Tony Mantor: Why Not Me ? - Dr. Adi Jaffe: The Truth About Addiction, Trauma, Shame, and Breaking Free
Episode Date: July 8, 2026(Show Notes) What if addiction isn't the real problem? In this powerful episode of Why Not Me? Embracing Autism and Mental Health Worldwide, Tony Mantor sits down with psychologist, TEDx speaker, and ...bestselling author Dr. Adi Jaffe to challenge everything we've been taught about addiction, recovery, trauma, and personal transformation. Drawing from both his professional expertise and his own remarkable journey from addiction and prison to becoming a UCLA-trained psychologist, Dr. Jaffe explains why destructive behaviors often begin as attempts to survive emotional pain—not moral failures. Together they discuss: • Why addiction is often a response to trauma, pain, and unmet emotional needs • The powerful role shame plays in keeping people trapped • Why willpower alone rarely creates lasting change • How habits are formed in the brain—and why changing them takes time • The connection between anxiety, depression, addiction, and self-worth • Why healing begins with understanding instead of judgment • The importance of self-compassion during recovery • How changing your mindset can transform your life Whether you struggle with addiction, love someone who does, or simply want to better understand human behavior, this conversation offers practical wisdom, compassion, and hope. If this episode speaks to you, please follow the podcast, leave a review, and share it with someone who may need encouragement today. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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What if everything you thought you knew about autism and mental health wasn't the full story?
Today's conversation might change the way you see it.
Welcome to Why Not Me, embracing autism and mental health worldwide,
where real conversations and lived experiences inspire understanding and hope.
I'm Tony Mantor.
This is where understanding begins.
If this kind of conversation matters to you, then follow the show.
So you don't miss what comes next.
Joining us today is Dr. Adi Jaffe, a UCLA-trained psychologist, Ted X speaker, and one of the most forward-thinking voices in the addiction space today.
He's also the author of Unhooked, a book that pushes back on the traditional labels and stigma surrounding addiction and asks a very powerful question.
What if addiction isn't a disease, but a deeply human response to pain, trauma, and unmet needs?
He doesn't just study addiction.
He's lived it.
In this conversation, we're going to explore what it really means to break free from destructive patterns.
Why willpower alone isn't just the answer.
And how understanding the why behind behavior might be the key to lasting change.
It's a great story, so let's dig into it.
Thanks for joining us today.
Yeah, I appreciate you having me, man.
Oh, it's my pleasure.
Let's start out with what you do and how you got there.
Sure, I mean, nowadays, I do a lot, but I speak.
I coach and consult, especially executives and professionals.
And then I run a company called Ignited IGNTD that offers mental health and addiction support for people through software that we created.
So that's my hope, my attempt at being able to give help to people who can't afford high-end care and just really need support.
And so, you know, think mobile-based.
We've been doing that since 2018.
So before COVID and everybody went online.
And I've helped thousands and thousands of people who struggle anything from depression and anxiety all the way to addictions.
So what is your focus? You have a great spectrum there. As we all know, you can have one end of the spectrum to the other, but in the middle is probably where you'll land and what you'll focus on. So what is that focus? Or in your case, maybe specialty. Yeah, good call. I mean, my main focus now is on trying to help people who are struggling with where they are find a way to a better place. And that takes a ton of different approaches. And it depends on the client and money, time, availability, all those things.
in terms of what they can do.
But yes, that is a central theme to everything.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
What are some of the more common issues that you face on a daily basis?
Yeah, I mean, one of the most common issues is people are used to behaving the way they're
used to behaving and they've been doing it oftentimes for decades.
And so even when they want, you know, we've all heard the thing, right?
If you keep doing the same thing, you're going to keep getting the same results, right?
That's easy to say.
Really, really hard to change your habits.
I was actually just leading a group yesterday and talking, you know, there's so many
books on habit change. Atomic Habits is obviously one of the ones that really comes up for people,
but that comes from a book called Tiny Habits by Dr. BJ Fogg and other books on behavior change.
