The Rich Roll Podcast - Tackling Addiction With Jack Canfield

Episode Date: May 2, 2016

Who am I to disagree with a guy who has sold 500 million books? That is not hyperbole. Not only has Jack Canfield — the personal growth & self-improvement author behind The Success Principles* and the wildly popular Chicken Soup For The Soul* series — actually sold that many copies of his many books, a full 47 of them have graced the New York Times bestseller list. In fact, Jack holds a Guinness World Record for having 7 books on the NYT list at the same time. I don't know how that's even possible. I do know he's recently pulled focus on alcoholism, tackling addiction in his most recent offering, The 30-Day Sobriety Solution: How to Cut Back or Quit Drinking in the Privacy of Your Own Home*. I almost backed out of doing this interview. You may think I'm a New Age California hippie, but I'm actually a relatively skeptical guy. I'm not easily romanced by the latest in self-help. I can be stubborn and my perspective on long-held beliefs can be difficult to shake. I'm also someone with extremely strong, experience-based opinions about sobriety — not only what's required to achieve it, but more importantly what's essential to properly maintain it. To be frank, part of me feels it's somewhat ostentatious for Jack — not himself a recovering alcoholic — to publish a book that purports to resolve alcoholism by virtue of a 30-day program. In my experience, sobriety just doesn't work that way. Moreover, I'm far from convinced that you can successfully combat addiction from the privacy of your own home. Let me rephrase — I couldn't do that. Thus my conscience struggles to ratify or validate an author who supports such a methodology. I’m a 12-step guy through and through – I can say without reservation or exaggeration that it saved my life. My participation and service in recovery is and remains my #1 priority. But as they say in the rooms, contempt prior to investigation keeps a man in everlasting ignorance. So in good faith, I read Jack's new book with an open mind. I can't say I agree with everything it proposes. But I can say it does contain more than a few valuable insights — more than enough to merit a spirited exchange with it's acclaimed author. Moreover, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to tackle this conversation. It's not everyday you get invited up to Santa Barbara to visit the home of a man revered for a life devoted to serving the personal growth of others. So needless to say, here we are. I haven’t listened to any other interviews with Jack, but I think its fair to say – and by Jack’s own admission — this conversation is not your normal fare. I'm not saying it was contentious (it wasn't at all). Jack was a great sport and I think my dubiousness made for a fun and engaging meeting of the minds. Enjoy! Rich

There's always opportunity in the midst of everything, but most people are so focused on blaming someone else for why it's not working, they don't see the opportunity. That's Jack Canfield, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, how are you guys doing? My name is Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody, how are you guys doing? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to The Rich Roll Podcast,

the show where each week I sit down with the world's brightest thought leaders, paradigm-breaking minds across all categories of health, wellness, diet, nutrition, fitness, entrepreneurship, athletic performance, creativity, mindfulness, meditation. Why do I do all of this? I do it so that all of us, myself included, can be helped on the path towards unlocking and unleashing our best, most authentic selves. So thank you so much for tuning

in today. I appreciate you guys subscribing to the show on iTunes. That helps us out a lot, as does leaving a comment on iTunes, which I know a lot of you guys have done over the last couple of weeks since I shouted it out. I really appreciate that. I also greatly appreciate everybody who has made a habit of always using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases.

You can click through the banner ad on any episode page on my site, takes you to Amazon. Amazon does not charge you one cent extra on anything that you buy, but they kick us some loose commission change. It really does help us out a lot. So I appreciate everybody who has made a habit of that. You can also just go to richroll.com forward slash Amazon and achieves the same result. All right. I got Jack Canfield on the show today. He is a self-improvement slash personal growth author and public speaker, perhaps most famously known as the chicken soup for the soul series of books, or maybe you know him from a book he wrote called The Success Principles.

You might not know that this guy has written 47 New York Times bestselling books. That's incredible. 47 New York Times bestsellers. Like I can't even wrap my head around that. Anyways, got a new book out. It's called The 30 Day Sobriety Solution. And look, by nature, you guys might be surprised to hear that I'm a relatively skeptical dude. I'm not really prone to fall into the spell

of the so-called self-help gurus of the day. I'm also somebody with some pretty strong opinions about sobriety, what's required to achieve it, and more importantly, what's required to maintain it. So to be totally honest and transparent with you guys, I wasn't really sure I even wanted to do this interview because I think there's a certain audacity about a guy who is not an alcoholic, a guy who has made his living for a very long time as a professional

self-helper to put out a book that purports to solve one's alcoholism by virtue of a 30-day program. On the flip side, I also admit that I couldn't resist the opportunity to go through with this conversation because it's not every day that you get invited up to Santa Barbara to visit the home of a guy who has sold 500 million books. That is not hyperbole. This guy has actually sold 500 million copies of his books. Like what? And he's also a guy who has had seven books on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time. At the same time. Also, I checked out his new book. As a disclaimer, you guys probably know, I'm a 12-step guy through and through. It saved my life. I'm

still very much invested in 12-step. It is my number one priority. That said, I found that this book has more than a few compelling insights. There is plenty of merit in it and a lot of stuff that I thought would make for a pretty good discussion. So needless to say, here we are. I did the podcast with Jack. I haven't listened to any other interviews with this guy, but I think it's fair to say, and by Jack's own admission, when we were all done, when the dust had settled, that this talk is a little bit different than your normal interview fair with Mr. Canfield. I wouldn't say it was contestuous by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think Jack sensed my dubiosity. Is that a word? Dubiosity. And he was a good sport about it. And I think that that made

for a pretty interesting and at times compelling conversation. But first, let's acknowledge the awesome organizations that make this show possible. This is a conversation about sobriety, of course, including some of the ugly truths behind the industry of sobriety, sobriety ink, if you will. We talk about the driving force behind the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books.

We talk about this healing technique that Jack is super enthusiastic about called tapping. I'd never heard of it before, but that was fascinating. And as an anecdotal aside, when I got home from the podcast, I asked Julie if she knew anything about tapping. And of course, she's like all about it. She loves it. Anyway, we talk about Jack's daily routine, his own experience dealing with alcoholism in his family and amongst his kids. We talk about ayahuasca, plant medicines, something that has come up on the podcast before, of course. We talk about something called the Sedona Method and how to begin the process of letting go of

unwanted emotion. We talk about Jack's opinions on people's biggest limiters and the deleterious implications of American consumerism on cultivating the soul, cultivating a healthy interior life. And all in all, I really enjoyed sitting down with Jack in his study. It was a very cool, interesting opportunity. And I think it was a great exchange. And I hope you guys enjoy it as well. So let's talk to Jack. I like that water system you have in the bathroom.

What is that? It's from Niken. The guys are Magnet MLM. I like that water system you have in the bathroom. Who's that? It's from Niken. The guys are Magnet MLM. Uh-huh. And it alkalizes the water. Yeah. Good stuff, man.

Thank you for inviting me into your lair. This is quite an impressive office. Have you read all of these books? There must be tens of thousands in here. I would say everything on that side and over there I wrote or edited. Yeah, it's funny. And the rest of them I've read, probably 85% of them. In the grand scheme of writers' offices, there's a larger percentage of books on these shelves that you've actually written as compared to books you've read. Quite prolific. I once figured out I read 3,000 books. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah.

That's pretty good. Do you still, I know you have a habit of setting aside time every day to read. Is that something you still- I still do that. I actually, if I had to go back over again, I would have read fewer books and reviewed them more consistently so that I would have really taken in the material and mastered it rather than just had a overview of a lot of things. But I took a lot of things. But I took a speed reading course. I used to read a book a day, and now I probably read two books a week. Right. And how do you select the books that you read? Are they books? I'm sure people just send you books every day, right?

I get sent a lot of books, and then I also, people refer books to me. I read reviews of books in magazines. When I go to Amazon, they say, people refer books to me. I read reviews of books in magazines. When I go to Amazon, they say, people who like this book also bought this book. So I check them out and I read the reviews. And if they're interesting, I purchase them. What's something you've read recently that has impacted you? I'd say The One Thing by Gary Keller. He's at Keller Williams Real Estate.

And the idea that if there was one thing that could totally change your life or change your business, what would it be? And so focus on that one thing rather than trying to just burst yourself all over the place. So for me, it was delegating more and using my assistant more effectively. How did you identify that that was the one thing? I looked at my life and I said, okay, what is it where I feel like I'm wasting the most time? And it was a lot of busy work and filing and just answering emails that my staff could answer and just doing lots of things that other people could do just as well. Right. That's something that I'm dealing with right now. I'm a bit of a control freak.

Yeah. And in order to grow, you've got to delegate, right? In order to grow, you've got to let go. So, is that where it comes from with you? I mean, what was holding, I mean, you know, at this point in your career, I would have imagined you would have mastered that a long time ago, especially with the number of books that you're putting out. I think, well, I do have a good staff. I have 12 people that support me. But I think that for me, there's a perfectionism that it was built in at an early age. And then I also think nobody can do it as well as me. Right. I suffer from that.

There's also, like when I do a lot of emails, I want people to feel like they're really hearing from me. Of course. And like with tweets and Facebook posts. If it doesn't sound like me, it hurts the brand. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. So how many bestsellers now?

47? 47 New York Times. 47 New York Times. Times bestsellers, yeah. Bestsellers. How many books total? 200. Well, the Chicken Soup books, I never know exactly, but we're in the range of about 250

books. So many, you don't even know how many. That's true. I lost count. 500 million copies sold. I mean, the numbers are staggering, right? Like 500 million copies sold, world record for most number of books on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time, seven or something like that.

Seven days. Seven days. How does this happen? When you reflect back on your career as we're sitting here you know is this something that that uh you know in your younger years you felt destined to be and do or is i mean how does this not at all i was not good in english class i got a c in freshman composition in college i never thought of myself as a writer. And then I became an educator and I really wanted to motivate my students to learn because they were not motivated.

So I became more interested in that than I was in teaching history. And that led me to write a book called 100 Ways to Enhance Self-Concept in the Classroom. So I wrote it out of my desire to make a difference, not out of my desire to do anything other than that. And then I was collecting stories. I found that not only my students, but eventually I was a teacher trainer, training teachers, that people responded to stories more than they responded to information and facts. And so I had a lot of stories, and I used them in my talks. And one day someone said, that story about the Girl Scout that sold 3,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies, that in the book anywhere?

