SHAWN STEVENSON: Today we're going to be addressing one of the most prevalent and most devastating issues in our world today. Here in the united states, overdose deaths are three and a half times higher than any other wealthy country. In fact substance related deaths have emerged as a leading cause of death for people under 40. But, and here's the key, this is why this is so important. It's not just the lives that we've lost through death. It's the millions upon millions of lives that we lose while people are still living. It's the families that are devastated. It's the lives that are ultimately destroyed and we cannot sit idly by and allow this to continue because as you're going to find out today, these numbers are staggering. And it changes our perspective on, yes, impacting the lives of people who are currently experiencing addiction.

And we're really going to open up the can of worms and take a look at all of the different things and sometimes very unsuspecting things that people are becoming addicted to today. But we're going to understand that this is touching us. Literally every person alive today is being impacted by this, whether it's directly or indirectly. And so giving this issue a voice and also digging in on why the situation is the way that it is, and to talk about real solutions, real science backed solutions, because the science has changed, as science does. And our special guest, his prestigious university education, he'll share with you today, what he was taught in school is very different from the prevailing narrative and paradigm of treatment.

Today, and you're going to learn where we really are and how much more effective. And I'm telling you, once you hear all the different pieces that are contributing to these epidemics of addiction, it's really going to illuminate this for you. I know many times during this conversation, I was just like, of course, that makes so much sense, but what are we going to do about it? And this conversation and this topic is especially impactful for me as well. Growing up in an environment where I was surrounded by addiction and losing people that are very, very close to me over the years and understanding the ramifications, the fallout that happens to the children in these environments and how we tend to pick up these behaviors and continue this cycle. We have to break the cycle. And so I'm very, very grateful to share this episode with you today. 

Now as we always do when our special guests come into the model health show studios. We shower them with gifts. We've got the best snacks. We've got grass fed water. I'm just kidding. Water is not grass fed. All right. Well, we got the best water. We've got incredible teas. And like I mentioned, I love giving gifts to our special guest. A lot of the snacks that we keep here at the studio are from the incredible folks at paleo valley. They've got amazing grass fed grass finished meat sticks superfood bars that use 100 percent grass fed bone broth protein. And also real food ingredients, real food ingredients. And they have a variety of flavors Apple cinnamon, chocolate chip, red velvet, and more.

And today I actually gave my special guest. I just, again, sometimes I just tune into my heart. Like what would be a good gift for my guest? And one of the gifts that I gave him in this little gift basket that I gave him was from paleo Valley. And it was their 100 percent grass fed bone broth, protein powder in their new salted caramel flavor. Caramel, caramel have you like to say it? But he was like I saw his eyes light up Like christmas day. All right. He was like, you don't know how much I like, this is such a big part of my life, and he. My guess is incredibly fit like it was obvious But he was like a couple years ago. He transformed his body and one of those big changes was him realizing working with one of the most incredible minds in nutrition and fitness and how much protein he was needing to hit for his particular goals.

And he realized he was consuming like one third of the amount that he really needed. And he saw the difference. He saw the change with his body composition when he started to proactively include more protein. And so he's very happy to receive the gift and you can get this gift for yourself. For your family, for people that you care about, head over to paleovalley.com/model, and you're going to get 15 percent off site wide. This includes their incredible snacks. This includes their 100 percent grass fed bone broth, protein powder. They've got some incredible spices, all kinds of goodies over there. So definitely head over there and check them out. It's paleovalley.com/model. That's P A L E O V A L L E Y. com/model for 15 percent off site wide. And now let's get to a special YouTube comment of the week. 

ITUNES REVIEW: Another YouTube review by Atcrunchypopsy. Shawn, you are the best in the game, hands down. No ego, diet tribes, etc. Just motivation and genuine care for people. I'd love for you to come to the UK one day. It would be a dream to hear you speak in person. You've helped me, like many others, change my life and my health. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I appreciate that so much and I can't wait, absolutely. It is on my agenda to make it to the UK to do an event, and of course, just to explore. There's so many different things that I want to see and experience. And so it is done. It's just a matter of time. So thank you so much for sharing your heart over on YouTube. If you're yet to do so hop over to the model health YouTube channel and subscribe! Subscribe to the YouTube channel. We're doing some incredible things on YouTube this year. All right. This year and beyond, but this year we're getting it popping. All right. So make sure to head over to YouTube and subscribe to the channel. Of course you could join us in studio for these amazing episodes and be able to sit down with us and our special guests. And we've got a great one for you today.

Dr. Adi Jaffe is a nationally recognized expert on mental health, addiction and relationships. As a former lecturer in the UCLA psychology department, he was also the executive director and co founder of one of the most progressive mental health treatment facilities in the country. Dr. Jaffe attended UCLA, graduating with a bachelor's degree and a PhD in psychology. Using both his personal experience and his research, working with his clients, Dr. Jaffe now writes for psychology today and has been featured on multiple major media outlets, including CNN, the Huffington posts, the Los Angeles times and more. And now he's here to share his incredible game changing insights on addiction with you. Let's dive into this conversation with the incredible Dr. Adi Jaffe. 

All right. This is very special and important. Right now. I don't think that many of us understand the real landscape when it comes to addiction. And you articulate this very, very well to kick off your new book, your new project. So can you start off by talking about the current state of affairs with addiction?

DR. ADI JAFFE: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think the only way most people have become aware that addiction is a problem is through the opioid overdose epidemic, right? So over the last 15 years, we've heard more and more people dying. That's coming in the suburbs. It's all over the place. You know, we're now in a place where over a hundred thousand people are dying of drug overdoses every year. Add to that over a 100 - 150,000 from alcohol related deaths and then add to that smoking, we're losing more than a half a million people a year to drugs. So let's just put that out there. Secondly, we used to talk about addiction as being something that hurts about 10 percent of the population. So figure 350 million Americans, about 25 million adults, 10 percent of the adults, who struggle. Well, SAMHSA, which is the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration, just upped its numbers from the mid 20s to about 42 million a year who struggle, right?

Almost doubling it. And that's only alcohol and drugs. It doesn't include nicotine. Because that's in a different class and importantly as you and I talked about right before the show, it doesn't include any behavioral addictions including compulsive eating. And you know, I don't have to if there's somebody I don't have to tell it's you how you know corn syrup sugars are addictive and they're causing massive health problems. So imagine adding into the number of people dying, the diabetes number is because of sugar, we're now losing millions of people every year. But this doesn't include porn addiction, which is rampant because of the advent of the internet and how easy it is to get now. It doesn't include gambling addiction and any other technology addictions. It doesn't include something else I talk about in the book, which is work addiction.

