that, right? Let me find out, I'm not getting the sleep I want to get. How do I get slightly better sleep? You know, my communication

with my partner was way better than it was 15 years ago, but we're still fighting about these three specific topics. What is underlying that? How do I get to that, right? Like, you're never taking your eye off the ball. And I think anybody who's serious, professional committed to to make anything better, from work to this podcast, writing their book to being a better parent. Life is a constant journey of self-improvement in those specific areas. And when you take that on, I think you also find more purpose

in your daily life, because you know you still have potential, unmet potential. It's really beautiful. It's like once you get into that upward spiral, instead of a downward spiral, you become good at catching things early. Stuff still happens to you. It's just you catch it early. Oh my gosh.

I was so reactive with my parents this weekend. That's crazy. I haven't seen them in a long time. I don't want to be that way. Why did I do that? What came up for me? What was the situation I was going into? What did I feel?

Like, why did that happen? Like the awareness around the circumstances in your life, even when negative or slightly stressful things end up happening, you just become so much better at just catching it early and being open to that. And just to go back to one other thing that you talked about is that the happiest, most fulfilled people in my life, they're not walking around spending a lot of time with very harsh judgments about the world around them. Right?

And the opposite is true. The most unhappiest people that I know who are struggling in my, I have so much, you know, empathy for them are the ones that are constantly stuck in judgment because they can't apply this framework that you've built to they forget about applying to themselves they can't even think about the concept about applying it to somebody else yeah and just like we have the us versus them in politics and media in in so many different aspects there's also the internal us versus them There's that classic saying, which is that people, if we could see the way that they speak to themselves, you're harsher to yourself than anybody around you.

If we would see the thoughts that you would have about yourself as little thought bubbles, you would be saying the most hurtful things that not even your worst enemy would be saying to you, which is why this framework is so important because if we can't understand why is that, Why am I addicted to beating myself up? Sure. Even. Yeah. Actually, let me just even take that as a question to you.

So many people feel they are addicted to beating themselves up. Yeah. Unpack that for a second. Yeah, I mean, again, right, think about how we talked about these patterns. Think about growing up. So you talked about this is beautiful, right? You talked about your environment growing up. And it sounded great.

And if we sat here for another 30 minutes, we could probably talk about specific experiences and events and what it, you know, what your relationship between your parents is like and now and what it was and the, you know, all the moving around and why did it happen. We could unpack a lot and there would be, I'm sure you've talked about this at different stages here, we would understand a lot about you. But right off the bat, I'm listening to you and I'm like, oh, that's, you grew up pretty well resourced. In the book, I talk about inhibitors and promoters. And you had a lot of protective factors in there, right, which are inhibitors or negative. behavior or promoters of positive behavior, right? Because you got to model pretty good behavior

around yourself. How many people grow up in environments full of criticism, full of aggression, full of violence, full of hate, full of fear? Imagine, I mean, let's just take an example, just based on what's going on in this country right now. Like, imagine you grew up in a household that was ultra-nationalistic and incredibly xenophobic and racist. Right? There are households like that. It still exists. Are you the one making the decisions right now when you wake up in the morning and you hate a specific group of people or not? Or you think our policy needs to, you know, kick everybody who is not here legally or sought asylum over the last 10 years? Are you the one making those choices? Or is it just bred in through belief that has been ingrained in you over

decades of growing up in a specific environment? And by the way, the exact, I'm using one example, but the exact same thing is wrong on the other side, right, in terms of the more liberal, more progressive kind of concept. So when we look at the world around us, we, oh, this is a really, I think for a lot of people, hard pill to swallow, but a good starting point for the conversation we're having. Please recognize that the reality that you see around you myself is a projection of your belief about what is true and what is not in the world. One of my favorite researchers and authors about this is Bruce Lipton. I don't know if you know, Bruce. The biology of belief. is one of the books that he wrote.

Yeah, he's been on this podcast. Amazing. Yeah, I had him on my podcast twice. Love Bruce. Bruce is an amazing guy. Go pick up the book, listen to Bruce's stuff. I like him more than some other people in that genre. But your brain interprets information based on the programming and the learning you did early in life.

