SUMMARY KEYWORDS
addiction, addicted, conversation, drinking, programme, drink, people, rehab, book, years, ignited, life, story, feel, create, thought, talk, ayahuasca, point, part
SPEAKERS
Martin O'Toole, Dr Adi Jaffe, Julia Malcolmson
00:00
Martin O'Toole 00:29
Dr. Jaffe, I presume? How are you?
Dr Adi Jaffe 00:32
Hey, Martin, how you doing?
Martin O'Toole 00:34
Really good. Thank you very much.
Julia Malcolmson 00:37
It's great to have you here. Thank you for joining us
Dr Adi Jaffe 00:39
so excited to be here.
Martin O'Toole 00:40
Yeah, we are. We're honoured. I must say we're honoured. I feel as though we're amongst addiction treatment royalty.
Dr Adi Jaffe 00:49
It doesn't feel like that from this side by I appreciate the kudos. Thank you.
Martin O'Toole 00:53
Well, likewise, we appreciate your humility that in that case. So there's lots of ways we could start this conversation, I thought we might just jump into something light and easy. What are the Geoffrey's definition of addiction?
Dr Adi Jaffe 01:13
Yeah, really, really good question. I look at addiction as any compulsive behaviour that is leading to negative consequences in life. And I guess, then I'll define what compulsive means and and what negative consequences might mean. You know, compulsive to me means that at some point, you have thought to yourself, I don't want to be doing this like this anymore. And you haven't managed to turn it around on your own. And the reason I say compulsive in that sense is, you know, some people say, I'm addicted to this TV show, or I'm addicted to hamburgers, I'm addicted to fries. And my first question is, well, have you ever tried to not do it? And if somebody says no, then then you're not addicted. Right? Because I think there has to be this part where there's a compulsion to use. So that's one thing. And the second piece has to be negative consequences. And that for me came out of the concept. I think this is a decade ago, but somebody in the space said to me, Well, you know, people can get addicted to anything. And that's obviously patently false. By the way. My joke response, my light hearted joke response for that is I've never met anybody addicted to sand, let's say, Yeah, anybody addicted to, you know, poison ivy leaves or anything like that, that people get addicted to things for a specific reason. So it's not the entire universe that is feasible. And, again, I only define it as addiction, if it's been causing repetitive, negative consequences in your life. And you've tried to stop because of those and haven't been able to. So that still includes a lot of behaviours, a lot of use a lot of potential outcomes. But that's my definition.
Martin O'Toole 02:57
I thought it'd be an interesting point to start the conversation because I as a recovered addict, I think you and I share a lot of similar views. And in fact, what is obviously how is that how we're having this conversation, because it was you that put me on to the jewels that put me on to you, I think, yeah, first place, wasn't it? And, and you were saying some things I guess some of the establishment would consider to be controversial. But, but, but it resonated with me because I early doors, when I've been sober for four and a bit years now. I never went to AAA. Thank you. I never went to AAA and we'll talk about my journey. It's a conversation. Mine was mine was mine was an alternative alternative journey using Ayahuasca plant medicine. But I came across some people in the in the AAA circuit, who found it very difficult to accept my story, which I found kind of really bizarre and interesting, because they, and I had at least two people say, Well, you obviously weren't in addicts. Were you.
Dr Adi Jaffe 04:11
I've heard that.
Martin O'Toole 04:14
And I wonder what you might have to say about that.
Dr Adi Jaffe 04:15
No, go ahead. Finish the story. I want to I want to put out a story follow up on my own.
Martin O'Toole 04:20
Well, well, yeah, so essentially having been challenged to identify as an addict. And this was all new to me because of course, I had not attended AAA or NA. He went wound up doing it. Not too long after this because I was volunteering at a rehab. And so I had to take the clients it was it was a traditional 30 day residential rehab and it was the 12 steps programme. So I ended up taking clients to NA and AAA where and this was my first experience out with of watching it on the TV or in the movies, right, you know, where everybody has to say hi, my name is Martin. I'm an alcoholic or My mother Martin, I'm an alcoholic and addict. And I've watched everyone do this time after time and get and I always really struggled with it. I gotta say it was it for me it felt odd to identify with my past, almost to drag my past along, despite the fact that I was actually moving away. And there was already sober to two years sober at the time. So, yeah, to hear you talk about a really clear definition is encouraging. But then I think I'm right in saying, you also, don't you prefer not to identify as being in recovery?
Dr Adi Jaffe 05:40
Yeah, I mean, like recovery can be broad, right, I was in a motorcycle accident, broke my leg, I was in recovery from that for years. I didn't walk for a year. Right. So I was in a wheelchair first. And then I was on crutches. And then I used a cane. I was in recovery for my broken leg for over a year. And then I think I walked with a cane for almost a whole other year. But when I was done with that I was no longer in recovery from my broken leg, I still have a leg, it was still broken, you can very easily see where the screws used to be like scars are still there. But I'm not going to say that I'm in recovery for my broken leg anymore. Some things are more fluid than that, I would say right. So that's, I look, mental health in general, forget addiction for a second is a bizarre, weird kind of Sideshow to mental health, we all have mental well being on an ongoing basis, everybody listening to this right now, if I gave you a scale of zero to 100, or one to 10, or pick your poison, right, you'd be able to give me a rough estimate of how you're doing in terms of your general mental well being. For some reason, we've decided at some point that the people who struggle with addiction are in a separate box. They're not like the other people. We give them names, they're addicts, junkies, alcoholics. And once you get defined as that you actually don't ever get to leave that box. You are now that you could be that in recovery. By the way, even in the 12. In the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, it does say we've recovered. So even in that book, which everybody keeps touting, they forget the parts where they say that you reach a point where you have recovered, you're no longer in recovery. But that's okay, that maybe some of them just need to read the book more. But you know that that line is still we're recovering alcoholics, right. So it's not like you're recovered and you get to remove the alcoholic label, you still were the label, but you just recovered alcoholic. So it's like you could be an untreated alcoholic, you can be a alcoholic in recovery, you can be a recovering alcoholic, and then eventually you can be a recovered alcoholic, which is kind of weird, in a way, right, you have to hold on to that label for the rest of your life. And I had the same struggle with having to identify, I got taken to very, very strict AAA meetings when I was in recovery early on. And my drug of choice, by the way, it was meth. So I definitely went through incredibly heavy drinking periods, don't get me wrong, and through incredibly heavy marijuana smoking periods. And then I used a lot of ecstasy and I use a lot of LSD, and I use a lot of mushroom, I use a lot of a lot of drugs. Meth was the thing that I had no control over. That's the one that just took me down. So I go to rehab as a meth addict. That's, I can tell the story of how I became to know that that's what I'm supposed to call myself. But then I would go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and I had to identify as an alcoholic, they wouldn't let me identify as an addict, even. Because alcoholics go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. And I was like, but I don't drink. Literally, when I walked into an AAA meeting, I was recovering where I needed to fix my meth addiction at a time. But I hadn't had more than four sips of an alcoholic drink in probably four to five years. And so talk about having a pretzel yourself into the one size fits all solution. I walk in not having drank anything, and these people are telling me well, you're an alcoholic. And I'm like, Well, I don't drink. So how could it be an alcoholic? So it started not making sense for me from a very, very early standpoint. And I want to share the story that I think explains and you reminded me when you were talking about Ashley Martin, because I haven't told this story. At least five years. I used to tell it a lot early in my experience, but I haven't told him forever and you just remind me of it. So this is probably the origin of where I realised I was going to have to go prove to people that there's another way I was addicted. I committed many, many crimes under the influence of drugs and also sold drugs for a living so I ended up having to go to jail, SWAT team arrest the whole thing. Had to go to rehab while I was fighting the case. I mean, it was yeah, it was it was not a pretty scene in my life at the time I weighed 124 pounds on 165. Now Right I was 40 pounds lighter than I am right now was like a skeleton, got arrested, went to rehab failed out of the first rehab for using I use meth in that rehab for two months while living there. Ended up getting my act straight with the second rehab recognising that if I don't do this, I'm gonna end up in prison for 10 to 13 years, that's about what I was facing. And that's what kept me on straight in there, went to jail, got a year in jail and got out, couldn't get a job to save my life. And that is what brought me back to school. So that's just the background. couldn't quit. I mean, I kept trying to quit on my own nothing work. SWAT team rehab barely made it. And now I can't get a job. Yeah, go ahead.