And so people are often preoccupied without how to change their behavior, but they don't really
want to change their behavior. They want to change their life. They want to change their outcomes.
So on the executive professional side, they may look like somebody who feels like they want to
advance more. They want to move up in their career. They want to make more money and get a bigger
title, be in charge of more. But there's something they keep banging ahead against the wall.
they can't reach that level or it's going too slowly for them.
On the addiction side, it could be somebody who, you know, they've been overdrinking for
15, 20 years.
They know it's a problem.
They know it's caused them issues.
It's causing issues to people around them and they can't seem to get their head around it.
But, you know, for so many people that I've worked with on the family front, it's they keep
gagging fights with their wife or their husband and they can't get themselves out of it.
I look at all those things through the same lens and that is you're stuck in a habit.
It's a loop.
It keeps playing.
In order to get the results you want, you've got to be able to change their behavior.
So what I talk about in my book, and this is my most recent book, Unhooked, what I talk about is the way to get that change is not actually to try to change the behavior itself, although that's a small part of it.
It's to understand what is driving the behavior underneath the surface.
Go change that, and then you'll get the changes you want in your life.
When people think about addiction, loss of times they think about substance abuse.
When you really get into what addiction is, loss of times is a reason to go to something.
to get away from something.
How do you approach that?
When you get into that type of scenario,
you can't depend on something else to fix it.
Sometimes you have to take control yourself.
You have to fix it yourself.
You have to confront the situation that you're in
and be honest about it.
I'll tell you a story.
It ended up being, I don't think in this book,
it's in the previous book,
but I had a woman who came to me
and she had been struggling with drinking.
And when she walked through the door,
it was the classic line.
Hey, I'm an alcoholic.
I've been trying to slow down
or stop drinking for a number of years now.
It hasn't worked.
My husband is threatening to leave,
et cetera, et cetera. She could kind of, you know, told the quintessential story. Three kids, Orange County,
well off, drinking soccer mom, right? Well, we started working together. And within three days of
working together, it turned out her marriage has been an unhappy marriage for about the last 15 years.
She and her husband met in college and she didn't realize that when she got married,
and once the kids came, she would have to give up her life. So she was on her way to become
a lawyer, gave that up to raise the kids. Now she stuck at home really frustrated that she never made
anything of her life. On a daily basis, her identity was giving her struggles.
And then every time she interacted with her husband, who was a traveling salesman.
So he was gone five, six days out of the week, home for the weekend, back out on the road.
And then the relationship is a nightmare too.
And I said to her, I said, look, we're not going to be able to help you drinking until we fix the way you feel about your day-to-day life and fix what's going on with the relationship.
Because even if I stopped you from drinking, you're going to go to something else in order to fix the fact that you don't like your life.
And that's just an example of one of thousands of stories that always follow, well, almost always follow the same line.
And that is, I'm really unhappy, I'm miserable.
I'm using fill in whatever the blank is for you to deal with it.
How can you help me stop dealing with this through drinking, using porn, drugs, whatever?
And it always, like you said, it always goes back, Tony, to figure it out, well, what is the struggle?
What are you struggling with on a daily basis?
What is hurting you?
What is making you anxious, angry, frustrated?
What is hurting your belief into yourself?
What is removing your hope for a better world?
We've got to get to that.
And once we solve that, we'll solve the addiction.
Now I'm sure you've heard this many times.
People will say, well, that comes down to personal responsibility.
All that is is a couple of words people use.
Many times, I'm sure, people feel like they've lost control
and they're trying to gain that control back.
So do you phrase it in such a way that by taking control back,
you are actually taking your own personal responsibility back?
And hopefully that makes them feel better in the end?
I want to answer that in a few different parts if I can.
There's certainly a ton of personal responsibility, but all of us started in a place in the world.
We had absolutely no control over our lives.
When we were children, we didn't have a say in where we were born, what we did on a daily basis,
what culture, what habits, what world environment in our home we were born into, right?