I'd like my daughter to read that. I have to go, no. That story about the puppies for saleott cookies that in the book anywhere i'd like my daughter to read that i have to go no that story about the puppies for sale is that in the book no and so over about a month every day someone asked me is that in the book anywhere is that in the book anywhere and finally it was like you know that i should have had a v8 commercial where the guy slaps his head i go i think i'm supposed to write a book put all these stories in there and that was the beginning of chicken soup for the soul and because we said at the end of the first book if you have a story send it in maybe we'll do a sequel now we have 200 plus sequels because people started to send us sometimes we get 500 letters a day in the mail with stories in them now were they all good no but if you if you called through them enough we're good that we could start

doing sequels and then eventually we started inviting certain people like we did chicken soup for the baseball fan so we asked tomm Lasorda, who was the Dodgers manager at the time, to co-author that with us. And then the other thing, which is we did something called the Rule of Five. Every single day, five action steps to promote our books. So if you look over to Courts of Fear, that's 1,500 things we did. Call a radio station, ask for an interview, call a minister and say, we'll replace your sermon with Chicken Soup for the Soul Stories that illustrate biblical principles. Sending free books to the O.J. Simpson jury, which ended up becoming a magazine article because they were sequestered and couldn't

read magazines and watch TV. So, it was just a matter of constant, constant, constant focus on the outcome. And as we determined, we were talking to a psychic once about this, and he said if you would go to a tree with an ax, it wouldn't matter if it was a redwood tree. Eventually the tree would have to cut down if you took five cuts a day at the tree. So that metaphor meant just do five things every day toward your goal and eventually you're likely to achieve it. I feel like you're sort of a, you know, you're OG, like, you know, old guard, original gangster in this kind of, you know, self-empowerment,

self-help movement that's really, you know, kind of mushroom clouded, you know, in the last several decades, couple decades. But, you know, you're kind of, you know, came up with the, you know, with Tony Robbins and the like, and now I feel like there's, you know, all these sort of pretenders to the throne. You know, the internet has created a vehicle and a distribution platform for people to put out a healthy message. And I think that's fantastic. And there's a certain democratization with that that I think is great. But I feel like there's a lot of people who would like to be sitting in your shoes. And it's challenging, I feel like, sometimes to try to figure out who's for real and who's just parroting what they've heard or seen or

read somewhere else. No, it's true. I mean, when I wrote The Success Principles, I wrote it because I had sold millions of chicken soup books. And a lot of people asked me a similar question, like, how'd you do that? How'd you get to where you are? And I thought, yeah, I never really thought about it. So let's look back over my life and see what are the principles and strategies and techniques I've applied. I sat in bed one morning. I remember my son, who was about 10 or 11 at the time, was sitting next to me. And we each had our laptop. And I was typing in all these principles.

Like, it came up with about 115, I think. And my son was doing something else. And we were just having that Sunday morning connection. And I thought, that's a lot of principles. So I better scale that down a bit. The first book was 64. I think we have 67 and then a new 10th anniversary edition. But it came out of a desire to say, OK, I've been super successful, not just selling success,

but in actually running businesses and being a trainer and being a speaker and all that. And I think it's true that a lot of people today have read a lot of books and they've taken that information and said, okay, I'm going to go teach this stuff without having ever been really super successful other than teaching success. And so it's not that they're not good. And I don't have any judgment about that because they're reaching audiences that you and I might not reach. Maybe they're reaching the Hispanic community. Maybe they're reaching the younger community. Maybe they're reaching the younger millennials. Maybe they're reaching the retirement community.

Maybe they're reaching people on Wall Street. So people kind of have a niche of what their energy is like, and they attract a certain kind of person. I'm never going to do probably a talk in Grants Pass, Oregon again, like I did in the early days, because I go to bigger venues. Like rock stars don't play the bowl here in Santa Barbara. If they're really big, they play the LA Staples Center. Yeah, yeah.

I get it. It is a weird thing, though. It's almost like this Ouroboros phenomenon because there are so many people that are teaching success with these programs, but their success equation is based upon them teaching success. They don't have experience growing or building businesses outside of teaching people how to be successful. So, their wealth comes from that. So, it's this weird, vicious cycle kind of thing. No, I hear you. I mean, it's a fair judgment. I'm not judging your judgment. I'm just saying for me, I've been- It's not really a judgment. It's just an

observation. Oh, okay. I'll take that. But in talking about the kind of the people that are, you know, not yourself, but I think you've inspired a generation of people that are out there putting out that kind of message, I suppose I would say. I think a lot of us have. And, you know, I think, too, when I was teaching self-esteem, I would go into schools and I would teach teachers how to develop self-esteem in the classroom so kids could feel better about themselves, risk more, participate more. And the reality was maybe one out of every 10 teachers would put up their hand and say, I want to teach that. And so they were naturals at wanting to teach human development, let's call it. And I think there are people out there who are perhaps naturals at wanting to teach success or human development. And you can't go to graduate school and take a course at UCSB on how to be a motivational speaker or how to be a success guru or something like that. I think people, they decide, that's what I want to do. And they do it. Some people may be

doing it for what I call the wrong reasons just to make money. But I think a lot of people do it because they really are excited about the topic. And so I would give them credit for just going out and saying, okay, I'm going to go do this and see what happens. Interesting. When you look back on your career, I mean, do you, when somebody says you're a self-help guru, like how does that, like do you feel a certain responsibility in carrying that mantle? Like how does that, is that a welcome sort of moniker for yourself?

Or does that feel weird? I'm okay with it. I mean, you know, the self-help, transformation. I call myself a transformation trainer. And I write books that are supposedly helping people transform their consciousness to be one of more love, inclusiveness, peace, harmony, joy, abundance, success, all that. And so, I didn't start out teaching success. I started teaching out people having enough self-esteem that they would participate fully in expressing themselves fully and go for their dreams. And what I learned early on is self-esteem

consists of feeling lovable and capable and significant. So, lovable, people like me. I love myself. I accept my feelings and my body and all that. Capable, meaning I can handle whatever life throws at me. And significant, meaning I matter, that what I do makes a difference. And so over the years, when the recession hit in 1993, at the time of the first Gulf War, all the school money dried up. There was no money for in-service training. People wouldn't send people to my seminars anymore. So I had to re-vector what I was doing into the corporate world that did have money and also doing public seminars. And it was then that I began to be known as the self-help guy as opposed to the self-esteem education guy. Right, right, right, right. I feel like your gift, you have a talent for

being able to take principles that perhaps are founded in a variety of, you know, spiritual traditions and tenets, you know, whether it's Buddhism or, you know, whatever, it doesn't matter. But translate, sort of distilling the core ideas out of these and translating them in a way that's very digestible and understandable to the average human being. I mean, I feel like that's really where your main thing is. Is that a fair characterization? I think so. I started with what works for me. And then I started teaching that to students and I looked at, well, what works for them? What didn't work?

What worked? I've tried a lot of things in my life that didn't particularly, they weren't that useful. But the things that were useful to me and useful to my students, continued to practice read more about took a lot of trainings i usually kiddingly say i took a to z a rika training to zen buddhism and um you know i draw from mysticism and nlp and eft and byron katie's work and sedona Method, Gestalt Therapy, Psychosynthesis, Transactional Analysis. I have certificates in most of those trainings. Yeah, I see you have the Maharishi Award on the wall over there and all kinds of crazy stuff. Yeah, I mean, what do you – so there isn't one core kind of through line of spiritual principles that inform what you do.

It's kind of a la carte. It's more of an integration for me of the things that have worked. And I would say, I was thinking about this this morning because my wife's on the board of directors of the local Buddhist meditation center. And if I had to do, I don't consider myself religious. So, I don't, if you ask me what my religion is, I don't have one. I'm more spiritual. I've studied literally with Christian mystics and the Sufis and big 10-day, 15-day retreats. But I resonate a lot with Buddhism because I like the concept of peace and not attachment and not trying to proselytize anybody. Those tenets feel powerful and good to me. But as I said, for me, it's like,

I know that when I meditate, my life works better. When I'm non-conditional in my love, my life works better. When I forgive people, my life works better. When I am positive in my thinking, my life works better. So we can say, oh, you're a positive thinker. You're into the law of attraction. So I've looked at all those and said, okay, here's a smorgasbord of techniques that have come down over the centuries from some of the wisest people on the planet. Why wouldn't I look at that and see if there's something there for me? So whether it's a Kabbalah meditation like the Tree of Life, or whether it's an affirmation that was developed by Asa Jolie, a psychosynthesis teacher in Italy, or something that Carl Jung came up with.

You know, I'm a big believer in what I call the 30-day practice period. So take something, do it for 30 days, you know. I was a vegetarian for 17 years. It worked real well for me. Then I started getting sick a lot. I find that if I eat protein, fish, for example, I don't eat a lot of beef very rarely unless someone serves it and it's the only thing to eat. But I feel better now. I felt better as a vegetarian for a while, but then I stopped feeling better. So then I changed. I tried something else.

You should have called me. I could have sorted you out. You probably could have. We've got to get you back on the Ahimsa train with us. There we go. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, what, so what is, you know, what's the daily routine look like now? Of all the practices that you've, you know, experimented with, like what sticks the most and shows up in your, you know, daily practice with the most frequency? Yeah, I would say, let me just preface that by saying some of the things that I used to practice I don't because they're just such a part of my way of being. I don't even think about it anymore.

Right, I get that, yeah. But I practice meditation. Is there a specific technique? You know, when I sit down to meditate, I'm not sure which of three things I'm going to do. Because I study Vipassana meditation, which is a Buddhist meditation, and sometimes I just settle into that. I also do repetitions of Sat Nam, which is a Sikh meditation, or Hamsa, which is a Hindu meditation.

Sometimes that feels right to do. And then sometimes I do the Tree of Life, which is a Kabbalah meditation from Jewish mysticism. And I honestly don't know. And I'll start to repeat something, it doesn't feel right. Then I'll do the next thing, oh, that feels good. If that doesn't feel right, I'll do the other. So it's usually one of those three. Occasionally, if someone's just given me a new meditation CD by somebody, I'll do that and see what happens. And I might listen to that for a couple weeks if I'm getting value from it. And then usually I drop back into my old ways. But then I also exercise vigorously with aerobics.

And I use this exciser here, which you see on the floor, which is kind of a stair-stepper type thing. exciser here, which you see on the floor, which is kind of a stair stepper type thing. And burst training, what they call high intensity interval training, where you do two minutes, go as fast as you can, then a minute, just totally stop and rest. And I do that for a minimum of 20 minutes. And then I also do 20 minutes of reading. That usually turns into 30 minutes to an hour. Sometimes the meditation turns into 30 minutes to an hour. If I'm in there and I'm grooving and I don't have an early morning interview or something,

I might just stay there. And the next thing I know, I'm looking at the clock and going, oh my God, that was an hour. Do you come into your office to do that? No, I do it in my bedroom. I do it in my bedroom. I have a little meditation stool that someone built for me that I love. So I do that there and I read there. And I actually exercise there too.

I have another one of those up in my bedroom and I have some bands. I also have a gym in my house, which I visit maybe on the weekends. Like most, right? And what's the writing routine look like? You know, I write when I have to. When I'm writing a book, it usually looks like from about 7 o'clock till midnight. Sometimes, as it often happens, I don't like it but it does i get so into it the next thing i know i hear birds chirping and i see this turning gray outside and i've been typing for 12 hours um and that's okay not a

morning writer no i'm not a morning person maybe when i was in graduate school i had my perfect rhythm i would go to bed around 3, 30 or 4 and wake up around 11. All my classes were in the afternoon. And so my wife goes to bed at 10. I go to bed at 2. She wakes up around 6.30. I wake up around 9 o'clock, 7 hours. Right, right, right. And are you working on a book right now? I'm thinking about a book and collecting stuff and throwing it into a file right now for a book called, it's going to be about love and fear. There's only two choices in life. You're either making a choice for love or a choice out of fear.

