Tackling Addiction With Jack Canfield

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:04Speaker 01

  There's always opportunity in the midst of everything, but most people are so focused on blaming someone else for why it's not working, they don't see the opportunity.

• 1:12Rich Roll?

  That's Jack Canfield, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:26Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody, how are you guys doing? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, the show where each week I sit down with the world's brightest thought leaders. Paradigm-breaking minds across all categories of health, wellness, diet, nutrition, fitness, entrepreneurship, athletic performance, creativity, mindfulness, meditation. Why do I do all of this? I do it so that all of us, myself included, can be helped on the path towards unlocking and unleashing our best, most authentic selves. So, thank you so much for tuning in today. I appreciate you guys subscribing to the show on iTunes. That helps us out a lot, as does leaving.

• 2:10Rich Roll?

  ...a comment on iTunes, which I know a lot of you guys have done over the last couple of weeks since I shouted it out. I really appreciate that. I also greatly appreciate everybody who has made a habit of always using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. You can click through the banner ad on any episode page on my site, takes you to Amazon. Amazon does not charge you one cent extra on anything that you buy, but they kick us some loose commission change. It really does help us out a lot. So I appreciate everybody who has made a habit of that. You can also just go to richroll.com/Amazon and achieve the same result. All right. I got Jack Canfield on the show today. He is a self-improvement slash personal growth author and public speaker,

• 2:53Rich Roll?

  perhaps most famously known as the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books, or maybe you know him from a book he wrote called The Success Principles. You might not know that this guy has written 47 New York Times bestselling books. That's incredible. Forty-seven New York Times bestsellers. Like, I can't even wrap my head around that. Anyway, he's got a new book out. It's called The 30 Day Sobriety Solution. And look, by nature, you guys might be surprised to hear that I'm a relatively skeptical dude. I'm not really prone to fall into the spell of the so-called self-help gurus of the day. I'm also somebody with some pretty strong opinions about sobriety, what's required to achieve it, and more importantly,

• 3:36Rich Roll?

  what's required to maintain it. So, to be totally honest and transparent with you guys, I wasn't really sure I even wanted to do this interview because I think there's a certain audacity about a guy who is not an alcoholic, a guy who has made his living for a very long time as a professional self-helper, to put out a book that purports to solve one's alcoholism by virtue of a 30-day program. On the flip side, I also admit that I couldn't resist the opportunity to go through with this conversation because it's not every day that you get invited up to Santa Barbara to visit the home of a guy who has sold 500 million books. That is not hyperbole.

• 4:19Rich Roll?

  This guy has actually sold 500 million copies of his books. Like, what? And he's also a guy who has had seven books on the New York Times Bestseller List at the same time. At the same time. Also, I checked out his new book. As a disclaimer, you guys probably know, I'm a 12-step guy through and through. It saved my life. I'm still very much invested in 12-step. It is my number one priority. That said, I found that this book has more than a few compelling insights. There is plenty of merit in it and a lot of stuff that I thought would make for a pretty good discussion. So needless

• 4:59Rich Roll?

  to say, here we are. I did the podcast with Jack. I haven't listened to any other interviews with this guy, but I think it's fair to say, and by Jack's own admission, when we were all done, when the dust had settled, that this talk is a little bit different than your normal interview fare with Mr. Canfield. I wouldn't say it was contestuous by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think Jack sensed my dubiosity. Is that a word? Dubiosity? And he was a good sport about it, and I think that that made for a pretty interesting and at times compelling conversation. But first, let's acknowledge the awesome organizations that make this show possible.

• 5:45Rich Roll?

  This is a conversation about sobriety, of course, including some of the ugly truths behind the industry of sobriety, Sobriety, Inc., if you will. We talk about the driving force behind the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books. We talk about this healing technique that Jack is super enthusiastic about called tapping. I'd never heard of it before, but that was fascinating. And as an anecdotal aside, when I got home from the podcast, I was Julie, if she knew anything about tapping, and of course, she's like, all about it. She loves it. Anyway, we talk about Jack's daily routine, his own experience dealing with alcoholism in his family and amongst his kids. We talk about ayahuasca, plant medicines, something that has come up on the podcast before, of course. We talk about something called the

• 6:30Rich Roll?

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

• 7:05Rich Roll?

  I like that water system you have in the bathroom. What is that?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  It's from Nikin, the Geyser Magnet MLM, and it alkalizes water.

• 7:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, good stuff, man. Thank you for inviting me into your lair. This is quite an impressive office. Have you read all of these books? There must be tens of thousands in here.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  I would say everything on that side, and over there, I wrote or edited.

• 7:30Rich Roll?

  Uh huh, yeah, it's funny.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  And the rest of them, I've read probably 85% of them.

• 7:34Rich Roll?

  In the, in the grand scheme of writers' offices, there's a larger percentage of books on these shelves that you've actually written as compared to books you've read. Quite prolific.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  I once figured out I read 3,000 books.

• 7:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, that's pretty good. Do you still, I know you have a habit of setting aside time every day to read. Is that something you still?

• 7:55Speaker 01

  I still do that. I actually, if I had to go back over again, I would have read fewer books and reviewed them more consistently so that I would have... Really taking in the material and mastered it rather than just had a overview of a lot of things. So, but I took a speed reading course. I used to read a book a day and now I probably read two books a week.

• 8:15Rich Roll?

  Right. And how do you select the books that you read? Are they, are there books? I'm sure people just send you books every day, right?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  I get sent a lot of books and then I also, people refer books to me. I read reviews of books in magazines. When I go to Amazon, they say, people who like this book also bought this book. So I check them out and I read the reviews and if they're interesting, I purchase them.

• 8:37Rich Roll?

  What's, what's something you've read recently that has impacted you on a?

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Say, The One Thing by Gary Keller. He's a Keller Williams real estate and the idea that if there was one thing that could totally change your life or change your business, what would it be? And so focus on that one thing rather than trying to just burst yourself all over the place. So for me, it was delegating more and using my assistant more effectively.

• 9:04Rich Roll?

  How did you identify that that was the one thing?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  I looked at my life. I looked at my life and I said, okay, what is it where I feel like I'm wasting the most time? And it was a lot of busy work and filing and just, you know, answering emails that my staff could answer and just, you know, doing lots of things that other people could do just as well.

• 9:27Rich Roll?

  Right. That's something that I'm dealing with right now. I'm a bit of a control freak. And in order to grow, you've got to delegate, right?

• 9:34Speaker 01

  In order to grow, you gotta let go.

• 9:35Rich Roll?

  So is that, is that where it comes from with you? I mean, what, what was holding? I mean, you know, at this point in your career, I would have imagined you would have mastered that a long time ago, especially with the number of books that you're putting out.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  I think, well, I do, I do have a good staff. I have 12 people that support me, but I think that for me, there's a perfectionism that it was built in at an early age. And then I also think, you know, I also think nobody can do it as well as me.

• 9:57Rich Roll?

  Right. I suffer from that.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  There's also like when I do a lot of emails, I want people to feel like they're really hearing from me.

• 10:03Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  And like with tweets and, you know, Facebook posts, if it doesn't sound like me, it hurts the brand as well.

• 10:11Rich Roll?

  So.

• 10:13Rich Roll?

  How many bestsellers now? Forty-seven is

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Forty-seven New York Times.

• 10:17Rich Roll?

  Forty-seven New York Times.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Bestsellers, yeah.

• 10:19Rich Roll?

  Bestsellers. How many books total?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Uh, two hundred. Well, if you, the Chicken Soup books, I never know exactly, but it's, we're in the range of about two hundred and fifty books.

• 10:28Rich Roll?

  So many, you don't even know how many.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  That's true. I've lost count.

• 10:31Rich Roll?

  Five hundred million copies sold. I mean, the numbers are staggering, right? Like, five hundred million copies sold, world record for most number of books on the New York Times Bestseller list at the same time.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, the same day.

• 10:43Rich Roll?

  Seven or something like that, or say, same day.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Seven days.

• 10:45Rich Roll?

  You know? How does this happen? Like, when you reflect back on your career as we're sitting here, you know, is this something that, that, uh, you know, in your younger years, you felt destined to be and do?

• 10:58Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:59Rich Roll?

  Or is, I mean, how does this transpire?

• 11:01Speaker 01

  I was not good in English class. I got a C in freshman composition in college. I never thought of myself as a writer, and then I became an educator, and I really wanted to motivate my students to learn, because they, they were not motivated. So I got, became more interested in that than I was in teaching history. And that led me to write a book called A Hundred Ways to Enhance Self-Concept in the Classroom. So I wrote it out of my desire to make a difference, not out of my desire to do anything other than that. And then I was collecting stories. I found that, that not only my students, but eventually I was a teacher trainer, training teachers, that people responded to stories more than they responded to information and facts. And so I had a lot of stories, and I used them in my talks, and one day someone said, "That story about the Girl Scout that sold three thousand boxes of Girl Scout cookies, is that in the book anywhere?"

• 11:46Speaker 01

  I'd like my daughter to read that. I have to go, "No." "That story about the puppies for sale, is that in the book anywhere?" "No." And so, over about a month, every day, someone asked me, "Is that in the book anywhere? Is that in the book anywhere?" And finally, it was like, you know, that I should have had a V8 commercial where the guy slaps his head. I go, "I think I'm supposed to write a book, put all these stories in there." And that was the beginning of Chicken Soup for the Soul, and because we said at the end of the first book, "If you have a story, send it in, maybe we'll do a sequel." Now we have two hundred-plus sequels, because people started to send us. Sometimes we get 500 letters a day in the mail with stories in them. Now, were they all good? No. But if you called through them enough, we're good that we could start doing sequels. And then eventually, we started inviting certain people, like we did Chicken Soup for the Baseball Fan Soul.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  We asked Tommy Lasorda, who was the Dodgers manager at the time, to co-author that with us.

• 12:36Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  And so, and then the other thing, which is, we did something called the Rule of Five. Every single day, five action steps to promote our books. So if you look over the course, Veer, that's 1,500 things we did. Call a radio station, ask for an interview. Call a minister and say, "We'll replace your sermon with Chicken Soup for the Soul stories that illustrate biblical principles." Sending free books to the O.J. Simpson jury, which ended up becoming a magazine article, because they were sequestered and couldn't read magazines and watch TV. So it was just a matter of constant, constant, constant focus on the outcome. And as we determined, we were talking to a psychic once about this, and he said, "If you would go to a tree with an axe, it wouldn't matter if it was a redwood tree, eventually

• 13:21Speaker 01

  the tree would have to cut down if you took five cuts a day at the tree." So that metaphor meant, just do five things every day toward your goal, and eventually you're likely to achieve it.

• 13:32Rich Roll?

  I feel like you're sort of a, you know, you're OG, like, you know, old guard, original gangster in this kind of, you know, self-empowerment, self-help movement that's really, you know, kind of mushroom-crowded, you know, in the last several decades, couple decades. But, you know, you're kind of, you know, came up with the, you know, with Tony Robbins and the like. And now I feel like there's, you know, all these sort of pretenders to the throne. You know, the internet has created a vehicle and a distribution platform for people to put out a healthy message, and I think that's fantastic. And there's a certain democratization with that, that I think is great.

• 14:15Rich Roll?