Now, for many of us, the environment was relatively safe and maybe casually traumatizing and stressful,
but not in a severe way.
But for a subset of people, and the subset I'm talking about is 15% to 20% of the population,
that's not true.
They grew up in our version of hell.
For that subsection, that's why I'm going to answer this in a few different sections.
For that section of the population, they are fighting an uphill battle because those experiences
a childhood shifted the way their brain processes the world in a way that for many others
is unfathomable.
I've never struggled with this, but I've dealt with hundreds of clients who were sexually abused
as children.
It's hard to only rest on personal responsibility when that happened to you as a child.
And you're also still right.
The abuse happened 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago.
You, unfortunately, it's not fair, but you unfortunately are now saddled with a ton of work to do
to overcome something you had no role in doing.
Yeah, that's a very tough situation.
One of my favorite therapeutic kind of retreats environments that I went to,
the practitioners there had this saying that I really like, which is everybody's guilty
and nobody's to blame.
What does that mean?
I'm here now.
All the people will hurt me in the past may be guilty of hurting me.
They have their own reasons.
They tried whatever in their distorted version of reality was the best.
And I'm still the one sitting here trying to change my life.
They can't do it for me.
So it still falls in line with what you were talking about, Tony.
It's still your responsibility.
But you're saddled with this weight.
For many of the rest of us, there's a version that I want to answer,
which is a much more subtle version of what happens to those who have been heavily traumatized as kids.
Most people don't know this.
You know, the way memories and the way habits are formed in the brain is biologically structural.
What do I mean by that?
There's this concept in neuroscience called Hebbian synapticity.
It's the idea that neurons have fired together, wire together.
I literally ran a group on this a couple of days ago in my program.
So I won't belabor an hour-long explanation of this.
But the idea is this.
When you have parts in your brain that work together a lot, they become more entrenched.
They literally, there's these things called dendrites.
Your neurons grow like these bigger, thicker roots to connect areas of the brain that are regularly connected.
It's literally like the cable, the wiring that is connected,
then becomes thicker and better, okay?
Yeah, that's really interesting.
Can you dive a little deeper on that?
That happens for people and for things that happen regularly.
So habits that you have in your everyday life,
they become like physical structures in your brain.
You can think of it as a groove.
Imagine like you walk through the jungle,
and if you walk the same path a thousand times,
between your feet stomping on the ground
and the machete moving around and cutting down some trees,
there's now going to be a really clear path in the jungle, right?
Now, technically, you could cross the jungle
through other paths.
But this path is really clear
and you're going to want to go
through the clear path
because it's easier.
That's what habits do in your brain.
It is easier to follow the same habitual route.
So even for the rest of us
who don't have highly traumatized paths,
the way we learn to do things
at a younger age and through our development
become the soft, easy, automatic path.
And when you decide that you want to change,
you again are now fighting
against the built-in physical mechanism.
And I try to explain that to people
because so many people get disturbed or anxious, resentful, upset that changing their habits gets hard.
And then they read a book like atomic habits that says, hey, you know, just make the hard things easier,
make the easy things harder, connect to an identity of somebody who wants to change and go out there and do it.
And they try and they fail.
Sometimes failure is the path to success.
What I try to explain to a lot of people is odds are you will fail multiple times in trying to recreate a new route through your jungle.
That's okay. Next time, get back up, remake the commitment to try to go down that new path.
Over time, you can forge another new path, number one.
Number two, there was a massive disservice done to us a couple of decades ago when this idea
of a 21-day habit change thing became a reality.
Yeah, I remember that.
I think that's complete BS.
You don't change your habit in 21 days.
I don't know who picked that freaking number.
It's like picked out of a half.
The number of days it takes to change a habit is totally variable.
You can start it as early as 20-some, 30 days.