And everything else that we'd say is like greed. Well, that comes from fear. I'm not going to have enough. And I'm finishing up a book, but really a compilation of stories of people who've taken my trainings, read my books, and their stories of how their lives are transformed. It's called Living the Success Principles. It's going to be self-published, and we'll just give it away at events because people will read it and go, oh, my God, I want to take that training or I want to read that book. Yeah. You sold enough books.

I have sold tons of books. Well, on that subject, it's a good segue to launch into talking about the new book a little bit, The 30-Day Sobriety Solution. And I think an interesting way to kind of kick it off is to kind of extend your idea of being non-dogmatic in your kind of spiritual approach to your life and this idea of experimenting with a whole bunch of different modalities. When I read your book, it should be said that I'm a longtime sober guy,

got sober in rehab, 100 days in rehab, AA through and through, sponsor steps, sponsor people, still very active in the program to this day, you know, number one priority in the whole thing. And so, for me, I have to overcome my predisposition to judge anything that is outside of 12-step, right? So, my challenge is butting up against my own, you know, ideas about what recovery should look like and shouldn't look like. So, my own dogma, right? Sure. I get that totally.

And being able to step outside of that and say, well, just because Bill and Bob wrote this book so long ago doesn't mean it's the be-all, end-all. I have no judgment on how people get sober as long as they get sober. I know that AA works for me. And I'm open to other ideas that work for other people. So, what was the inspiration behind this book? What drove you to express yourself in this way? Sure. Well, for some background about the alcoholism in my family, my mother and father, my biological father, were both alcoholics. They both quit late

in life, but they were miserable to each other and to us as children when we were younger. I can remember waking up on a Saturday morning and finding 15 people asleep in my house on the couches on the floor because they drank so much they couldn't drive home. Everybody in the party. Everybody in the party. You know, I remember this one guy- This sounds like a good time, Jack. Well, it sounds like a good time for a little bit.

You know, and as I like to say, the problem with addictions is they work. They give you relief from pain, but only temporarily. So that was great Friday night, but Saturday morning, everyone had a hangover. I don't think they were very functional, and God knows they probably weren't very effective on work on Monday.

But I watched the pain of all that in my family. My grandmother was an alcoholic. That was the first time I was exposed to the big book because she had one when she got sober late in life. And my aunt, I can remember her pitching forward into a plate of mashed potatoes when I was a kid. And my uncle picked her up and took her up to bed and came back downstairs and acted like nothing ever happened. So it was something you didn't talk about. It was painfully a secret. And then I have three kids, two of my own children and one stepchild, who've gone through rehab, gotten sober.

They're in AA. They go to meetings. Two of them are sponsors. So I have a lot of respect for them. A lot of alcoholism. A lot of alcoholism in the family. So whether it's a gene, a disease, or just an environment that they grew up in, I think a lot of it, you know, a friend of mine recently coined a term,

skills, not pills, and the idea that a lot of times people don't have the skills they need to manage their emotions, manage the shame, the guilt, to look at the underlying reason why they're drinking. And so they can't stop. So for me, with all that background, when I met my co-author, Dave Andrews, who had successfully developed this program called the 30-Day Sobriety Solution, they had a website and an online coaching program. And a lot of the work that he was using was drawn from my work, from Tony Robbins' work, from Brian Tracy's work,

and some other people. Yeah, it's definitely influenced by the success principles. Totally. Correct, yeah. Yeah, and it's what Dave said, and I'll give you a little bit of his background, rehab three times, relapse three times, AA meetings, relapse. So, it wasn't working for him. And so, someone gave him a Tony Robbins tape and said, you ought to listen to this. And he's listening to it in his car, And it really made a lot of sense to him.

And he was looking at some of his own behavioral patterns. And he said, why aren't they teaching this stuff in rehab? And so when I would take my kids to rehab centers and go there and do family weekends and all that stuff, I was just like, God, if I could just jump in and do an exercise that I know here. If I could just jump in and teach these kids a meditation. If I could just jump in and process these two people using something other than what the people were doing in the rehab centers. And I think there's some good rehab centers out there, and I think there's some bad rehab

centers out there. And what I learned when I was taking my kids, and my sister, who's also, she was addicted to a drug from an accident, got on Oxycontin, those kind of things, and got addicted. And I would just, you know, there are a number of rehab centers, and a couple of them where you live in Malibu, that are really real estate investments, where you get, buy this big piece of property, you have people paying you $30,000 a month or more, and then basically you have this great real estate investment. Yeah, there's no question that there's a lot of problems with the current state of you

know recovery houses and sober living houses and rehabs there's there's plenty of great rehabs but so just to finish the point i i was always going like god i'd love to jump in here and i see a lot of people that are really dedicated to help people like some of the young counselors but they didn't have a lot of skill sets and so one of the things things, I see this book, The 30 Day Sobriety Solution, is actually we now have a lot of rehab counselors who are actually using the book and using some of the techniques with people in rehab, which I'm happy about.

However, what we found, what they found, and I found as I started doing the research with them, is that a lot of people, they're afraid to go to AA because of the publicness of it. Even though it's Alcoholics Anonymous, they're afraid their friends will know they're going to AA. They're afraid their boss will find out about it. They think it doesn't work for them. They're afraid of the spiritual or religious aspect of it.

They don't like saying, I'm an alcoholic. If they've been in the Human Potential Movement, they think that's kind of an affirmation that's bad. I think it's good in the beginning to acknowledge and get out of denial. But I think it's a lifetime phrase it might not always be the best. But mostly importantly, is that a lot of people can't afford rehab. It's like $30,000 a month, something like that. They're not going to go. They're not going to risk their job if they're away. Why are you away? So we said, is there an alternative? And he was showing that he was getting a 79.6% success rate with people over an eight-year period using these techniques that are in the book.

I added a couple more when we wrote the book that he wasn't using. And I don't know if you know who Tommy Rosen is, Recovery 2.0. He's got a blog and podcast that he does. And I was on his podcast not too long ago for his Recovery 2.0 tele-summit. But he's been sober. He's also a vegetarian. He does yoga. He teaches meditation. He's a really cool guy. You'd like him. And he said, when I got my 20-year chip, I hugged my sponsor. And my sponsor said, you're one in 10,000. And he said, what does that

mean? He said, one in 10,000 people that start AA make it 20 years. And so he said, I knew something was off. There had to be some other, nothing, never making AA wrong. I love AA. For my sons, it was really helpful. But to say, is there a group of people who are not getting served that could be served in the privacy of their own home with techniques that we know work from the research that we've done and Dave did with his work. So that was the basis of the book.

And the big controversy too, as we say on on the cover how to quit or cut back. And AA says, you can't cut back. You have to quit. And we agree. Probably 90% of the people have to quit. But if you tell people you have to quit before they start getting the value of some of the things in this book, they're so afraid they'll never have fun again. They'll never know what. They'll have anxiety their entire life, et cetera, that they won't even play. And so what Dave found out in his work, and I found out since,

and we now have a couple of recovery centers who are using this book, who are starting to say, you know, we may have turned away a lot of people that we shouldn't have turned away, because we told them you had to do total abstinence. And so all I'm saying is that we have a lot of people that go through this, and they think they're going to cut back, and then they realize when they get to the end of it, no, I can't, I need to be sober the rest of my life. However, we get 5% to 10% of people who do cut back and actually become successful social drinkers,

can have a glass of wine and walk away from it. Most people can't. All right, well, like, dozens of observations. Go for it. No, no, it's fun. I mean, I think... I enjoy it. Fundamentally, there's a difference between somebody who can have a good time with drinking and set it aside. Maybe it causes a little bit of problems in their life, but that's different

from somebody who is an alcoholic. I mean, would you agree that there's non-alcoholics and alcoholics, and then there's a fundamental difference between how these two personality types are wired? Are you saying that there's not a dualistic? I used to totally believe that. And now I'm saying I'm not sure. I'm not saying no. I'm saying I'm not sure. And I've got a couple of friends who work with addictive personalities and do addiction counseling who are convinced that there's not that gene, if you will, or that disease mentality. I don't go there yet. And I'm not saying the book is saying that either.

I am saying that a lot of people, it's not the alcohol. It's the reason why they drink. It's like people that are addicted to television, it's not the alcohol, it's the reason why they drink. Like people that are addicted to television, it's not the television's fault. It's the fact that they are trying to escape the shame, the anxiety, the pain, and that's a way to numb out. And so, you know, let's assume that you're right, that there is an alcohol gene or that there's a personality that's addictive. You know, one of the beliefs that keeps people drinking is, I have an addictive personality. And then you go into, well, I can't stop because I have an addictive personality.

So, I don't know. I do a lot of work with beliefs, and I think sometimes your beliefs can keep you stuck. Of course. Yeah, yeah. It's very, very interesting. You know, the story you tell yourself about yourself is incredibly powerful, and that's at the core of the work that you do, and I'm well aware of that. And, you know, a common sort of criticism of 12-step is you're constantly reaffirming what you are. I am an alcoholic.

The traditions would state, well, this is a reminder so that you stay connected with what brought you there. But there is that counterargument argument and I can intellectually understand that. And also to kind of take your point further, I'm sure you're familiar with Gabor Mate. I love Gabor Mate. Yeah, so he's a friend, he's been on the podcast and I think the work that he's doing is fascinating. And for the listener out there

that didn't hear my podcast with him, his core kind of idea is that addiction is rooted in childhood trauma, unresolved childhood trauma. And that's sort of what you're saying as well. It's like you can, the drink or the drug is the solution to the problem. It's not the problem. And it works until it stops working, of course. But if you don't address the underlying personality defects, the wrong word, but whatever is troubling the person that's giving them that discomfort that drives them to check out with drugs and alcohol or behavior or whatever it is,

you're never really getting at the problem, right? Yeah. And what we say too is, look, we have a chapter in the book called The Willpower Solution and why it doesn't work. And in some ways, a lot of programs are about, you just choose not to drink. And see, in drinking- That's a disaster. That's not going to work. Yeah, well, we know that. You know that. But a lot of-

Go ahead. No, no, just so your listeners hear this again, the idea that if you associate alcohol with pleasure and not drinking with pain, because the pain comes up when you don't drink you know when you're no longer numbing out the sensations then what happens is you're doomed because that willpower will never sustain long enough i always use the metaphor if i've got a boat and it's going north and the automatic pilot is scheduled to go north i can take the wheel of that boat and turn it east but as soon as i let go of the wheel, the automatic pilot takes over and goes north again. So we have to reprogram the automatic pilot, and that's what, whether you call it healing

your childhood trauma or healing the decisions you made to survive when you were younger, a lot of ways we can talk about it, but the anxiety, the shame, the guilt, the anger, all of that that exists until that is healed and released, and we get back to the central essence of who you are, the core essence culture, God self, your high self, whatever, that part is not ever going to drink. It doesn't need to. And the commitment to resolve that is, I mean, that could be a lifetime of work. It's not something that's going to get resolved in 30 days or 100 days or in a year. We say these 30 days will get you started on a series of disciplines that you're going to have to continue for a while in order to keep growing.