We're in a work addicted culture. If you actually redirect all your efforts away from family, away from relationships, away from your health and towards work, that's lauded, right? That's looked up to, but it can still make your life a struggle. I work with a lot of clients. So I work out the numbers based on different studies that have looked at all these, and there's about a hundred million adults who struggle with addiction in this country, at different levels, with those different behavioral and substance addictions. 350 million people or so, 250 to 300 million adults. That's half to a third of the adult population that is struggling. And then what I say in the book, it's like, you're either a person who struggles or you're close to somebody who struggles. That's it. It's no longer them. It's us, right? I've never met a person who doesn't have and has never had somebody in their life who struggled with addiction.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Yeah, this is again, it's a paradigm shift because unless you're directly like paying attention to it directly impacted yourself. We don't really understand how broad this is. Now, there's another thing you talk about as well and you brought up and I really sat and thought about it for the first time and I thought about the language we use around it. The addiction to social media and also the addiction to television. We call it binge watching. 

DR. ADI JAFFE: Literally. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: All right. So it's just like when I made that can it was the first time I ever Connected the power of that word binge that's usually attributed to food right and food addiction and drinking as well. You know And just these other like we call it these quote other things that are more hard addictions. But many of these same attributes are taking place and it's taking over people's lives 

DR. ADI JAFFE: How many people listening right now either themselves or know somebody who escapes into video games? We're escaping the binge watching TV, right? They watch three or four hours of TV. I think the number last time I saw for an average young adult in this country, adolescent and young adult is like eight hours of media consumption a day. So you sleep eight to nine hours, right? Teens are sleeping a lot. Eight hours or so of watching and eight hours of school. That's it. That's their day. And that's crazy to think about, right? Almost everybody's watched Wally or whoever. I'm thinking we're closely getting to that state, right? Everything is fed to you, you don't have to work on anything. It's pretty scary.

SHAWN STEVENSON: It's a very powerful animated film. Yeah. That I definitely want to check out with your family as well. 

DR. ADI JAFFE: Oh yeah, I mean it's, I think it delivers the message in a really interesting way. Easy to digest way, but it's a scary proposition of where we're heading. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: For sure. For sure. Now, your work in this field, to say that it was an unconventional interest into psychology and of course, getting your PhD and helping so many people and addressing really again, addiction and treatment. Your path and getting into this really blew my mind on multiple levels. So if you could share because I think it is very important because your perspective is incredibly unique and I think that's A big part of the reason that's so valuable. 

DR. ADI JAFFE: I appreciate that man. Yeah, I wasn't supposed to be here. It's kind of the way I think about it for a multitude of reasons. But you know, I was a regular Young teenager 13, 14 years old. My family moved to this country. And I was already starting to get into a little bit of trouble back home, but when we moved I felt really out of place. I had a lot of social anxiety. I talk about it in the book. But I never really felt like I fit in. I was in my head constantly. I was one of those people as I'm talking to you. I'm trying to figure out if I'm standing right if I'm saying the right words. I'm looking over there to see if people are looking at me weird. I just was in my head so much. And I tell the story of how it happened so I won't kill it for whoever ends up reading the book. But I got introduced to alcohol at a essentially at a social event and I did it because I didn't want to look weird. Some kid hands me a bottle of vodka.

I'm going to drink it cause I don't want to stick out. But then once the alcohol took its effect, like 20 minutes, 30 minutes later, I felt unencumbered by anxiety for the first time. All of a sudden I was kind of calmed down. I could talk to girls. I could just kick it with the guys. And that was not normal for me. I was really self conscious. I joke in the book, but it's true. I ended up fooling around with this girl I liked from Jersey, this was in upstate New York, New Jersey, kind of at a camp. And for me, that was it. I was like, all right, bring on the alcohol, you know? And every time there was a party, I now drank.

And it also opened doors to social circles that I wasn't kind of allowed into a 14, 15 years old, then came weed. Then came harder drugs, and I got heavily addicted to meth. I was at UCLA, got introduced to the drug, I don't want to ruin all the different parts of the story, but I got introduced to the drug and it got me. I went from using it to study for finals and midterms for about one or two quarters to using it every day, very quickly, like within six months I'd say. And then I used it like that for about four or five years. I'm about 165 pounds here sitting in front of you, I was 124 pounds. Skeleton by the time the arrest, which is how the book opens, happened, and I was at UCLA.

I'm using every day. I had to start selling drugs because I was using like an eight ball of meth a day. That's about 400 worth of meth. I had no money. I wasn't making anything. So I started selling. I was already selling ecstasy to my friends. I started selling coke. I started selling meth. I became like a little 7 eleven. And two kind of cool things happened from it. For me as a 21 year old kid, really, right? Number one, I had money. So, that was, I was broke beforehand. I was making like 7, 000, 8, 000 a month just selling drugs to friends. But then the other thing is, now people wanted to be around me, so all that social anxiety kind of went away. I had no idea where it was going to take me, but I got deeper and deeper into it.

By the time I barely graduated from UCLA, I was smoking meth from a pipe in the bathroom in between classes because I just needed, I needed to smoke it all day or I would go to sleep. So I would be up for about three days, three nights. At a time and then sleep for about eight to ten hours. Wake back up and do another three day run, and like that was that was kind of life. I barely graduated college. I mean literally I could tell you the story. They called me one day and said they had shifted the requirements for the undergrad psychology major at ucla and a class that I took before that didn't make it now could count. And so I graduated on a technicality a year after I'd stopped, I was sitting in my recording studio smoking meth and hooking up.

And that was my life. I wasn't talking to my parents. I would avoid them when they called. I had no friends. Everybody I knew was either a drug user or a drug dealer. And out of four or five guys who were running for me, I was making bank at that point. And, you know, I kind of joke, fast forward to this Saturday morning. I get, I get the SWAT team, the Beverly Hills SWAT team just warms my bedroom. And I come to, I, there's a meth pipe next to me. I was doing GHB to fall asleep after that like it was insanity. I had a gun next to me, which thank God I didn't reach for because they would have happily shot me in bed. And I had this kind of come to Jesus moment. They lifted me I'd been in a motorcycle accident, which is how they even found out about the drugs in the first place. And they laid me out right under, there was a couch and it was right under a Scarface poster.

And I don't know if you remember in Scarface, there's that scene, Al Pacino, like, got his gun, his arms in a sling, he's just been shot up. And it's so crazy for me to say this now, but, you know, when I was dealing, Al Pacino in that movie was like a hero. Like, the little guy who came up. I don't know how I missed the part of the movie. I mean, I didn't miss it, but where he gets shot up dead at his house by his friends who got him the right, like, I don't know, somehow the way I looked at the world was totally twisted. So I'm broken leg, sitting on the couch. They carry me to the squad car cause I couldn't walk and they wouldn't let me bring my crutches because they're a weapon and I get taken to jail.

And it was really this kind of stop sign from the universe like, yo, you gotta, you gotta do something else. But I, I'll be honest, man, I didn't know what to do. So you were talking about a kind of an abnormal or a non traditional route to get here. I did a year in jail. Well, I did a year in rehab, then I did a year in jail in LA County. And when I got out, I had nine felonies on my record and nobody would hire me. I mean, mall jobs, I tried to get a job at the Apple store, I was just starting out, it got all the way to the, you know, security clearance kind of part, the background check, and they never called me back. I almost got a job as a pizza delivery boy, and then they dropped me because of the background check.