Martin O'Toole 10:45
Well, I was just gonna say the SWAT team can't can't dissuade you from your addiction. And I think it's safe to say that you fit the you fit the definition of having a problem, right? Yeah, but
Dr Adi Jaffe 10:56
I tried probably about seven or eight times to stop on my own. Didn't work. That was my fourth arrest. By the way, it was not my first arrest. But this time, I mean, full on, get up, you know, heads over your head, the whole screaming, you've seen this in the TV shows eight o'clock in the morning on a Saturday, I'm passed out there's a meth pipe next to my bed. I use GH B at the time to fall asleep because you can't fall asleep unmet. So I will take ghp to fall asleep. Wake up start using meth. That was my life. I had a gun next to my bed that got it in reach for that because if I had, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now as you know, American cops are very quick to fire. So I'm glad I didn't give them a reason. Went to ended up in jail for a year. And when I got out, I couldn't get a job. That's why I went back to school. So I'm back in school, getting my master's degree. I barely eked out my undergrad, and I'm going to get my Master's now. In psychology, I'd already been through rehab, it already been through jail. I'm now I think I've been about two and a half years sober. And I start studying psychology on a really, really deep level. And as I'm learning things, something in my head goes. You know, this is different than the rehab conversation, the conversation they were having with me in rehab about what's going on with me is very different than this conversation. But it didn't sink in quite yet. When you go to graduate school, you do research at an amazing advisor, Dennis Fisher, who showed me the ropes taught me how to be a researcher and how to do graduate school, right. And he was studying addiction. That's the only reason I was even studying addiction. He was studying drug use in HIV positive homeless people. And so I that's the research I got involved in and I got really, really deep into it. That's what got me really focused on studying addiction. We got this poster accepted for the American Public Health Association meeting. And I was so excited. Right, I went from a meth dealer in Los Angeles, facing like, 13 years in prison. barely getting out of rehab serving a year in jail sucks. I mean, it's hard to explain how terrible jail is if you've never been there. But it's the only place where you can be scared and bored at the exact same time. And that's just the state you live in. You're like a constant fear and you can't wait for the man. So we got to this conference in the conference had a poster accepted. If anybody's ever done academics, you know, it's like a massive piece of paper with all your research sort of laid out and within on graphs and all this kind of stuff. And I go to present my research is and I'm doing and I'm walking around seeing other people's research. And there was a woman this is in Washington DC I'll never forget it was a woman with a little table setup. She was from the local AAA chapter. Now I'm really excited. I'm, you know, a year out of jail. I think at this point, I was two years out of jail. I'm moving forward in my life. I'm almost finishing grad school. I'm in DC presenting my own research like, mind blown. I never thought I would be here. Right? caveat. I wasn't fully sober anymore. I started drinking again. So I'm having this conversation with this woman. Oh, you know, I used to go to AAA that it all the stuff. She goes, oh, what made you stop going? I said, Well, you know, I'm going to graduate school and I really just got really busy and I'm studying psychology and also, you know, I've started moderately drinking again, and I just didn't feel like it would be a good fit. And she looks at me in a split second. She hands me a card and she says we'll save a seat for you. And I was like, but I don't need to see I'm good. And the only way she could look at my story is that I was an alcoholic. And I was relapsing. And unless I get back to a I'm gonna die. That's the only version of the story she could see And I was so shaken up by that experience. Because before that conversation I was, I was good. I was persuaded I was I was on the right track. And it was so much fear and so much of that poll about oh, my god, maybe I'm wrong. And maybe I'm crazy. And all this stuff that kind of came up because of a reaction, that it really, really shook me. And I got it. You know, it's now what was that those 2004 2005 It's 18 years later, I'm still moderating, successfully by the way, anybody who's listening, I'm good. I don't need to see it anymore. By the way, I could end up being wrong in 10 years and need help. I don't know, right? I don't have a crystal ball. But that story in that moment made me go. Shit. Nobody thinks there's another way of doing this. They think there's only one way of succeeding. And I think that's what kind of took me on my path.
Martin O'Toole 15:57
Thanks for sharing that.
Julia Malcolmson 15:58
And that's something that we, when I originally came across you that alternative perspective on addiction and alcoholism is what really interested in what you were doing. And that's why I passed you on to Martin, because I thought you'd be really interested in seeing this alternative, alternative view. And we'd love to know a little bit more about that alternative perspective, and also what makes IgniteD different.
Dr Adi Jaffe 16:22
Sure. I want to hear about the Ayahuasca ceremony at some point. And you know, I'll just say this, and anybody who's not in the addiction field, thinks what I'm about to say, is obvious. And until recently, I'll say until the last five to seven years, most people in the addiction field thought I was insane for saying this out loud.
Martin O'Toole 16:46
Have you been vilified for it publicly?
Dr Adi Jaffe 16:50
When we started out, so I ran a rehab, an outpatient rehab with a co founder we started in I think it was eight, nine years ago, and 2013 10 years ago, almost, almost 10 years ago. We would get hate phone calls, because we would you know they do PR on us or something like that a story in the news. And we will get phone calls, people screaming at us on the phone, that we're going to kill people. And honestly, when we started, we probably got at least a couple of weeks. And then once you go online, it's everywhere. I mean, so there was a very long while where any ad we ran or anything like that would be immediately looked at as a money grab. And, and just I just want to tell everybody, it's not that I would like to make money what I do. I've lost money doing this for the last eight years of my life. So if anybody thinks this is a money grab, it's a really bad one. Just to be very clear, right? I haven't even broken even it's lost money. But here's the GSU asking jewel. So I'll just kind of give a really broad view and then we'll dig in through the rest of this. Addiction is not about the behaviour that you came in for. In neveress. slight exception that happens in single digit percentages are people who got medicated for pain, and got a dependency on opioids that they were unable to kick. But I would argue even in the majority of those cases, not all, but in the majority of those cases. There are underlying reasons why the pain relief was so powerful that just getting over the withdrawal alone was too painful. So that's my take. And you know, we can debate it. But that's sort of the vast majority, over 90% of people will ever find themselves addicted. The end behaviour is just a symptom of an underlying issue. I think that sounds obvious to anybody who's ever known anybody who's addicted. But somehow in between. Holy shit, life sucks. I don't know what to do. Oh, crap, alcohol makes me feel better. Okay, I'll just drink more on the weekends and everything will be fine. Because I hate my job, my relationship, that my self esteem, the trauma, I went through whatever that is, well, now I'm drinking a lot on the weekend, and I feel kind of shitty on Monday, I'll just drink a little bit on Monday. By the time that becomes a daily thing, or heavy duty weekend thing, somewhere in the time between when that starts and when somebody goes to look for help, which by the way, on average is 15 to 20 years. Somewhere in that range, the vast majority of people forget why they started doing the thing. Because it's worked so well for so long, and it's helped them function. Despite that pain, despite the strife despite the trauma despite the environmental stressors, whatever it is, it's worked so well they take it for granted that the pain has been gone but it hasn't been touched. It's just that you have a really great self. You've had a cell that has worked really, really well for 15 years. But if the 15 years something worked and then it stops working go What the hell is Why is alcohol not working for me anymore? and you start looking at the alcohol. But it was never the alcohol in the first place. So for me, the story was I had a lot of social anxiety. I was awkward around girls, I know all the stories that led to this now after a lot of my own work, but I felt lacking in confidence, really low self esteem didn't feel manly enough, or the guys didn't feel like the girls wanted me. And like it left me in this really bizarre. Nobody thought it was socially anxious, but inside an ongoing war constantly. And then at a sleepaway camp, somebody handed me a bottle of vodka. I took three or four swings that thing, and I just it was disgusting. It was warm, I wanted to throw up, but I can't throw up because then I look even less cool around all these people I barely know. So I drank like three or four of these swings, and 15 minutes later, I felt better than I'd ever felt in my life. I didn't even know I had a problem. But all of a sudden, I felt really good. Alcohol was not my problem. Alcohol was my solution. I started drinking every weekend, eventually weed came in, etc. But my social anxiety was never helped. Because I never had to deal with it, I would just drink it away. So years and years later, I still had to figure out how to deal with my social anxiety. And that is my very lightweight example. I don't have big T trauma. But that's what's really happening, right, we need to go back to the core issues, we need to help people feel comfortable enough to be vulnerable with us, because half the time they don't even remember what happened. And they definitely don't give it the gravity that it deserves. You know, to them, it is the story of their life. It's not trauma, it's just what happened. And we need to hold their hand, make it easy and comfortable to discuss all the things that happens. So that's the psychology piece, understand the environmental influences involved, you know, really do deep inquiry with who they are as a human being. And then support them as they try to start relying less and less on those crutches less than less than those selves and band aids that they've put together to be able to deal with their May.
Martin O'Toole 22:10
And that's and that's where the abstinence myth concept has come from. And I guess, isn't it? Excuse me, what you're, what you're saying is that? You don't, it's not. You don't need to rely on abstinence, you need to rely on doing the deep the deep root trauma work. And as a result of doing that successfully, then ultimately, you suddenly rely less on substances that borrow have I just summed up a whole book in paraphrased you.
Dr Adi Jaffe 22:42
Yeah, no, no, no, you've got it. Right. You've got to write. I mean, the reason the book is called the abstinence myth is two reasons. We think people have to be able to commit to abstinence. As they go to enter treatment, right? Like, you have to know that you want abstinence. And then we measure success by abstinence. And both of those have to go for very simple reasons. By the way, number one, most people are not willing to commit to absence. That's it. I don't want to even argue about whether abstinence is the right goal for them or not. If they're not engaging in care. They're not they're not getting the help they need. And the example I use for this that always gets the point across is, imagine if you went to a therapist who were having a lot of depressive episodes, you're having a hard time getting out of bed, getting a job holding a relationship, whatever. And you went to a therapist, and they were really, really amazing. And helping people fix depression, and you come in, they say, Look, we did our intake interview, you seem like a really good fit for what we do here. I just want you to know, if I'm going to take you on as a client, I just need you to commit to you're not going to be depressed anymore. Because I can't treat you if you're gonna get depressed.
Julia Malcolmson 23:52
Interesting way to hear.
Martin O'Toole 23:54
That's a good perspective. Insane. Would you mind not being depressed? Absolutely.
Dr Adi Jaffe 24:01
So we take people who cannot stop drinking, and we tell them, Look, we I just need you to commit to not drinking. I go, okay, that's the heart. That's the thing I can't do. That's literally the thing I can't do. Because if I don't drink now, think back to what we talked about earlier. If I don't drink, I'm anxious, I'm depressed, the trauma comes back. My life is a fucking mess. It doesn't get better. It's a nightmare when I don't drink. And so I say, we have one rule that ignited. We will give you help. If and only if you want help. That's it. That's the only rule. If you don't want help, we're not the ones for you. But if you want help, we're here. And by the way, I'll just say it's in the book. I'm not making this up. People read the book, and they think I'm trying to get people to continue drinking and not addictively. No, I think absence is a wonderful goal. I'm just not going to make it a condition of giving you help Good.