  But I feel like there's a lot of people like who would like to be sitting in your shoes. And it's challenging, I feel like, sometimes to try to figure out who's for real and who's just parroting what they've heard or seen or written, you know, read somewhere else.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  No, it's true. I mean, when I wrote the Success Principles, I wrote it because I had sold millions of Chicken Soup books. And a lot of people asked me the similar question, like, how'd you do that? How'd you get to where you are? And I thought, gee, I never really thought about it. So let's look back over my life and see what are the principles and strategies and techniques I've applied. I sat in bed one morning, I remember my son, who was about 10 or 11 at the time, was sitting next to me. And we each had our laptop, and I was typing in all these principles, like it came up by 115, I think. And my son was doing something else. And we were just having that Sunday morning, you know, connection. And then I thought, that's a lot of principles. So I better, you know, scale that down a bit. The first book, we have 64, I think we have 67, and then new 10th

• 15:13Speaker 01

  anniversary edition. But it came out of a desire to say, okay, I've been super successful, not just selling success, but in actually running businesses and being a trainer and being a speaker and all that. And I think it's true that a lot of people today have read a lot of books. And they've taken that information and said, okay, I'm going to go teach this stuff without having ever been really super successful, other than teaching success. And so it's not that they're not good. And I don't have any judgment about that, because they're reaching audiences that you and I might not reach. Maybe they're reaching the Hispanic community. Maybe they're reaching the younger millennials. Maybe they're reaching the retirement community. Maybe they're reaching people on Wall Street, you know. So people kind of have a niche of what their energy is like, and they attract a

• 15:57Speaker 01

  certain kind of person. I'm never going to do probably a talk in, you know, Grants Pass, Oregon again, like I did in the early days, because I go to bigger venues, like rock stars don't play, you know, the Bowl here in Santa Barbara. If they're really big, they play the LA Staples Center.

• 16:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, I get it. It is a weird thing, though. It's almost like this Ouroboros phenomenon, because there are so many people that are that are teaching success with these programs, but their success equation is based upon them teaching success.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:24Rich Roll?

  You know, they don't have experience growing or building businesses outside of teaching people how to be successful. So their wealth comes from that. So it's this weird vicious cycle kind of thing.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  I hear you. I mean, it's a fair judgment. I'm not judging your judgment. I'm just saying for me.

• 16:41Rich Roll?

  It's not really a judgment, it's just an observation.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll take that.

• 16:47Rich Roll?

  But in talking about the kind of the people that are, you know, not yourself, but I think you've inspired a generation of people that are out there putting out that kind of message, I suppose I would say.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  I think a lot of us have. And, you know, I think too, when I was teaching self-esteem, I would go into schools and I would teach teachers how to develop self-esteem in the classroom so kids could feel better about themselves, risk more, participate more. And the reality was maybe one out of every 10 teachers would put up their hand and say, "I want to teach that." And so they were naturals at wanting to teach human development, let's call it. And I think there are people out there who are perhaps naturals at wanting to teach success or human development. And you can't go to graduate school and take a course at UCSB on how to be a motivational speaker, or how to be a success guru, or something like that. I think people, they decide, "That's what I want to do," and they do it. Some people may be doing it for what I call the wrong reasons, just to make money.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  But I think a lot of people do it because they really are excited about the topic. And so I would give them credit for just going out and saying, "Okay, I'm going to go do this and see what happens."

• 17:49Rich Roll?

  Interesting. When you, when you look back on your career, I mean, do you, when somebody says, "You're a self-help guru," like, how does that, like, do you feel a certain responsibility in carrying that mantle? Like, how does that, is that a welcome sort of moniker for yourself? Or does that feel...

• 18:09Speaker 01

  I'm okay with it. I mean, you know, the self-help transformation. I call myself a transformational trainer.

• 18:14Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  And I write books that are supposedly helping people transform their consciousness to be one of more love, inclusiveness, peace, harmony, joy, abundance, success, all that. And so I didn't start out teaching success. I started teaching out people having enough self-esteem that they would participate fully and expressing themselves fully and go for their dreams. And what I learned early on is self-esteem consists of feeling lovable and capable and significant. So lovable, people like me. I love myself. I accept my feelings and my body and all that. Capable, meaning I can handle whatever life throws at me. And significant, meaning I matter, you know, that what I do makes a difference. And so over the years, when the recession hit in 1993, at this time of the first Gulf War,

• 19:00Speaker 01

  every, all the school money dried up. There was no money for in-service training. People wouldn't send people to my seminars anymore. So I had to re-vector what I was doing into the corporate world that did have money and also doing public seminars. And it was then that I began to be known as the self-help guy as opposed to the self-esteem, you know, education guy.

• 19:18Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right, right. I feel like your gift, you have a, you have a talent for being able to take, you know, principles that perhaps are founded in a variety of, you know, spiritual traditions and tenets, you know, whether it's Buddhism or, you know, whatever, it doesn't matter. But translate, sort of distilling the core ideas out of these and, and translating them in a, in a way that's very digestible and understandable to the average human being. I mean, I feel like that's really where your main thing is. Is that a fair?

• 19:51Speaker 01

  I think so. I started, I started with what works for me. And then I started teaching that to students and I looked at, well, what worked for them? What didn't work? What worked? I've tried a lot of things in my life that didn't particularly, they weren't that useful. But the things that were useful to me and useful to my students, I continued to practice, read more about, took a lot of trainings. I usually kiddingly say I took eight of the Arika training to Zen Buddhism. And, you know, I draw from Mysticism and NLP and EFT and Byron Katie's work and Sedona Method, Gestalt Therapy, Psycho-Synthesis, Transactional Analysis. I have certificates of, you know, in most of those training somewhere.

• 20:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I see you have the Maharishi Award on the wall over there and all kinds of crazy stuff hanging. Yeah, I mean, what do you, so there isn't one core kind of through line of, you know, spiritual principles that inform what you do. It's a, it's kind of a à la carte?

• 20:51Speaker 01

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

• 21:32Speaker 01

  it's like, I know that when I meditate, my life works better. When I'm non conditional and my love, my life works better. When I forgive people, my life works better. When I am positive in my thinking, my life works better. So we could say, oh, you're a positive thinker. You're into the law of attraction. So I've looked at all those and said, okay, here's a smorgasbord of techniques that have come down over the centuries from some of the wisest people on the planet. You know, why wouldn't I look at that and see if there's something there for me? So whether it's a Kabbalah meditation, like the Tree of Life, or whether it's an affirmation that was developed by, you know, Asajjoli, a psycho-synthesis teacher in Italy, or something that Carl Jung came up with. You know, I'm a big believer in what I call the 30 day practice period. So take something, do it for 30 days, you

• 22:15Speaker 01

  know? I was a vegetarian for 17 years, worked real well for me, but then I started getting sick a lot. I find that if I eat protein, fish, for example, I don't eat a lot of beef, very rarely unless someone serves it and it's the only thing to eat. But I feel better now. I felt better as a vegetarian for a while, but then I stopped feeling better. So then I changed, I tried something else.

• 22:36Rich Roll?

  You should have called me. I could have sorted you out.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  You probably could have.

• 22:39Rich Roll?

  We gotta get you back on the Ahimsa train with that.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 22:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, what so what is, you know, what's the daily routine look like now of those of all the practices that you've, you know, experimented with like, what sticks the most and shows up in your, you know, daily practice with the most frequency?

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say, let me just preface that by saying some of the things that I used to practice, I don't because they're just such a part of my way of being. I don't even think about it anymore.

• 23:06Rich Roll?

  Right, I get that. Yeah.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  And but I practice meditation and

• 23:10Rich Roll?

  What is there a specific technique?

• 23:12Speaker 01

  You know, I when I sit down to meditate, I'm not sure which of three things I'm going to do because I used to I studied Vipassana meditation, which is a Buddhist meditation. And sometimes I just settle into that. I also do repetitions of like Satnam, which is a Sikh meditation, or Ham Sa, which is a Hindu meditation. Sometimes that feels right to do. And then sometimes I do the Tree of Life, which is a Buddhist, I mean, a Kabbalah meditation from Jewish mysticism. And I honestly don't know. And I'll start to repeat something. It doesn't feel right. Then I'll do the next thing. Oh, that feels good. Better than do the other. So it's usually one of those three. Occasionally, if someone's just given me a new meditation CD by somebody, I'll do that and see what happens. And I might listen to that for a couple of weeks if I'm getting value from it. And then usually I drop back

• 23:56Speaker 01

  into my old ways. But then I also exercise vigorously with aerobics. And I use this exciser here, which you see on the floor, which is kind of a stair stepper type thing. And burst training, what they call, you know, high intensity interval training, where you do two minutes go as fast as you can, then a minute just totally stop and rest. And I do that for a minimum of 20 minutes. And then I also do 20 minutes of reading. That usually turns into 30 minutes to an hour. Sometimes the meditation turns into 30 minutes an hour. If I'm in there, and I'm grooving, and I don't have an early morning interview or something, I might just stay there. And the next thing I know, I'm looking at the clock. Oh, my God, that was an hour.

• 24:33Rich Roll?

  Do you come into your office to do that?

• 24:35Speaker 01

  No, I do my bedroom. Do my bedroom. I have a little meditation stool that someone built for me that I love. And so I do that there. And I read there. And I actually exercise there, too. I have another one of those up my bedroom. And I have some bands. And I just I also have a gym in my house, which I visit maybe on the weekends.

• 24:57Rich Roll?

  Like most, right? And what's the writing routine look like?

• 25:00Speaker 01

  You know, I write when I have to. I don't have a, when I'm writing a book, it usually looks like from about seven o'clock till midnight. Sometimes, as it often happens, I don't like it, but it does. I get so into it, the next thing I know, I hear birds chirping and I see this turning gray outside and I've been typing for 12 hours. And that's okay.

• 25:21Rich Roll?

  Not a morning writer?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  No, I'm not a morning person. When I was in graduate school, I had my perfect rhythm. I would go to bed around three, 30 or four and wake up around 11. All my classes were in the afternoon. And so my wife goes to bed at 10, I go to bed at 2. She wakes up around 6:30, I wake up around nine o'clock, seven hours.

• 25:40Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. And are you, are you working on a book right now?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm thinking about a book and collecting stuff and throwing it into a file right now for a book called, it's gonna be about love and fear. Like there's only two choices in life. You're either making a choice for love or a choice out of fear. And everything else that we'd say is like greed. Well, that comes from fear. I'm not gonna have enough. And I'm finishing up a book, but it's really a compilation of stories of people who've taken my trainings, read my books and their stories of how their lives are transformed. It's called Living the Success Principles. It's gonna be self-published and we'll just give it away at events because people will read it and go, oh my God, I wanna take that training or I wanna read that book.

• 26:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you've sold enough books, so.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  I have sold tons of books.

• 26:25Rich Roll?

  Well, and that subject is a good segue to, you know, launch into talking about the new book a little bit, The 30 Day Sobriety Solution. And I, and I think an interesting way to kind of kick it off is, is to, is to kind of extend your idea of being non-dogmatic in your kind of, you know, spiritual approach to your life and this idea of experimenting with a whole bunch of different modalities. When I, you know, read your book, uh, you know, it should be said that I'm a long time sober guy. Got sober in rehab, 100 days in rehab, you know, AA through and through, you know, sponsor steps, sponsor people, still very active in the program to this day, you know,

• 27:10Rich Roll?

  number one priority in the whole thing. Um, and so for me, I have to overcome my predisposition to judge anything that is outside of 12 step, right? So my challenge is butting up against my own, um, uh, you know, ideas about what recovery should look like and shouldn't look like. So my own dogma, right?