I couldn't get hired, I went back to school. Because it was the only thing I had available to me. And because I was so motivated, we talked about it before, but it was like this back against the wall moment. You know like adjust or die and I became a 4. 0 student. I was a horrible student in undergrad in high school and I just had to figure out how to be good at this. So I became a 4. 0 student. Got connected with a professor who did addiction research. And by the grace of, whatever it is in the universe. He liked me and like my work so much. He really went to bath for me to get me back into UCLA and that was the beginning of the end man. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I, man. To, whoa, I got to circle back to one point.

DR. ADI JAFFE: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Well, that's 30 points, but one that just jumps out right now is that poster of Scarface and that connection that you felt. And really being, and this is part of our culture, it's like you were attracted to the romantic part of it. And we turn off the part of like the destruction and devastation that is attached to it. The inevitable outcome. 

DR. ADI JAFFE: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And that's part of, you know, kind of what was coming to life for me even reading your book was how we compartmentalize things. 

DR. ADI JAFFE: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And especially when it comes to addiction, because if you could elaborate on this in your very, very prestigious education. By the way, we're talking about one of the top schools, if not the top school in psychology in the world, or especially in the United States in particular. But in a way being miseducated and kind of going through the changing tides of like, you know, back in the day was thought to be like mystical issues that became like, you know, let's attach you to different mechanisms and try and shock therapy to you being taught that your problem and everything that you went through was because of your genetics. It was because you have a disease. So let's talk about that prevailing paradigm in your education versus where we are today. 

DR. ADI JAFFE: Yeah, I love this focus because one of the big points in the book overall is our perspective and our perception of what it is we're dealing with has a massive impact on the approach we take to fix it. The way we feel about the process and the potential outcomes. So I'll just start even more broadly. You know, when we're taught things in the world, unfortunately, as we're taught them at home and then in school, like for me at UCLA, and I'll get into that here in one second, we're taught the truth, right? Like you're sitting in a class and your teachers tell you how it is. Your parents teach you what life is like and how it is. Rarely does somebody say, look, this is my version of how life is. There are 5 million of these, or 10 billion of them. I'm giving you mine. Take what you want. If something doesn't fit or doesn't feel right, let me introduce you to 50 other versions that I know of.

Nobody says that. So you get to sit in these rooms, or you sit at home, and you get taught the truth. And I talk about that a lot in the book. A lot of that is probably not true. Period. And some of it may just not be true for you. So, I'm sitting at UCLA, which absolutely was the number one, I think it might still be, but the number one psychology Ph. D. program in the country. And it followed what I call the NIDA, National Institute on Drug Addiction Disease Model. So there were abnormal psychology classes about the psychology of that. There were genetics classes about genetic predisposition and different genetic markers and SNPs that have been connected to differences in at least personality variables that are connected to addiction because there aren't a lot of Genetic variants that are directly connected to addiction, but there are some directed to risk taking and some directed to impulsivity. Some that impact your risk aversion how likely you are to do something risky, right?

So there have been studies on that. You put all those together and you get to something like addiction. Well, that's not a surprise because if you've got somebody who's a little more impulsive and likes to do things a little bit more impossibly, and they're willing to take risks, some of the risks they may take will be around drug use. Like me with drug dealing, right? Most normal people who run out of money for drugs at the age of 21 may do less drugs. I said, hey, let me buy more drugs and sell them so I can get my drugs for free. That's risk taking, right? And then I spent another six. So, all those genetic markers were one thing. And then another huge piece that is part of the equation in addiction is the brain.

Dopamine is a reward signal. It's a novelty seeking signal in the brain. That's another genetic marker, too. And so they would focus on the dopamine response and what happens to the dopamine as you, you know, for chronic cocaine users or chronic methamphetamine users, or people who use cannabis a lot or drinkers, and they would say, look at the brain of a drinker and look at the brain of a regular, normal person. And the selling point was these people have brains that are different than "normals". Their genetics are different than "normal people". And they created this delineation. Here's what was missing from the equation. It, I mean, there was a lot missing. There was rarely a conversation about the influence of environment, culture, rarely in a conversation about trauma, and the connection to addiction. 

Even though about 60 to 70 percent of people who struggle with addiction have a massive history of trauma. Attachment theory, which was taught in another area in the same department in the developmental psychology, never came into the addiction conversation. Even though it's completely obvious that the way you relate to your parents and what your home environment was as a child will have something to do with whether you go to seek alcohol or drugs or anything else for comfort. None of those things were discussed. And what I learned when I left UCLA, thank God, through other professionals, was that there were all these other schools of thought. Not even one other school of thought, all these other school of thoughts. So what I talk about in the book is, it's kind of like we're going through these stages.

You mentioned the first one, right? 200, 300 years ago, all mental health, but also addiction, alcoholism, etc. were thought to be the demonic evil spirit kind of taking over and occupying your body and it was about exorcisms and going back to god. That was the answer then we found electricity and we found lobotomies and we found all this other stuff like let me play around with your brain and do some like almost like rabbit ear antennas on a tv, like let me just knock your brain around to see if that helps. We thought it helped people won prizes for being really, really great at lobotomies and electroconvulsive shock therapy. Then we got talk therapy. Which helped to some extent, right?

People went back to your earlier years, but now we really separated the sick from the well. And I think we're now at the fourth stage that I talk about in the book. Where we're realizing there's this smorgasbord of knowledge we have about the human mind and the brain and genetics. And what I talk about in the book is addiction is not a disease. I call it a syndrome. Syndrome is just the same sort of symptoms that show up together, but they could have a totally different underpinning. And once we start understanding it, that we can draw from different tools, we're not looking for the same tools to fix a problem because addiction is not one thing.

SHAWN STEVENSON: I'm so grateful that you shared that because the connotation with disease, that labeling is that, and especially in our culture, unfortunately is that this is something that I can't change. I have this thing. I am this thing. And there's nothing that I can do about it, except try to manage it, right? And so this labeling, even, but this applies to so many other chronic conditions, of course, as you know, and thank goodness. And right now, this time that we're all alive and experiencing this, so many of the revelations are coming out about this, whether it's dementia, whether it's diabetes, whether it's heart disease. This doesn't have to be your lot in life. To come forward and to say this applies to addiction as well. To shift the paradigm that this is a syndrome. There's this cluster of symptoms, but this is not all of who you are. As a matter of fact, there's so much more. 

And you shared, I mean you shared already so many great insights, but a big part of this. That is unfortunately was not shared with you in your university education was the role of all these other pieces that seem, as you're saying them, they seem so logical. Trauma. Environment. Chances are, even if you have the risk taking gene. If you're not in an environment that has meth, around, you're probably not going to be addicted to meth. It's going to be environmental exposures, and situations, and circumstances, and you know, mental health templates in the moment, and peer pressure, and all these other things. But just, we easily label somebody as an addict. They just have a problem, that's why they did it. And I think we do that, and we talked a little bit about this before we got going, just to compartmentalize it for ourselves, make ourselves feel better. And to ignore the complexity and just to say that's what it is so that we can sleep at night. 