Martin O'Toole 25:10
So I just finished reading your your book and obviously been checking you out, watching your TEDx talks, and so on and so forth, which has been incredibly inspiring. But it's triggered something in me, I think, the debate which I was having with Jules just last night, my recovery story I was I was a hard drinker, probably actually, for 20 years, if I'm honest. Certainly for Yeah, certainly, for 15 to 10 years, there were some, there were some really hardcore drinking times. But in my mid 20s, I discovered cocaine. And in the advertising industry, you know, that those two things go together, right? And, and I, I hit the I hit the white stuff, hard. And I had a love, love hate relationship with it as, as we all do, right. And it took me a long time to finally accept that this trail of destruction behind me, and we're talking decades of failed relationships, both romantic, personal, professional, the whole shebang, everyone else seemed to want to everyone else, because we've all got issues, right. But many, many other people in my life seemed to be having a far more rosy time of it. While I was constantly blaming everything that had happened to me on everybody else. And it was a, it was actually a drunken afternoon slash evening that resulted in a smashed laptop, a torn knee ligament, some holes in a hotel wall, and me having to do a presentation to 20 people. Two hours after waking up to this, that was quite I think that was my big wake up call. And that was when I started the path of stopping drinking, but but I did, I did therapy. And that really, really helped me. But I still put my absolute absence down to Ayahuasca, that down to plant medicine, and not just one ceremony, I've probably done 11 or 12 Ayahuasca ceremonies. And I've worked with psilocybin as well done some some pretty interesting psychoanalytical work with mushrooms. And I'd love to talk to you about your perspective on those sort of treatments. Because of course, as we know, yeah, 100% that research is exploding now to treat PTSD trauma.
Dr Adi Jaffe 27:44
So by the way, I mean, I just want to say this, and I think it's obvious, but in the classic sense of the word you're not sober, right? in the classic sense, exactly. And because you've used mind altering substance, why
Martin O'Toole 27:54
and what many people will term drugs?
Dr Adi Jaffe 27:59
And yeah, so by the way, I say that with zero judgement, I just want to get clear, and people have helped me clarify that because I think you were saying that you and Jules, were having a discussion that came up after reading the book. And I think I know where it's going, but I'd love to hear you. Yeah, saying it first. And then we can dig it.
Martin O'Toole 28:17
Yeah, thanks for bringing it back on track. So. So I've spent over four years completely sober, never touched a drop. I've still worked with mushrooms. I still worked with Ayahuasca I've worked with San Pedro cactus. I've worked with Chunga DMT in the Cusco hills and in an Inca Temple, which was one of the most profound experiences I've ever had in my life. And I've it's never occurred to me to drink again, this is obviously one of the byproducts of working with plant medicine, because as you likely already know, many people will will liken one or two Ayahuasca ceremonies to 10 or 20 years of therapy. It's kind of kind of sucks if you're, if you're a therapist, I suppose in a way, depending on your way,
Dr Adi Jaffe 29:07
we have enough clients, we're not running out of clients
Martin O'Toole 29:12
that you're going to be short of people. No, because of course, there's there's a huge fear factor around working with these medicines as well. So it's not for the faint hearted. It's, you've you to have to take a giant leap. And you're not just taking a physical leap because the physical experiences can be quite taxing on the body. It's it's a cosmic slap and very big one. Yeah, huge one, right. And in that process, and obviously everybody has different experiences. It's very difficult to to map out what an Ayahuasca journeys life but most people, certainly those carrying trauma as I had, my mother was an alcoholic, and I grew up in a in an unhappy home, had intimacy issues. From a very young age, there was violence in the family
Dr Adi Jaffe 30:03
that she obviously had deep deep struggles. Right? I mean, beyond the drinking there were there was a love for her in life.
Martin O'Toole 30:10
Yeah, exactly. And she was a teacher, she was a teaching kids around four or five. So really an in in a very underprivileged schools as well. So she was having to deal with a lot interesting because I never really took any of that on board until after she died. And her dying, incidentally, was part of part of this melting pot of what happened to me because she suddenly was presented with my previous life story, a long list of regrets, and shame for not having resolved any of these issues with her and then she's gone. Which is part inspiration for the how to die happy podcast, right? Because we talk about people having long lists of deathbed regrets. Anyway, getting back on piste. So so the debate I've been having recently is, I wonder what would happen if I had a beer, or a glass of wine and I saw something you posted on Instagram the other day to say you maybe a six pack on the weekend kind of guy these days. That's that's your limit. And so we were having this discussion,
Dr Adi Jaffe 31:16
while my limit and yeah, we just Yeah, so the reason I say that, and we'll get much more deeply into this, because my drinking is definitely waxed and waned over the years. But I have a pretty hard limit of three drinks when I drink that I gotta tell you nowadays, I don't remember the last time I hit that limit. And so the reason I said that is when I was drinking, I don't drink that much at all anymore. But when I was drinking, even moderately, and regularly, three drinks was my limit. And so if I would like drink on the weekend, that'd be like six drinks. And that will be it. But that's, that's a very rare occurrence. Now, we can talk more about that later. But I just wanted to clarify.
Martin O'Toole 31:59
No, no, thanks for that clarity. And for me, I suppose. I don't know. I don't know if it's, I don't know if it's an inherent fear. Is that still in me somewhere? I feel like it's not I feel like I've done the work. I feel fully healed of my addiction. But is it still in there? And if I had a beer, would that lead to 10? If I had a glass of wine, would that lead to two bottles? Or? Or would I have the would I have the the understanding now of what the alcohol did? For me why I was using it? Right? And I already know the answer to it. And I think actually, the answer is, I could take a drink now. But then the debate we were having really was around well, what benefits does drinking alcohol have?
Dr Adi Jaffe 32:52
And I think I think that's an important distinction. So let me I want to just, I think there's so much to unpack here. First of all, I think the important thing to think about always is what was the benefit of alcohol for you? Right? Like, we have to start there. Because alcohol gave you something when you were drinking a lot. And we can try to have this discussion without understanding what that is. But then we're kind of hiding from the reason why it ever became a problem. So do you know right off the bat, why did you like drinking and we can go into cocaine as well. But why did you like drinking so much?
Martin O'Toole 33:39
I think they were both. They both provided superpowers. And I saw I think similarly to part to your story. I was very extrovert but I now realise in later later in life that I'm actually an introvert extrovert. So I needed our I enjoyed the superpower that a few beers, the beer buzz, or the cocaine buzz would give me but more than that, I realised that actually I was deeply, deeply unhappy. Part of my story resulted with a loaded shotgun to my face, and I was this close off not having this podcast interview with you. And, bizarrely, my Beagle saved my life stopped me from stop me from killing myself. And I realised through this through doing the work and that the inward retrospective review of the shadow work, everything, everything that comes with healing, right, that I was deeply unhappy. And I wore several masks facades, of pretend happiness, and I had a different facade for that person, different one for that person different. This person was a people pleaser. And ultimately, actually, I think a lot of it came down to Due to a lack of intimacy, and attention as a child, so, I mean, obviously, we can't really unpack it all in in a short podcast conversation, but but I think that alcohol and cocaine gave me that superpower. Love it.
Dr Adi Jaffe 35:17
Thank you for thank you for the vulnerability. So here's what I would say. And we can do this in layers, right? I would say that if none of that is true at all, like literally at zero, right? No need to be more extroverted than you feel naturally. No need to show off and develop superpowers, right, like part of life is getting comfortable with who you are. Right? The idea of superpowers is I'm somehow lacking because I don't have this thing. But I am me. That's what I got. So let's say there's a world where you're zero, literally, none of those things are issues at all. I would say alcohol wouldn't be a problem at all. Now, if we take that to the next level, you ask the question already, so I'll just put out there. But what value would it provide at all then? And so that's where I think a lot of us end up wrestling really in the end. And I do that myself, right? So alcohol was still a stress reliever for me. Now, mind you, alcohol was not my drug of choice. But it was actually Stanton Peale, that helped me with this next part of the conversation. I don't know if you know who he is, but incredibly controversial. I mean, far more controversial than I am, and has been around the entire time that I've been alive doing this work. So just kudos to him for being here. But yeah, Stan, and I were having dinner. And I'd mentioned you know, drinking is not my was not my drug of choice. So it didn't, it still felt like a huge risk, because people told me if I drank, I would go back to math. But drinking was not my main issue. Again, don't get me wrong, there were periods where I drank like a crazy person. But it wasn't my main issue. I wasn't afraid of drinking, per se, I was just afraid that it would lead to something else. But then it became another cane, an emotional cane when I was really, really stressed out or when I was socially awkward, I would drink. And what I will tell you in the reason I drink so much less now is I found other ways to deal with that. And in a multitude of channels, so part of that is just a psychological mental work of Oh, shit, I don't actually have to be anybody else for anybody. That was a huge unravelling for me. Now, I tell people this, take this with a grain of salt. Not everybody in your life is going to like that realisation because a lot of people have gotten really used to you acquiescing playing nicely with others, and all that, but there might be people you really don't want to play nicely with anymore. And you can just not be in those relationships, if it's feasible for you. The level of stress that that might take off of your daily well being could be immense. And next thing you know, you just don't need to drink as much your work. What you described, I can't tell you relationships and jobs. I've looked, I've talked to so many people who are 1520 years into a job, they hate a relationship that hasn't been working. And they're trying to stop drinking, and I go, what are we going to do about your job or your fucking marriage? And they're like, Well, I don't nothing. I go, Well, you that's gonna fucking suck. You're not gonna have your drink and your job sucks. So a lot of changes have to happen. I used to work 70 hour weeks hating half the work that I did. Definitely not satisfied in the relationship that I was in the marriage, but also in other relationships in my life. Disconnected from a real sense of purpose, like ignited, you asked us before Jules, one of the first assessments people take is what I call the Ignited wheel of life. It's a it's a 10 slice, overall quality of life assessment. Most people, when they start out have 100, they score like in the 20s, if they're honest about their life, maybe in the 30s. And I think that's a good realistic thing to look at is if you hate every aspect of your life, then I don't wonder why you're drinking. And drinking is not the thing that's the problem is you hate every aspect of your life. We got to go fix that. So now that I'm in this place, and if you're in a place where you're comfortable, what is drinking giving me and that's why my drinking has gone down from I was probably drinking 10 to 12 drinks a week on average, to then you know, 10 987 and now I think most weeks I don't have more than three drinks in a whole week. Maybe even less like there might be weeks that I don't drink at all. I don't really track it that much anymore because it's not a alcohols. Not a big deal. But I probably have three to four psilocybin journeys a year. I use and we've talked about this publicly with my wife. We use MDMA a handful times a year, in terms of connection. And really, I have a really hard time with empathy and expressing emotions. It was not the world I came from. So I need some help, sometimes connecting to what the hell's happening in my inside my head emotionally. And so I get it from that. And with those things in place, there really isn't a big role for drinking for me just doesn't it's not even exciting. So I might go to a restaurant and have a glass of wine because everybody's having it. But honestly, more times than not, I don't finish the glass of wine. So it's interesting. I think what we have to pay attention to is if we're in the work if we're doing the work on a regular basis, and we're just exploring, and we're not afraid of our shadows, we recognise they're just part of us. If you've done 11 Ayahuasca ceremonies, it's hard to get it's hard to be scared of your shadow. You've stared it straight in the face a handful a day.