• 27:34Speaker 01

  I get that totally.

• 27:35Rich Roll?

  And, and, and, and being able to step outside of that and say, well, just because, you know, Phil and Bob wrote this book so long ago, doesn't mean it's the be all end all. I have no judgment on how people get sober, as long as they get sober. I know that AA works for me and I'm open to other ideas that work for other people. So what was the, you know, inspiration behind this book? What, you know, drove you to express yourself in this, in this way?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, for some background about the alcoholism in my family, my mother and father, my biological father were both alcoholics. Um, they both quit late in life, uh, but they were miserable to each other and to us as children when they, when we were younger. I can remember waking up on a Saturday morning and finding 15 people asleep in my house, on the couches, on the floor, because they drank so much, they couldn't drive home.

• 28:25Rich Roll?

  Everybody in the party.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Everybody in the party. You know, I remember this one guy.

• 28:28Rich Roll?

  Sounds like a good time, Jack.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Well, it's not like a good time, you know, for a little bit, you know, and as I like to say, the, the, the problem with addictions is they work and they give you relief from pain, but only temporarily. So that was great Friday night, but Saturday morning, everyone had a hangover. I don't think they were very functional and God knows they probably weren't very effective on work on Monday. But I watched that, the, the pain of all that in my family. My, my grandmother was an alcoholic and that was the first time I was exposed to the big book because she had one, when she got sober late in life. And my aunt, I can remember her pitching forward into a plate of mashed potatoes when I was a kid, and my uncle picked her up and took her up to bed and came back downstairs and acted like nothing ever happened. So it was something you didn't talk about. It

• 29:10Speaker 01

  was painfully a secret. Then I have three kids, two of my own children and one stepchild, who've gone through rehab, gotten sober, they're in AA, they go to meetings, two of them are sponsors. So I have a lot of respect for them.

• 29:22Rich Roll?

  A lot of alcoholism.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  A lot of alcoholism in the family. So whether it's a gene, a disease, or just a, you know, environment that they grew up in, I think a lot of it, you know, a friend of mine recently coined a term, skills, not pills, and the idea that a lot of times people don't have the skills they need to manage their emotions, manage the shame, the guilt, to look at the underlying reason why they're drinking. And so they can't stop. So for me, with all that background, when I met my co-author, Dave Andrews, who had successfully developed this program called The 30 Day Sobriety Solution, they had a website and a online coaching program, and a lot of the work that he was using was drawn from my work, from Tony Robbins' work, from Brian Tracy's work, and some other people.

• 30:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's definitely influenced by the success principles.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 30:09Rich Roll?

  Correct, yeah.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's, what Dave said, I'll give you a little bit of his background, rehab three times, relapsed three times, AA meetings, relapsed, so like, it wasn't working for him. And so, someone gave him a Tony Robbins tape and said, you ought to listen to this. And he's listening to it in his car, and it really made a lot of sense to him, and he was looking at some of his own behavioral patterns. And he said, why aren't they teaching this stuff in rehab? And so when I would take my kids to rehab centers and let, you know, go there and do family weekends and all that stuff, I was just like, God, if I could just jump in and do an exercise that I know here, if I could just jump in and teach these kids a meditation, if I could just jump in and, you know, process these two people using something other than what the people were doing in the rehab centers.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  And I think there's some good rehab centers out there, and I think there's some bad rehab centers out there. And what I learned when I was taking my kids, and my sister, who's also, she was addicted to a drug from an accident.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Got on OxyContin, those kind of things.

• 31:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  And got addicted. And I would just, you know, there are a number of rehab centers and a couple of them where you live in Malibu, there are really real estate investments where you get by this big piece of property, you have people paying you thirty thousand a month or more, and then basically you have this, this, this great real estate.

• 31:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's no question that there's a lot of problems with the current state of, you know, recovery houses and sober living houses and rehabs. There's, there's plenty of great rehabs, but.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  So just to finish the point, I was always going like, God, I'd love to jump in here. And I see a lot of people that are really dedicated to help people, like some of the young counselors, but they didn't have a lot of skill sets. And so one of the things, I see this book, The Thirty Day Sobriety Solution, is actually we now have a lot of rehab counselors who are actually using the book and using some of the techniques with people in rehab, which I'm happy about. However, what we found, what they found, and I found as I started doing the research with him, is that a lot of people, they're afraid to go to AA because of the publicness of it, even though it's Alcoholics Anonymous, they're afraid their friends will know they're going to AA, they're afraid their boss will find out about it. They think it doesn't work for them, they're afraid of the spiritual or religious aspect of it.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  They don't like saying, I'm an alcoholic, if they've been in the human potential movement, they think that's kind of an affirmation that's bad. I think it's good in the beginning to acknowledge and get out of denial, but I think is a lifetime phrase that might not always be the best. But mostly importantly, is that a lot of people can't afford rehab, it's like thirty thousand dollars a month, something like that, they're not going to go, they're not going to risk their job if they're away, why are you away? So we said, is there an alternative? And he was showing that he was getting a seventy nine point six percent success rate with people over an eight year period using these techniques that are in the book. I added a couple more when we wrote the book that he wasn't using. And I don't know if you know who Tommy Rosen is, Recovery Two Point O, he's got a blog and podcast that he does.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  And I was on his podcast not too long ago for his Recovery Two Point O tele assignment. But he's been sober. He's also a vegetarian. He does yoga. He teaches meditation. A really cool guy. You'd like him. And he said, when I got my 20-year chip, I hugged my sponsor. And my sponsor said, you're one in 10,000. And he said, what does that mean? He said, one in 10,000 people that start AA make it 20 years. And so, he said, I knew something was off. There had to be some other, nothing, never making AA wrong. God, I love AA. For my sons, it was really helpful. But to say, is there a group of people who are not getting served that could be served in the privacy of their own home with techniques that we know work from the research that we've done and Dave did with his, his work. So that

• 33:43Speaker 01

  was the basis of the book. And the big controversy, too, is we say on the cover, how to quit or cut back. And AA says, you can't cut back. You have to quit. And we agree. Probably 90% of the people have to quit. But if you tell people, you have to quit, before they start getting the value of some of the things in this book, they're so afraid, they'll never have fun again, they'll never know what they'll have anxiety their entire life, etc., that they won't even play. And so what Dave found out in his work, and I've found out since, and we now have a couple of recovery centers who are using this book, who are starting to say, you know, we may have turned away a lot of people that we shouldn't have turned away because we told them you had to do total abstinence. And so all I'm saying is that we have a lot of people that go through this, and they think they're going

• 34:26Speaker 01

  to cut back, and then they realize when they get to the end of it, no, I can't. I need to be sober the rest of my life. However, we get 5% to 10% of people who do cut back and actually become successful social drinkers, can have a glass of wine and walk away from it. Most people can't.

• 34:50Rich Roll?

  All right. Well, like dozens of observations.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Go for it.

• 34:54Rich Roll?

  No, no, it's fun. I mean, I think.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  I enjoy it.

• 34:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah. There fundamentally, there's a difference between somebody who can have a good time with drinking and, and set it aside. Maybe it causes a little bit of problems in their life, but that's different from somebody who is an alcoholic. I mean, would you agree that like, there's non-alcoholics and alcoholics, and then there's a fundamental difference between how these two personality types are wired?

• 35:20Rich Roll?

  Are you saying that there's not a dualistic?

• 35:23Speaker 01

  I used to totally believe that. And now I'm saying I'm not sure. I'm not saying no. I'm saying I'm not sure. And I've got a couple of friends who work with addictive personalities and do addiction counseling, who are convinced that there's not that gene, if you will, or that disease mentality. I don't go there yet, and I'm not saying the book recommend is saying that either. I am saying that a lot of people, it's not the alcohol, it's the reason why they drink. It's right, like people that are addicted to television, it's not the television's fault. It's the fact that they are trying to escape the shame, the anxiety, the pain, and that's a way to numb out. And so, you know, let's assume that you're right, that there is an alcohol gene, or that there's a personality that's addictive.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  You know, one of the beliefs that keeps people drinking is, I have an addictive personality. And then you go into, well, I can't stop because I have an addictive personality. So I don't know. I do a lot of work with beliefs, and I think sometimes your beliefs can keep you stuck.

• 36:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's very, very interesting. You know, the story you tell yourself about yourself is incredibly powerful, and that's at the core of the work that you do, and you know, I'm well aware of that. And, you know, a common sort of criticism of 12-step is you're constantly reaffirming what you are. I am an alcoholic. The traditions would state, well, this is a reminder so that you don't, you stay connected with what brought you there. But there is that counterargument, and I can, you know, intellectually understand that. And also, to kind of take your point further, I'm sure you're familiar with Gabor Maté.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  I love Gabor Maté.

• 36:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so he's a friend, he's been on the podcast, and I think the work that he's doing is fascinating. And for the listener out there that didn't hear my podcast with him, I mean, his core kind of idea is that addiction is rooted in childhood trauma, unresolved childhood trauma. And that's sort of what you're saying as well. It's like you can, the drink or the drug is the solution to the problem. It's not the problem. And it works until it stops working, of course, but if you don't address the underlying, you know, personality, you know, defects, the wrong word, but whatever is troubling the person. That's giving them that discomfort that that drives them to check out with drugs and alcohol or behavior or whatever it is, you're never really getting at the problem, right?

• 37:39Speaker 01

  So and what we say too is look, we have a chapter in a book called the willpower solution, why it doesn't work. And in some ways, a lot of programs are about you just choose not to drink and see in drinking.

• 37:52Rich Roll?

  That's a disaster. That's not gonna work. You know that.

• 37:57Speaker 01

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

• 38:39Speaker 01

  we can talk about it, but the anxiety, the shame, the guilt, the anger, all of that that exists until that is healed and released. And we get back to the central essence of who you are, the core essence, call it your God self, your high self, whatever, that part is not ever gonna drink. It doesn't need to.

• 38:55Rich Roll?

  And the commitment to to resolve that is, I mean, that could be a lifetime of work. It's not, it's not something that's going to get resolved in 30 days.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  And we say that too. We say that too. Yeah, we say these 30 days will get you started on a series of disciplines that you're going to have to continue for a while in order to keep growing. And basically, I don't think you ever stop growing. You know, there's always core issues that are that we seem to have that are, most of us have one basic core wound. Some of us have more, but there that one kind of cycles back. And we think we've solved it. And then later, we come back and say, God, I thought I solved that. But you're not on the same level. You're spiraled up above it. But it's still got things that are blocking you have to deal with.

• 39:37Rich Roll?

  You know, if I don't do the work. Prior to stay sober, then I'm going to default to a dark place that's going to take me on a path that I don't want to go down. And I have to stay connected and do the work in recovery to combat that, right? So I don't know that I'll ever completely overcome that default setting. It's sort of like

• 39:58Speaker 01

  I think you can, by the way.

• 39:59Rich Roll?

  Do you? I mean, it's better. I don't, I don't have the obsession of the mind. I don't, I don't feel in jeopardy, you know, today, but that's a result of, of, you know, persistently doing the work and being committed on, you know,

• 40:13Speaker 01

  I think, I think there's a space at which you can achieve, and this doesn't happen overnight by any means, but I think you can reach a place where those original wounds are completely healed and released. But it requires the knowledge of how to do that and a commitment.