And basically, I don't think you ever stop growing. There's always core issues that we seem to have. Most of us have one basic core wound. Some of us have more. But that one kind of cycles back, and we think we've solved it. And then later we come back and say, God, I thought I solved that. But you're not on the same level. You're spiraled up above it, but it's still got things that are blocking you.

You have to deal with. You know, if I don't do the work required to stay sober, then I'm going to default to a dark place that's going to take me on a path that I don't want to go down. And I have to stay connected and do the work in recovery to combat that, right? So, I don't know that I'll ever completely overcome that default setting. It's sort of like- I think you can, by the way. Do you? I mean, it's better. I don't have the obsession of the mind. I don't feel in jeopardy today, but that's a result of persistently doing the work and being committed on a 100% level. I think there's a space at which you can achieve, and this doesn't

happen overnight by any means, but I think you can reach a place where those original wounds are completely healed and released. But it requires the knowledge of how to do that and a commitment. There's this gap between, this is something that comes up on my podcast a lot, but it requires the knowledge of how to do that and the commitment. Pete There's this gap between, this is something that comes up on my podcast a lot, but the gap between information and action, right? So, whether it's the 12 steps or it's the tools and the principles that are set forth in your book, there's the intellectual understanding of them and then there's the actual doing, right? Pete That's right.

Pete You have to do the work. Pete That's right. You have to do the work. That's true. You can read the book and go, I get that. But if you don't commit yourself to actually practicing these ideas, then it's not going to change your circumstances. Absolutely. That's why every day, this is not a book to read. This is a book to do.

And it literally is a 30-day program. And each day there's a homework assignment. And that homework assignment, sometimes it's writing, sometimes it's a visualization, sometimes it's meditation, sometimes it's deep reflection, sometimes it's examining your values and your core values. Sometimes it's a visualization where you look at, if I don't change my behavior five years out, what's my life look like? If I change my behavior, what's my life look like five years out? Can I create a vision for that? Can I revisit that vision on a daily basis with an affirmation so that that starts to root out the negative images that are in there and begin to move forward this new image that I start to move towards, like the GPS system

in your car? Once that's established and you're going the wrong direction, your GPS system says, take an immediate U-turn and go back to the highlighted route. And that can happen. You can reach that place in your brain. And also with tapping. Are you familiar with tapping? No, I've heard you talk about it a little bit, though. Tapping is so... This is like, this starts to get like way out there. Yeah, it is way out there.

Explain to me what this is. Well, here's the deal. We know that we have the amygdala in the back of the brain. The amygdala is related to fear. And when we tap, we take energy out of the amygdala and bring it back up into the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is where rational decisions are made. It's what's not fully developed in teenagers, which is why they do such stupid things sometimes. And it's also where your third eye is located if you get into the spiritual stuff.

So this is where spiritual energy comes in. That's why they often have you close your eyes, look forward and up and activate the prefrontal cortex. And so what happens is tapping is simply based on acupressure and acupuncture, where you tap on nine acupuncture points on your head and on your chest and on your arm. As you say, I totally love... Well, you start by saying, I totally love and forgive myself or totally love and accept myself even though I have this craving for alcohol

or I totally love and accept myself even though I have this guilt over having had an affair when I was married or whatever and then you just

you tap on what's called the reminder phrase as you tap on these points this guilt this guilt you're tapping on your forehead your temples

the top of your head it's you tap on the top of your head it's you tap on the top of the head you tap right where it's called the eyebrow point where the two eyebrows come together unless you have a unibrow so you tap right at the end of those you tap right at the side of the eye tap right under the eye you tap under the nose tap on the chin tap on the what we call the collarbone points not really thebone, it's down an inch and over two, and we tap here under the arm. And you do a sequence of that, and you start with how intense is this craving, or how intense

is this guilt, or how intense is this anger, or how intense is this belief? You can also tap away pain, it's ridiculous how powerful it is and how simple it is, no one believes it. But there's a preset routine, you go from here to here to here to here. You repeat whatever it is that you're trying to... I got it. And we have a diagram in the book. That's out there, man. We have...

It is out there, but think about this. So is veganism out there for most people. The reality is... I'll go there. We can go as deep as you want. I can go down the rabbit hole. It doesn't have to be the chicken soup. I thought this was all weird stuff until about 20 years ago, someone invented the five-minute phobia cure, a guy named Dr. Roger Callahan.

And I studied that with him. And I learned that you could disappear all phobias, 99.4%, according to Roger, in five minutes or less when I cured people. Come on. No, no. I could take you on Amazon.com where I have a book called Tapping into Ultimate Success, which is all about tapping, which I co-authored with a tapping expert. And the first one is Sharon Worsley, who says, I was at Jack's seminar. We went down to the pool to have a pool party. I couldn't go in because I was afraid of the water. Jack tapped on me. I started floating. By the end of the night, I was swimming. I swim every day now. People afraid to come up on stage and speak. I have

them turn to the wall. Don't even look at the audience. We tap for five minutes. They turn around. They tell jokes. They speak. Woman is afraid of heights. We take her out up to the top of the building, put her at the end of the terrace and look down.

No fear of heights anymore. One session of this tapping. Usually one session. Usually one. What are you doing writing books? You could just take this on the road. This sounds like the solution to all our culture's ills. I just told you.

I wrote a book called Tapping into Ultimate Success. We have two tapping videos on our website done by Dawson Church, who runs the tapping. He's really a big tapping leader. And then Nick Ordner has a book called The Tapping Solution. And Nick worked with the kids in Rwanda. He lived in Newtown, Connecticut. He worked with the kids in Newtownanda. He lived in Newtown, Connecticut. He worked with the kids in Newtown after the massacre, helping tap away the fear. So we know all this works.

The problem is it sounds weird. Most people don't believe it, so they don't do it. But the fact is I teach this to people like 500 people at a time in my seminars, and we get rid of like 300 phobias in about 10 or 15 minutes. So do you tap on yourself or you have someone tap on you? You can do it either way. You can have someone tap on you, which was the original protocol with a therapist who wanted to keep everything and make a lot of money. You had to charge $2,500 to get rid of a thing.

I call myself Robin Hood. Steal from the rich, gives it to the poor. So Gary Craig came along and he took that whole protocol and simplified it. And so you can tap on yourself that's what 99 of the people do so i can have an audience where i'm tapping with them and the whole audience is tapping at the same time and we'll have them house on a scale of one to ten how strong is this craving you can bring you can bring in chocolate alcohol anything you want put it right in front of people and their mouths are salivating.

We can tap on this craving for chocolate. We did it for about four minutes. The craving's gone. They won't even pick up the chocolate. That's pretty interesting. It is interesting. Until I started kind of looking into you, I would have never heard of this. Are there practitioners that you can go and...

There are. There's like a whole world of tapping that I god they have a energy psychology conference which is all energy psychology but i would say half the people there are tappers and is this is this rooted in in chinese medicine what is the what is the point of origin for this the guy who invented it originally way back when roger callahan had a secretary who was phobic of water. Roger lived in Palm Springs. He wanted to be able to have his secretary take dictation while he sat by his pool. She couldn't come out there. So, he went on a search to figure out how do you get rid of fear quickly.

And he found these tapping points relate to the kidney primarily. And the kidney is fear. That's why we pee our pants when we get scared. And so, basically, you're interrupting a program in the brain that goes see spider freak out and you're just basically like taking um dominoes out like when you see those big gyms where they set up 2 000 dominoes you take three dominoes out it stops and so basically you're deprogramming the stimulus to the response and um taking you out of the fear and amygdala up into the forefront of the brain. Lots of different theories about why it works, but it works.

So, this could be used for people that are trying to quit smoking or- Quit smoking, overeating, gambling, sex addiction. Is it rooted in the same principles that hypnosis are for eradicating these kinds of errant behaviors or is it a different- That's a really good question. I don't think I could give you an academically sound answer to for eradicating these kinds of errant behaviors, or is it a different... That's a really good question. I don't think I could give you an academically sound answer to that. I mean, probably Dawson Church, who's the foremost expert on this, could,

because he studied everything under the sun. All right. He's read more books than I have. I could look into it a little bit more. Here's the deal for your listeners. If you just go to YouTube and type in tapping, and you'll see there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of videos, all people teaching tapping primarily because they want to get you as a client,

but they're giving away the store and you can learn to do it just by watching a video. All right. I'm going to check it out. There's a whole chapter in our book on it. I'm open-minded. Diagram. All right. Well, some of the core fundamental principles that are super important to, you know, my sober journey are meditation, of course, which we kind of touched on and talked about in your own life. But also, I think at its base, you know, a fundamental cornerstone of 12-step is one

alcoholic talking to another, right? And I feel like, I'm interested in your thoughts on this, because it feels like part of the book is addressing a core contingent of people who might be intimidated to go to AA, they're afraid of it, and they want to do this in the privacy of their own home, right? But, you know, a fundamental kind of character definition of the alcoholic is somebody who likes to isolate. Like, that's alcoholism, like wanting to isolate, not wanting to leave your house. Yep, I understand. So, part of the recovery process is getting somebody out of their home, getting them to be able to open up and communicate, you know, at first, at least, with another alcoholic. Because all alcoholics think that they're terminally unique, that no one can understand their pain, that only they know from what they suffer from. So here's how we deal with that, two ways.

Number one, there's a chapter in the book called The Relationship Solution. We actually recommend people go to AA meetings in that chapter and say, meet some people, find out other people who are on the path you are. But we also have a website. It's free, comes with a book. And basically, there's a chat room and a forum in there, which I go in and respond to people's stuff. Dave responds. We have a psychologist who goes in regularly, responds to people.

And if you look at what's in there, you can go look at the chats, 30daysolution.com. And then also on Amazon, you'll see we have 64 positive reviews now. And the book came out January 19th, so not bad for a couple of months. And it took 30 days for people to get through the program before they could even post reviews. People are saying things like, oh, the website was so helpful for me. Some people said, hey, I did the book on my own and it worked. I'd relapsed three times. It's the first time in my adult life I've been sober for longer than 12 days. So we know it's working. And we know that relationship is important. And we know that connecting with other people and you look at

people, I just give you one example. Guy said, Friday night, Friday nights, tonight, I always drink. So I said, I'm not going to drink. I'm going to stay home. This was so hard. My kid said, Dad, why don't we make it movie night? So I said, okay, I'll go to the store and I'll get some pizza. And I'm walking down the aisle and I got to go past the beer and the wine aisle to get to the checkout counter. I didn't even stop to think I wanted a drink. I came home, we watched the movie. Another person writes back, oh my God, it's such a great idea. Friday night, movie night. I'm going to do that with my family. So a lot of things are going on back and forth in the chats with people where they're getting support. And people are also saying, I'm having trouble with this. I'm feeling like I need,

and people are reaching out to each other, almost like sponsors do, and we also do. So, I'm not suggesting that that's a substitute for relationship. Ultimately, most people are solo drinkers because of the anxiety of what they feel like when they're with people. And so, we want to get past that, which is why tapping on the anxiety and also creating relationships, which we say you have to do if you're going to be successful. Outside the tapping, is there a spiritual contingent component to this program? I mean, fundamentally, 12 Step is a spiritual program. Dave and I are both spiritual.