Martin O'Toole 41:09
Oh, yeah. We arm wrestled. Yeah.
Dr Adi Jaffe 41:12
So if we're not afraid of our shadow, and we're willing to come to everyday go and look. And I said it in my story before, I could be totally wrong. But everything I think is right, right now. My ego is not attached to what I think I know right now, because I've, I've been through this enough times now, and been proven completely wrong, and enough things that I thought I was completely right on, I will never again, stake everything I have on a single belief, a single way of looking at the world, I could be wrong about all of this. And after show up everyday like that, and just keep doing the work, keep talking, keep being open, keep exploring, you know, I had my own therapy session earlier. Today, I just, that's my job. And as long as I do that, alcohol is no longer the kind of thing I'm relying on. Neither is any other drug to make my life complete. And that's where I think the rubber meets the road is. I don't believe any of these things have the power to make my life better even?
Martin O'Toole 42:21
No, you're right. Yeah,
Julia Malcolmson 42:23
it's a really nice viewpoint.
Martin O'Toole 42:24
It is. And and it's, it's wonderful to have a conversation with someone with your story, because you've a unique combination. Gone from obviously being meth addicts, drug dealer, to just nipping off and getting a PhD, and then becoming an addiction psychologist, but but also remaining open to to all of these alternatives, shall we say? modalities. And I think I imagine it can be quite easy for people in the field to fall straight into the traditional path and you know, find themselves working at 12 steps, rehab clinics, for example. And then not or
Dr Adi Jaffe 43:10
medication based stuff. I feel like that's kind of where it falls, you'll get psychiatry, so I'm not going to say his name. But this was an actual conversation I had with a colleague at UCLA. We are planning to potentially maybe do a project together with I think this was what ignited maybe the rehab I had before I don't remember, but he's a great guy, really, really great guy. But he looked at me and he said, I don't think I can do this with you. Because I'll be honest with everybody thinks you're a little crazy. And I was so glad that he was willing to just be that transparent with me. Yeah, but it was not an easy road, Martin. I mean, what you know, UCLA is a very science based school. I mean, one of the top PhD programmes in the world in psychology, right? But CBT is the main foothold in terms of behavioural interventions, and all things that have to do with that. And then medications, genetics, neuroscience, etc. And I studied behavioural neuroscience and statistics. So I was very deeply indoctrinated into the NIDA, medical disease model. It wasn't honestly until years and getting exposed to some other mentors that I went. Look bows, you definitely plays a role in addiction. It's hard to ignore it playing a role. But it's not the whole story. And it's not a fatalistic kind of story. And that took probably four to five years to slowly make that transition.
Martin O'Toole 44:42
When as is I'd love to pick your brain on that in a separate conversation just to ensure that I'm avoiding those same traps knowing what I know. But interesting, I love your point about about what we know about our truth. It's this Something that the Ayahuasca actually taught me, funnily enough, and the alternative work that I do over here in Bali, excuse me, is the idea that everything in the universe is impermanent, even knowledge. So our truths can change. And not just that we all have different truths that might not necessarily 100% coincide. And I wanted to ask you about this anyway. But if you think about the, what should we call them? The camps? I think you refer to them as camps, the camps. In the addiction treatment space, you have a number of camps that have different opinions, right? Somebody's saying it's all about biology, neuroscience, somebody's saying it's about trauma, somebody's saying it's, it's, it's inherited, and so on and so forth. I wonder what you think whether or not whether or not there's a universal truth shared by all of those camps? Is it? Is there a point where everybody meets? Or does the twain never meet?
Dr Adi Jaffe 46:14
I tried to make this point in the book, and I'm working on the second book. So I'm going to try to make this point again. Because it's pretty germane to I think the view, I think, for me, the only universal model that works is that all the factors matter. But it's the mix within a given individual. That is different. Right? So what's I think there's a, I've never used this analogy before. So maybe this will work here. We'll test it out. There's, there's that cookbook? Is it like salt, fat heat, or something like, we're gonna we're gonna figure it out. Yeah, salt, fat acid heat, right? There's a cookbook called salt, fat, acid heat. The reason the book is named that is every recipe has to contain these elements. To make a good dish, if you're missing too much, or too little of a given one, the dish is incomplete. But they're not saying every recipe has the same amount of salt, fat, acid and heat, right? Some you eat less, I mean, you eat more. Some of you have to nearly burn some of them, you barely even have to touch heat at all. Some of them have almost no salt, some episodes, it's these four factors that you mix in a unique way to create a book full of recipes. I think the same thing is true of addiction. There are people that have all the biological cards stacked against them. And there are biological underpinnings. There's habit chains that happen in your brain that get reinforced due to repetition and intensity. There are genetic and epigenetic reasons why things happen. There are traumatic biological impact trauma kind of things that can make your body lean towards more risk taking less risk taking, we know this right prefrontal cortical activity gets affected, you make less rational decisions and have a harder time planning. It would be ridiculous to pretend that this doesn't exist, it exists. But it's not fatalistic, it's rare that somebody has so many biological cards stacked against them. That positive attributes on the other three areas, as I talk about them, psychology, environment, spirituality, can't help overcome even really, really negative biological underpinnings. So everybody has a mix of risk factors and protective factors as we talk about them and kind of clinical research across these fields in our game. And this is what we try to do it ignited we're not doing a lot on the biological front right now. But in the end, I do hope to be able to include genetics, testing, and epigenetics, testing and all these other, you know, by the way, nutrition microbiome testing, right? It's not just about your brain, it's also about your gut, there's so many different areas of the biology. And it's the marriage of these factors, risk and protective factor across all four of these areas, that creates each person's sort of like unique, addictive footprint, if you want to call it that. And that's also a recipe for how to get out of it. And that's why there will never be a one size fits all solution for anybody who struggles with addiction. Because what that presupposes is that everybody struggles with the same thing, but they don't. They struggle with their own unique mix of things. And so the same exact technique that can be really, really helpful for Person A can actually be damaging for person too. And we have to get comfortable with that the solution is never just going to be simple. There's not going to be a silver bullet. It's not happening. There's not going to be a vaccine against addiction. There's not going to be a single medication everybody can take against it. And by the way, even Ayahuasca I have to say I'm Ayahuasca naive I've never I'm a virgin. I've never done it yet, but um, I've done a lot of psychedelic journeys. Ayahuasca is amazing. And I've heard so many incredible stories, but it's not a panacea, it's not going to do the thing that everybody needs it to do. So how do we get comfortable with saying, Hey, here's Martin, what would work for Martin? Oh, Jimmy's over there. What would work for Jimmy? Here's Melissa. Here's Jennifer. Right, we start getting comfortable, you're a unique individual, I need to be able to be comfortable with the fact that your solution will be unique to you in many ways.
Julia Malcolmson 50:39
That's one of the things I was going to bring up with us how you really look at everyone as the individual and kind of bring together different tools for each different person, depending on what they might need. And within that, do you think it's important to bring in a lot of alternative healing modalities into the treatment of addiction?
Dr Adi Jaffe 50:57
I do. And unfortunately, we're still in the place where there are too many things considered alternative treatments. Right. So essentially, anything outside of 12 step or medication, and by the way, into some fields, even medication, but anything outside of those two things is technically considered alternative. So we're still in the place where like yoga is considered that alternative treatment for addiction. That amuses me. Exercise is an alternative treatment, right? Because it's not the standard of care. Standard of Care is if you really advance CBT, mindfulness. And there are different manualized ways of doing those specific medications. And Tosca. Smart Recovery is slowly getting identified as another kind of peer support idea for non 12 Step help. But there's not a lot that people consider standard care. So anything else outside of that would be considered therefore alternative. So I do I love medicine, by the way, and I do work with people, I only do one on one or in very small groups right now. Mostly because I've been to jail and I don't want to go back. And you know, you open yourself up to that and all that something, one thing has to go wrong. And it can be a pretty deleterious impact and all of our lives. So I'm very cautious around that work. But I believe there's huge power and medicine, but it's also not a panacea. It's it works really, really well for some people, and not as well for some others. Sorry, hold on one second. Yeah. Sorry. Give me one second.