It's just a fact. You cannot be objective. When you allow that in for the first time in your life, you can stop being as defensive of the stances you have. And you can start asking yourself the question. Does my belief, is my projection, are the ways I'm looking at what's around me? Are they serving me?

Are they making my life better? Are they hurting me? Are they hurting the people around me? Are they making me associate with people that are hurting me? Right. And what you brought up as an example, and I used to be one of these people drew all in, period, point blank. I thought the world sucked.

I thought everybody was out for themselves. I thought you couldn't trust anybody. And look where it led me. I had a gun, shotgun under the seat in my car. Everybody I knew wanted drugs or money for me. The people who sold for me all the time. I got held up in gunpoint. People who I knew told other people how to rob me because there's no way, like just

the circumstances when I got robbed. Like people knew when I was going to be out and they broke into my place and stole hundreds of thousand dollars. Like between all the different thefts, where I probably lost a million or two million and people robbing me when I was in the middle of my drug use. I've gotten beat up. I've spent a year and jay. I saw the world as a dark place where you're on your own and nobody believes in you

and everybody will take until you show them their place or whatever. And I ended up exactly in that place. Was that because that's what's available in the world? Or was it because the way I learned, competition, you know, perfectionism versus failure with my dad and you work hard and you're perfect or you're a loser, right? Like that idea, I kind of manifested that way of life, but I didn't manifest that on the success side. I manifested on the failure side because I rebelled against my, you create the reality that you live in. And I'm not saying the reality that you live in right now is false.

It's one sliver of what's available. And explore except transform is all about recognize that. Where do that come from? Some of it might serve you. Keep it. Look at what doesn't serve you. Figure out how you can change it. understand how you got to this place and transform it.

And so I think as we do that as a people, as a society, we end up living with people that we like and like us, and they support us in our endeavors. That doesn't mean they have to like everybody else. It's okay. We can have factions. I'm not saying we all need to create a kumbaya for the entire world. As you said, I can deeply disagree with your opinions

and still appreciate that you had the experience that led you here. And then we can say, hey, enjoy your life. I want to go enjoy mine. No, no hard feelings. And I think, unfortunately, we've lived in this place in individual relationships and societally where we have to fight each other. Like, this is my truth. And if you don't believe it, then there's something wrong with you.

And that's damaging. Well said. I'll attribute the author after the episode in the show notes. But one of my favorite questions that I came across a few years ago, I think his first name is John. He's a VC coach, early venture capitalist investor. He has this quote. He says,

how have I been complicit in the things that I say that I don't want in my life? And I love that because there's so many things. You know, a great place to start in your life to see where there needs to be a little bit of massaging, a little bit of awareness, a little bit of an opportunity to apply some of the principles in this book is to see what annoys you. Yes.

Right. And, you know, let's not start with the outer world. Let's start with your more immediate world. What annoys you about your co-workers, the people around you, your wife, your kids, whatever, the immediate people around you, right? And what has annoyed you for a little bit of some time? And how can we take one of those examples?

And just as a thought experiment, no different than like a debate team would look at this. How can we ask yourself, how? Doesn't mean you're 100% responsible, but how have you been complicit? How have you been a part of the process of making this thing a reality, even though you say you don't want it in your life? And I don't know if there's an actual law. I kind of would tell my friends sometimes. Like, if there was a law of responsibility, the law of responsibility would say that the beauty is if it was at least somewhat of your fault, you can do something about it. If it's 100% somebody else's fault that this situation is.

is this way that this is happening to you, then you have no power. Love it. You're powerless. So you can't do anything about it anyway. Can't do anything about it anyway. At least that's good to realize. And then you go, oh, I better let this go then. If there's nothing I can do about it, I better let it go.

So in the book, there's the sphere of influence. Actually, I don't know if you saw it, but it's, I split the world up into things I control fully, which are very few, by the way, things I have some influence over and then things I have absolutely no control or influence over. And what I say to people is please make sure you bias as much of your worry, concern, energy every day on things you control fully. Next up, things you have some influence over. And then whatever you feel like you really want to waste and have leftover, go ahead and spend it on things that you have absolutely no control or influence over. And the reason is most people that I know do the flip.