40 days, like that's on the lowest end, it can go up to a year or more. The average seems to be
more around 65, 70, 75 days. And if you think about that, that's two and a half months of work
on something to change. I'll give a stupid example, but it'll serve the purpose. I brush my teeth
with my right hand. If I want to start being able to brush my teeth with my left hand, for somewhere
between a month to two to three months, I'm going to have to wake up every morning and remind myself
that the thing that feels natural and easy, which is just doing this, is not what I'm doing today.
I'm going to go do this.
And it feels awkward and it's weird and I'm not covering my whole mouth.
But if I stick with it, day after day after day, two, three months later, the thing that
feels weird is going to feel normal.
And so what I really try to enforce for all my clients, there's a process.
So in the book, there's a path in which I help people understand where is my behavior broken?
Where am I screwing up?
And then there's another process, a loop that I take them through, which helps them understand
how to change it. I call it the Eat Loop, the explore, accept, transform. Explore, identify where the
loop is broken, accept, and there's a process for acceptance, but you can't change what you haven't
accepted about yourself, because then you're fighting an internal battle. So acceptance means reducing
shame about it, it means having compassion, forgiving you, yourself, and others who have brought
you to that place. And once you get to that place, you're ready for transformation. And transformation
is normally, not always, but normally less about stopping the bad behavior and more about replacing
it with better alternative behaviors. And there are a whole set of different ways to get that done.
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western union.com and send money today i'm glad you brought up the shame part of it that's the big thing
that people really don't think about if you took the shame out of whatever it might be addiction
put a term to it anything how would that change the way that people perceive themselves and
perceive the world to help make that change i think shame is one of the most insidious
emotions we have. It plays a role, right? If you think back to tribal times and when we lived in small
communities, you know, 20, 30, 50 people, you know, shame is the idea that I am different
less than the people around me. And the different part is what matters, right? Because if my insides
don't match what you need for me, I could get ostracized, right? I could be shunned. Nowadays,
if I'm shunned, less of a big deal, there's a huge community out here. I'll go find some other
friends. Think evolutionarily. If my community kicks me out, I'm on my own out there in the wilderness,
I may die. So there's a real need to belong and shame makes you feel like you don't belong. I have a really
weird example. I hope this lands for the listeners, but I just went through it in a group. We were
actually unpacking this in a group I was just leading. And I believe all of us have unhealthy
beliefs about ourselves that create little moments of shame. There's big shame, right? Like again,
if you were molested as a child, a lot of people have shame around that. I'm not even talking about
that shame. Very crucial, very important, very, very problem.
But there are these little micro moments where we feel shame.
So we were unpacking people's unhelpful beliefs about themselves.
And this one woman who's very high functioning, but she said she had a belief to share.
And the initial belief she shared that was upsetting to her when she thought about it was
that if she has a request of others, if she needs something from others, they may judge her.
I think some of us can understand that, right?
If you need help from other people, they may look down to you.
Okay, but I wanted more information.
So Tony, I asked her, hey, can you give me an example?
Because it sounds like you're talking about something pretty specific.
And she started getting embarrassed.
That shame started building up.
You know, she thought about it for a second.
She said, yeah, you know, the other day, I had to go return something that I bought at the store.
She wanted credit back.
She wanted a refund for it.
You could see her, you know, blushing and getting embarrassed, just thinking about this moment.
But she said, I thought to myself that as I walk into the store with this item that I wanted to return,
she started getting anxious just thinking about it because she thought, you know, the clerk at the store would judge her.
Maybe the people standing around would judge her.
Now, I know that's really small.
But think about the sort of belief somebody must have about themselves and the world to think
that if I bought something and then I want to return it because I don't like it, people might
look down at me.
In what other places in her life does she not ask for what she needs?
Does she not say what she wants to say?
Does she not raise her hand in the class or tell somebody she's in a disagreement with that
she disagrees with them?
Because the fear, shame, is that if I do this thing, I will be different than, I will
be laughed at, I will be looked down at, right?
Now, I think most people listening right now have had at least a couple of experiences in their lives where they can relate to feeling like people are going to look down at you.
The fear and the feeling is semi-natural.