Martin O'Toole 52:40
No worries. Hello,
Julia Malcolmson 52:45
hello.
Martin O'Toole 52:48
Who's this then? We can edit this out later. But this is no, he's my.
Julia Malcolmson 52:54
Hi.
52:56
Beautiful little girl. I guess she woke up for her nap and is hanging out upstairs.
Martin O'Toole 53:05
She wants to know more about iOS cuplock Medicine.
Dr Adi Jaffe 53:07
I'm sure he's sure she does. Okay. Okay. Is it okay if she's on video for a little bit? She can't hear me.
Martin O'Toole 53:22
Yeah, we don't we don't mind as long as you're happy to have her in the in the podcast. That's fine.
Dr Adi Jaffe 53:27
Yeah. I yeah,
Martin O'Toole 53:30
I should probably elaborate. So as much as I feel as though I was asked her did the heavy lifting. I, part of my journey was to remove myself from my environment. Yeah, so I lived in London for four years. And I was cocaine was readily available everywhere. And is hilariously, it's part of the process of erratic, radical. Now extricating myself from that lifestyle was to go through my phonebook and delete all these numbers. And that depressing point where you have SO and SO Coke, if so, and so Coke is so concerned, so coke in your phonebook, you got all these drug dealers, and not an actually in different cities as well, which was quite interesting. So I always had these contacts for wherever I was in the Western world. So part of my process was to this extreme, but it worked. And that was to completely extract myself from the UK and smart Bali. Yeah, I think so. I think it was very much it sped up the process. And but I also discovered yoga, I discovered meditation, I discovered sound healing. I went on silent retreats. So the point is, my experience wasn't a WASC just about the Ayahuasca wars, but it was about adopting and I guess creating my own little programme, you know, what worked for me? And it was all alternative mirroring Oh, no, no, no more traditional therapy no more. I never did any. I never had to use any medication to get off the substances I was I was addicted to. But I guess that's the point, isn't it? And it plays to your question, Jules. And that is how, how do you approach it? So because obviously, your wife's a yogi, I'm assuming you guys, therefore work with yoga and mindfulness meditation in your programme, but how do you assess someone decide, okay, feels like, we're going to need to do this on the nutrition front that on the meditation front that in the yoga front, yada, yada.
Dr Adi Jaffe 55:50
So I'll just be very frank, it's an ongoing work in progress, if I'm honest. That is the one place where I think technology is going to give us a really strong advantage. So I'll repeat that. Or maybe not. That is the one place where I think technology is going to end up giving us a really strong advantage. And that is, we need data. And if you think about it, in most addiction treatment centres, the data they get on the person who comes in the quote, unquote, identified patient is incredibly limited, incredibly limited, they do this biopsychosocial thing or whatever, how long have you been using blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff, but then none of it gets used in any actual way, because they can't tailor the treatment to you. So it doesn't matter what you said on a piece of paper, they're gonna give you exactly the thing they gave the other person who said, a completely different set of things on a piece of paper. That's the wrong way to go about it. The right way to be would be to get the relevant information on the front end. Obviously, the question is what is relevant? make some decisions on the front end, based on that data. So hey, based on what we see, in this assessment, or in these assessments, we think this would be the best starting point for you, then have ways to measure and assess how progress is continuing based on the existing treatment, and adjust as needed, until you get to whatever the desired end outcome is. But you can tell there's a lot of checking in with progress, which is not at all how we do things right now, right? Right now we measure things very simply. Are you sober? No. Okay, then it's not working. Are you sober? Yes. Okay, then whatever we did works, there's no idea at all about any adjustments, any tailoring, none of that exists right now. And I didn't make this up. This is called adaptive treatment research. And this has been around for about 1516 years. Nobody does it. Nobody touches it with a 10 foot pole. Because it's scary. It means you have to do different things with different people and adjust. And it's what we're trying to do with ignited. So everybody gets assessments on the front end. And we have 1000s of pieces of content, over 1000, over 1000 hours of content. And part of what we try to do is match the content you see, to your specific set of issues. And we're working with a team in Penn State actually right now, on creating machine learning algorithms. That will get even smarter than any ideas that I have. And will say when people have these factors based on the assessments we have, they like these types of videos better they watch these types of videos longer, they rate these videos more favourably, or they stay longer, or they have better outcomes. So I'm so I love hearing stories like yours, Martin, because it just reiterates the point, which is if we're comfortable with different people having different recovery experiences, and what we really care about is the end outcome we care about, are they getting better? Then we get to let go of this notion that there's a right treatment or wrong treatment and best treatment. And instead we started ascending, what's the best treatment for Martin? Yeah, amen. And I think that opens up massive possibilities. Because there are a lot of approaches that work guys a tonne. I don't think we need more approaches that work right now. We have a bunch of medications, we are a bunch of treatment approaches instead of in terms of behavioural interventions we have, you know, medicines, plant medicines, and otherwise. We have yoga, we have exercised all the different forms of exercise. We have gratitude journaling, and endless versions of mindfulness and meditation. We have so many tools. It's like, I don't know how to do carpentry. So maybe this example will land it's like if somebody gave me a 500 tool like chest right with everything drills, all the stuff that you would need to build a house and I would look at it now go Yeah, I don't have exactly what I need to build a house yet though. I just need this one other tool, but in reality, I just don't know how to fucking build houses. So you can give me any toolkit you want and I don't know how to do the thing we have to shift are we You don't need more treatment approaches, we need to figure out how to use what we have to the best of our ability with the people who are presenting
Martin O'Toole 1:00:08
to that, brother.
Julia Malcolmson 1:00:09
That's what kind of goes with everything, everything we're trying to heal from. Everyone needs to be seen as an individual. Yes, yeah. Even within all realms, the medical realm, whatever the issue is, we just put everyone in the same tick box.
Martin O'Toole 1:00:23
What do you think about you, when you sit down with a client and use and you assess them for yoga or for the mentorship that you do? It's not a one size fits all?
Julia Malcolmson 1:00:33
No, no. And I have a, you know, I learned that very early on, it might sort of career just to everyone, everyone needs something different, and everyone has different, they all have different needs, they come to you with different reasons. And if you've got a set set programme, it doesn't work, because you need the flexibility in there. And
Martin O'Toole 1:00:51
therein lies the problem for the likes of rd because he wants to heal people, right. And if you've got 20 addicts on a programme, and they've all got very different pathologies, that must be an absolute nightmare for you to design a course or a retreat or a programme, that there's going to have the highest optimal success rate for all of those people.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:01:19
First of all, I love challenges. So let's start with that. Secondly, I seem to have made a career out of banging my head against the wall in one way or another. But I don't think it's as challenging as we think it is. And I'll explain why. So at ignited, for instance, we've run about 3030 500 people through our programme. I've never met 90% of them, not once, like I've never spoken to them. And that's because 65 to 70% of our users never engage with any in any of our live support, not the one to many groups, right? live online groups, and not the one on one coaching, which I don't do 90% of anyway, so probably wouldn't see them there. I leave three or four groups a week, the vast majority of people who've run through the programme I've never seen I've never met. The question that I keep asking myself is what additional resources do I need to offer? So that no matter who the person coming in, there's something for them? And then the next piece is, how do I get smart enough? And I don't actually mean me, I mean, our online platform, how do I make that thing smart enough so that the first few things they get are so tailored to them that they get the we get them? And that's the question. That's the game I'm playing right now is. So I'll give you an example. We're having really amazing conversations and correction settings, jails, prisons, parole probation. I thought this was the last place I would ever be able to talk to anybody. But we're having incredible conversations. But I had this realisation just a few days ago. Yeah, I went to jail. Yes, I was a drug dealer. But that was 22 years ago. And also, I don't know if you guys notice, I'm a white guy. And I'm foreign, right? I'm from Israel originally. So I am a first generation immigrant to the states. But nobody knows that. Nobody would be able to see that and talking to me, because I look like every other white American guy. My English is good enough. Now, you know, it's I I've assimilated fully. This might not be surprising, but I'm not exactly the demographic that is 80% of which are spending time in jails and prisons. So I'm not an idiot, I'm not the best guy to deliver the message to some of those people, some will listen and will be able to still fully absorb what I have to say and connect to me somehow. But many of them will look at me go Who else just douchebag he's not going to teach me anything. My job is not to care about that I don't need to be liked, I don't need to be lauded, I don't need anybody to even know who the hell I am on our platform. My job is to go look for the voices that those people would connect to. And then make the platform smart enough to go that one that person would prefer a, you know, a set of content delivered by these types of people in this sort of way. And if we can do that, it is utilising the power of technology to give people what they need instead of what I think they should have. I think we can do it. I don't think it's that big a deal.