• 40:29Rich Roll?

  There's this gap between, this is something that comes up on my podcast a lot, but the gap between information and action, right? So whether it's the 12 steps, or it's the tools and the principles that are set forth in your book, there's the intellectual understanding of them, and then there's the actual doing, right? You have to, you have to do the work. You can read the book and go, I get that. But if you don't commit yourself to actually practicing these ideas, then it's not going to change your circumstances.

• 40:57Speaker 01

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

• 41:39Speaker 01

  that's established, and you're going the wrong direction, your GPS system says, take an immediate U-turn and go back to the highlighted route. And that, that can happen, you can reach that place in your brain. And also with tapping, are you familiar with tapping?

• 41:51Rich Roll?

  No, I've heard you talk about it a little bit, though.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Tapping is so.

• 41:54Rich Roll?

  This is like, this starts to get like way out there.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is way out there.

• 41:58Rich Roll?

  Explain to me what this is.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Well, here's the deal. We know that we have the amygdala in the back of the brain. The amygdala is related to fear. And when we tap, we take energy out of the amygdala and bring it back up into the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is where rational decisions are made. It's what's not fully developed in teenagers, which is why they do such stupid things sometimes. And it's also where your third eye is located, if you get into the spiritual stuff. So this is where spiritual energy comes in. That's why they often have you close your eyes, look forward and up and activate the frontal cortex. And so what happens is tapping is simply based on acupressure and acupuncture, where you tap on nine acupuncture points on your head and on your chest and on your arm.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  As you say, I totally love, well, you start by saying, I totally love and forgive myself, totally love and accept myself, even though I have this craving for alcohol. Or I totally love and accept myself, even though I have this guilt over having had an affair when I was married or whatever. And then you just, you tap on what's called the reminder phrase. As you tap on these points, this guilt, this guilt.

• 43:04Rich Roll?

  You're tapping on your forehead, your temples, the top of your head.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  It's, you tap on the top of the head. You tap right where it's called the eyebrow point, where the two eyebrows come together, unless you have a unibrow. So you tap right at the end of those. You tap right at the side of the eye, tap right under the eye, you tap under the nose, tap on the chin, tap on the, what we call the collarbone points. Not really the collarbone, it's down an inch and over two. And we tap here, under the arm. And you do a sequence of that. You start with, how intense is this craving? Or how intense is this guilt? Or how intense is this anger? Or how intense is this belief? You can also tap away pain, it's ridiculous how powerful it is and how simple it is. No one believes it.

• 43:43Rich Roll?

  But there's a, there's a, there's a preset like routine. You go from here to here to here to here. You repeat whatever it is that you're trying to, I got it.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  And we have a diagram in the book.

• 43:51Rich Roll?

  That's out there, man.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  We have, no, dig it, it is out there, but think about this, you know? So is veganism out there for most people?

• 43:57Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  The reality is.

• 43:59Rich Roll?

  I'll go there, like, we can go as deep as you. You want like I go down the rabbit hole, you know, it doesn't have to be the chicken super.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  I thought this was all weird stuff until about 20 years ago, someone invented the five minute phobia cure. A guy named Dr. Roger Callahan, and I studied that with him and I learned that you could disappear all phobias, 99.4% according to Roger, in five minutes or less when I cured people.

• 44:20Rich Roll?

  Come on.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  No, no, I could take you on amazon.com where I have a book called Tapping Into Ultimate Success, which is all about tapping, which I co-author with a tapping expert. And the first one is Sharon Worsley, who says, I was at Jack's seminar. We went down to the pool to have a pool party. I couldn't go in because I was afraid of the water. Jack tapped on me, I started floating by the end of the night I was swimming. I swim every day now. People afraid to come up on stage and speak, I haven't turned to the wall, don't even look at the audience. We tapped for five minutes, they turn around, they tell jokes, they speak. Woman was afraid of heights. We take her out up to the top of the building, put at the end of the terrace and look down, no fear of heights anymore.

• 45:00Rich Roll?

  One session of this.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Usually one session, usually one, some.

• 45:03Rich Roll?

  So what are you doing, writing books? You could just take this on the road. This sounds like, you know, the solution to our, you know, all our culture's ills.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  I just told you, I wrote a book called Tapping Into Ultimate Success. We have two tapping videos on our website done by Dawson Church, who runs the tapping. He's a really a big tapping leader and then Nick Ordner has a book called The Tapping Solution. And Nick worked with the kids in Rwanda. He worked with the, he lives in Newtown, Connecticut. He worked with the kids in Newtown after the massacre, helping tap away the fear. So we know all this works. The problem is, it sounds weird, most people don't believe it, so they don't do it. But the fact is, I teach this to people, like 500 time, people at a time in my seminars, and we get rid of like 300 phobias in about 10 or 15 minutes.

• 45:46Rich Roll?

  So do you, do you tap on yourself or you have someone tap on you?

• 45:50Speaker 01

  You can do it either way. You can have someone tap on you, which was the original protocol with a therapist who wanted to keep everything and make a lot of money. I had to use charge $2,500 to get rid of a thing. I call myself Robin Hood, steal from the rich, gives to the poor. So Gary Craig came along and he designed, he took that whole protocol and simplified it. And so you can tap on yourself. That's what 99% of the people do. So I can have an audience where I'm tapping with them and the whole audience is tapping at the same time. And we'll have them house on a scale of one to 10. How strong is this craving? You can bring, you can bring in chocolate, alcohol, anything you want, put it right in front of people and their mouths are salivating. We can tap on this craving for chocolate, do that for about four minutes, the craving's gone, they won't even pick up the chocolate.

• 46:34Rich Roll?

  Hmm. That's pretty interesting. I'm, you know, it's, it's until I started kind of, you know, looking into you, I wouldn't have, I would have never heard of this. Like, are there practitioners that you can go and there are, there's like a whole world of tapping that I'm not familiar with.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Oh my God. They have a, a energy psychology conference, which is all energy psychology, but I would say half the people there are tappers.

• 46:55Rich Roll?

  And is this, is this rooted in, in Chinese medicine? What is the, what is the point of origin for this?

• 47:01Speaker 01

  The guy who invented it originally way back when Roger Callahan had a secretary who was phobic of water. Roger lived in Palm Springs. He wanted to be able to have his secretary take dictation while he sat by his pool. She couldn't come out there. So he went on a search to figure out how do you get rid of fear quickly? And he found these tapping points relate to the kidney. Uh, primarily and the kidney is fear. That's why we pee our pants when we get scared. Um, and, um, so basically you're, you're, you're interrupting a program in the brain that goes, see spider freak out. And you're just basically like taking um, dominos out, like when you see those big gyms where they set up 2000 dominos, you take three dominos out, it stops.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  And so basically you're deprogramming the stimulus to the response and um, taking you out of the fear and amygdala up into the forefront of the brain. Lots of different theories about why it works, but it works.

• 47:52Rich Roll?

  Hmm. So this could be used for people that are trying to quit smoking or?

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Quit smoking, overeating, gambling.

• 47:59Rich Roll?

  Is it, is it rooted in the same? Principles that hypnosis are for like eradicating these kinds of errant behaviors? Or is it a different?

• 48:08Speaker 01

  That's a really good question. I don't think I could give you an academically sound answer to that. I mean, probably Dawson Church, who's the foremost expert on this could because he's studied everything under the sun.

• 48:17Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  He's read more books than I have.

• 48:19Rich Roll?

  I could look at you a little bit more.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Here's the deal for your listeners. If you just go to YouTube and type in tapping, and you'll see there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of videos, all people teaching tapping, primarily because they want to get you as a client, but they're giving away the store. And you can learn to do it just by watching a video.

• 48:37Rich Roll?

  All right. I'm gonna check it out.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  There's a whole chapter in our book on it.

• 48:39Rich Roll?

  I'm open minded.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Diagrams.

• 48:42Rich Roll?

  All right. Well, some of the core, you know, fundamental principles that are super important to, you know, my sober journey are meditation, of course, which we kind of touched on and talked about in your own life. But also, I think at its base, you know, a fundamental cornerstone of 12 step is one alcoholic talking to another, right? And I feel like, I'm interested in your thoughts on this because it feels like part of the book is addressing a core contingent of people who might be intimidated to go to AA, they're afraid of it, and they want to do this in the privacy of their own home, right? But, uh, you know, fundamental kind of character, uh,

• 49:23Rich Roll?

  definition of the alcoholic is somebody who likes to isolate. Like, that is, that's alcoholism, like wanting to isolate, not wanting to leave your house.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  I understand.

• 49:30Rich Roll?

  So part of the recovery process is getting somebody out of their home, getting them to be able to open up and communicate, you know, at first at least with another alcoholic because all alcoholics think that they're terminally unique, that no one can understand their pain, that, you know, only they know, you know,

• 49:47Speaker 01

  That's my older son.

• 49:48Rich Roll?

  From what they suffer from.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  So here's how we deal with that, two ways. Number one, there's a, there's a chapter in the book called the Relationship Solution. We actually recommend people go to AA meetings when, in that chapter, and say, you know, meet some people, find out the people who are on the path you are. But we also have a website, it's free, comes with the book, and, um, basically there's a chat room and a forum in there, which I go in and respond to people's stuff. We have a psychologist who goes in regularly, responds to people. And if you look at what's in there, you can go look at the chats, thirtydaysolution.com. And then also on Amazon, you'll see we have sixty-four positive reviews now. And the book came out January nineteenth, so not bad for a couple of months. And it took thirty days for people to get through the program before they could even post reviews.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  People are saying things like, oh, the website was so helpful for me. Some people said, hey, I did the book on my own and it worked. I relapsed three times. It's the first time in my adult life I've been sober for longer than twelve days. So we know it's working and we know that relationship is important and we know that connecting with other people. And you look at people, I'll just give you one example. Guy said Friday night, Friday nights, tonight I always drink. So I said, I'm not gonna drink, I'm gonna stay home. This was so hard. My kid said, Dad, why don't we make it movie night? So I said, okay, I'll go to the store and I'll get some pizza. And I'm walking down the aisle and I gotta go past the beer and the wine aisle to get to the checkout counter. I didn't even stop to think I wanted to drink. I came home, we watched the Bim. Another person writes back, oh, my God, it's such a great idea, Friday night, movie night, I'm gonna do that with my family.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  So a lot of things are going on back and forth in the chats with people where they're getting support. And people are also saying, I'm having trouble with this, I'm feeling like I need. And people are reaching out to each other, almost like sponsors do and we also do. So I'm not suggesting that that's a substitute for relationship. Ultimately, most people are solo drinkers because of the anxiety of what they feel like when they're with people. And so we want to get past that, which is why tapping on the anxiety and also creating relationships, which we say you have to do if you're gonna be successful.

• 51:49Rich Roll?

  Outside the tapping, is there a spiritual contingent, you know, component to this program? I mean, you know, fundamentally, Twelve Step is a spiritual program and...

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Dave and I are both spiritual. I haven't been in a church other than... For, you know, some special event on a Wednesday night in a long time. That's not true. I went to Michael Beckwith's church on Sunday this past Easter.

• 52:12Rich Roll?

  Agape.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Agape. I love Agape. Michael's a good friend of mine. So I'd go there three or four times a year. It's one church I feel like I belong there.

• 52:20Rich Roll?