I haven't been in a church other than for some special event on a Wednesday night in a long time. That's not true. I went to Michael Beckwith's church on Sunday this past Easter. Agape. Agape. I love Agape. Michael's a good friend of mine. So, I go there three or four times a year.

It's one church I feel like I belong there. It's almost not, it's not fair to call it a church. For people that are listening, it might conjure up an image that isn't a fair representation of agape. I mean, explain what agape is because it's so unique and beautiful. Well, agape is, you know, Michael Beckwith is definitely channeling something that's spiritual. For sure. And certainly believes in God. And I'll tell you, I took my son there two Easter's ago and he's 26 and he's also a member of AA, he's a sponsor. And at the end I

said, so Christopher, what'd you think? He said, dad, that was a soulgasm. So, basically it's a spiritual experience. It's a community of people. And as Michael says, we're not interested in dogma. We're interested in having a direct experience with God. And so, it's really connecting to the essence of who it is inside of you that is God-like, that is God. It's the way he would say it is God expressing itself through you as you. And so, we're each an expression of the evolutionary impulse in the universe of God expressing itself and evolving in consciousness. And there's thousands of people that show up. He has an overflow room. He's now doing simulcasting on television on the internet. And it's amazing. The choir sings and people dance and it's kind of a combination between a Southern Baptist revival

and a Buddhist experience. Yeah. That's a good description of it. Yeah. It's like 20 minutes of silent meditation. And then there's the singing and that part's like a Baptist church, and Michael's an amazing, if you want to call it, preacher. It's rooted in Science of Mind, which is Ernest Holmes' ideas that

date quite a ways back. So, going back, is there spirituality in the book? Yeah, it's not blatantly in your face, you know, but I come from a spiritual perspective, and so it's ingrained in all, but I come from a spiritual perspective. And so, it's ingrained in all the principles that there's a spiritual part of you that we can access. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's interesting to entertain new ideas and new

approaches to sobriety. You know, I wouldn't have sat down with Gabor if I didn't, you know, if I wasn't interested in that. And I think it's important to not be dogmatic and to be open to that. One of the things that Gabor suggests that gets suggested to me quite often is plant medicine like ayahuasca for treating addiction. It seems to come up quite frequently.

It's something that I've declined to avail myself of. As somebody who's in recovery, the idea of taking a mind-altering drug to resolve my issue with mind-altering drugs doesn't sit quite right with me, but I'm wondering whether that has come up in the research that you put into this book or you've had conversations or thoughts on that.

Well, I'll just tell you personal experiences. So, my oldest son wrote a book called Long Past Stopping. It was about his heroin addiction. And I got divorced from his mom when he was about two. And so, he had the fraction of the wound of that. His mother was real tough. That's why I got a divorce. I initiated a divorce. That was real tough. He got into alcohol at a very young age and then into drugs. And because marijuana didn't seem that bad to him and everyone said it's terrible, you know, the whole society, it's the gateway drug. He said, well, they lied to me about marijuana.

Maybe they're lying about heroin. Well, heroin, as you know, a few shots of heroin and you're pretty hooked for life. And that was probably the most painful thing I ever watched was him getting sober again, was the detox and all that that went on. But what cured him, if you will, or got him to the point where he's sober, because he relapsed a lot of times and lots of money went into rehab. But he was that special case you talked about earlier. Nobody can understand me. I'm more artistic than the rest of Marnie is very artistic.

But he actually did a drug called Ibogaine, which is an African drug. And it recapitulates your life experience and you see all the way. And that was really helpful for him. And then he did a thing called the Hoffman Process, which is a 10-day training that was started by these two guys called Fisher and Hoffman, which a lot of people have done. It's very powerful. And it heals your relationship with your parents. You see the patterns you've adopted from your parents and you really do a lot of healing. As he would say, those two things made him teachable. Then he went back into rehab and he finished rehab.

He was like his rehab star, if you will, like the team captain for his rehab center. And then he came out and he became, you know, he became a sponsor. He wrote his book and he's doing really, really well. His name's Oram? O-R-A-N. Oram Cantill.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that was, I mean, that book was a little rough on you. Yes, it was. And that was fine. I mean, I was a little rough on him. So it's fair game. But he's sober now. He's sober now.

He's doing very well. He's married. He's not married. He's living with a woman. I have a grandson. He'll be three in a couple of weeks. Interesting. And he's a now. He's sober now. He's doing very well. He's married. He's not married. He's living with a woman. I have a grandson. He'll be three in a couple weeks. Interesting. And he's a really cute kid.

But from that, I take that his experience with ibogaine makes you feel like, well, I don't know. I don't have judgment on that. It seemed to have been of benefit to him and his kids. It was for him. And I think there's some research out there that seems that it is, especially for heroin. Heroin's one of the toughest ones to recover from. I think it's 15% recovery rate with heroin addicts. With ayahuasca, I have taken ayahuasca in the rainforest.

Oh, you have? Yeah, I went down to Ecuador. And I have to say that was a life-altering experience. So I definitely think there's something powerful. The problem is, it's like the 60s. I did some drugs in the 60s, but it was never like recreational for like fun. Like people would go to Disneyland on acid. I can't imagine doing that. I mean, I would clean my apartment to an inch of his life. I would play spiritual music. I would meditate before. I would really get into the space of it. For me, it was for spiritual evolution and I would do it maybe twice a year. And later I worked with a shaman here in America and maybe twice a year for four years, we would ingest some substance and work with him for a day

afterwards to integrate it. Great insights, great awarenesses. The problem is if you have a, go back to your thing, addictive personality, you got to be real careful. There are a lot of people that do ayahuasca every weekend. Yeah, I've seen that. I'm not sure that's too healthy. I've seen that more and more. And it also seems like it's become kind of a bucket list thing to do for, you know, a well-heeled person to take their trip down to Peru with the shaman, you know, and do the deal and say, okay, I did that, right?

Like, I had- What was the guy who wrote a book called Spiritual Materialism? Yeah. It's like a spiritual merit badge, you know, you gotta be careful of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I had, I'm sure, you know, Daniel Pinchbeck? I don't. You know, he's a, he's sort of a voice in the psychedelic movement and somebody who had been kind of supporting people's spiritual expansion through psychedelic experimentation.

And he wrote that book, 2012 Quetzalcoatl. He was the guy who was saying 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar. I do know that book, actually. I just forgot his name yeah so he but he i had him on the podcast and he was sort of lamenting um you know he had aspirations that ayahuasca or these plant medicines would usher in kind of a new era of heightened consciousness but instead it's sort of resorted to people who are tourists with it or people that are doing it every weekend and they're doing it in a in a non-intended way well it's the same thing. I think Timothy Leary and Ram Dass had the thought that ASIC would do that. Right.

LSD would do that. And I think in the, in a, in a controlled environment with a qualified shaman, it has that potential. And when it just becomes a recreational drug, like anything else that's out there, it loses, it loses that potential. Yeah. I'm scared. I don't want to, you know, I don't.

Well, I'll tell you a funny story. You know what I mean? Like, I don't want to take any more drugs. I understand that. I understand that. I'm scared. I don't want to, you know. Well, I'll tell you a funny story. You know what I mean? Like, I don't want to take any more drugs. I understand that. I understand that. I understand that. And, you know, fear is sometimes a good thing, and sometimes fear gets in the way of things that can help you, and so you have to do your own work with that.

But my son, Oren, we went to this thing called a brain camp, where the guy that invented ecstasy thought that he needed to help people recreate their brains after he realized he probably destroyed a bunch of them. And so, he developed these supplements, he calls them, that bypass the brain blood barrier and go in and help remove the drugs that get attached to the end of the neurons so that people could regain brain function. And my son went with me to that weekend. Almost like a chelation. Yeah, kind of. And it also rebuilds brains. Like there's salamander tail, whatever helps salamander tails rebuild.

They put some of this in there. I mean, it's all wild stuff. But this guy is a certified genius. I mean, the guy is amazing. He was winning science fairs when he was, I think, 11. He told his parents, you've got to find someone to parent me because you're not smart enough i mean he was that smart as a kid and um anyway so my son went and he's like you said i'm not gonna i don't want to take these supplements because they seem like they're drugs you know and i said what's your call

you know do we do it twice in a four-day period and because there is a serotonin and a dopamine boost which most drugs and alcohol give you and so he decided to do it one of the two days and it was extremely healing for him and me before that i think he was super upset with me as his book would indicate and after that we're really good friends now so it healed our relationship because we got into a space of consciousness we both needed to go to the bathroom so bad we stood outside the bathroom door for about four hours neither of us peeing because we were afraid to break the bond that was forming that's how beautiful it was

and the connection to him and I don't think he's ever done anything since then and he wouldn't you know he's a purist he won't drink non-alcoholic beer or kombucha you know because there's a little bit of alcohol in it so he's really straight and narrow but the ibogaine and that one thing he did with me I think were both useful for him.

And in terms of your program, it's called the 30-Day Sobriety Solution. But I would presume that there is some form of aftercare, right? Are you submitting that after 30 like, everything's good? If you do this, you've resolved your problem and you are free and clear? No, we say that at the end of the book, you know, that this is not, you're not done. This is a lifetime journey. And what we hope happens for you is you've learned some key disciplines here of meditation, of journal writing, of focusing on the positive, of visioning, of affirmations, of eating more healthy. And we definitely want

people to eat more healthy because alcohol is basically fermented sugar and sugar is deleterious to the body to the nth degree. So there's a lot in there about nutrition. And we have on our website, we have other nutritional things that you can do to start moving. I mean, it's not as deep as what you're doing with veganism and all that. But we tell people, look, this is a lifetime journey. But most people, it's kind of like some of these weight loss programs where you do a two-day fast and you lose six pounds, maybe 80% of its water weight. But it's so like, wow, this is possible. So there's now a belief that it's possible to live a sober life.

Yeah, I get that. And that's powerful. And that goes back to what we were talking about, story, the story you tell yourself about yourself. Like, I'm somebody who can never get sober. I'm a chronic relapser. Like, when you're sort of in that cycle of affirming that, it's difficult to break out of that and form a new story. And one of the things too, we have a chapter on asking better questions. And a lot of people say, well, why am I such a loser? Why can't I get sober? Why can't I stay sober? Which presupposes I can't stay sober. So, you never ask a why question that doesn't presuppose that the condition is in the question called why can't I, meaning I can't. So, how can I get sober? How can

I stay sober? How can I keep sober after I finish 38? So there's a bunch of tools in there that really retool the brain in a way. And they have to be reinforced over time. And we say that very clearly. And people have continual lifetime access to our website. They can do the meditations again. They can stay part of the chat room.

They can keep talking to each other. So it's not a... What we also say to two things, reboot this. In other words, do this again. Like they now have this thing called dry January for people that are drinkers, but they say, if you can cut out drinking for a month, it's good for your kidney, your liver. We now know that women who drink two drinks a day are 70% more likely to get breast cancer than people who don't. That's a horrific statistic when you think about that. So what we've started as we're here recording, I don't know when you're hearing this, but all of April is called the 30-Day Sobriety Challenge.