Martin O'Toole 1:04:29
Oh, it's fascinating. I have to say this is the first time I've ever had a conversation about addiction treatment that that opens up or examines the possibilities that the AI machine learning and facial recognition. For example, we'll talk about that in a minute. Offer I don't know about you is it's fascinating. I was thinking maybe going a little bit off topic, but the future of edtech excuse me is out Seeing these questions. And I know, there are a couple of firms out there now looking into exactly what you've identified. And that is actually how we how we personalise this, and we do it on mass and on scale, because that's the issue right? To is to create a huge library of content, and then allow the AI through facial recognition, in fact, to serve up specific content. I am a writer, and find myself writing all sorts of things for all sorts of people. And so I happen to know a bit about this, because I've worked in the ad tech space not too long ago. And there is already the technology out there to register the the interest on the face of the learner and ascertain how engaged they actually are on a scale. And quite clearly, if they're, if they're less engaged than they should be, then the there's there's also the technology for AI to then switch out the content. So to constantly be delivering content, this that's Uber relevant to that human on a scale that you and I will obviously you less so but I would absolutely have no clue about in terms of how is this engaging, because as much as I can register micro expressions, the same as any other human, this technology allows a whole other opportunity to say, actually, this isn't working for him or her, switch it out. Let's hit this content.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:06:35
Yeah. So I don't think we're that far. It's just that, you know, addiction is like the redheaded stepchild of the health industry. And I'll just clarify what I mean by that. i Sorry, I, I did not mean to offend anybody with red hair. I have to remember constantly. stepchildren are the stepchildren. No stepchildren were harmed in the processing of this data. The advances are so late coming into addiction for two main reasons. First of all, I hate this term, but I'll use it to make the point addicts are seen as bad people. So for the same reason that you're not running out there to help a bunch of criminals, which is also idiotic. But for the same reason people aren't running out there to help a bunch of people committed crimes, because the idea in our society, they committed crimes, because they are bad people. People aren't lining up to help, quote unquote, addicts. The one difference being pharmaceutical companies, because they feel like they can make enough money long term chronically. So all we get is a bunch of medications, if they can be prescribed long term chronically for the rest of these people's lives at a high enough cost. So high level technological advances, they're not coming to addiction. And that's part of the reason why I'm sort of trying to lead the charge in this way is the tools are there. Like I said, we don't need any more tools, we've got all the tools we need. I just have no money, right? Like if I had $150 million dollars in the bank account, I could hire the developers, we could get this done by next year. It's taken me four and a half years to create over 1000 hours, it's probably more than that at this point of content. Because you have to have a huge content library. We had to start from nothing, create videos, record the videos. And now we literally have an editor going and editing the videos and tagging them, etc. But we're a tiny outfit. It's me and my daughter. No, I'm just kidding. It wouldn't be fun, like me and my three year old are running this company. We have a team of two full time employees. People sometimes think that igniters it's like we have a bunch of coaches, we have other people, but two full time people do this. So we don't have the bandwidth to run it as fast as it needs to. But the tools are here right now. Somebody just needs to care enough about this to put the money behind it. And yes, they need the area expertise. They need to be able to create the content, all those other things are there. But we're not trying to create. I should be careful what I say because technology changes so fast. Like a decade ago, I would say something like you know, we're not trying to create a hovercraft. But there's probably got them hovercraft already that works now. So maybe we are trying to give it a hovercraft like the technology is there. We know how to do the thing. We just need to care enough about it and put the resources into it. And we'll be good.
Martin O'Toole 1:09:38
That's a really exciting prospect. We should have a conversation about that off off off air because I might be able to put you in touch with some people in that in that regard, but it's certainly a whole other territory and space that I hadn't really considered. And it moves into its into the edgy, it's into the online education space, isn't it and what I love about it, excuse me, is that it's empowering this. And I think so. So few people. This comes back to your point about labelling and stigmatisation of, of addicts and people with mental illness. Actually, a lot of us are doing the work a lot of as a crawl, maybe crawling through it through the turgid mess, to do it, but a lot of us are doing it from a self empowered perspective, more so than I think many people realise. And actually, to have an opportunity for people who are doing that work on their own, in their own at their own pace and their own.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:10:43
And getting better, right, just not getting as much better as everybody would like for them to get total, I have a client client, a user on the United platform, who cut her drinking down at her peak, she's gone up a little bit sensitive, but still drinking less than 25%, I think of what she was drinking when she came to us. But she cut her drinking down by 97 98%, at some point, from 15 bottles a week to three to six drinks a week of wine.
Martin O'Toole 1:11:11
Without physical intervention, with no
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:11:13
I mean, just just an online therapy group and online groups. When she told her therapist about it, his response was, you shouldn't be drinking at all. Like he couldn't even celebrate a 97 98% reduction in drinking, because he's so brainwashed that well, but you need to go to zero. And we know relapse rates are ridiculous. People try to go to zero all the time. And by the way, again, zero is great. But people go to zero and then drink and then they'll go to zero and then drink. This happens all the time. Like, we need to get ourselves out of this ridiculous mindset. And I think education is a really good platform to start thinking from, because you can't do that in education. Imagine an education if the only acceptable score was 100. Everybody would fail. It would never work, the whole system would crumble. They couldn't even talk. Nobody would start
Julia Malcolmson 1:12:06
exactly, which is why you want achievable, you're not going to do it. Which is
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:12:11
why nobody starts an addiction because, oh, crap, I can't hit that. And if I can't hit that, I might as well do nothing. Right.
Martin O'Toole 1:12:20
Because it's easy to stay doing doing exactly the same thing. As I noticed, shocking stat that you've you mentioned in your book, and and in your talks that 85% of of addicts never actually seek help.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:12:35
Yeah, and that never seek. And by the way, I have to qualify that because the numbers gotten worse in my head. So when I was doing that there was a drug dependence, right, people who meet criteria for dependence, essentially, which is now the severe part of substance use disorder. So when you qualify that there about 24 and a half 25 million people with an A severe substance use disorder in the US, two and a half million people enter help every year, there's another, you know, 1 million or so they say they sought help but didn't get it. So that's where the number comes from 25, two and a half get so 10% Get help about 15% say they sought help. But there aren't 25 million people who struggle with drugs and alcohol in the States. There are 70 to 75 million people who struggle with alcohol and drugs in the States. None of those, none of those other 50 million even consider getting help, because the help is so insane, that they would never, you know, like if you're a housewife that's drinking a bottle a night, that's five drinks. It's definitely too much for most people, right? Health wise, even in many other ways. But you're never going to think to yourself, I'm going to go to rehab. It's going to sound insane to you. So the compute, it literally does not compute. So the the number has actually gone up to me to almost 90 to 95% of people never even try to get help because the help has been so siloed that the vast majority people who need help not who are severe but who need help, don't even consider the current help was an option for them.
Martin O'Toole 1:14:11
That plays to something you were saying last night about your feelings of the normalisation of addiction.
Julia Malcolmson 1:14:21
Yeah, and what I was saying how it's almost like we comes into like a learned behaviour we learn with alcohol anyway, to drink throughout life all different occasions. And then for some of us, it spirals into just drinking more and more and more.
Martin O'Toole 1:14:39
But in many societies and in many societies, let's use alcohol as an example. It's it's normal normalised.
Julia Malcolmson 1:14:45
It's okay in the UK, it's an accepted and accepted way to finish your day or to deal with your stress or to deal with sugar.
Martin O'Toole 1:14:54
You're either celebrating commiserating or taking the edge off. Yeah, and And yeah, I'm,
Julia Malcolmson 1:15:03
it's normal at the weekend to drink a good few bottles of wine and have a little bit of a hangover on a Monday.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:15:10
You're the abnormal one. You know, you're the abnormal one. If you go to a party, you're like, Yeah, I don't I'm not drinking. Oh, yeah. You know,
Julia Malcolmson 1:15:18
like, I stopped drinking maybe two and a half years ago now. And I went home for Christmas. And it was very bizarre for everyone that I wasn't drinking. And I was very, it was very much Oh, no, well, what can you drink? What are we going to? And it was like, I became a bit of an issue, because
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:15:33
are we going to invite Jules or not, you know, she's the one that doesn't drink. I don't know, we don't have any. We don't have any water or soda. So we might as well just not invite her at all. That's fine.
Julia Malcolmson 1:15:43
I first of all, she gave me and now she doesn't drink.
Martin O'Toole 1:15:46
But you were lucky to be in a supportive family environment there who have already supported your vegetarianism and veganism. I've been in situations prior to leaving England where I was mocked and vilified. You
Julia Malcolmson 1:16:00
weren't very supported when you chose to give up alcohol and drugs,
Martin O'Toole 1:16:04
no. And I lost. It's funny how you lose a great number of your so called friends, I call them disco friends, now, people who suddenly aren't associating with you in the same way, because you had that connection. And actually, turns out we were all propping one another up, we were propping one another's addiction up.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:16:24
That's what I meant when I was saying before, and you talked about environment that I wrote in the book, and it'll be my next book as well. environmental influence is one of the least understood factors having to do with addiction. And the evidence for that is ridiculous. So we don't need to go through all of it. But you gave one example, right? Oh, look, if I move away from where I do all this stuff, and I there in the next play, set up a completely different way of life, both of those unnecessary, right? All of a sudden, a lot of the triggers a lot of the cues, a lot of the things that made me think about using remind me I wanted to use and by the way, stressed me out to the point where I needed to drink or use in order to feel okay. With those being gone, you don't have as much of a problem. And I think I said this before, we just give that example. So I'll just reiterate. If there are people in your life, you need to drink around in order to hang out with them stop hanging out with them. Pretty simple, right? I'm not saying don't ever drink with other people if you consume alcohol. But if you can't be with those people sober because you can't stand them enough to hang out with them. The solution is not to drink. The solution is to eliminate those people from your life. Very simply. Amen. So and the same applies to many other things, right? If your job makes you want to drink, I'm not saying you can quit today, you got to pay rent, nobody listened to this and go quit and go homeless on me and then go a but you know, Doctor a D on this podcast told me that I should. That's not what I'm saying. But if you hate your job so much that at the end of the workday, and I was in that place, many times in my life, you have to go home and drink. Either change the job, change the way you feel about your job, or, you know, get the fuck out of dodge and go move somewhere else where you don't need to have that position like, and it doesn't matter how much money you make. By the way, I've worked with people who are billionaires with a bee. Right? Multiple jets, multiple continents, hate their day to day life. And my question to them always is when are we going to change what you do every day? I can well, you know, all these people come to me from Africa, cool, then you're going to be doing this for the rest of your life. You know, I don't let
Martin O'Toole 1:18:39
you've glad you've cracked this this topic open because it's I find myself saying speaking in the same matter of fact, way. Excuse me. And sometimes people criticise that, well, it's not that easy. Well, I'm not saying it's easy, you know, obviously, I'm, I'm sitting in a different seat than I was three years ago, five years ago, seven years ago, 10 years ago. But it is the big book. And I think this this cracks the nut for a lot of people. If you're not willing to embrace the concept of change as a universal fact. Then you are you are you are in your own way. I can't read the expression what you're not changing you are choosing and, and it's something I find myself saying a lot in different ways, shapes and forms. People said to me, how did you close my business down in London? This was back to the iOS story briefly. They say you're not supposed to make any major for at least three months after it I asked you know how long she's three days. One day I was in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco having you know this spiritual rebirth and history Two days later, I'm in the boardroom in my creative agency in Bora saying, Guys, I'm really sorry. I've decided to just close it all down. What is it? It's a successful business yada, yada, successful, but it isn't. Actually it's making me really miserable. And we're all part of the problem. So yeah, I'm just gonna close it all down, and I'm gonna go and live in Bali. And that that literally blew people's minds. The idea that I could close down my business, my legacy, and I'm doing air quotes for those just listening to this podcast.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:20:34
They were really good air quotes, by the way.