DR. ADI JAFFE: I think the us versus them component is big. I think we always want to feel like we're normal. Although it's a joke I talk about in the book, right? Nobody really wants to be normal, but if they tell you you're bad, like you have addiction as a disorder or disease, you want to fix it. And I think this gets to what we did talk about quite a bit before we started shooting, which was, you know, this idea that, you have to cross some magical marker and then you're sick and then you have to be fixed, which really fits into our medical model, right? We don't really do anything about anything until you cross some barrier.

We don't think about disease management as anything that happens before in terms of prevention or lifestyle changes to alter your trajectory. And you mentioned If you didn't grow up around meth, you're probably not going to end up using meth, and I'll just, I'll broaden that, right? If you grew up in a household that modeled open conversation about difficult emotional topics or something like that, then you may have a path to deal with discomfort, deal with emotional overwhelm, stress, anxiety within the confines of the family. I don't know about you, most of the families I know of do not have that as a path. So what do you do? You look for outlets. Now, If in your family, sports are a really, really big thing, that might be one of the outlets. Can we pick up a BMX bike or a skateboard and start doing ramps and that will be your escape?

Because when you're really, you know, when you're skateboarding really hard and trying to hit a rail, you're not thinking about being anxious because you better hit that rail or you're going to break your arm, right? So, you focus on something else. And to me, addiction is just a coping strategy that you came up with you decades ago, oftentimes, 15 to 20 years ago on average, before people come get help. And it worked. That's really the whole point. Right? I had social anxiety. Somebody gave me alcohol and drugs. My social anxiety went away when I did those things. Would it have helped to have a therapist or my mom to talk to me? Maybe. But that wasn't available at the time. And that's true for a lot of people.

I tell a story of this woman, and again, most names other than one client, I changed all the names. She specifically asked me not to change her name and Aaliyah, which is a second story after mine I didn't change her name. But, you know, one of my clients came to me for weed. A lot of people think you can't get addicted to weed. That's bullshit You can get addicted to anything because it's not about the substance. It's about what you do with it so she was also really really socially anxious more than I was phobias panic attacks the whole thing. And whenever she had a big performance, so she was on a big stage sports team and she was on a student government or debate team.

I forgot what exam, what we shifted it to in the book, but I think it was student government. Anytime before a big event, she would need to throw up. So she would go to the bathroom, it was an event and she would go right before the bus left, there was this like patch of grass where she would throw up before she'd get on the bus. Everybody laughed at her, mocked her for throwing up and she felt horrible about it, right? Cause you're already nervous. Everybody else just wants to go to the game. The bus is waiting for her to throw up. And one day a friend just hands her a joint. It's like, hey, try this. She hits the joint, never threw up again.

Now every time before a game or before a debate, smoke some weed, life is good. You're telling me she made the wrong choice in that moment? Like, she was supposed to somehow understand that she's supposed to go talk to her parents who weren't available about, hey, I'm throwing up. She didn't know about anxiety. She didn't know about panic. She had no idea about it. Nobody taught her. She did the thing that was right in front of her to fix it. 15 years later. She can't get a job as a teacher, which is what she wanted to do, because they drug test. And she can't stop weed, because every time she wants to stop weed, she starts throwing up, and her GI acts up.

So, I, you know, I talk about this in the book for sure, but you gotta follow the whole story. You gotta, you gotta really be with a person, understand their trajectory of how they got there. The reason the book is called Unhooked, the hooks are not the drugs. People say, I'm hooked on cocaine. I'm hooked on meth. I'm hooked on this video game. You're not hooked on the video game. You're hooked on the pain relief that the video game is giving you from some other hook that has its claws in you. We got to go back to that original hook and fix that. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yes. One of, as you were sharing your story, and you talked about that moment when you were with those other kids and the vodka bottle got passed to you. Yeah. Yeah. And the relief that you felt hooking up with the girl, like all these other things. And I was like, are these the hooks that he is talking about right here? Getting played out right in front of us. 

DR. ADI JAFFE: Yeah. So social anxiety was a big one, but if we go in one level deeper than that. I always felt less than. I always felt like I wasn't cool enough or good enough. I always felt like I needed to step up my game or I needed to be smarter or look better. I remember being eight years old, standing in front of a mirror at home. Telling the eight year old version of me in the mirror, you're not good looking enough to get by on your looks. You're gonna have to find something else to kind of make you special.

I think about that, I thought about that in my mid thirties. I'm like, what the hell? What even put that thought in the eight year old kid's head? You know what I'm saying? Because that's a pretty deep, heavy thought for an eight year old. I think it was after my dad left. I think some things happen like socially in my circle that maybe like, you know, I just didn't get into the cool group. I wasn't accepted the way I wanted to, but I started telling myself a story at eight or nine or 10 years old that I don't measure up and that followed me forever. So the fear that I'm not good enough was definitely one of my hooks and I would do anything I could to shut that thing down. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. One of the things that really jumped out to me in reading your book was how addiction goes multiple ways, right? It isn't just the addict and their problem. The addict requires this kind of codependency from the people who are perceiving them and interacting with them. And you even share that like blatantly that this is a code dependent phenomenon being an addict. Let's talk a little bit more about that.

DR. ADI JAFFE: Yeah, so I think the biggest example, because probably some people listening right now identify as somebody who is close to somebody who is addicted, and some people listening right now identify as somebody who is struggling or has struggled. So this is the cleanest thing that I could talk about. There's no way for somebody to get through 10, 15 years of problematic kind of behavior if there aren't other people that are helping to cover up. You know what I mean? So let's say you start drinking too much and you can't show up for work, or you start drinking too much and you cause a fight. The people around the person who's struggling with the addiction kind of cover for them and try to make things smooth, which is understandable.

We're in relationship, but it's an issue of boundaries. So, that comes up and that's number one. But what's interesting, on the flip side is once these things keep getting bad and really bad and somebody really needs to get help or they have end up with one of these back against the wall, you got to change kind of moments. An arrest, a fight, a physical altercation that where they get hurt, you know, a threat of divorce or leaving you in the relationship. Something really, really negative happens at DUI. Oftentimes what I end up finding are two things. Number one, a lot of the bridges have been burned, and a lot of those relationships have left because the boundaries got so enmeshed and mangled that people had an easier time leaving than really setting hard lines, number one.

Number two, a lot of the people around the person who's struggling with addiction don't see and are not interested in getting any help themselves. So what happens, they'll say, yo, my son has a cocaine problem. Go fix them. Well, I start talking to the family, and it's pretty clear everybody has some problems. And when I talk about it, I give this sponge example in the book, but this is why a lot of treatment doesn't work. You know, best case scenario, the family has resources or there's treatment available around whatever they send the kid to treatment. Well, the kid goes out of their environment, goes somewhere totally different, where there's no drugs, there's no alcohol, hopefully.