  It's almost not, it's not fair to call it a church, you know? For people that are listening, yeah, it might conjure up an image that isn't a fair representation of Agape. I mean, explain what Agape is, because it's so unique and beautiful.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Well, Agape is, you know, Michael Beckwith is definitely channeling something that's spiritual.

• 52:38Rich Roll?

  For sure.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  And certainly believes in God. And I'll tell you, I took my son there two Easters ago, and he's 26, and he's also a member of AA. He's a sponsor. And at the end, I said, "So Christopher, what'd you think?" He said, "Dad, that was a soulgasm." So basically, it's a spiritual experience. It's a community of people. And as Michael says, "We're not interested in dogma. We're interested in having a direct experience with God." And so it's really connecting to the essence of who it is inside of you that is God-like, that is God. It's what he would say, it is God expressing itself through you as you. And so we're each an expression of the evolutionary impulse in the universe of God expressing itself and evolving in consciousness.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  And there's thousands of people that show up. There's an overflow room. He's now doing simulcasting on television.

• 53:27Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  On the internet. And it's amazing. The choir sings and people dance. And it's kind of a combination between a Southern Baptist revival and a Buddhist experience.

• 53:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's a, that's a good description of it.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, it's like 20 minutes of silent meditation. And then there's, you know, the singing, and that part's like a Baptist church. And Michael's an amazing, if you want to call it preacher.

• 53:52Rich Roll?

  Right. It's rooted in Science of Mind, which is Ernest Holmes's ideas that date.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Very good stuff. To go back, is there spirituality in the book? Yeah, it, we don't, it's not blatantly in your face, you know? But I come from a spiritual perspective. And so it's ingrained in all the principles that there's a spiritual part of you that we can access.

• 54:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's interesting to entertain new ideas and new approaches to sobriety. You know, I wouldn't have sat down with Gabor if I didn't, you know, if I wasn't interested in that. And I think it's important to not be dogmatic and to be open to that.

• 54:33Rich Roll?

  One of the things that Gabor suggests, that gets suggested to me quite often, is plant medicine, like ayahuasca, you know, for treating addiction. It seems to come up quite frequently. It's something that I've declined to avail myself of. As somebody who's in recovery, the idea of taking a mind-altering drug to resolve my issue with mind-altering drugs doesn't sit quite right with me. But I'm wondering whether that has come up in the research that you put into this book or you've had conversations or thoughts on that.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Well, I'll just tell you personal experiences. So my oldest son wrote a book called Long Path Stopping. It was about his heroin addiction. And I got divorced from his mom when he was about two. And so he had a fraction of the wound of that. His mother was real tough. That's why I got a divorce. I initiated a divorce. That was real tough. He got into alcohol at a very young age and then into drugs. And because marijuana didn't seem that bad to him and everyone said it's terrible, you know, the whole society, it's the gateway drug. He said, well, they lied to me about marijuana. Maybe they're lying about heroin. Well, heroin, as you know, a few shots of heroin and you're pretty hooked. And that was probably the most painful thing I ever watched was him getting sober again, was the detox and all that that went on.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  But he, what cured him, if you will, or got him to the point where he's sober, because he went, he relapsed a lot of times and lots of money went into rehab. But he was that special case you talked about earlier. Nobody can understand me. I'm more artistic than the rest of them are. And he is very artistic. But he actually did a drug called ibogaine.

• 56:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Which is an African drug. And it recapitulates your life experience and you see all the, and that was really helpful for him. And then he did a thing called the Hoffman Process, which is a 10-day training that was started by these two guys called Fisher and Hoffman, which a lot of people have done. It's very powerful. And it heals your relationship with your parents. You see the patterns you've adopted from your parents and you really do a lot of healing. As he would say, those two things made him teachable. Then he went back into rehab and he finished rehab. He was like his rehab star, if you will, like the team captain for his rehab center. And then he came out and um, he became, you know, the A became a sponsor. He wrote his book and he's doing really, really well.

• 56:53Rich Roll?

  His name's Oram?

• 56:54Speaker 01

  O R A N.

• 56:55Rich Roll?

  Oren, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that was, I mean, that book was a little rough on you.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Yes, it was, and that was fine. I mean, I was a little rough on him, so it's fair, it's fair game.

• 57:03Rich Roll?

  But he's sober now.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  He's sober now, he's doing very well. He's married, he's not married, he's living with a woman, have a grandson. He'll be three in a couple of weeks.

• 57:11Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  And he's a really cute kid.

• 57:13Rich Roll?

  But from that, I take that, that, you know, his experience with ibogaine uh, makes you feel like, well, you know, I don't know. I don't have judgment on that. Like it, it seemed to have been of benefit to him and his kids.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  It was for him and, you know, and I think there's some research out there that seems that it is. Um, but um, especially for heroin. Heroin's one of the toughest ones to recover from. I think it's 15% recovery rate with heroin addicts. Um, with ayahuasca, I have taken ayahuasca in the rainforest.

• 57:41Rich Roll?

  Oh, you have?

• 57:42Speaker 01

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

• 58:23Speaker 01

  The problem is, if you have a, go back to your thing addictive personality, you gotta be real careful. There are a lot of people that do ayahuasca every weekend.

• 58:32Rich Roll?

  And yeah, I've seen that. I'm not sure that's too healthy. I've seen that more and more. And it also seems like it's become kind of a bucket list thing to do for, you know, a well-heeled person to take their trip down to Peru with the shaman, you know, and do the deal and say, okay, I did that, right? Like, I had, um,

• 58:54Speaker 01

  What was the guy who wrote a book called Spiritual Materialism? It's like a spiritual merit badge, you know?

• 58:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. I had, I'm sure, you know, Daniel Pinchbeck.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 59:03Rich Roll?

  You know, he's a, he's sort of a voice in the psychedelic movement and somebody who had been kind of, you know, supporting people's spiritual expansion through psychedelic experimentation. But, and he wrote that book, uh, 2012, Quetzalcoatl, like, he was the guy who was saying 2012,

• 59:22Speaker 01

  I do know that book, actually. I just forgot his name.

• 59:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so he, but he, I had him on the podcast and he was sort of lamenting,

• 59:30Rich Roll?

  you know, he had aspirations that ayahuasca or these plant medicines would usher in kind of a new era of heightened consciousness, but instead it's sort of resorted to people who are tourists with it, or people that are doing it every weekend and they're doing it in a, in a non-intended way.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Well, it's the same thing. I think Timothy Leary and Ram Dass had the thought that acid would do that, LSD would do that. And I think in the, in a controlled environment with a qualified shaman, it has that potential. And when it just becomes a recreational drug like anything else that's out there, it loses, it loses that potential, I think.

• 1:00:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I'm scared. I don't want to, you know, I don't, you know what I mean? Like, I don't want to take any more risks.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  I understand that. I understand that. I understand that. And, um, you know, fear is sometimes a good thing and sometimes fear gets in the way of things that can help you. And so you have to do your own, your own work with that. But my son, Orin, we went to this thing called a brain camp where the guy that invented ecstasy thought that he needed to help people recreate their brains after he realized he probably destroyed a bunch of them. And so he, he developed these, um, Supplements, he calls them, that bypass the brain blood barrier and go in and help remove the drugs that get attached to the end of the neuron so that people could regain brain function. And my son went with me to that weekend.

• 1:00:49Rich Roll?

  Almost like a chelation.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, kind of. And he, and it also rebuilds, it rebuilds brains, like there's salamander tail, whatever helps salamander tails rebuild, they put some of this in there. I mean, it's all wild stuff. But this guy is a certified genius. I mean, the guy's amazing. He was winning science fairs when he was, I think, 11. He told his parents, you gotta find someone to parent me because you're not smart enough. I mean, he was that smart as a kid. And anyway, so my son went and he was like you, he said, I'm not gonna, I don't want to take these supplements because they seem like they're drugs, you know? And I said, what's your call? You know, do we do it twice in a four day period? And because there is a serotonin and a dopamine boost, which most drugs and alcohol give you. And so he decided to do it one of the two days. And it was extremely healing for him and me. Before that, I think

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  he was super upset with me, as his book would indicate. And after that, we're really good friends now. So it healed our relationship because we got into a space of consciousness. We both needed to go to the bathroom so bad, we stood outside the bathroom door for about four hours, neither of us peeing, because we were afraid to break the bond that was forming. That's how beautiful it was and the connection to him. And I don't think he's ever done anything since then, and he wouldn't. You know, he's, he's a purist. He won't drink non-alcoholic beer, kombucha, you know, because there's a little bit of alcohol in it. So he's really straight and narrow. But the Bible game and that one thing he did with me, I think were both useful for him.

• 1:02:19Rich Roll?

  And in terms of, you know, your program, it's called the 30 Day Sobriety Solution, but, you know, I would presume that there is some form of aftercare, right? Like, are you submitting that, like, after 30 days, like, everything's, everything's good? If you do this, you've resolved your problem and you are free and clear?

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  No, we say that at the end of the book, you know, that this is not, you're not done. This is a lifetime journey. And what we hope happens for you is you've learned some key disciplines here of meditation, of journal writing, of focusing on the positive, of visioning, of affirmations, of eating more healthy. And we definitely want people to eat more healthy because, you know, alcohol is basically fermented sugar. And sugar is deleterious to the body to the nth degree. So there's a lot in there about nutrition. And we have on our website, we have other nutritional things that you can do to start moving. I mean, it's not as deep as what you're doing with veganism and all that. But we, we tell people, look, this is a lifetime journey. But most people, it's kind of like some of these weight loss programs where you do a two day fast

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  and you lose six pounds, maybe 80% of it's water weight. But it's so like, wow, this is possible. So there's, there's a now belief that it's possible to live a sober life.

• 1:03:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I get that, you know, and that's, that's powerful. And that goes back to what we were talking about. You know, story, the story you tell yourself about yourself. Like, I'm somebody who can never get sober. I'm a chronic relapser. Like when you're sort of in that cycle of affirming that, it's difficult to break out of that and form a new story.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  And one of the things too, we have a chapter on asking better questions. And, you know, a lot of people say, well, why am I such a loser? Why can't I get sober? Why can't I stay sober? Which presupposes I can't stay sober. So you never ask a why question that doesn't presuppose that the condition is in the question called, why can't I, meaning I can't. So how can I get sober? How can I stay sober? How can I keep sober after I finish 30 days? So there's a bunch of tools in there to really retool the brain in a way. And they have to be reinforced over time. And we say that very clearly. And people have continual lifetime access to our website. They can do the meditations again. They can stay part of the chat room. They can keep talking to each other.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  So it's, it's not a, it's, it's, it's, what we also say too, two things. Reboot this. In other words, do this again. Like they now have this thing called Dry January for people that are drinkers. But they say if you can cut out drinking for a month, it's good for your kidney, your liver. We now know that women who drink two drinks a day are 70% more likely to get breast cancer than people who don't. That's a, that's a horrific statistic when you think about that. So what we've started, as we're here recording, I don't know when you're hearing this, but all of April is called the 30 Day Sobriety Challenge. And we're going to redo it probably in September and do it again in January, which is a dry month. And we're saying to people, even if you're just a social drinker and you want to cut back.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  We had the person who did the graphics for the cover of the book and the website that we've created. She said, I was reading your book, trying to get a feel for what I was going to do the graphics on. I decided I'd do the 30 days. She said, now it's been 90 days. Now I'm going to go for a year. I've got 12 women that are doing it with me. I was a fitness instructor. I feel better. I'm healthier. I'm working out more. I'm spending quality time with my kids, better time with my husband. I don't feel groggy the next morning. I'm not like, all I can do is watch TV at night. She's writing a book, you know, so all this stuff, we're saying, basically, not only if you're alcoholic, but if you're, most people are drinking too much, even if they're a social drinker, they're binge drinking on the weekend, they're drinking at two drinks a night, they're putting on, you know, 300 calories every glass

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  of wine they drink. Over the course of a month, they're gaining one or two pounds. I mean, there's just a lot of negative impact in their life from drinking.