And we're going to redo it probably in September and do it again in January, which is dry month. January was dry month. And we're saying to people, even if you're just a social drinker and you want to cut back, we had the person who did the graphics for the cover of the book and the website that we've created. She said, I was reading your book, trying to get a feel for what I was going to do the graphics on. I decided I'd do the 30 days. She said, now it's been 90 days. Now I'm going to go for a year. I've got 12 women that are doing it with me. I was a fitness instructor. I feel better. I'm healthier. I'm working out more. I'm spending quality time with my kids, better time with my husband.

I don't feel groggy the next morning. I'm not like, all I can do is watch TV at night. She's writing a book. So all this stuff, we're saying basically, not only if you're alcoholic, but most people are drinking too much. Even if they're a social drinker, they're binge drinking on the weekend. They're drinking that two drinks a night. They're putting on 300 calories every glass of wine they drink. Over the course of a month, they're gaining one or two pounds. I mean, there's just a lot of

negative impact in their life from drinking. Yeah. I mean, I think most people are eating terrible food. They have poor lifestyle habits. They're drinking periodically, excessively. So they're going through life basically feeling like shit most of the time. And you acclimate to that. That becomes your new normal. So you don't know what it feels like to feel good or that you could perhaps feel 50, 70, 100% better than you do until you start playing with that equation and changing things up.

Totally. Totally. I will tell you this, some of the reviews that you'll see on Amazon, if you go there are people saying, I thought this was about getting sober. I now realize it's about my life. I thought this was about getting sober. This was like a human potential workshop for 30 days that's now retooled how I think about myself, my goals, my life, my future. So, because it has so much of that built into it, it's more than just getting sober. As you said, there's a whole, I mean, it's a lifestyle choice you have to make, obviously. Right. And the same argument can be made for 12-step. I mean, I think any person can benefit if they actually did the 12 steps in their life and ultimately arrive

at a place of understanding that we're spiritual beings having a human experience and that our job here on earth is to serve and be of service to other people and all these kind of- There are some brilliant things in a 12 step. I mean, Bill and Bob, they tapped in deeply, clearly. What I think is that, and Bill, one of them said this. I read it somewhere, so I believe it. That what I'm putting in this book, they said, is not the only way to get sober.

There are other things that might work. Feel free to try them. All I'm saying is that I think there's some new technology that's been developed since whenever the big book was written that can be integrated into the 12 steps, integrated into rehab, integrated into addiction counseling. The biggest fans we have of this book so far are addiction counselors that are in private practice, that are working with people who have addiction problems, whether it's sobriety in terms of alcohol, gambling, sex, shopaholism, whatever it might be.

And they're saying, God, there's so many things in here i'm using now with my clients this is really helping and so for me it's an adjunct to what we used to know worked let's not throw out the baby with the bath water but you know don't be upset if the mother has another child right we now got two kids yeah yeah i get that i get that and i think you know to be clear uh it's not just about alcohol. And I think that we're myopic as a culture, as a society, when we refuse to accept and really objectively look at and understand the extent to which most people are on the spectrum of addiction with respect to some substance or behavior in their life. And again, it goes back, you know, whether it's shopping or gambling or sex or porn or, you know, alcohol or, you know, OxyContin. And, you know, whatever it is.

I mean, I know personally, I have the ability to become fixated and obsessed with anything, anything to get me out of how I feel right now. Whatever, you know, sort of feeling I'm experiencing that I don't want to feel, I'll find some way of checking out. And that can be Facebook, it can be whatever it is, it doesn't even matter. But if that's true, to go back to- I have to still, yeah, there's work that needs to be done, Jack, help me.

If that's true, here's the thing, how to say this. A friend of mine once said, psychotherapy is like a sausage factory, and every sausage is coming out with a rip in it. And psychotherapy is sewing up all the rips. Wouldn't it make sense to go back, stop the machine, figure out what's causing the rips, and fix it at the core level? So, if in fact, and I think Gabor Mate, because he's a Buddhist, would say this as well. If in fact, the discomfort of being in the present moment is the issue, and I'll do anything, it doesn't matter what it is, alcohol, TV, sex, music, whatever. So, I don't have to feel what I'm feeling in the present moment. Wouldn't it make sense to teach

us how to experience what we're feeling in the present moment without believing it's going to kill us and learn to allow ourselves to experience it fully and then allow ourselves to realize what is it that's creating that feeling because most feelings are created by thoughts having an opinion about a feel about an experience so we can stop creating the bad feelings in the first place i used to use this metaphor that people would come home and it'd be cow manure in their house and they'd say we got to clean up the cow manure. And then the next day they come home and it's more cow manure. Eventually you go, where's the cow? You know, like, can we close the door?

So, my experience is that most of people being stuck in life is pushing away what they don't want to feel and being attached to holding on as long as possible to what they do want to feel. And there's a classic joke about why did God invent orgasms? And so, teenagers know when to stop screwing. And the idea is otherwise we just go forever because it feels so good. So, I think that we have the ability, the capacity as human beings in self-healing ourselves, if we can learn to experience our feelings and know that we're not going to die and learn processes for processing them so we can release them and get rid of them, if you will, release, heal, however you want to say it,

faster through tapping, through Byron Katie's work, through the Sedona Method. There's a lot of stuff out there that's all related to that. Then we can have inner peace. And when you have inner peace, there's nothing better than that.

Why would you want to know that? That that's the work that's the journey you know i'm saying i think there's more technology than you've exposed yourself yeah i'm sure they're it well listen you know i haven't tapped yet so there's that right um no i got a friend in in in recovery who always says feelings are just feelings man and they may feel like they they're going to kill you they may feel real but they're to kill you. They may feel real, but they're only as real as the, you know, extent to which you allow them to feel real. And there's one thing that's for sure

is they always pass. So be okay just sitting there and feeling. It's okay, you know? Well, the word emotion means energy, E, in motion. And motions pass through. We say we're moved. So something moves through us. And what happens is we lock it down. Benet Brown, in her TED Talk, talked about emotions only last

15 minutes, 15 seconds, the actual feeling. This is why little kids will hit their shin on a coffee table, and they cry like hell for about 15, 20 seconds. Then he looked at us to see, and if we just go, they stop crying. If we go, oh my God, what happened? Then they cry longer. So the drama starts to come in there. And so I agree with you. I remember a psychotherapist, there's someone who would say, well, if I cry, I'll cry forever. I said, I've been a psychotherapist for, I used to be one, for 20 years, I've never seen

a person cry forever. If I get angry, I'll explode. Never seen it happen. So there's just a lot of story. And I know emotions can be overwhelming. They really can. No question. They can be.

But if you allow yourself to be overwhelmed and just live through it, it passes. And not identify with it. Not identify. And if you can do that sober, I mean, I think that's what, you know, back to the sobriety context, I mean, using, drinking, these are all ways of, you know, numbing yourself or avoiding the pain that you associate with experiencing whatever emotion it is. But when you do that sober and you get to the other side of it, you have that sober history, you understand, oh, that wasn't so bad. Now I know what that feels like. Now I know what to do next time. And you're better equipped to manage it. And that's where you're doing kind of like push-ups with those neuron receptors so that you're creating these new pathways and empowering yourself to be able to navigate similar and more intense situations in the future without that jeopardy of relapse hanging over your head.

Absolutely. So, what else should I be doing that I'm not doing other than tapping, Jack? Well, have you tapped into Byron Katie's work? No, I haven't. Okay, just Byron Katie wrote a book called Loving What Is. So, what is, the feeling that shows up.

Loving it rather than resisting it and going away from it. And loving, see, we tend to judge everything outside of us. And as she says, it's not the thing out there that's making us miserable. It's our belief that it shouldn't be so. So, if I believe you shouldn't be a certain

way. Pete Yeah, you're resistance to what is. Pete Yeah, resistance to what is. And her book is brilliant. And she teaches four questions. Is it true? Like, you know, my wife shouldn't be attracted to Bill Clinton, which she was when we met in life, and most women will admit to. And so, I'll just use that as an example. So, and can I know that that's true? Well, no, I can't know what she's supposed to be attracted to or not. Can I absolutely know it's true? No. How do I feel when I have that thought that she shouldn't be attracted? I feel jealous. I feel upset. I feel angry. I feel scared. Who would I be without that thought? I'd be happy. And then you do a turnaround a sentence. You have to turn

around. My wife should be attracted to Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton should be attracted to my wife. I should be attracted to Bill Clinton, you know, whatever. And usually you find some truth in that. But I discovered her when someone sent me an audio tape from one of her training. I think they bootlegged it out of her training. And I listened to it in the car with my head down near the speaker because it was such a bad recording. By the time I got from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, I was in an altered state of consciousness. This woman is about as evolved as you can possibly be in a human body. And so, I started doing, it's called The Work. And every day, anything that upsets you, you take yourself through those questions. And we have those questions in the 30-Day Sobriety Solution book on the chapter on feelings. And there's also something called Sedona Method. Sedona Method is where you

actually go through a series of questions, like I'm feeling upset in my body, let's say anxiety. So, normally we want to make it go away. We either want to push it away, think it away, drink it away, whatever. Can you just allow it to be? Can you actually welcome the feeling, experience it fully? Because nothing leaves you unless it's been experienced fully. It's like someone knocks at your door. If you don't let them in, they keep knocking and they knock louder. But if you let them in and you say, oh, it's you. Okay.

And you just take them into the house and usher them out the back door, then you're fine. So can I fully experience it? And then you say, could I let this go? Just could I? Yeah. Would I? Yeah. When?

Now. So you go through those series of four questions and literally when i first met hill dwoskin who developed this i was up in ohio at a friend's house who had him there for a little guest event and sauce on a sunday afternoon and i had neck pain it was terrible and i did this and i thought that this can't possibly work but i'll do it and about three rounds of that my neck pain was was gone. I thought, this is ridiculous. So I taught my son when he was 16, that was one of his Christmas presents. I gave him a coat, I gave him some music, and I taught him that technique. And I asked him a few days later, so what was your favorite

Christmas present? He said, that thing you taught me about how to make anxiety go away. Because test anxiety doesn't bother him in school anymore. He's a singer, he used to get anxious being on stage. It's one of the reasons he got into marijuana and stuff. So, it's the neutral allowing of the emotion to just be, like becoming the observer. Yeah. Right. And that's a skill. The Buddhist meditation teaches you that. These other techniques are kind of like westernized mental approaches to

meditation, allowing things to be the way they are. And I think, you know, when you first do them, they're scary. Because when that trauma comes up from when you were raped or sexually abused by your father, or that fear of being, you know, beaten up as a kid in the parking lot by the bullies or whatever it is, it's so overwhelming. That's why when you're in a group, you're in therapy or an AA meeting, you're in a chat room, but it's better to do it with a person, no question. But these new techniques of tapping, you don't really experience it that much. That's the cool part about tapping. It just disappears. It's weird. The reason we tell people before we tap on a scale of 1 to 10, how intense is it?