Therapy and treatment on a near daily basis. They're isolated, they're supported, and they stay sober. You know, 60 percent of people can stay sober through 30 days of rehab. So it's not 100, but it's 60%. They go back, almost everybody relapses within one month. Some people, a substantial portion of people, like, double digit percentages relapse within a day or two. Why is that? Because you take the person who's now gotten some support, some help, you put them right back in their old environment, right? Where are they going? They're going right back home. They're going right back to where the things were happening. Because we don't pay attention to the environmental influence, we don't pay attention to the relationship to the families, we bring this person, they go back, and what I write about in the book, and I think this is the section you're talking about, is you got to watch out for the people around you who are not going through life changes themselves.

They think they can keep going the way they're moving forward, and you will change and everything will get better, and the world will look the way they want it to look. In reality, relationships are, if they're not 50 50, they're on average 50 50, right? We're contributing both to every relationship, both sides. And so, what I tell people is, If you really want you in a relationship, you and your family, you and your work colleagues, if you want something to change there, it's not a single person situation, right? You've got to change. The way I talk about it is you take a sponge and the sponge learned how to behave over time.

It learned how to do everything. You squeeze some of the dirty water out of it. Well, you better be careful where you put that sponge back because if you got a really clean sponge, you cleaned up your counter and it's all dirty. Now you squeeze the water out of the counter. You dropped the sponge right back in the water. It's just going to pick up the dirty water again. And so what we need to do is go do work with the family, with the wife, with the husband, with the kids, in order to get essentially kind of a new system in place that has real boundaries. It has, you know, strong relationships are not a free for all. Everybody protects themselves. Everybody stands for themselves and the relationship. It's a lot of work to maintain a strong, lifelong relationship. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Got a quick break coming up. We'll be right back. 

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SHAWN STEVENSON: Let's talk about your strategy for this and what you're sharing with everybody in unhooked. And talk about, I think it's really important. I know this applies to so much in life awareness is like the first domino, oftentimes. And so being aware of our hooks, like, let's talk about your process, the strategy that you're giving to everybody, because I think that just these insights alone can change the paradigm for so many families.

DR. ADI JAFFE: Yeah, I hope so. And the number one thing, you know, somebody asked me in an interview, What's the difference between what you're doing here and what's done in traditional recovery circuits? And I said number one, you don't have to be ready to quit. You don't have to be ready to call yourself an alcoholic or an addict. Actually, would rather you never use those words. You don't have to admit that you have to change everything right now. You just have to be aware that what's happening right now isn't good. The outcome the current circumstances of your life are not the way you want them to be. And you have to have some motivation to change them. If you can say to yourself, Hey, you know what, what happened last week, or the way I'm drinking, or what's happening for me with porn, or with video games, or the way I'm eating pizza every night, or ice cream every night, it's a problem.

As long as you can just say that, I don't need you to commit to anything else. Because the system, the unhooked method as I call it here, has a few different components, but you talked about awareness. The first one is let's understand what is actually happening. So I have this cycle that I run all my clients through. I do it in my own life. It's called explore, accept, transform. I call it my eat cycle, right? Just like you have to eat good food, right? We're on a health program. You got to eat good food to build good basic building blocks for your body. You have to eat good things for your head, right? So how do we eat? We become curious and we explore.

I tell people, I talked about one of my moments, right, the SWAT team arrest, but there have been others. 10 years after I quit meth, my wife almost left me. She was my girlfriend at the time, but like, she almost left me. Well, why is that? Something was broken at the time too. So, what I tell people is, when something bad happens in your life, instead of going and changing it right away, pause and ask yourself the question, wait, what just didn't work? What broke down? Because most of us don't actually know what we're acting on, what we're trying to prevent is a discomfort. Just like me with those other kids in the camp, I was weird and uncomfortable. Somebody hands me a bottle of vodka. I drink because I don't want to be uncomfortable. I'm not drinking because I know how this fits into my life and what it's going to do.

I'm not sitting there going, wait, I've never really had vodka. What is this thing that this could, I'm not exploring, right? As an adult, pause. What just broke down? And then I'll talk about the system that I give you to explore that. Once you understand that, there's some internal processing we have to do. So explore, accept, eat, explore, accept. A lot of us, when we find out some things about ourselves that we don't like. We really want to jump to changing them quick. But again, I believe in your backstory, your trauma, the way you grew up, all those things play. The environment you grew up in, right? That's such a big part of your story.

We have to get comfortable with those things. They are you. You will never escape, "the environment you grew up in", right? If when I ask you a question about, you know, your kids and how old you were when you had your kids, if you were in a place mentally where you would have to get all embarrassed and be like, Oh my God, you wouldn't believe it. I was 60. If you had to kind of start qualifying it, I would know you're not in acceptance, but I could see what we were talking about your kids, you're in full acceptance of that was my state. That was where I came from. It was totally normal and look at me now kind of a thing, right? We have to start embracing even our weak spots.

We have to start embracing even what looked like weaknesses back in the day because they make up us. Once you're in acceptance, you can transform because now you're transforming from a place of power, of a place of acceptance, a place of empowerment, a place of understanding of who you are. So now we can start matching tricks and hacks and tools to make you improve. So explore, accept, transform is kind of the cycle I take everybody through. And then I'll just cycle back and this is how the book opens. We have to completely reconfigure our understanding of failure. Because we've grown up in a society where failure is a non starter. Failure is a problem. If you fail, it means you are a failure, right? 

So we, all we want to do is hide from mistakes. But in reality, and I give a lot of examples of this in the book, Jordan is one of them. I mean, you can, there are an endless number of examples. You look at anybody that you look up to in the universe, anybody, I urge anyone on this podcast right now, email me a DJ@ignited.Com if I'm wrong about this. Anybody you look up to in the world has made a ton of mistakes. The difference between what they do with their failures and what people who are not successful do with their failures is people who are not successful run away from the failure and want to hide it. The people who are successful utilize the failure as a learning opportunity and their way to move up.

They say, okay, this didn't work out the way I want it to. What happened? They isolate it. They go put extra work on that aspect of their personality, their behavior, their fitness, their nutrition, whatever it is. And then they level up and actually repeat it over and over. There's a quote I use in the book. I do it in some of my talks. Thomas Watson had this quote, "If you want to succeed more, double your failure rate." I heard that for the first time about a decade ago, changed my life. Because now I look at negative outcomes as opportunities. So I teach people the Sparrow loop and that's stimulus, perception, activation, response, outcome.

You start at the outcome, something bad happened. Which of the first four phases. brought out that negative outcome. Was it my drinking or was it the fact that I feel crappy around other people and I need to hide? Was it my drinking or is it the fact that I look at the world as a negative place and I always think everybody's out to get me and in order to drop down that voice, I drink, I sleep in, I binge watch TV or I run into video games. I help people analyze where the issue really is because the drinking, the eating, the video games is not the issue. It's actually your solution to the problems that come before it. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: It's fascinating, fascinating. So it just seems so obvious, seems so obvious. Now I've got a question for you because again, you're providing inroads and insights on how to do some of this stuff. And I know that a lot of people, this is one of the things we talked about as well, is that you are bringing to light that there isn't a one size fits all path when it comes to addiction. This is so important in and of itself. With that said, there are people, especially when you get into such a complicated and dark place, that have told themselves certain stories, right? That might not be true because they're trying to make themselves feel comfortable with what they're doing, right?