• 1:05:59Rich Roll?

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

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  Totally. Totally. I will tell you this, some of the reviews that you'll see on Amazon, if you go there, are people saying, "I thought this was about getting sober. I now realize it's about my life. I thought this was about getting sober. This was like a human potential workshop for 30 days. It's now retooled how I think about myself, my goals, my life, my future." So because it has so much of that built into it, it's more than just getting sober. As you said, there's a whole, I mean, it's a lifestyle choice you have to make, obviously.

• 1:06:58Rich Roll?

  Right. And the same argument can be made for 12-step. I mean, I think, you know, any person can benefit if they actually did the 12, did the 12 steps in their life, and ultimately arrive at a place of understanding that, you know, we're spiritual beings having a human experience, and that our job here on earth is to serve and, you know, be of service to other people and all these kind of-

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  There are some brilliant things in the 12-step. I mean, Bill and Bob, they tapped in deeply, clearly. What I think is that, and Bill, one of them said this, I read it somewhere, so I believe it, that what I'm, what I'm putting in this book, they said, is not the only way to get sober. There are other things that might work. Feel free to try them. All I'm saying is that I think there's some new technology that's been developed since whenever the big book was written that can be integrated into the 12 steps, integrated into rehab, integrated into addiction counseling. The biggest fans we have of this book so far are addiction counselors that are in private practice, that are working with people who have addiction problems, whether it's

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  sobriety in terms of alcohol, gambling, sex, shopaholism, whatever it might be. And they're saying, God, there's so many things in here I'm using now with my clients. It's really helping. And so for me, it's an adjunct to what we used to know worked. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater, but you know, don't be upset if the mother has another child.

• 1:08:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  We now got two kids.

• 1:08:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I get that. I get that. And I think, you know, to be clear, it's not just about alcohol. And I think that we're myopic as a culture, as a society, when we refuse to accept and really objectively look at and understand the extent to which most people are on the spectrum of addiction with respect to some substance or behavior in their life. And again, it goes back, you know, whether it's shopping, or gambling, or sex, or porn, or you know, alcohol, or you know, Oxycontin.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  Overeating, whatever.

• 1:08:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, whatever it is. I mean, I know personally, I have the ability to become fixated and obsessed with anything. Anything to get me out of how I feel right now. Whatever, you know, sort of feeling I'm experiencing that I don't want to feel, I'll find some way of checking out. And that can be Facebook, it can be whatever it is, it doesn't even matter.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  But if that's true, to go back to...

• 1:09:19Rich Roll?

  I have to still, yeah, the work, there's work that needs to be done, Jack.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  But if that's true, here's the thing, how to say this. A friend of mine once said... Psychotherapy is like a sausage factory and every sausage is coming out with a rip in it. And psychotherapy is sewing up all the rips. Wouldn't it make sense to go back, stop the machine, figure out what's causing the rips, and fix it at the core level? So if in fact, and I think Gabbana Mate, because he's a Buddhist, would say this as well, if in fact, the discomfort of being in the present moment is the issue, and I'll do anything, it doesn't matter what it is, alcohol, TV, sex, you know, music, whatever, so I don't have to feel what I'm feeling in the present moment, wouldn't it make sense to teach us how to experience what we're feeling in the present moment without believing

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  it's going to kill us? And learn to allow ourselves to experience it fully, and then allow ourselves to realize what is it that's creating that feeling? Because most feelings are created by thoughts, having an opinion about an experience. So we can stop creating the bad feelings in the first place. I used to use this metaphor, that people would come home and there'd be cow manure in their house, and they'd say, "We gotta clean up the cow manure." And then the next day they'd come home and it's more cow manure. Eventually you go, "Where's the cow?" You know? Like, can we close the door? So my experience is that most of people being stuck in life is pushing away what they don't want to feel, and being attached to holding on as long as possible to what they do want to feel. And there's a classic joke about why did God invent orgasms?

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  And so teenagers would know when to stop screwing. And the idea is, otherwise, we just go forever because it feels so good. So I think that we have the ability, the capacity as human beings, in self-healing ourselves, if we can learn to experience our feelings and know that we're not going to die, and learn processes for processing them so we can release them, and get rid of them, if you will, release, heal, however you want to say it, faster, through tapping, through Byron Katie's work, through the Sedona method, there's a lot of stuff out there that's all related to that. Then we can have inner peace. And when you have inner peace, there's nothing better than that. Why would you want to?

• 1:11:30Rich Roll?

  That's the work. That's the work. That's the journey.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  All I'm saying is I think there's more technology than you've exposed yourself.

• 1:11:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm sure there is. Well, listen, you know, I haven't tapped yet. So there's that, right? Um, now I got a friend in, in, in recovery who, who always says feelings are just feelings, man. And they may feel like they, they're gonna kill you. They may feel real, but they're only as real as the, you know, extent to which you allow them to feel real. And they will, and there's one thing that's for sure is they always pass.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  That's why they're called emotions.

• 1:11:59Rich Roll?

  Sitting there and, and feeling, it's okay, you know?

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Well, the word emotion means energy, E, in motion. And motions pass through. We say we're moved. So something moves through us. And what happens is we lock it down. Brené Brown, in one, in her TED Talk, talked about emotions only last 15 minutes, 15 seconds. The actual feeling is why little kids will hit their, their, their shin on a coffee table. And they cry like hell for about 15, 20 seconds. And he looked at us to see. And if we just go, they, they stop crying. If we go, oh my God, what happened? Then they cry longer, you know? So the drama starts to come in there. And so I agree with you. Um, you know, I remember psychotherapists, someone say, well, if I cry, I'll cry forever. I said, I've been a psychotherapist for, I used to be one. For, for 20 years, I never seen a person cry forever. If I get angry, I'll explode. Never seen it happen, you know?

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  So like, there's just a lot of story. And I know emotions can be overwhelming. They really can. No, no question. They can be. But if you allow yourself to be overwhelmed and just live through it, it passes.

• 1:12:56Rich Roll?

  And not identify with it.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  Not identify.

• 1:12:58Rich Roll?

  And if you can do that sober, I mean, I think that's what, you know, back to the sobriety context. I mean, using, drinking, these are all ways of, you know, numbing yourself or avoiding the pain that you associate with experiencing whatever emotion it is.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:14Rich Roll?

  But when you do that sober and you get to the other side of it, you have that sober history. You understand, oh, that wasn't so bad.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:21Rich Roll?

  Now I know what that feels like. Now I know what to do next time.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:13:24Rich Roll?

  And you're better equipped to manage it. And that's where you're doing kind of like, you know, pushups with those, um, you know, neuron receptors so that, you know, you're creating these new pathways and, and empowering yourself to, uh, be able to navigate similar and more intense situations in the future without that jeopardy of relapse hanging over your head.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:13:47Rich Roll?

  So what else should I be doing that I'm not doing other than tapping?

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  Well, have you tapped into Byron Katie's work?

• 1:13:54Rich Roll?

  No, I haven't.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  Okay, Byron Katie wrote a book called Loving What Is. So what is the feeling that shows up? Loving it rather than resisting it and going away from it. And loving, see, we tend to judge everything outside of us. And she says, it's not the thing out there that's making us miserable. It's our belief that it shouldn't be so. So if I believe you shouldn't be a certain way.

• 1:14:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, your resistance to what is.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

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

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  from one of her training, I think they bootlegged it out of her training. And I listened to it in the car with my head down near the speaker because it was such a bad recording. By the time I got from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, I was in an altered state of consciousness. This woman is about as evolved as you can possibly be in a human body. And so I started doing, it's called the work. And every day, anything that upsets you, you take yourself through those questions. And we have those questions in the 30 Day Sobriety Solution book on the chapter on feelings. And there's also something called Sedona Method. Sedona Method is where you actually go through a series of questions. Like, I'm feeling upset in my body, let's say anxiety. So normally we want to make it go away. We either want to push it away, think it away, drink it away, whatever.

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  Can you just allow it to be? Can you actually welcome the feeling? Experience it fully? Because nothing leaves you unless it's been experienced fully. It's like someone knocks at your door. If you don't let them in, they keep knocking, they knock louder. But if you let them in and you say, oh, it's you, okay. And you just take them into the house and usher them out the back door, then you're fine. So can I fully experience it? And then you say, could I let this go? Just could I? Yeah, would I? Yeah, when? Now. So you go through those series of four questions. And literally, when I first met Hildoskan, who developed this, I was up in Ojai at a friend's house who had him there for a little guest event in his house on a Sunday afternoon. And I had neck pain. It was terrible. And I did this, and I thought that this can't possibly

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  work, but I'll do it. And about three rounds of that, my neck pain was gone. I thought, this is ridiculous. So I taught my son when he was 16, that was one of his Christmas presents. I gave him a coat. I gave him some music, and I taught him that technique. And I asked him a few days later, I said, what was your favorite Christmas present? He said, that thing you taught me about how to make anxiety go away. Because test anxiety doesn't bother him in school anymore. He's a singer. He used to get anxious being on stage. It's one of the reasons he got into marijuana and stuff.

• 1:16:53Rich Roll?

  So it's the neutral allowing of the emotion to just be, like, becoming the observer?

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:00Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  And that's a, that's a, that's a skill. The Buddhist meditation teaches you that. These other techniques are kind of like westernized mental approaches to meditation, allowing things to be the way they are. And I think, you know, when you first do them, they're scary. Because when that trauma comes up from when you were raped or sexually abused by your father, or that fear of being, you know, beaten up as a kid in the parking lot by the bullies, or whatever it is, it's so overwhelming. That's why when you're in a group, you're in therapy, you're at an AA meeting, you're in a chat room. But it's better to do it with a person, no question. But these new techniques of tapping, you don't really experience it that much. That's the cool part about tapping. It just like,

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  you just, it just disappears. It's weird. The reason we tell people, before we tap, on a scale of one to 10, how intense is it? And they'll go nine. And okay, then we'll tap for maybe three, five, seven minutes, and it's gone. I've had people say, what fear? What are you talking about? They actually don't remember how, they can't find it.

• 1:18:03Rich Roll?

  That's a trip.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  It's, it is trippy.

• 1:18:05Rich Roll?

  That's a trip.

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  We had a woman in a workshop in Bali. We did a workshop in Bali. And this woman, her husband was a TV producer in Malaysia. Big guy, really well-known. Cool guy, very, very hip. I forget it was an audio, no, it was a stroke. He had a stroke, so paralyzed on one side of the face, couldn't walk. He comes to this training in a motorized wheelchair, I mean, one of those big motorized wheelchairs. And he actually got out of his wheelchair and walked a couple steps before the end of that four-day training, which I thought was miraculous in itself. But we were working with her, and she finally gave herself permission to feel resentful that she had to take care of him for the last two years, because mostly people don't allow themselves to feel guilty if they did. So we said, let's tap on the guilt. So we went through, even though I have this guilt that I resent my husband, even though

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  I have this resentment, I totally unconditionally love myself. We did that three times. Then we started tapping the sequence of acupressure points we talked about earlier. She didn't even get through a whole sequence. She got to her chest, and she started laughing. She just started laughing. It was gone. It was gone. We didn't even, I'd never see, I thought, come on, is this really possible? It is. So it's really, it's miraculous.