Martin O'Toole 1:20:37
Thanks. Great. I've been working on it. Sell and give everything I owned away, and literally took a couple of bags in a bagel to Bali.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:20:48
That's the name was Do you have a book yet? Because if not a couple of bags and a beagle is the name of the book.
Julia Malcolmson 1:20:54
He does tend to speak and book titles I've noticed recently.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:20:59
I mean, if you're not using it, I'm stealing it for something.
Martin O'Toole 1:21:03
Perhaps I'll reach Elert? Well, actually, there's there's a, I do have a book, I'm writing a book called How to die happy no surprise there. Yeah. And one of the chapters is about the Beagle. But I will just tweak that. Thanks for that.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:21:15
I mean, that that'd be the chapter name, couple of bags. They don't matter.
Martin O'Toole 1:21:18
Two bags in a vehicle. But, you know, back to your point is I think we underestimate humanity's, intransigence, which is directed by many things, primarily by fear. I think the idea of making wholesale changes to one's life is an absolute impossibility to so so many people. And I think there's something in that. And I think there's something in in how that conversation is had in this space. Because it doesn't require a medication, it doesn't require, I guess it requires mindfulness skills, perhaps. Awareness, observation, self awareness. I don't know, I'm rambling. What do you think?
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:22:10
Well, self awareness is really difficult. I don't know if it is for you or not. It's really, really difficult. We have a very limited understanding of who we are, what we're doing, let alone why we're doing it. And I'm a big supporter. And this why I love these kinds of conversations is I always learn, it's why I love leading groups, I always learn. I learned from seeing things in myself in other people. And then I go, Oh, I'm telling you, you got to work on that. But I think I, once we're done with this group, I gotta go work on it myself. And I love that, you know, we see ourselves reflected in other people. And I think that's an important piece of the human puzzle. This might be a cliche, really, when it when it comes down to it, if I'm alone in a room isolated by myself, then who am I? What's my personality? Like? What what is? How do I behave? It's not that clear. Right? It's, it's in my relationship with others that I reflect who I am. And so it seems pretty obvious therefore, that if you change that environment that you are in if you are willing, comfortable enough to experiment, like, what if you just don't even don't even do it as a point of fact, but you say, let me run an experiment. If I don't like these things in my life, or I think they're causing me stress, what would it be like if I take myself out of this place? Do I feel differently? Do I want to drink as much? Am I as frustrated at the end of the day? Do I want to yell at my spouse or kick the dog or scream at my children? Or is it that in these other settings, I don't feel that to the same extent. Because if that ends up being true for anybody listening right now, pay attention to the message. It's not built into you. Because if it was built into you would carry all of it with you. If something changes and run little experiments in your life, this is a really, really important thing. Push your own boundaries a little bit, do things that are a little uncomfortable and do them not because they necessarily are the right things for you. But do them because you don't know if they're the right things for you. And you won't know until you experience them. And so, you know, like mindfulness is one of those things right? Huge evidence base for meditation. Huge. I don't know how many books how many articles, how many brain imaging studies we need to do. Meditation is good for people. Some people hate meditation. They despise it. They feel like crap when they do it. Well guess what? Slow down. You don't need to meditate right now. If it's harming you slot but but if you don't try it, you won't know what the impact will be. And so I mean And I in a way, it's funny because I applaud the the single mindedness that you had coming out of this journey, and the commitment you had to creating change. And part of the reason people tell us not to make in any situation, sort of very quick decisions is, you know, things settle. And especially psychoactive states, especially psychedelic states, have have a much longer process length of process, the most of us realise, right, it's like you've done silent retreats, the same thing happens if you talk about anybody who's done a silent retreat, like, day one is not like day two. And that's not like day three, and that like day four, not like day five, I just led a silent retreat here locally, in somebody at the end told a story that I loved. They said before they did it, everybody who's listening right now and thinks we're crazy for even talking about salary retreats, I totally get it. I scared the shit out of me the first time I did one, I was freaked out. But this guy was sharing a story that he heard about a woman who went into a Buddhist monastery for 18 years. And when she came out, they asked her what was it like, and she said, it wasn't boring. And the point that she's making is, there's enough happening upstairs with very simple life, to create an entire journey. It is a lie perpetuated by marketing and sales. And, you know, this is probably why it was so bothersome to you to go back to a sales and advertising position. The lie that you need something to make your life good, is a lie that is perpetuated by commerce because you got to get the other car and the jackets and the socks and the tie and the sunglasses. And, you know, because if you don't get it, then people don't have jobs. So there's, there's a role for it, right? But you can be and oftentimes are actually much happier, without all those things than you are with them. So first you run experiments, run every kind of experiment you can in your life, and then which is what you did. And I will promise you, you will start honing in on the pieces that feel good to you. And then if anybody's listening right now, and the thing that feels good to you, is crypto trading, you know, crypto day trading and sitting on a laptop and watching you know, financial metres move up and down. And that makes it for you, that does it for you love it. Go all in, enjoy yourself. But don't run yourself through the programming, other people told you will make you happy. live a miserable life, and then try to blame yourself for not being able to find that happiness. Get out there, create the experiences and your intuitive sense will tell you, you know, you're making the right choice or the wrong choice. And then just, you know, the commitment part, which you obviously had is the difficult part of the whole equation.
Martin O'Toole 1:28:10
That's good advice. I love the idea that we all continue this journey of self empowerment and run your own experiments, it's it's absolutely spot on it plays back to the conversation when we haven't done it. You can't say that one size fits all,
Julia Malcolmson 1:28:26
we have to remember that we are powerful, and we've given we give a lot of our power away. But a lot of the power is taken away. I think once we start to re empower ourselves. Yeah, I mean that well,
Martin O'Toole 1:28:36
that place I suppose it plays into the spiritual aspects of this of, of heat of self healing, doesn't it? We are creative beings, and you're quite right society and the system. I'm going to say the matrix have played it played a huge part in removing our sovereignty,
Julia Malcolmson 1:28:56
we have the power to heal ourselves. If you just watch we are at the point, we need a little guidance and a little, you know,
Martin O'Toole 1:29:03
yeah, totally.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:29:06
You put it out there. So it's not my fault that we're going here. But um, we just watched the matrix again with my kids. And I have an 11 year old, a nine year old and a three year old. And you know, I'm old, I'm 46 years old. You know, I feel like I've crossed over into some other threshold I never thought I would necessarily make it to but I remember when that movie came out, and it was life changing, and not life changing, and cinema changing and all these other things, right? It created a huge ripple effect, if you will. And I think the reason was it gave us language for thing we already knew we were talking about, right? Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. All these things have to do with your beliefs and how you see the world the language was there, but it was it was complex, and it didn't it wasn't intuitive. It didn't feel like something you could sink your teeth into? Well, you know, my underlying belief structure is that just felt academic and weird. And now you can just say, Well, you know, we're all part of the matrix, and everybody understands what you mean. And, of course, I think I hope this is obvious. We're actually all living in different matrices, right? Because your matrix and my matrix are different. They were dictated by the programming the people, you were raised around the culture, the expectations, I hope, and obviously, if people are listening to your podcast, that they're open to this at least. But I hope people take it to heart, guys, there are almost no rules. There are almost no rules other than the rules that you have been told or placed upon you. And that is true in relationships, like marriages, or romantic relationships, that is true in friendships. That is true and what you decide to do for work. That is, obviously as you just gave us an example of it's true in terms of where you live, what books you read, what TV shows you watch, or whether you ever watch TV, substances you ingest, or don't like, the across the gamut, like any area of life, there is no right way to live doesn't exist. Okay, what do we do with that? Well, it's now up to all of us, we all have to make the choices and find the people and and connect to those that fulfil what it will take to make us live a life full of joy of excitement of contentment. You talk about spirituality, having a sense of purpose, and contributing to the environment you live in is one of the things that has given me the most spiritual, the biggest spiritual awakening. So we all find our mix. But that was the most freeing. realisation for me, was when I was able to take. And again, I know it's cliche. But when I was able to take the kind of lessons the matrix was positing, if anybody who doesn't know that, by the way, the people, the people who directed and wrote the book, meant it as a commentary on at least the sexual gender roles in society and how you can get trapped in this world of where you're supposed to be. Being able to live that way, is an incredibly freeing experience. And if you've never experimented with it, I highly recommend it.