And they'll go 9. And then we'll tap for maybe 3, 5, 7 minutes, and it's gone. I've had people say, what fear? What are you talking about? They actually don't remember. They can't find it. That's a trip. It is trippy.

That's a trip. We had a woman in a workshop in Bali. We did a workshop in Bali. And this woman, her husband was a TV producer in Malaysia. Big guy, really well-known. Cool guy, very hip. I forget, it was an auto... No, it was a stroke. He had a stroke.

So paralyzed on one side of the face, couldn't walk. He comes to this training in a motorized wheelchair. I mean, one of those big motorized wheelchairs. And he actually got out of his wheelchair and walked a couple steps before the end of that four-day training which i thought was miraculous in itself but we were working with her and she finally gave herself permission to feel resentful that she had to take care of him for the last two years because mostly people don't allow themselves to feel guilty if they did so we said let's tap on the guilt so we we went through i

even though i have this uh guilt that I resent my husband, even though I have this resentment, I totally unconditionally love myself. We did it three times. Then we started tapping the sequence of acupressure points we talked about earlier. She didn't even get through a whole sequence. She got to her chest and she started laughing. She started laughing. It was gone.

I mean, it was gone. We didn't even, I'd never seen, I thought, come on, is this really possible? It is. So it's really, it's miraculous. That's crazy stuff, man. It is crazy stuff. All right, well, now I'm going to have to look into it. What do you think is the number one thing that holds most people back?

I think there's two things. I think there's fear and there's limiting beliefs. So fear, fear of failure, fear of looking foolish, fear of literally physically being hurt, fear of losing assets, money, your job, that kind of thing. Fear that I'm not competent, fear of dying, fear of death even. And then I think the other thing is limiting beliefs. The beliefs that seem like, they don't even seem like beliefs. They're just like, this is what is, this is what's so. Most people's limiting beliefs, they're not even questioning them. They're just, this is what's so. You can't do that. Women can't do that. Men can't do that. I can't do that. I'm not smart

enough. I'm not sexy. I'm not attractive, whatever it might be. I had a woman in a training, the Mexican-American woman, drop dead gorgeous, 10 on anyone's scale, could have been a Miss America pageant person. And she thought she was ugly. And her entire childhood, her mother would say, mijo, you are so ugly. The truth was, her mother was jealous of how pretty she was. And she was basically trying to cut down her self-esteem. But here she was, dropped it gorgeous, looking in any mirror, and she thought she was ugly. And we know from plastic surgery,

there's a guy named Maxwell Maltz who wrote a book called Psycho-Cybernetics where he was a plastic surgeon. He noticed he would take people that had defects, their nose, their ears, their eyes, cheek implants, whatever, and at the end, they still wouldn't feel beautiful. They'd look in the mirror and they would still see someone that wasn't beautiful because it took them, he said, 30 to 60 days to change the internal self-talk

because the belief was so strong. It was just like a holdover. So what is the core work that goes into untangling that knot of self-belief? And, I mean, fear is a whole separate thing. I think fear lies behind everything. But in terms of the opinions that we hold about ourselves and how we limit ourselves with that view, I mean, what is the kind of core thing that one can begin to unravel that? Well, first you have to become aware of what are the limiting beliefs. So, what I look at is I try to push people into something that's uncomfortable and then

notice what thoughts come up. So, I'll have people set goals. And I say, now double or triple it. Like, do it in half the time or twice as much. I can't ask my dad for money. I can't do that. I can't make more money than my dad. I can't outshow my brother.

My husband will be upset if I, you know, whatever. So we get the limiting beliefs present. If you do an affirmation, I am a, you know, I see myself thriving in sobriety. Then the internal voice comes up and says, you've never been able to go more than a week sober. You, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So there's the belief like that. In the book, we have 10 lies that alcoholics believe. So, those are things you can look at. I can't have fun and be sober. Sex without alcohol will never be fun, that kind

of thing. And then once you know what the belief is, then we have to replace it. There's something called the law of the vacuum, which means that if you take a behavior out of your life and you don't replace it with something positive, the old behavior will get sucked back in by the fact that there's a vacuum there or something not happening. If you're going to stop eating a certain food, you need to replace it with something else. You're going to stop exercising it to find something else that's going to give you that feeling of aliveness. So the limiting belief, when we get rid of it, there's this void.

So what we want to do is fill it with two things. We want to fill it with a positive belief, which is usually the opposite. I'm not smart enough. I am smart enough. Nobody will ever love me. I can have all the love I want in my life. Having too much money is not spiritual. The more money I have, the more spiritual I can be.

The more philanthropic I can be, the more spiritual growth I can buy by going to seminars and hiring trainers, whatever. So then you then use affirmations. That's one technique. you can use tapping so we can tap on the old belief this belief that i'm not smart enough we tap that out once the belief level gets below three remember we talk about intensity level one to ten once it gets below three now we can tap in positive belief i am smart enough and we keep tapping on the same things now what you can do with a practitioner who's trained, they'll play with you. They'll say,

I am smart enough. No, I'm not. Who am I kidding? No, I really am smart. No, come on. You're never going to be smart enough. We play with the two, kind of collapsing them in on each other. And then we can replace it with, I'm smart enough to do anything I want and tap on that. One of the things about tapping

that I think is more powerful than just affirmations is Esther Hicks, who channels this being called Abraham. She says, you never want to put a smiley face sticker on an empty gas tank monitor because it's still empty. And so, we say, even though we teach positive thinking, you have to acknowledge the negative, like, I am an alcoholic when you're first confronting your denial in alcoholism. But then after a while, we want to tap that out and then replace it with I'm thriving in sobriety, something along those lines. But Byron Katie's work of getting past beliefs about how other people should be, that's really good for that, the work. You just go to thework.org or thework.com,

you can access her work. That seems to get at the core of taking responsibility for your actions and getting out of victimhood too. Because once you're, when you're looking externally, like for all these people are not doing, the world is not aligning to your vision. You're creating your own suffering. Yeah. This belief that the world should do what I want it to do. The world revolves around me. You know, one of the things Byron James says- Which is a very alcoholic thing to do, by the way. Yeah, well, see, there was a wonderful woman in Texas whose name I forget. I think it was Jackie somebody. She wrote a book, When a Nation Becomes an Addict. And it was the idea that we live in an addictive culture, that we live in a psychologically ignorant culture. We live in a blaming culture.

If you look at Congress, each side blames the other. Instead of saying, how can we cooperate to get something done that would be useful? The Republicans right now are kind of like, we'll stop anything the Democrats want to do. And Democrats blame the Republicans for everything that's not happening. So, they're just like, you know, it's ridiculous. Nothing happens. So, we're all blamers, complainers, and victim mentality. And that's kind of built into the culture.

And unfortunately, you know, we see it on TV. We see it in the movies. We see it in, you know. blamers complainers and victim mentality and that's kind of built into the culture and unfortunately you know we see it on tv we see it in the movies we see it and i feel like it's getting amplified too especially the victim victimhood kind of narrative about our culture is really the volume seems to be peaking on that right now in a way that i haven't seen in past years i see it in race relations a lot. I see that going on. There's a lot of victim on both sides. You know, the whites are the victims of the immigrants coming in

and the blacks are victims of the cops. And I mean, there's certain truth in all that or they couldn't even exist as stories. But the truth is, I'll never forget, I was watching, I was speaking at a conference with all African-Americans and this one African-American got up and he says, you're all bitching because the white man won't let you take the elevator.

He says, to hell with that. Start walking up the stairs. You know, it's like, just quit blaming everybody for what's not working in your life and figure out how to do something that works. And so, yes, there's racism. Yes, there's sexism. Yes, there's all kinds of crap.

You know, Wall Street is out of control. All that doesn't work. But we elect the congressmen. We're the ones who buy the stocks and keep them in our 401ks. We're the ones that kept electing people after we didn't go after the Wall Street people. So we're responsible for our reality. And we're definitely responsible for how we respond to it. We can look at the recession that just occurred, and a lot of people lost their homes. Some people in the same conditions actually made money. curb. And a lot of people lost their homes. Some people in the same conditions actually made money.

One woman I know said, oh, everyone's selling stuff on eBay to try to pay their debt. She opened a store called I'll Ship the Stuff You're Selling on eBay. Bring it to my store, I'll ship it for you. So there's always opportunity in the midst of everything, but most people are so focused on blaming someone else for why it's not working, they don't see the opportunity. It's like literally they have a call of scotoma, which means a blind spot in psychology. But I also feel like our culture is in a crisis of consciousness in that we're prioritizing and outsourcing our happiness to material accumulation. And this is being driven by, I don't have to say it, you understand what I'm talking about. Like Madison Avenue is driving this notion that our happiness is derived from keeping up with the Joneses and all of that. And we can read a bunch of books and we can listen

to you and we can all intellectually understand that that's not the case, but we still sort of blindly base our lives on that premise. Well, information without action is delusional. So basically, I tell people, this is why there's a 30-day action program for the 30-day sobriety solution. My book, The Success Principles, has 67 principles. Every one of them has action steps. Because knowledge without action, knowing you shouldn't smoke doesn't make any difference unless you stop smoking. Knowing you should eat healthy food, organic food, don't eat GMOs, all that stuff doesn't

make any sense. You can talk about it at a cocktail party if you don't stop eating that crap. So basically, we have to take action. And again, it goes back to fear. Why don't people take action? They're afraid of negative consequences. They're in habitual thinking. You have to get your head out of the sand. Most people don't read books. Most people are getting their news from the internet. There's no in-depth understanding of anything anymore. I mean, Donald tweets something. Donald Trump tweets something, and the whole media, that's all they talk about all day long.

There's no in-depth analysis of anything anymore. It's ridiculous. So, I agree with you. And going back to the materialism, we have been conditioned to believe by advertising that something outside of us will make us feel better. That's why the pharmaceutical industry is a trillion-dollar-a-year industry. We think some pill will fix us. And I go back to that quote I said earlier. It's skills, not pills, that are going to make your life different.

We have to learn the skills to manage our life. Not just our emotions, but our relationships, our food, our sense of power, how we deal with money. All of that has to change, and we're the only ones that can do that. But we've been, as you said, conditioned by the media, and the media is owned by large corporations. They're all in it for selling more stuff. What did George Bush say when we were attacked on 9-11? Don't let the terrorists stop us, go out shopping. And so, we have this culture that believes it can only grow if the consumerism continues to grow by a certain amount every year so the gross national product goes up. And we are steeped in this attachment to abundance to things that will never fulfill us as opposed to sufficiency of what will fulfill us.

And so until we break that addiction, we're stuck. And if you had to articulate what would fulfill us, how do you answer that? I think, you know, I always say this. If you were blind and deaf, what would fulfill you? It would be a good hug. It would be meditation. It would be pleasure in a sense of connecting with people, relating to people. Let's take the deaf part out for a minute.