They spend their day doom scrolling on news. CNN or Fox, whatever you watch, is always on. Why? What are you doing? Right? How much control and influence do you have all what's happening there? And you're just letting this poison you daily, constantly, in the interest of awareness, but it's not awareness that contributes to what you're doing unless you decide that you're going to become an activist and spend your entire life focusing on that that's fine. But most people don't. They just let it fester.

And so what I love so much about that quote is just think about the shift that somebody has to go from in order to listen to that question and not hate the asker. the person who's asking the question, but instead listen to the question and go, oh, hold on. I hate fill in the blank with whatever it is that bothers them, but I've spent my whole life letting people like that rule me or, you know, I've people pleasing. I've kept trying to get the attention of those people. And so I give them too much weight in my life, right? Like, just allowing that for the first time cracks open this little window to say it's not they're up to everybody else. And I think going back to the growth mindset,

that's the thing that we talked about in the beginning. There's more than you imagine under the things you control and things you influence. We have to stop paying attention to the noise because it requires energy. It requires thoughtfulness, right? Like I can tell within five minutes of sitting down here and you're talking like, I can tell the level of attention, let's say, that you put when you take on a guess in terms of really making sure that you can go below the surface and not ask the surface level questions versus, you know, I've done, I don't know, 50, 60 interviews for this book by now, versus people who like got a copy of the book, maybe read the first page, maybe read the cover,

and went from that place. And that translates. But I guarantee as a people pleaser, and you already told us that you've had that tendency before, you had to figure out what was important for you and whatnot in life in order to clear up space for that. because that takes time. And so if everybody did that in their own life, what is the noise? What are the things that are filling up my life

that I don't actually care that much about? How do I eke out space? You can't make up time, right? Time is passing. If you don't take it for what is important to you, it will keep passing and you will not do the things that are important. You've obviously found a way to stretch yourself so that you can do the things that matter

for the work you do. Thank you for that, brother. Thank you for that. As we wind down over here, you know, if somebody's made it to this point in time in the interview, there's always a few individuals that say, I'm buying what you're selling, right? I believe in this.

And, Adi, you don't know my situation. I want to be there. but I feel hopeless because of my past, because of this, because of that. For that person who feels like that, what do you want to share with that individual? Yeah. First of all, you're not alone in feeling that. I would argue probably most people feel that way in one of two primary situations. One, you've been thinking about doing something about this for a long time, but you're scared

and you haven't taken the first step. Number two, you've tried over and over and over. in Oregon. We'll talk about sugar. You probably know the stats better. Is it like 47% of Americans are obese? Something like that? Yeah. I think we're reaching close to 50% of Americans are obese. I think we know some of the problem, right? Most of this is type 2 diabetes and not type 1. Like it's diet, it's actually like we know a lot of the issues and yet creating behavioral change that is long lasting is difficult. So I first of all, I totally get it. Secondly, what I would urge people to pay attention to

is look at some of those past experiences if you are somebody who experimented or look at where your life is right now. And what if it could be 5% better? 10% if the problem you're dealing with could be 10% better. I think a lot of us, we create a black and white kind of delineation of success and failure.

So how long have you been running this podcast? 2018. Okay. So only 17. I'm thinking of myself. How many episodes? Seven years? That's a long time to work on something. Do you mind me asking? I don't know if you can tell me that F off and you don't want to share this, but like roughly how many people listen? Yeah. Let's see. I have like 600,000 subscribers on YouTube. Average episode there, maybe it's like 20,000 views. Some have a few

million. And then on audio, probably have a regular listener base in about 30,000 to 50,000 per episode. Okay. So I'll give an analogy that I've loved because between writing the two books, and all the speaking of that and all the stuff, I've impacted, let's say, close to just over 100,000 lives, let's say, in my life. Like, not millions of readers on other things, but like people that I've had. And somebody put this to me one time, like, imagine those 100,000 people gathered somewhere. I mean, it's like a rose ball full of people, right? Like, you're a level above that, right?