If you start stopping yourself from doing things in the world because of that feeling, or if you start having to drink or use drugs or in some other way, escape the feeling, that's what we develop some serious problem.
I always used to have a lot of social anxiety.
And so I would have to get really drunk before I would go to events because I didn't want to be judged.
But the judgment was happening in my own head, right?
So that's where a shame I think comes in.
The moment we remove, and it's funny, as we get older, we care less about it, right?
When I was 14, 18, 25, I really cared what people thought about me.
I'm almost 50.
I'm not going to say I don't care at all what people think about me, but I don't care about it all that much.
And that provides a lot of relief so that I can act in ways that are more aligned with who I want to be.
I think what you're describing really comes down to a sense of personal comfort within yourself.
When you're younger, you tend to be more focused on what others think.
trying to fit in, trying to belong, trying to meet expectations.
But as you get older, something begins to shift.
You have more comfort in your own skin, more confident in who you are,
and less dependent on outside validation.
You reach a point where you can be completely alone and feel at peace.
Or you can stand in the middle of a thousand people and still do exactly what feels right to you
without worrying about judgment.
It's like you create your own space, your own sense of belonging.
where ever you are. What you said makes a lot of sense, but the truth is, getting to that place
isn't easy for everyone. Difficult to get there for some people. Definitely difficult to speed up that
process. You know, we didn't talk about it much, but I went through a lot. And not that early in life,
right? It was in my mid to late 20s, early 30s, but including my own addiction story, getting arrested,
spending time in jail. By my late 20s, early 30s, I was confronted with a reality, which was
parts of my life were going to make people feel uncomfortable.
Because I'd sold drugs. I'd used drugs. I'd gone to jail. I had nine felonies on my record.
You know, everything is double-sided, right? Everything is good and bad.
In an interesting way, the experience was negative. But I had to figure out how to live in a world where, you know what?
Tony, I knew for a fact, some people will judge me. And I had to be in some moments where somebody
listened to my story and they just didn't want to spend time with me anymore because they didn't trust me.
I could play the victim or I could understand, hey, you know, I understand that for somebody who's never lived on the side of the tracks that I lived on and didn't do the things.
things that I've done. Sitting next to a nine-time felon that's been in jail may be uncomfortable.
And they may just not want that. So I have to play this game with myself of judging myself less
because I'd been there and I made it out and now I was trying to live a normal life or my
version of normal anyway. But then, Tony, I learned not to judge them as well because what's right
for me does not have to be right for everybody else. We all need to discover our version of what works
for us. And again, for people who are stuck in depression, in anxiety, in addiction, or in any other
version of being malcontent with their own experience in life. Some part of it may be external,
but a lot of it is internal. A lot of it is their own judgment of the experience and that they don't
feel like they're getting what they want out of life. How do you help people move beyond their
preconceptions, especially when what they believe turns out to be completely different from
reality? How do you present your lived experience in a way that allows them to see the value in it
So they can begin to lower those internal walls and become more open to understanding.
Let me just say that not everybody needs the same thing.
So the way that I do it is not the right way for everybody.
We've all seen that David Goggins, kind of motivation by Marine Corps, you know,
get up off your butt and do what I told you kind of a version.
Some people need that, by the way, and it works really, really well for them.
That's not my version.
So the way I do it, the way I go about it is by trying to actually understand the person's path.
so that I can mirror back to them the lesson you just said.
Because you said something really important,
which was how do you get somebody essentially who doesn't believe in themselves
or only looks at darkness,
only looks at what's wrong?
How do you get them to understand that their experience is actually motivational,
hopeful, et cetera, right?
Easy to say, hard to do, man.
Hard to do.
Because when somebody has always looked at what doesn't work,
there's this concept in the brain.
It's called confirmation bias.
Their brain is now trained to look at what's broken.