• 1:19:16Rich Roll?

  That's crazy stuff.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  It is crazy stuff.

• 1:19:18Rich Roll?

  All right. Well, now I'm gonna have to look into it. What do you think is the number one thing that holds most people back?

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  I think there's two things. I think there's fear, and there's limiting beliefs. So fear, fear of failure, fear of looking foolish, fear of literally physically being hurt, fear of losing assets, money, your job, you know, that kind of thing. Fear that I'm not competent, fear of dying, you know, fear of death even. And then I think the other thing is limiting beliefs. The beliefs that seem like, they don't even seem like beliefs. They're just like, this is what is, this is what's so. Most people's limiting beliefs, they're not even questioning them. They're just, this is what's so, you can't do that. Women can't do that. Men can't do that. I can't do that. I'm not smart enough. I'm not sexy. I'm not attractive, whatever it might be. I had a woman in a training, a Mexican-American woman,

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  drop-dead gorgeous, 10 on anyone's scale, could have been a Miss America pageant person, and she thought she was ugly. And her entire childhood, her mother would say, "Miho, you are so ugly." The truth was, her mother was jealous of how pretty she was, and she was basically trying to cut down her self-esteem. But here she was, drop dead gorgeous, looking in any mirror, and she thought she was ugly. And we know from plastic surgery, there's a guy named Maxwell Maltz, who wrote a book called Psycho-Cybernetics, where he was a plastic surgeon. He noticed he would take people that had defects, their nose, their ears, their eyes, implants, whatever, and at the end, they still wouldn't feel beautiful. They'd look in the mirror, and he would still see someone that wasn't beautiful.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  Because it took them, he said, 30 to 60 days to change the internal self-talk. Because the belief was so strong, it was just like a holdover.

• 1:21:02Rich Roll?

  So, what is the core work that goes into untangling that knot of self-belief? And, I mean, fear is a whole separate thing. I think fear lies behind everything, but in terms of like, you know, the opinions that we hold about ourselves and how we limit ourselves with that view, I mean, what is the kind of, you know, core thing that, you know, one can begin to unravel that?

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  Well, first you have to become aware of what are the limiting beliefs. So, what I look at is I try to push people into something that's uncomfortable, and then notice what thoughts come up. So I'll have people set goals, and I say, "Now, double or triple, like, do it in half the time or twice as much." "I can't ask my dad for money, I can't do that, I can't make more money than my dad, I can't outshow my brother, my husband will be upset if I..." you know, whatever. So we get the limiting beliefs present. If you do an affirmation, "I am a..." you know, "I see myself thriving in sobriety," then the internal voice comes up, "You've never been able to go more than a week sober," you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So there's the belief like that. In the book, we have 10 lies that alcoholics believe, so those are things you can look

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  at, you know, "I can't have fun and be sober, sex without alcohol will never be fun," you know, that kind of thing. And then, once you know what the belief is, then we have to replace it. There's something called the law of the vacuum, which means that if you take a behavior out of your life... And you don't replace it with something positive. The old behavior will get sucked back in by the fact that there's a vacuum there or something not happening. If you're gonna stop eating a certain food, you need to replace it with something else. You're gonna stop exercising and to find something else that's gonna give you that feeling of aliveness. So the limiting belief, when we get rid of it, there's this void. So what we wanna do is fill it with two things. We wanna fill it with a positive belief, which is usually the opposite. You know, I'm not smart enough. I am smart enough. Uh, nobody will ever love me.

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  I can have all the love I want in my life. Having too much money is not spiritual. The more money I have, the more spiritual I can be, the more philanthropic I can be, the more spiritual growth I can buy. You know, by going to seminars and hiring, you know, trainers, whatever. So then, you then use affirmations. That's one technique. You can use tapping. So we can tap on the old belief, this belief that I'm not smart enough. We tap that out. Once the belief level gets below three, remember we talked about intensity level, one to 10. Once it gets below three, now we can tap in positive beliefs. I am smart enough. And we keep tapping on the same things. Now, what you can do with a practitioner who's trained, they'll, they'll play with you. They'll say, I am smart enough. No, I'm not. Who am I kidding? No, I'm really am smart. No, come on, you're never gonna be smart.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  You know, we play with the two, kind of collapsing the money in on each other. And then we can replace it with, I'm smart enough to do anything I want and tap on that. Um, one of the things about tapping that I think is more powerful than just affirmations is Esther Hicks, who channels this being called Abraham.

• 1:23:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  She says, you never wanna put a smiley face sticker on an empty gas tank. Uh huh. Wonder, cuz it's still empty. And so, we say, even though we teach positive thinking, you have to acknowledge the negative. Like, I am an alcoholic, would you first, you know, confronting your denial and alcoholism. But then after a while, we wanna tap that out and then replace it with, I'm thriving in sobriety. You know, something along those lines. Um, so. But Byron Katie's work of getting past beliefs about how other people should be, that's really good for that, the work. You just go to the work.org or the work.com, you can access her work.

• 1:24:30Rich Roll?

  That seems to get at the core of taking responsibility for your actions and getting out of victimhood too, because once you're, when you're looking externally, like for all these people are not doing, the world is not aligning to your vision, you're creating your own suffering.

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, this belief that the world should do what I want it to do. The world revolves around me. You know, one of the things Byron

• 1:24:50Rich Roll?

  Which is a very alcoholic thing to do, by the way.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, see, there was a wonderful woman in Texas whose name I forget, I think it was Jackie somebody. She wrote a book, When a Nation Becomes an Addict. And it was the idea that we live in an addictive culture, that we live in a psychologically ignorant culture. We live in a blaming culture. If you look at Congress, each side blames the other. Instead of saying, how can we cooperate to get something done that would be useful? The Republicans right now are kind of like, we'll stop anything the Democrats want to do. And Democrats blame the Republicans for everything is not happening. So they're just like, you know, it's ridiculous, nothing happens. So we're all blamers, complainers, and victim mentality. And that's kind of built into the culture. And unfortunately, you know, we see it on TV, we see it in the movies, we see it in

• 1:25:32Rich Roll?

  I feel like it's getting amplified too, especially the victim, victimhood kind of narrative about our culture is really, the volume seems to be peaking on that right now in a way that I haven't seen in past years.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  I see it in race relations a lot. I see that going on. There's a lot of victim, on both sides, you know, the whites are the victims of the immigrants coming in and the blacks are the victims of the cops. And I mean, there's certain truths in all that, or they couldn't even exist as stories. But the truth is, I'll never forget, I was watching a, I was speaking at a conference with all African Americans, and this one African American got up and he says, "You're all bitching because the white man won't let you take the elevator." He says, "To hell with that. Start walking up the stairs." You know, it's like, just quit blaming everybody for what's not working in your life and figure out how to do something that works. And so, yes, there's racism, yes, there's sexism, yes, there's all kinds of crap. You know, the Wall Street is out of control. All that doesn't work. But we elect the congressman.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  We're the ones who buy the stocks and keep them in our 401ks. We're the ones that kept electing people after we didn't go after the Wall Street people. And so we're responsible for our reality. And we're definitely responsible for how we respond to it. We can look at the recession that just occurred and a lot of people lost their homes. Some people in the same conditions actually made money. One woman I know said, oh, everyone's selling stuff on eBay to try to pay their debt. She opened a store called, I'll ship the stuff you're selling on eBay. Bring it to my store, I'll ship it for you. You know, so there's always opportunity in the midst of everything. But most people are so focused on blaming someone else for why it's not working. They don't see the opportunity. It's like literally they have a call of scatoma, which means a blind spot in psychology.

• 1:27:11Rich Roll?

  But I also feel like our, our, our culture is in a crisis of consciousness in that, you know, we're prioritizing and outsourcing our happiness to, you know, maternal, uh, not maternal, material, you know, accumulation. And this is being driven by, you know, it's like, I don't have to say it. You understand what I'm talking about. Like Madison Avenue is driving this notion that, you know, our happiness is derived from keeping up with the Joneses and all of that. And we can read a bunch of books and we can listen to you and we can all intellectually understand that that's not the case. But we still sort of blindly base our lives on that premise.

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  Well, information without action is delusional. So basically I tell people, that's why this is the 30 day action program for the 30 days of body solution. My book, The Success Principles has 67 principles. Every one of them has action steps because knowledge without action, knowing you shouldn't smoke doesn't make any difference unless you stop smoking, knowing you should eat healthy food, organic food, don't eat GMOs, all that stuff, it doesn't make any sense. You can talk about it at a cocktail party if you don't stop eating that crap, you know? So basically we have to take action. And again, it goes back to fear. Why don't people take action? They're afraid of negative consequences. They're in habitual thinking. You have to get your head out of the sand. Most people don't read books. Most people are getting their news from the internet. There's no in-depth understanding of anything anymore.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  I mean, Donald tweets something, Donald Trump tweets something and a whole. Media, just that's all they talk about all day long. There's no in-depth analysis of anything anymore. You know, it's ridiculous. So, you know, I agree with you. And then going back to the materialism, we have been conditioned to believe by advertising that something outside of us will make us feel better. That's why the pharmaceutical industry is a, you know, trillion dollar a year industry. Where we think some pill will fix us. And I go back to that quote I said earlier. It's skills, not pills that are going to make your life different. We have to learn the skills to manage our life, not just our emotions, but our relationships, our food, our sense of power, how we deal with money. All of that has to, has to change. And we're the only ones that can do that. But we've been, as you said, conditioned by the media.

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  And the media is owned by large corporations. They're all in it for selling more stuff. What did George Bush say when we were attacked on nine 11? Don't let the terrorists stop us. Go out shopping, you know? And so we believe, we have this culture that believes it can only grow if the consumerism continues to grow by a certain amount every year. So the gross national product goes up. And we are steeped in this, in this attachment to abundance, to things that will never fulfill us, as opposed to sufficiency of what will fulfill us. And so until we break that addiction, we're, we're, we're stuck.

• 1:29:47Rich Roll?

  And if you had to articulate what would fulfill us, how do you answer that?

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  I think, you know, I, I always say this, if you were blind and deaf, what would fulfill you? It would be a good hug. It would be meditation. It would be pleasure in a sense of connecting with people, relating to people. Let's take the deaf part out for a minute. Be talking about things that matter, be about having intimacy, shared intimacy. It'd be about exercise. You'd feel good in your body. It'd be about doing all those things that don't cost that much money. You know, it's like, I remember being at a workshop in Chicago when I was in graduate school. And this trainer had us, there were three hundred people in the workshop. We're in a big gymnasium and the trainer, oh, I loved, a really cool guy, said, I want you to close your eyes and mill around and make contact with people. Don't let anything happen to you you don't want and don't, and go for what you do want.