So exploring might not be as easy as, again, like, I start to go within, for example, and I do some inner investigation, but it just keeps coming to this blame. I'm blaming someone else. I'm blaming my parents. I'm blaming my father. That's why I'm here and accepting that it's my dad. Right. So is this a, this might not be the right use of that power that you're giving us. So articulate that a little bit. 

DR. ADI JAFFE: Yeah, no, I really appreciate that. And look, I tell people right at the outset in the book, and I'm serious about this. Okay. I'm not saying the road is easy for everybody. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying it's worth it. I'll tell you, there, there are a ton of examples, but I'll just pick some, right? So let's say the example that you gave. Your father may have truly wronged you in a number of ways as a child and set you up for failure. And one of the things I talk about in the book is, yes, it could be true. that other people could have done differently by you and your situation would have been different.

It could be true that you could have realized this 15 years ago and done something about it then and already be caught up. It could even be true that everybody but you had the best intention, right? Let's go all the way, like you were trying your best and everybody screwed you. Okay, that could all be true. Tomorrow's Monday. What are you going to do tomorrow? Because if you're going to keep sitting and putting the blame on them, you're also putting the responsibility on them to fix your life. And the point that I make in the book over and over and over is it's okay to have that perception. But if your perception of the world is one of the things that when you do your explore except transform, you realize is a problem.

I used to look at the world as a dark, dark place and I was depressed all the time. And when it dawned on me that's a choice. I started a gratitude practice. It felt ridiculously weird, uncomfortable, and really false and fake if I'm honest in the beginning. But there's always something to be grateful for. I can be grateful for comfortable shoes or even waking up this morning, right? The fact that I get to wake up and breathe is great because if I didn't wake up and breathe, I wouldn't be here. So, I had to start very, very small. And probably about two years, which is a long, I get it, that's a long time. Two years in, I started waking up in the morning with a completely different outlook on life.

And I've added more and more habits, and I talk about a lot of them. You know, this being a health and a wellness podcast, like I said before, what you eat, what you put in your body and your mind determines the life that you will live, right? Now, we all lived in an earlier point of time where we didn't control what that was. You're a four year old kid, you're a seven year old kid, even if you had the knowledge, you can't come to your parents and say, this food is not good for me, I need you to buy these other completely different foods, right? Your parents control your life. I get it. I'm not blaming you for it. I'm just saying, let's turn it.

And bring all the responsibility inwards. Do you know the book, Extreme Ownership? Jocko Winnick. That was another book that kind of changed things for me. In the way that I worked with my clients, right? It's, yes, there are many unfair things in life. But I want my life and my family's life to be better. Today and tomorrow. And so, it's not that you can't understand, point to, and, and really delve into how those people wronged you. But here's what I want people to do instead of just blaming. My father was cold. I'm actually literally talking from experience right now. My father was cold and unemotional.

He was Scandinavian. He never learned to talk about feelings. His parents were a holes to him, like success, success, success, do, do, do. That's the only thing that mattered growing up. So he did the same thing to me. And he was gone all the time. Until I was 14, I essentially never saw my dad. He just worked all the time. Now, as an adult, I can look at it and say, okay, not having a role model of a father screwed me up. No doubt. Him caring about work more than about me and the family screwed me up. No doubt. Him not being able to show emotion really, I mean, I'm 40 years old. I'm still learning how to talk about feelings for crying out loud, right?

Like, it's not easy for me. I can trace it back. And it wasn't his fault. He had all the reasons in his own head why he believed that what he did was the right thing. And whether I like it or not, he did his best. So now my question is, okay, knowing that, and then I don't have a time machine. I can't go in the back. I can't change any of what happened, but I can't change the way I look at it and I can't change what I do tomorrow. So it might not be easy and it might not be your fault, But we don't live a life based on whose fault it is that we're here. I'm going to wake up tomorrow, I'm going to live a life based on the habits, the perspectives, and the beliefs and the actions that I take. So that's the message I make in the book, like the hooks might not be yours, but taking them out is our job and our responsibility. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. One of the things that you mentioned really stood out for me with your father was him being there for you in the court situation, right? And I want you to talk about that and also, this is so important. It's our ability to choose, right? And of course, when we are just, especially when things are not going our way, it's very difficult to know that we can change our perspective on the thing. But even with the faults of your father, there were certain things that you could attach to that were more liberating and empowering and other qualities that you might've gotten from him. It's just, again, what you choose to focus on. But what stood out for me in that story was you mentioned how potentially no one would care if you're going away for seven years, except your father who was there at that moment. 

DR. ADI JAFFE: Yeah, I appreciate you caught that in there. The rebuilding of the relationship with my dad was definitely a huge part of my upswing back out of that life. So here's how the classic story of what I would have told you about me and my dad and how my dad treated me or what my dad was like to me when I was a kid before all that happened. And this is a true story. I came home from school at a 97 on a math test. And the first words out of my dad's mouth were, where were the three points that you missed. 

Now, my entirety up until like 28 years old, when, after I got out of jail. So maybe 27, cause he was visiting me a lot in jail up until that moment. What that story meant to me, my perspective, right? So, stimulus, perception, activation, response, outcome. My perception when I would think of my dad and that story would come up, my perception would be that nothing but perfect was good enough for my dad. And I couldn't be perfect, so I wasn't good enough for my dad. And that's why my dad was gone. That's why my dad didn't care about me. That's why my dad didn't show up. That was the story I told myself. I don't even know that that story is wrong because I never revisited that story with my dad and he's now gone, so I'm never gonna get that, right?

My mom's version of that story, by the way, is that she told me where was the 97, like where was the other three points. And that's a joke because my mom's math is horrible, so the last thing on earth that she would try to do is fix my math test. But whatever, that's her version of the story because she needs it to feel comfortable. So, that was how I would have told the story before. Now, because I'd fixed my relationship with my dad and he came, man, that guy flew from New York every month to be at my court date. Then I went to jail for a year and every month or every two weeks, my dad would show up to visit me, fly from New York and come out.

My mom couldn't and didn't want to visit me in jail. And I, trust me, I understand that, right. Visited me, I'm gonna cry probably just talking about, like every two weeks or every month. He was sitting there visiting me The only other people that visited me were a couple of guys from rehab, right? So I'm in for a year and I got like four visitors. A few of them a couple of times and my dad every month like clockwork, right? And I was blowing up their phone man like I remember their phone number. They had to switch and add another phone number by heart because they're all these collect calls coming in so I could just talk. So I spent all this time connecting with my dad and my dad shared a lot of really intimate things in all these times. We were getting to reconnect again.

So now I got to know my dad as a person. And I got to understand, he was just doing the best he had, man. He was 24 when he had a kid, and he just did what he knew how to do, which was be a dad like his dad, right? He wasn't trying to harm me, he loved me, he just didn't know how to show love until I was really in need later on. So once I understood that, I look back at that story and I'm like, man, you know what? What if my dad was joking when he said that? Like, what if my dad was like, oh no, where'd you miss three points? But I was six or eight or whatever. So I didn't know that's what he meant. And I took it seriously. And then for 20 years, man, for 20 years, I carried around the story.