Like, even more than that. Now, think to yourself of that is success. Now, you have your own metrics of what you mean by success. and where you want things to go. But I think I'll say for most people out there, if they decided they want to start a podcast, like having this level of listenership is success, right? But imagine you start a podcast today, right?

What is it? March of 2015, at 2025. You start a podcast and you start measuring your success by yours. And you put out a podcast and two people listen to it. You and your mom, right? Even your wife didn't listen to the first one. And then you put out another one, your wife listened and a couple of friends. You have five listeners.

But imagine when you do like 10, 20 of these, you go, man, I'm not even getting like to a thousand. I'm not even getting to 5,000. You know, look at Drew. He's got 20,000 per episode on the average and like a million for somebody. I'm going to fail. I'm never going to be able to do this. How many people would quit if they judge success by those metrics, right? If you're a new artist and you release a song, you're like, man, look at Taylor Swift or look at this rapper and look at this musician and they're getting a million.

listens and I'm getting four. What people underestimate is the value of commitment over time to a problem. And so if somebody's listening right now and saying you don't understand where I am, first of all, you may be right. But the question isn't if I understand. The question is, are you ready to do something to make things better? And then the question is, are you just take an experiment? Do the next thing. If it didn't work at all, who cares? Try the next thing. But if it didn't work a little bit and that didn't get you what you consider success, celebrate the smaller successes from the listener kind of version. Celebrate the five listeners. And then celebrate where you're 20. And when you're 50, when you're 100, when you're 500, because if you don't do those things,

what I found over time, I've helped, I don't even know how many thousands of people individually between me and group work over the last 15 years change. If you do not find a way to celebrate the incremental success along the way, you will never get to the ultimate success. That's the magic. lose 100 pounds, but they can't lose 15. Right. They get the eight pounds and they quit because it's not enough. Too many of us, we look at black and white success and we measure ourselves by those standards. Those are not the standards. Kobe Bryant didn't become Kobe Bryant by wanting to be Kobe Bryant. You just keep wanting to be better every single day, right? Everybody that you look at, success is a metric you measure relatively to your own place. So I've seen, and you read about in

the book with people who had massive trauma, like almost saw. a parent take their own life, been sexually abused from the age of, you know, three, massive trauma. And I've also dealt with people who had none of that. They had a really great upbringing and just felt isolated and alone and less than. Stop measuring yourself by other people. Stop measuring how bad or how good you are by other people. Measure it by this internal level of satisfaction. And if it's not where you want it to be, do the process. Like, why? Why is it not there? You know, right? Walk yourself through the steps. And you're 100% right. There are other places where similar processes are in place. I don't need, I mean, I'd love for you to read my book, but I don't need you to succeed through my

version. My number one message to everybody is if you tried something and it didn't work, toss it aside, try something else. Do not give up on yourself, right? Your life is precious. We were all little babies at some point who were born and none of us have a problem looking at a baby an understanding that they are worthy of love, joy, acceptance, support. But somehow we get dirtied up as we are raised. These negative opinions, these thoughts about others, these ideas of what success looks like and what we may look like as a failure, they start coming in and they weigh us down. But we're still those kids that were as worthy of love as ever before. So I urge anybody listening. If you're struggling right now, just take them single next step and just

keep going, right? What's that Chinese proverb? A junior of a million mile, over a thousand miles, start with a single step. You can't get a mile down the road without a whole bunch of steps in the middle. Just start taking them. Well, one of those steps can definitely be checking out the book. Yeah, sure. For those people that are interested, the book is out there, came out earlier this year. Unhooked, free yourself from addiction forever. Adi, this has been fantastic. Thank you, man. Thanks for going on the journey of all the different layers with me. This is great. Where are you most active on social media?

I think Instagram. Instagram is a place I'm more active at Dr. Adjafi for the more professional folks. LinkedIn is the next place. And then I'm on psychology today. I write for psychology today a good bit. But then I have my own website at Djaffi.com. And there's a, you know, obviously the books available on Amazon. But if you want kind of a little bit more details about it than we have on Amazon,

read unhooked is a website we set up for the book in particular. Beautiful. You'll find all the links in the show notes. Thank you again, brother, for coming on the podcast. Thank you, man. Thanks for having me. Thanks for everybody listening.