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  Go for what you do want, don't anything you don't want. And so we're milling around and hugging people and dancing with some people and just playing and laughing. Finally, I'm hugging this woman. I think, oh, my God, it's the best I've ever felt in my entire life. The energy, the nurturing, whatever. We actually sat down on the floor. I had my head in her lap. She's talking about that. It was about 10 minutes. Then they said, open your eyes. It was just like 65 year old African American woman. I was probably a 22 year old white guy. And I looked up and it was like she met she matched none of my criteria for what I thought beauty was. And I realized, boy, I am so screwed up, you know, because I'm looking for something out there that matches some, you know, societal vision of what good is of having the right car, the right woman, the right clothes. So if you're blind, you couldn't see what anyone's wearing.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  You couldn't see whether this car looks better than that car. You couldn't see that art collection is better than my art collection. All that stuff would disappear. And then what really matters is communication and keeping your body healthy, feeling the aliveness that you feel in your body, feeling the joy of maybe playing the piano, making music, all the things that really people talk about they do on vacation. We had fun. We went hiking. We sat on the beach and talked to some new people we never met before. We ate some good food, you know, whatever, those kinds of things, I think. And also the spiritual stuff.

• 1:31:51Rich Roll?

  It's so true. It's so true. It's so elemental. And then I'll see the new Tesla drive down the street. And I'm like, oh, but if I just had that, you know what I mean? Like, we're just hardwired to default to the other side. It's tough. It's the actual practice inhabiting that ethos is so much more difficult than intellectually grasping it.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  See, there's two things you can do. You can, you know, the big thing that made my life livable, if you will, I almost had a nervous breakdown in graduate school. I was studying Buddhist meditation and Gestalt therapy, and had also been working with W. Clement Stone, who was my mentor, who was a self-made $600 million millionaire. And I was learning you can create anything you want with your mind and go out and be successful. There's all these tools to do that. And also then it was like non-attachment. You don't need any of those things. I was like, ah, it was driving me crazy. I couldn't resolve it.

• 1:32:44Rich Roll?

  How do you reconcile those two things?

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  I reconciled it with a phrase, and I don't know if I heard this, read it, or made it up. I really can't remember, but it was high-intention, low attachment. So if you wanted a Tesla, you could figure out how to get one. The problem is, as soon as you got that Tesla, you'd see someone in the more expensive Tesla.

• 1:32:59Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  And so that bigger, better, more, never really, someone said, you can never get enough of what you don't really need. Might have been the Rolling Stones. I said that. And so the reality is that it's like, we don't need that. Now, if the Tesla is a statement for your ecological sustainability, and you really feel like you're making a good decision, you could design your life to do that. But if you're going to continue that more is better, more is better, more is better, more is better comparison, you know, I mean, I can afford any car in the world. I could have a Rolls-Royce sitting out there. I don't. It's not my desire to do that. You know, it's like, I could own a private jet. I don't want to do that because of the ecological considerations of leaving all that jet stream

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  stuff up there and polluting the environment. So my approach to wealth has been, how much do I need to do the work that I want to do in the world? And I think my work's had a huge impact, and I've needed to surround myself with people and things to be able to do that. But I don't need what Donald Trump has to feel good about myself, or to feel like I'm making a difference.

• 1:34:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think the problem comes in the sense that you think that when you get that next thing, that that's going to end the inquiry.

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:11Rich Roll?

  You don't realize that, you know, you find yourself there, and that hole still isn't filled. And so then it's on to the, oh, but it's, but it's not that. I thought it was going to be that, but it's not. But it's this next thing, and then that will solve it.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can never fill the hole with what's never been filled.

• 1:34:24Rich Roll?

  I mean, you're chasing the dragon, you know, for the rest of your life with that.

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  And you know, from your experience, that eating good food, exercising, taking care of your body, meditating, being as self-disclosing and transparent as you can be, those are the things that really make you feel good. You know, I go hiking with my wife, or we go dancing, or we make love, or we have two friends over for dinner, or we talk to my son on, or I've talked Skype my grandson, you know? That's better than 90% of what's out there.

• 1:34:53Rich Roll?

  All right, we gotta wrap it up here, but I think we can close it down with one final thought, which is, imagine somebody's listening to this, they're stuck in a, in a job that isn't doing it for them, or they're in a relationship that they know isn't right, but can't seem to find a way to extricate themselves, whatever it is, like some kind of, you know, crisis point in their life, and they're looking for, you know, a strategy out. I mean, could you sort of leave us with, you know, a little bit of insight or wisdom that could be of benefit to that person?

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think all conditions, you know, other than maybe you've got, you know, MS and you're in a wheelchair and things like that, or you've been paralyzed by a lot of things, pretty much all conditions we experience are changeable. And whether it's the job you're in, recently I saw a study just came out yesterday called the Steel Case Report, where only 13% of people worldwide are happy in their jobs, 13%. So, a lot of people are settling, and yet there's 13% who are happy. So, obviously, it's possible. You know, anytime someone's done something, it's possible. Someone can climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Someone can find a happy relationship. People do it. So, the first thing is to say, what would it look like if I were happy? What would I be doing? Well, I'd be, I'd be working

• 1:36:12Speaker 01

  with people instead of in a cubicle, or I'd be working with my body outdoors, or I'd be making more money. You know, whatever it is that would, you think would make you happy, visualize that and say, okay, what kind of jobs exist where that's possible to do? And then do some research, and you may have to learn some new skills. You may have to go back to school. You may have to take a course. You may have to, you know, get a credential you don't have, but you can get it. You know, an MBA takes a couple of years. You could go back to school and become a doctor. Well, eight years later, you'll be a doctor. But if you don't start now, you won't be a doctor eight years from now. I remember a story, a friend of mine was interviewing this woman who had picked up a car off her grandson, literally picked it up. She was 65 years old. And it was a

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  big newspaper story, and so he wanted to interview her because he studied peak performance. She wouldn't even let him come and do it because So don't talk about that. Well, he went over to her house anyway and said, I'm gonna talk to you. You can't stop me. And so she let him in, fed him breakfast and she, he's like, why don't you want to talk about that event? She says, because if I could do that and I didn't think I could, what else in my life did I not do because I thought I couldn't do it?

• 1:37:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, terrifying.

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a terrifying thought. Yeah, I mean, the only reason to take a fire walk with Tony Robbins is it not that you're gonna walk on coals anywhere. It's a party trick. You're not gonna use unless you go to a lot of barbecues. But when you do it and you realize you thought you couldn't, then you say, well, what else have I been telling myself I can't do? Anyway, he said, well, what did you want to do? You never did. She said, I wanted to be a, a, um, a geologist. I wanted to be a geologist. He said, well, why don't you go back to school and get a geology degree? She's got in four years, I'll be sixty nine. He says, well, four years from now, you're gonna be sixty nine without a geology degree? Exactly. Are you gonna go? She went back to school, got her geology degree and for the next seven years, she taught geology at a community college in, in, in Clearwater, Florida. So the idea is we just think we're stuck. We think we're stuck. We're not stuck.

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  I think, um, uh, the guy that did Star Wars, um,

• 1:38:04Rich Roll?

  Lucas.

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  George Lucas said, it's like we're inside a cage and we feel really trapped. And what we don't realize is the door was never locked. So the main thing is like, what would it look like to do that? What are the steps to get there? And if you don't know, go ask someone who's already done it, you know? What does it take to own your own hair salon? What does it take to become a lawyer? What does it take to have a podcast? I mean, a lot of people would love to do what you do, but they'll, I don't know enough. I don't know how to play radio, you know, whatever it is. Well, find someone who did it and ask them and then do the steps. Then the last thing I would say is visualize seeing and doing it, feel, you know, affirm I'm doing it. Set a goal by when you want to do it. So your subconscious knows when it's supposed to show up with the result.

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  And then get about doing it. And that's where the five things a day thing comes in, you know, just start taking action.

• 1:38:50Rich Roll?

  And they get on the tapping.

• 1:38:52Speaker 01

  Get on the tapping, exactly. Tap your way to success.

• 1:38:55Rich Roll?

  No, I think, I think, I think it's about, you know, taking that first step too. It can seem so overwhelming, but you know, the first step might be just going online and finding a phone number and placing a call to find out information.

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:39:09Rich Roll?

  It's tiny little things that you can, that you can do that in and of themselves are not intimidating or difficult and creating momentum around that.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  One of my students, Jenna Stanfield, has a quote, something like, she says, whenever you think of something and you don't know what to do, do three easy things. What are three easy things? You want to be a singer. So go down to the guitar store and just ask them how much the guitars cost. You can do that. Ask them if they know anyone who teaches singing lessons.

• 1:39:34Rich Roll?

  There's no risk.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  You can do that.

• 1:39:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:36Speaker 01

  You know, sign up for one lesson. You can do that. You know, just get started. Martin Luther King said, you don't have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step in faith. The staircase will reveal itself as you take the next step.

• 1:39:48Rich Roll?

  Thanks for talking to me, Jack.

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  My pleasure. It was really fun, Rich.

• 1:39:51Rich Roll?

  So the book is The 30 Day Sobriety Solution. You can find it on Amazon. Use the Amazon banner at richroll.com to check that out. And if you want to learn more about Jack, he's a pretty easy guy to find on the internet, right? You're just, it's just jackcanfield.com and at Jack Canfield on Twitter and all those places, right? And are you doing any events or speaking or conferences or anything coming up that you want to announce or?

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you go to jackcanfield.com and there's an events button, just click on that. We're doing a one day workshop in Los Angeles on June 3rd, I believe it is, Friday. And people can find out about that on our website. We also have a week long training we do, a five day training every summer in August coming up. We do it again in February. And we have a train the trainer program where I train people to do this work. We both do an online training and also a live training.

• 1:40:42Rich Roll?

  Cool. Feel good?

• 1:40:44Speaker 01

  Good.

• 1:40:45Rich Roll?

  We did it, right?

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  We did.

• 1:40:46Rich Roll?

  All right, man. Thanks. Peace. Plants, Wonder Twin powers activated.

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  Peace out.

• 1:41:03Rich Roll?

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

• 1:41:47Rich Roll?

  YouTube.com/RichRoll. I've already thrown up three vlogs. Basically, they're a look into my daily life. They're short, they're fun. And the process of assembling these things, shooting them and editing them, which I've all done on my own, have been incredibly creatively gratifying, challenging as well, but super fun. And I'm keen to know what you guys think, so check them all out. Anyway, if you do subscribe, then leave a comment on my most recent video, vlog number three, as of today. Number four might be up by the time you guys listen to this, but right now, there's three up there. I want to thank Jason Camiolo for audio engineering and production on today's show, Sean Patterson for help on the graphics, Chris Swan for additional production assistance in compiling the show notes.

• 1:42:31Rich Roll?

  Theme music, as always, by Anna Lima. Thanks for all the support, you guys. I love you. Here's my final thought on today's show. If you are, or you think you may be, an alcoholic, or a drug addict, or just someone who struggles with any kind of addiction, please reach out. Get help. You do not have to do this alone. Again, I'm a big proponent of 12-step, but I also have no judgment about alternative approaches, like what Jack is advocating. Whatever works for you. The important thing is that you grab onto something. You do not have to suffer in silence. Do not try to take this on alone. You never have to drink or use again if you don't want to. But the journey to sobriety begins with reaching out for help.

• 1:43:16Rich Roll?

  So please do this. I urge you. Don't wait. It's what saved my life, and it can save yours as well. See you guys next week. Peace.

• 1:43:29Rich Roll?

  Plants.