And to me again, I don't even know which of those two versions are correct, but here's my point that I make in the book. And I want everybody to just sit with, if I know that the version of the story were my dad was a perfectionist and nothing but perfect was good enough. And if I wasn't perfect, that wasn't good enough for him or for anybody else. If I know that version makes me hate myself and my life. And I know that the version that, you know, maybe it was just joking. It was like, damn, instead of saying, Hey, congratulations. Like, Oh no, you missed three points. I tell that version. My dad's a good guy who was just joking. I didn't get the joke.

I liked that version better. So I'm just going to believe that version because who cares? Right? And perspective is something most people listening right now either have had change in major ways and then you know what I'm saying is true or you haven't had a change and so you don't believe that it can happen because you think there's a truth. I've worked with thousands of people over the last 15 20 years. I don't know that there's an objective truth out there somewhere, especially not when it comes to human relationships. What you say and how you mean it and what you mean by and what you intend to happen when it comes out is so subjective.

I mean, I can even take this moment to explain something I talk about in the book in a different way. We're sitting in a studio, right? But for my vantage point, if I'm sitting here and you ask me to describe the studio, I would tell you there's a softbox over there and some lights and I see the wall over here. There's some LEDs behind you, some blue lights and a camera pointing at me and a screen and my, you know, I would talk about what I see. And then I would ask you and you sitting in a chair, I would ask you what the studio looked like and you would look forward and you would describe something totally different.

So, does the studio look the way I describe it, or the way you describe it, or is it both? And if I'm going to stop fighting for the truth in my perspective, man, I get less stressed. I can understand and empathize with other people. I get to connect. I get to wake up in the morning and learn from your experience because I want to know what the whole studio looks like. I don't want to be limited. Right, but my whole life was about like proving to everybody that I was right and I was miserable every day waking up. So to me perspective is actually probably one of the biggest changes many of us can make. We've all done it anybody listening right now used to believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or whatever, right?

And now you probably don't. That was a perspective shift. You can do it again. It's not that big a deal. Once you lock into that, you start controlling the perspective you walk into every day with. It's the hugest, most ridiculous unlock most of us can have. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Absolutely. So just to be clear, the Easter Bunny is not Real? 

DR. ADI JAFFE: I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to mess up your Easter. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I got a gang of eggs back at the house. 

DR. ADI JAFFE: You're still collecting eggs. I love it. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Thank you, man. That was so powerful. So powerful. You know, this is leaning into, I think one of the most important things in this process of healing for just about anything again, but in particular in this case of addiction and the importance of other people. And you mentioned your professor going to bat for you. You know, like just having those people along the way, and it might not be the people that you want. That's the thing. You know, you might've had this framework with your father, but then this other person can show up and it's just being able to pay attention to that.

And it reminds me, man, when you were about to cry, I started feeling it as well. You know, my, my father, my stepfather was in assisted living for, you know, over 10 years because of drugs and alcohol, what it did to his brain. And when he finally passed, I was headed on a trip before I headed back to St. Louis, for his funeral. And, you know, again, I, I'm me, I am who I am. And I've just, my life, even being able to sit here. In moments like this with individuals like yourself. I'm constantly learning. I'm constantly doing that to play around in this magical world, infinite world of perception. And so I've done a lot of work.

And so even with him passing, I was, I had this feeling of this overwhelming gratitude and just all the little beautiful micro moments that I could find. It was not an environment that anybody would want to come up in but there were these beautiful moments and I attached to those things right. And I was coming back here again just for a couple of days because I had committed to having a certain guest come in and I hadn't met him yet. But I committed to it I want to keep my word and I knew how special he was as well. But I hadn't personally met him and that person was a man named Greg Harden. All right. And he Low key, again, a lot of people didn't know he's like this super weapon, super power, he's a mentor for Tom Brady, for Michael Phelps, multiple Heisman Trophy winners, Desmond Howard.

And he was coming into the studio, and again, I was just here for two days before I go to St. Louis. Little did I know, he, before he came in here, he studied me. He studied my story, he spent a lot of time with me, and he sat here in this chair that you're sitting in and he affirmed to me how special I was, how remarkable my story was, and really identifying with where I come from, you know, and him being somebody like my father who passed, a black man trying to find his way and to survive. And the timeline that they grew up in and he became that figure for me of affirmation, but I could have missed it if I didn't choose to see it. And so he was there for me and it was like he was speaking to me and saying the things that my father never got a chance to say, or, or I might've missed him saying it because again, I wanted to tune my story to a certain station, right?

Your father with the math, right? But, I want to, I want to ask you about this and the importance of people and the importance of opening ourselves up to seeing the help that's available for having the audacity to even ask for help. And I believe, and this is again, just from my perspective, that doing this alone is not just, not just kind of. Not just kind of stupid, but a hard path to struggle and being unsuccessful. 

DR. ADI JAFFE: Man, there's so much in that. First of all, I'm a big believer now in synchronicity. I used to call it serendipity, which right is this concept that just things come together at the right time for some bigger thing that we don't understand. I now think it's happening all the time. It's just what we decide to pay attention to. And so it's not a coincidence that Greg sat in this chair when you were going through that, right? Just like it was the message you needed to hear. And he was the guy to deliver it. I mean, you're talking about the guy who I would argue made, tom Brady like without Greg Harden, there is no Tom Brady. So I think that's a really really cool example. 

You just gave and For everybody listening right now. It's happening to you in this moment at every day that you every moment that you wake up There's a synchronicity opportunity for you and it's why we want to align our perception of the world to one of opportunity and abundance and hope because you can come from the most dire situation. Now, let me be really clear I come from a really privileged place and I understand that, right, like when I went to jail My parents could help hire Lori even though all my money and everything got taken away when they seize all my stuff, right? I had that privilege. I get it Part of my thing now is in paying forward the work is why to do the work for writing the book. It's why to have these appearances like I just needed somebody to believe in me enough. I needed somebody to show me the message enough.

And I was lucky and blessed to have a few of those people. And even my dad, who I completely had misunderstood in our relationship came through. When he would have had all the reason in the world to be like, you know what, you screwed up man, go pay your consequences. He could have said that and I would have understood him, but that's not at all what he did, right? And so, we get to live the life we get to live because of the people and because of the environment that's around us. And part of what I'm saying, which I think really relates to what you're talking about, is the perception we have allows us to reach out to the people that will serve us towards one end. The more dark, more isolationist more what was me more screw everybody else and blame everybody else or more the self efficacy?

Look how special you are you can get anything done with the right motivation and the right habits and the right work. And somebody like a Greg sitting here in front of you While you're experiencing one of the biggest losses of your life. Helping fine tune the way you look at that process is huge because how you look at it is the whole, that's all that matters, right? You can have, I mean, you know, we've all had this experience. We can both go to a restaurant or go to a concert or go to a party or go to work, same time, same place, go through the same meetings and have a completely different perspective on what happened. Why is that? Because it's all here. And so for me, again, like going back to this concept of addiction, I say in the book, anybody can beat their addiction to anything, you just have to be willing to become somebody who's not addicted.