And in a way, like I'm an entrepreneur,
you know, you've had this podcast for a long,
long time. In a way, if you wake up in the morning and think about all the things that aren't
working, you may be really good at achieving things because you'll be there the first thing in the
morning to fix the thing that didn't work and you'll spend all night up in bed, unable to sleep
because you can't stop yourself from thinking about the 40 things that need to be fixed tomorrow
and the 12 you didn't do right today. You're constantly trying to make things better because you can't
calm down until they're perfect, but they're never perfect. So in a way, that might be debilitating
for you, but it might actually cause high achievement. Yeah, I call that the comfort zone.
will stay there because they feel safe. The truth is, if you never step outside that comfort zone,
you're never going to grow. You're never going to take the risks that might push you forward or
even knock you down. Life is always going to be hills and valleys. Some days you feel great. Others,
not so great. Sometimes a bad day turns into a bad week. Then it starts to feel like everything is going
wrong. After enough of those moments, you get to the point where I can't keep doing this. Maybe it's time to give up.
Then sometimes it only takes one small moment, one sliver of hope to break through that wall.
And if you can grab onto that, it can shift everything.
Because in the end, it's not just the circumstances holding people back.
It's the mindset.
And once that starts a change, that's when people can begin to move forward and create again.
Yeah.
You know, the way I say that, I love that.
That's so true.
The way I always talk about that is, you know, there's that saying, we make plans and God laughs.
in case everybody listening to this doesn't already know this, I'm sure you do, but we have zero control over what happens in the world.
Zero.
We barely control what we do, and this is hard for a lot of people to believe or understand or just accept.
Even though we control what we do, we rarely control the outcome of what happens when we do it.
Right.
There's this story I use in my program, my online program, that when I first heard it was such a good example of this.
I'm old enough to remember Queen Latifah.
Do you remember Queen Latifah?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
All right, perfect.
There's so many people that are too young listening right now probably for this.
But go look her up.
Queen Latifah came from a very poor neighborhood.
Mom had nothing.
I think her mom was a school teacher.
I don't remember this was exactly.
But poor family, poor family had nothing.
You know, she started rapping, got famous with her little group, then started producing.
She made it.
Yeah.
She made money.
That's right.
And one of her biggest joys having money was being able to give back to her family that didn't have much.
So I think she got her mom at house first.
But then afterwards, I want to be.
I want to say for his 18th birthday, she got her brother this bike that he'd been dreaming of.
Motorcycle.
Right.
It was like a Suzuki GSXR, 9,000 or 600 or something like that.
Anyway, the bike that he had been, he had posters of this bike on his freaking wall, right?
Yeah.
She bought him his dream bike.
He killed himself on it two months later.
Two months.
She got everything she wanted in life.
She gave her brother everything he wanted in life.
And the gift that she gave him killed her, killed him.
You know, you look at that and you go, damn.
You know, I'm damned if I do.
I'm damned if I don't.
when I was broke, I couldn't get him the bike he won and he was sad about it.
When I made all the money in the world, I got on the bike, he died on it.
We do not control what happens in the world.
And for me, the moment I started realizing this, because when I was younger, I was stupid
and I thought I did control what happened in the world.
And so I was always looking for the best way to control it.
Once this dawned on me, the amount of relief, some people have a really hard time with
this.
For me, it provided a massive amount of relief because here's the thing.
If I already don't control what happens in the world, the way I look at it is you only
have a couple of options.
we can just give up control and just wake up every morning and not do anything because the world's
going to do whatever it's going to do anyway. Or we can just show up and do our damn best every single
moment because then I'm giving everything I can and the rest I leave up the chance, which I was going to
have to leave up the chance anyway. And so the way I try to get to people is to say, look, you did your
best until this moment. It's just that you can change what your best means moving on. I love,
you know, you said something essentially about you could have a whole bad week. Man, I was just,
I was just in that place three days ago.
Every day, I was talking to my wife on the phone.
It almost ended when the right front wheel on my new truck was this close to falling off.
Wow.
And the reason it was this close to falling off was because I bought some land.
It's just land.
There's nothing on it.
So I camped on it the night before.
And apparently, sometime from the moment I parked it to the moment I left, I was there for about 24 hours.