Be talking about things that matter. Be about having intimacy, shared intimacy. It'd be about exercise. You'd feel good in your body. It'd be about doing all those things that don't cost that much money. You know, it's like, I remember being at a workshop in Chicago when I was in graduate school and this trainer had us, there were 300 people in the workshop. We're in a big gymnasium and the trainer, who I loved, a really cool really cool guy said i want you to close your eyes and mill around and make contact with people don't let anything happen to you you don't want and don't and go for what you do want go for what you do want the only thing you don't want and um so we're milling around and hugging

people and dancing with some people and just playing and laughing whatever if i am hugging this woman i think oh my god it's the best i've ever felt my my entire life. The energy, the nurturing, whatever. We actually sat down on the floor. I had my head in her lap. She's talking about, it was about 10 minutes. Then they said, open your eyes. It was just like 65 year old African-American woman. I was probably a 22 year old white guy. And I looked up and it was like, she matched none of my criteria for what I thought beauty was. And I realized, boy, I am so screwed up, because I'm looking for something out there that matches some societal vision of what good is,

of having the right car, the right woman, the right clothes. So if you were blind, you couldn't see what anyone's wearing. You couldn't see whether this car looks better than that car. You couldn't see that art collection is better than my art collection. All that stuff would disappear. And then what really matters is communication and keeping your body healthy, feeling the aliveness that you feel in your body, feeling the joy of maybe playing the piano, making music,

all the things that really people talk about they do on vacation. We had fun. We went hiking. We sat on the beach and talked to some new people we never met before. We ate some good food. You know, whatever. Those kind of things, I think. And also the spiritual stuff that's so true it's so true it's so elemental and then i'll see the new tesla drive down the street and i'm like oh but if i just

had that you know what i mean like right we're just hardwired to default to the other side it's tough it's uh the actual practice inhabiting that ethos is so much more difficult than intellectually grasping it. See, there's two things you can do. The big thing that made my life livable, if you will, I almost had a nervous breakdown in graduate school. I was studying Buddhist meditation and Gestalt therapy and had also been working with w clem stone who was my mentor who was a self-made 600 million dollar millionaire and um and i was learning you can create anything you want with your mind and go out and be successful there's all these tools to do that

and also then it was like non-attachment you don't need any of those things i was like ah it's driving me crazy i couldn't resolve it reconcile those two things yeah i reconciled it with a phrase and i don't know if i heard this read it or made it up i really can't remember but it was a high intention low attachment so if you wanted a tesla you could figure out how to get one the problem is as soon as you got that tesla you'd see someone in the more expensive tesla whatever and so that bigger better more never really someone said you can never get enough of what you don't really need might have been the rolling stones i said that and so the reality is that um it's like we don't need that now if the tesla is a statement for your ecological sustainability and you really feel like

you're making a good decision you could design your life to do that but if you're going to continue that more is better more is better more is better more is better comparison, more is better comparison, I can afford any car in the world. I could have a Rolls Royce sitting out there. I don't. It's not my desire to do that. It's like I could own a private jet. I don't want to do that because of the ecological considerations of leaving all that jet stream stuff up there and polluting the environment. My approach to wealth has been how much do I need to do the

work that I want to do in the world? And I think my work's had a huge impact and I've needed to surround myself with people and things to be able to do that. But I don't need what Donald Trump has to feel good about myself or to feel like I'm making a difference. Yeah, I think the problem comes in the sense that you think that when you get that next thing, that that's going to end the inquiry. Yeah. You don't realize that you find yourself there and that hole still isn't filled. And so, then it's on to the, oh, but it's not that. I thought it was going to be that, but it's not, but it's this next thing and then that will solve it.

Yeah, you can never fill the hole with what's never going to fill. I mean, you're chasing the dragon for the rest of your life with that. And you know from your experience that eating good food, exercising, taking care of your body, meditating, being as self-disclosing and transparent as you can be, those are the things that really make you feel good. I go hiking with my wife or we go dancing or we make love or we have two friends over for dinner or we talk to our son or I Skype my grandson. That's better than 90% of what's out there. All right, we got to wrap it up here, but I think we can close it down with one final thought, which is imagine somebody is listening to this,

they're stuck in a job that isn't doing it for them or they're in a relationship that they know isn't right, but can't seem to find a way to extricate themselves, whatever it is, like some kind of, you know, crisis point in their life, and they're looking for, you know, a strategy out. I mean, could you sort of leave us with, you know, a little bit of insight or wisdom that could be of benefit to that person? Yeah, I think all conditions, other than maybe you've got MS and you're in a wheelchair and things like that, or you've been paralyzed by an automobile accident, pretty much all conditions we experience are changeable. And whether it's the job you're in. Recently,

I saw a study just came out yesterday called the Steelcase Report, where only 13% of people worldwide are happy in their jobs. 13%. So a lot of people are settling. And yet there's 13% who are happy. So obviously it's possible. Anytime someone's done something, it's possible. Someone can climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Someone can find a happy relationship.

People do it. So the first thing is to say, what would it look like if I were happy? What would I be doing? Well, I'd be working with people instead of in a cubicle, or I'd be working with my body outdoors, or I'd be making more money. Whatever it is that you think would make you happy, visualize that and say, okay, what kind of jobs exist where that's possible to do? And then do some research. And you may have to learn some new skills. You may have to go back to school. You may have to take a course. You may have to get a credential you don't have, but you can get it. An MBA takes a couple of years. You could go back to school and become a doctor. Well, eight years later, you'll be a doctor.

But if you don't start now, you won't be a doctor eight years from now. I remember a story, a friend of mine was interviewing this woman who had picked up a car off her grandson, literally picked it up. She was 65 years old. And it was a big newspaper story. And so he wanted to interview her because he studied peak performance. She wouldn't even let him come and do it because she said, I don't talk about that. Well, he went over to her house anyway and said, I'm going to talk to you. You can't stop me. And so she let him in, fed him breakfast. And he's like, why don't you want to talk about that event? She says, because if I could do that and I didn't think I

could, what else in my life did I not do because I thought I couldn't do it? Yeah, terrifying. Yeah, it's a terrifying thought. I mean, the only reason to take a firewalk with Tony Robbins is not that you're going to walk on coals anywhere. It's a party trick you're not going to use unless you go to a lot of barbecues. But when you do it and you realize you thought you couldn't, then you say, well, what else have I been telling myself I can't do? Anyway, he said, well, what did you want to do? You never did. She said, I wanted to be a geologist. I wanted to be a geologist. He said, well, why don't you go back to school and get a geology degree? She's gone four years, I'll be 69. He says, well, four years from now, you're going to be 69 without a geology degree? Exactly. Are you going to go?

She went back to school, got her geology degree. And for the next seven years, she taught geology at a community college in Clearwater, Florida. So the idea is we just think we're stuck. We think we're stuck. We're not stuck. I think the guy that did Star Wars, George Lucas, said, it's like we're inside a cage and we feel really trapped. And what we don't realize is the door was never locked. So, the main thing is like, what would it look like to do that? What are the steps to get there? And if you don't know, go ask someone who's already done it. What does it take to own your own hair salon? What does it take to become a lawyer? What does

it take to have a podcast? I mean, a lot of people would love to do what you do, but they're like, I don't know enough. I don't know how to play radio, whatever it is. Well, find someone who did it and ask them. And then do the steps. Then the last thing I would say is visualize seeing and doing it, affirm I'm doing it, set a goal by when you want to do it so your subconscious knows when it's supposed to show up with the result, and then get about doing it. And that's where the five things a day thing comes in, you know, to start taking action. And then get on the tapping. Get on the tapping, exactly. Tap your way to success.

No, I think it's about, you know, taking that first step too. It can seem so overwhelming, but, you know, the first step might be just going online and finding a phone number and placing a call to find out information. Absolutely. It's tiny little things that you can do that in and of themselves are not intimidating or difficult and creating momentum around that. One of my students, Janice Stanfield, has a quote, something like, she says, whenever you think of something and you don't know what to do, do three easy things. What are three easy things? You want to be a singer.

So go down to the guitar store and just ask them how much the guitars cost. You can do that. Ask them if they know anyone who teaches singing lessons. There's no risk. You can do that. Sign up for one lesson. You can do that. Just get started. Martin Luther King said, you don't have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step in faith. The staircase will reveal itself as you take the next step. Thanks for talking to me, Jack. My pleasure. It was really fun, Rich. So, the book is The 30-Day Sobriety Solution. You can find it on Amazon. Use the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com to check that out. And if you want to learn more about Jack,

he's a pretty easy guy to find on the internet, right? It's just jackcanfield.com and at jackcanfield on Twitter and all those places, right? And are you doing any events or speaking or conferences or anything coming up that you want to announce? Yeah, if you go to jackcanfield.com and there's an events button, just click on that. We're doing a one-day workshop in Los Angeles on June 3rd, I believe it is, Friday. And people can find out about that on our website. We also have a week-long training we do, a five-day training every summer in August coming up. We do it again in February.

And we have a train-a-trainer program where I train people to do this work. We both do an online training and also a live training. Cool. Feel good? Good. We did it, right? We did.

All right, man. Thanks. Peace. Plants, wonder twin powers activate. Peace out. All right, so what'd you guys think about that? I thought it was pretty good. When we were all done, Jack was like,

"'Wow, that was different, that was interesting. Sometimes I don't always share all the interviews that I do, but this one was really kind of left of center of my typical experience. And so he was enthusiastic about sharing it when it comes out. So hopefully he will do that. On that note, don't forget to check out the show notes. I put up billions of links. Thank you, Chris Swan, for all the help in assembling this week's show notes because they're quite robust. We follow up on all the names and all the books that Jack referenced throughout the conversation. Tons of good stuff for all of you who are inclined to continue your education. Again, if you haven't already subscribed to my YouTube channel, please make a point of doing that.

YouTube.com forward slash Rich Roll. I've already thrown up three vlogs. Basically, they're a look into my daily life. They're short, they're fun. And the process of assembling these things, shooting them and editing them, which I've all done on my own, have been incredibly creatively gratifying,

challenging as well, but super fun. And I'm keen to know what you guys think. So check them all out. Anyway, if you do subscribe, then leave a comment on my most recent video, vlog number three, as of today. Number four might be up by the time you guys listen to this, but right now there's three up there. I want to thank Jason Camiolo for audio engineering and production on today's show. Sean Patterson for help on the graphics. Chris Swan for additional production assistance and compiling the show notes. Theme musicson for help on the graphics. Chris Swan for additional production assistance and compiling the show notes.

Theme music, as always, by Anna Lemma. Thanks for all the support, you guys. I love you. Here's my final thought on today's show. If you are, or you think you may be an alcoholic or a drug addict, or just someone who struggles with any kind of addiction, please reach out, get help. You do not have to do

this alone. Again, I'm a big proponent of 12-step, but I also have no judgment about alternative approaches like what Jack is advocating. Whatever works for you. The important thing is that you grab onto something. You do not have to suffer in silence. Do not try to take this on alone. You do not have to suffer in silence. Do not try to take this on alone. You never have to drink or use again if you don't want to. But the journey to sobriety begins with reaching out for help. So please do this.

I urge you, don't wait. It's what saved my life and it can save yours as well. See you guys next week. Peace. Plants. Thank you.