And people listen to that and think I'm crazy. And what I say is, look, the way you live right now is producing the results. And that includes the people in your life. That includes your job. That includes the place you live in. Of course, it includes everything about your life. If you want to really objectively look at it and go, hey, then there's an exercise in the book and all that kind of stuff. So I'll give like one of those examples right now. I make people do an exercise that is really, really hard for the vast majority of people who do it with me, but it's necessary. Make a list of all the relationships you have in every area of your life. Family, extended acquaintances and friends, work, school, whatever, right?

You make, put them out and then you rank them by extremely damaging to my well, well being and health, slightly damaging, neutral, slightly helpful, or extremely helpful. Now you circle the column of extremely damaging and let those people go. I'm not saying forever, but for right now, you got to let those people go. Because if you're reading my book, you're struggling. And if you're struggling, you are not strong enough to carry whatever the hell is happening with those people on your back right now. And you can, but you better shape up. You got to do some exercise, right? There's an example of doing pull ups. On a bar, in the book, like you better be able to do a lot of pull ups if you're gonna put somebody on your back and try to do some too.

So, there are some tough decisions you gotta make. One of those people might be your sister. It may be your father. It may be your mom. It may be your best friend, who calls you up every Friday and is like, Yo, I had a really, really tough week at work, let's go blow one out. Okay. You can, again, it's a perception matter. Like, does that relationship matter than more than your life? If it does, then keep going. So there are a lot of tough decisions to make here. And I talk about, you know, Greg might have ended up being one of yours, but I talk about everybody establishing a personal advisory board. Look around you at people you admire, at people you look up to, at people who live the kind of life you want to, and do the hard thing of reaching out there and being like, yo, I want what you have, but I don't know how to get it.

Is it okay if I can learn from you? Now, some of those people might be celebrities. You might not be able to get to them, but they probably have podcasts. They probably have books. They probably have videos you can watch, right? We live in this world right now where information is not the problem. So this is back to that personal responsibility piece and look at the decision you had to make to allow Greg to come into your life. Nobody would have looked twice. Nobody would have blamed you if you would have said, Hey, my dad just passed. I'm going to skip out on recording. You made the decision to show up for those two days. And because you made that decision, the opportunity happened. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Man, this is so powerful and so important. And, you know, I love that statement that "there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come." And you articulated in the very beginning that addiction, and I feel that this situation for our society at large, and just on the trajectory that we're on is going to get worse before it gets better. But it's going to get better through individuals. It's going to get better through families, it's going to get better through communities. But right now we have more access, as you just said, you know, this is the model health show. I created this to provide a model and a template regardless of where you are right there in the palm of your hand to get the right education and empowerment and to lift yourself out of those circumstances. 

And so we have access to that. As you just said, books, anybody that inspires you, you can connect with them right now. And, we also have, never seen before, more access to things that can f**k us up, right? So whether this is the media that we're addicted to, whether this is the access to food and to drugs and to alcohol, there's so much prevalence of things that can hook us in a negative way. And so, with that being said, we have a choice. We get to attune to something. And I think that your book is coming along at a time. That it is waking us up to what's going on and waking us up to our power and the ability to choose. So, can you let everybody know where they can pick up a copy of Unhooked and also where they can connect with you, get more information?

DR. ADI JAFFE: Yeah, absolutely. And I just want to, I just want to say this because you just gave so many really, really important reminders to people of the, it's the wolf you feed, right? That analogy kind of, right, like there's all these opportunities on one side for light and growth and empowerment and there's all those opportunities on the other side and it's a choice. And you have to feed it. And you have to feed it every day. And it's probably never going to end. I joke with my clients. It's like laundry and doing the dishes, right? Like, you can complain about the dishes all you want. But if you don't do them, you don't have an open, like, clear plate to eat off of. So, are you going to do them or not?

Same thing with clothes. Let's just stop complaining about the work that it takes to build a good life. Where you can get the book. So we have a website called read unhooked, really, really simple. R E A D unhooked. com. It's on presale right now. I don't know when this thing is coming out, but if it's already on sale, that will direct you to Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, and all the other amazing places where you can get this thing at. And you can connect with me through that or through adijafi. com. And I also do want to just talk about one other thing that I'm doing to pay it forward, and this is actually something I'm really passionate about. Okay. I started a company called IGNITED to take all these kinds of lessons and help people who are struggling.

But where we ended up, which is I'm really really really honored and humbled at, is we're helping a ton of people coming out of jail and coming out of prison. There's a huge gap. We talked about it in the general population. But what a lot of people don't talk about, and I just I do want to kind of just leave us with this. 85 percent of criminally justice involved people have a drug problem or were arrested for drug offenses. 85%. I mean that's essentially to me like saying that our crime problem and our drug problem are almost one and the same. The problem is over 90 percent of the people who need help within that system never get it. So, we're in Seattle, and in King County, and in Washington State, we're in Wisconsin, we're growing into more and more places.

Because to me, again, I recognize my own privilege, there are a lot of people who don't have resources, and they need the help the most, and it's the hardest for them to get it. And so if you're listening right now, and you're somebody who's gotten to the other side, I urge you to go out there and pay it forward, and help other people. Because there are a lot of people who are stuck for a reason. The environment they grew up in was hard. And their perspective of the world is the world itself is hard, but we can change that for those of us who turn the corner by going and shining the light for those people until they see it themselves.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Social media. 

DR. ADI JAFFE: At Dr. Adi Jaffe at D R A D I J A F F E everywhere. It's the same one. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Awesome, man. Thank you again. This has been a huge highlight of my day. I enjoyed immensely reading your book. Insight after insight after insight popping off. And again, like, I think this is really special. It's a game changer. So everybody make sure to pick up a copy. Dr. Adi Jaffe, everybody. 

DR. ADI JAFFE: Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate it. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I truly do hope that this was impactful and that you got a lot of value out of this. Please share this out with the people that you care about. Now, of course, this is something to proactively share with somebody who you know might be struggling with addiction and or have somebody in their life who's struggling with addiction, but my sentiment is that you never know. We don't often know who's struggling. We don't often know so be proactive because you might just inspire hope and change in somebody's life who's struggling that you don't even know that they're struggling. That's the power of this platform today.

We could send this directly through a podcast app. We could share it out on social media and be able to touch people's lives in a positive way. And it's coming in a context that's very digestible, easy to understand, informative, empowering. It just checks so many boxes. But again, most importantly, if we're going to create change in this very, very complicated and prevalent issue, the change has to come through us. 

And so I appreciate you so much for being a part of this mission. We got some incredible incredible masterclasses and amazing guests coming your way very, very soon. So make sure to stay tuned, take care, have an amazing day. And I'll talk with you soon. And for more after the show, make sure to head over to the model health show.com. That's where you can find all of the show notes. You can find transcriptions videos for each episode. And if you've got a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well. And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome. And I appreciate that so much and take care. I promise to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great content to help you transform your life. Thanks for tuning in.