Somebody stole four out of six bolts out of my right front tire.
I realized it's just in time before the wheel fell off.
I was late to a meeting.
I was already tired because I've been up all night, like in this camping area.
And it was already a hard week, like you said, Tony.
And I remember I was talking to my wife.
And this thing dawned on me.
I said, you know what?
I'm just happy I'm not falling apart while this is happening.
Because day after day, after day, it seems like everything is harder than it needs to be.
It is.
There's no doubt about that for sure.
It's not just our lives now.
It's what's going on in the world.
100%.
The world is an upside down mode that has never been.
been.
Yeah.
With the world, the way it is, creates a lot of stress on people.
And that stress is in so many different levels.
100%.
Then when you combine the stress that's going on in the world,
combine with what's going on in your little part of the world,
then with everything that's going on, it just compounds it.
And people say, why do I even try?
Well, I even try.
Yeah.
So somewhere deep down, you have to find that motivation to keep moving forward
because if you don't have control, give it your best and see what happens.
Exactly.
And by the way, that's a big understanding shift.
That's a big perspective shift for a lot of people, right?
Because if everything is going sideways and I don't control whether it's going up or down at any point in time, all I can do is my best is the way I look at it.
Now, here's the other thing that I think is important for a lot of people to remember.
Whether you like it or not, whether you like hearing this or not, we need the bad times.
We need the downs because it's only in comparison to the downs that the highs feel good.
Yes, that's right.
If everything worked out every moment of every day, whether you think about it or not right now,
whether you understand it or not, whether you believe it or not right now, you would get so bored of life.
You would get so bored.
Like imagine if every single person you asked out said yes.
Every single thing you wanted to buy you could have.
And everything you tasted was the best thing you've ever tasted in your life.
And every show you saw was the most interesting show you saw.
You would love the first week.
The first month might be exciting.
By the end of the first year, nothing would matter anymore.
That is so true.
And by the way, the reason I know this because I've never been, I've never gotten to live through that life.
But the reason I know this is I've worked with a lot of people who made a ton of money.
And some of them made a ton of money because they sold a company.
I'm talking for hundreds of millions of dollars, right?
So they went from working their butts off every day, slaving, slaving, slaving, maybe being comfortable, but not being rich by any stretch of the imagination.
Right.
And all of a sudden, their bank account has nine figures in it.
They can do anything they want, Tony.
Yeah.
They can fly anywhere, buy any plane, do anything they want.
You know what ends up happening pretty quickly?
Yes.
They get bored and frustrated because nothing is a challenge anymore.
And that's why these people start taking on massive world challenges
because nothing at the lower level becomes interesting anymore.
And I think we can adopt a learning from that.
And that is appreciate the difficult times
because you'll remember them when you're on the other side.
And in comparison is how you'll know you're happy.
Tell us how people can get in touch with you, find you, follow you,
so they can see what you're doing.
Yeah, yeah, 100%.
So Unhooked is the recent book.
If you want to get that,
it's on Amazon and anywhere else you get it.
I have a website called Adjafi.com
if you want to either work with me
or watch me speak or read any of the stuff I've done.
And then I wore the hat.
IGNTD is the name of the company
that offers a very low-cost health
for people who struggle with mental health and addiction.
24-7 help you can literally go on right now,
sign up for a very, very small price
and get the help you need.
Yeah, that's great.
Well, this conversation has been awesome.
There are so many things that we didn't even touch upon.
We could talk forever on this.
It's been a pleasure having you join us today.
I love it.
Thank you.
Yeah, thank you for all the great examples and questions.
It's been really fun.
It's been my pleasure.
Thanks again.
A sincere thank you to our guests for sharing their journey with us today.
We appreciate their honesty, courage, and willingness to open their heart in hopes of helping others.
If today's conversation helped you see the world a little differently, then we've
accomplished exactly what we set out to do. Until next time, keep believing, keep learning,
and most importantly, keep asking yourself, why not me?