Martin O'Toole 1:32:38
Yeah, I love that I do. I often say the matrix was a documentary.
1:32:41
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:33:16
we were stuck. Yeah.
Martin O'Toole 1:33:17
So yeah, yeah. I always say the matrix is a documentary, and I'm a big fan of red pilling anyone who will listen, it's, it's a funny, it's a funny thing, to do this work. And I think, certainly, personally speaking, doing this work is a long process. And it involves many things that involves can involve, as we've discussed, a changing environment, which then inspires the opportunity to do the shadow work to really sit with yourself in the searing pain of the things that you've done on set.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:33:58
I love the way you just said that.
Martin O'Toole 1:34:01
The the searing pain? Yeah, well, I did that. I remember doing it. I remember specifically sitting for days and weeks, just actually sitting with it. In it, not trying to avoid it, like I've done all of my whole life. You know, it's touchy just to sit in that and to, but to observe it for what it is. And then to suddenly feel that shift where judgement, self judgement change. And then, actually forgiveness came into play. And then self love became this incredible epiphany for me. heart opening epiphany, but then moving into these these additional spaces of okay, well hang on a minute, you know, how is society structured to support me? And you know what the answer was? Well, it kind of isn't actually, from a personal perspective. So, so, this for me, it was the slow unplugging and obviously, we're still talking about the matrix, but they have all of these cables in them together in this mess. either kind of jacked in, in several different ways all the way up the spine into this into the whole system. And, and actually, for me it was this wonderful systematic process of unplugging myself until eventually that shit on board. I've got no eyebrows I'm covering you
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:35:19
know, I'm also imagining Martin like closing the agency down shaving his head, covering himself in all of it together
Martin O'Toole 1:35:30
as a part of the process, I'm a very literal personality. That's funny. But it I mean, we've gone way off piste. But that's
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:35:40
I mean that really, though, I mean, if you look, we started in addiction, right? Addiction has been operating under the rubric of the medical slash spiritual disease model, right, the AAA model, the 12 step model that came out of very religious underpinnings and people can say it's not a religious programme, but I call bullshit. It came out of Christian programmes in the mid 1930s. Right around the time the Prohibition ended in the US. It was seated by people from those groups. It's a Christian programme. It says the word God and every prayer is a Christian prayer, like, I don't know how you can pretend it's not a Christian programme. And what is religion, and by that, I mean, organised religion, but a method of indoctrination into a system of belief of way of seeing the world. So I don't think we're off topic at all. It's just that we broaden the understanding to we were sold a bill of goods and the bill of goods was, hey, we figured out what addiction is these people figured it out, they were handed down a book, it was divinely ordained, that this is the way addiction should be helped. And psychiatrists didn't know what to do with addiction, partially because nothing was understood about the brain or addiction or anything like that in the 20s. So they handed it off to these people, and they have failed us miserably as a system. I want to be clear, I want to say this 12 Step programmes have helped millions of people. Right, it's not that they don't work for anybody. But they are far from a silver bullet. And they don't work for most people who try them. So I'm not putting down 12 Step programmes, but let's call them what they are. They are religiously oriented, support networks. And that's it. And we've developed an entire field of in an industry of addiction help based on these things. And in many addiction treatment centres, definitely 1520 years ago, what you got, and I'm putting that a big air quotes, was early, wake up with a breakfast, a meeting in the morning, maybe a process group in your rehab, in the middle of the day, if you had a lot of money, you got like a pool, and a chef. And if you didn't have as much money you got, you know, whatever government sponsored food was given in the place, then you went to an evening meeting and you went to bed. That was it. That was what you got. That was what we consider treatment. That's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. But we were sold it as reality. So we can talk about matrix is an overarching analogy and metaphor to life in general, or we can focus on any specific area that has been I don't think this is a verb, but has been dog mud to death, right? This is the right way. This is the only way the only way you do this. If somebody says that to you. Be careful. If somebody's standing there telling you my way is the only way Do not touch the Kool Aid, step slowly outside of the room, and try to make it home safely. That has never worked out well in society, you know, and so why why why do people vilify us who try to talk about things differently? Because we work against the fabric of how they see reality. It is like The Matrix, they look at us like, no, no, you're insane. Alcoholics need this kind of help. My book says it, you're not giving that kind of help, therefore, you're gonna hurt people. And then nothing else really computes. And for me, because I've picked this sliver for now of society that I'm trying to help, I will keep just picking at that version of the matrix. Because yes, it's an overarching metaphor that works for every element of our lives from how we parent to what we think food is to everything. Everything applies, right. That's too much for me to take on. Elon Musk might want to take that on later in life when he's done saving the planet and getting us to Mars. But but I'm sort of done. I have like one little sliver of the world I'm trying to make better. And I love the analogy because it works. It works in so many levels, and it also works in this level. Thank you, brother.
Julia Malcolmson 1:40:03
Yeah. What would you think we could do as a global community to really start supporting addicts and to deal with the dehumanisation that sort of been taking place of addicts? How do we flip that back around?
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:40:21
It's a good question. I mean, you know, Martin, you probably ought to be honest, you probably know more about the machinations of commerce than I do. I've never held a corporate job in my life. I was an academic. Well, let's see jobs, I bagged groceries, I played music. I sold drugs. I became a professor. And now I do this. So I've never really been part of any plugged in corporate structure in my life, other than kind of the education system, right, which is another one of those versions that also works on that level. But I think the thing the way I see it, is this is a grassroots or ground up sort of process, and it is red pilling everybody in a way, right, it is giving people permission to seek answers. Other than the ones they were initially provided, the way I talk about in the United programme, anybody who has been with us, they say, Look, when you when you were born, somebody gave you a book. And they said, anytime you got a problem, just look up in the book, and they'll tell you what to do. Obviously, not explicitly, but you got a manual from the people around you, your mom, your dad, your brother, your sister, your neighbours, your friends, whoever, your teachers. And we look at this book, and we follow it and we go, oh, when a girl looks like she likes you, you do this, and we do it. And if it works, we give credit to the book. If it doesn't we go What the fuck is wrong with me? I did a thing in the book, and I didn't get the result I wanted what's wrong with me? But we're asking the wrong question. Maybe the recipe in the book is not the right recipe for us. Maybe we need to find another recipe we need to edit the manuscript. And so I want to give everybody a freedom to just go well, do you guys like do you follow Bruce Lipton at all? Yeah. Bruce Lipton said this to me once when we were when we were talking to love that guy. And he said, look, look at the printout of your life, write out what happens in your life, write out the pieces that aren't working the way you want them. And recognise that the reason those things are not working right is because the programming you've come into this world with the programming you've been handed down, is creating a reality for you that you are repeating over and over and over that is objectionable. And you can live with it, or you can change it, but changing your underlying beliefs is a process. It's difficult, it's uncomfortable, it's going to cause all these pain points, the misery that you refer to earlier. And the misery is like the heat, right? Like, what is it irons, forge and fire, right, you're gonna have to go through the pain to get the end result, because you've gotten comfortable in the pain. And you're going to try to extricate yourself, as you pointed out earlier. So I don't know that there's a systematic way to do this. And the reason is, any system by definition, is going to need its own rules. Right? So no matter what the next system is that we create, it's going to have to have its own hierarchy, its own rules, its own ways of being the only other version that I know of is essentially anarchy. And that also has its own rules, right. Anarchy has its own rules. So I envision a life and I'd say this to our people had ignited all the time. If we had been having this conversation 100 years ago, I don't think I could do what I do. Because you really didn't have that many options. If you didn't fit into your close circle. You're, you're at risk of not surviving. A real risk of not surviving go farther than 100 years ago. That's certainly true. Right? But your family, your close neighbours, the people you knew, well, that was your lifeline. That was your safety net. You can't rock that boat too much. Because who else is going to help? You couldn't? You didn't have the ability to just go travel the world and find your next group of people right what you did, Martin was not really possible 200 years ago, Hey, guys, gonna get up, I don't need this money anymore. I'm gonna go move to Bali. You couldn't have done any of that. So that I think there's a privilege and what we get to do right now. But let's take advantage of that privilege. So do I think the way we do it is what will end up happening? I think technology, again, is helping facilitate this and we'll do that more will create smaller pockets, where people are more cohesive and more in agreement in terms of those values and those rules that they want to follow that give them joy and completion and and make them Content life. And just because that pocket is unlike mine, right, just because that tribe, that group of people doesn't behave like I do doesn't hold values won't actually interfere with their ability to survive or my ability to survive. And so it'll be fine. They'll get to live in their version we and I think it'll be, that's where I see things going. Versus what like the great American experiment was right, which is, in a way, can we create this world that runs on the same rules for everybody? Right? And I would argue probably all empires tried to do that. Capitalism everywhere, individual freedom, above all, blah, blah, like all that stuff. There was a time I hope most Americans don't believe this anymore. But there was a time where America is like, Oh, this is the best way to live. And everybody should do this all over the world. This is the only way to live. I think I think it's proving itself to not be exactly correct.
Martin O'Toole 1:46:03
It is. Well, I mean, I suppose the the proof is in the evolution of decentralisation, isn't it? And I think you make it you make a one of a number of wonderful points there. I think one of the wonderful opportunities that technology is bringing is for people like us in Bali, to have a conversation with people like you in California, and make that conversation available to anyone with an Internet connection and have these difficult conversation. How
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:46:36
insane I mean, just thinking about what you just said, like, that's insane. But it's fucking does. I mean, 20 years ago, this was impossible. Yeah, totally, I would
Martin O'Toole 1:46:47
imagine five years ago was impossible in Bali, because of the internet connection. So now we have this incredible, incredible opportunities as a, as a species, to tap into all of this knowledge, like so fast. And all we all we actually need is the desire to help ourselves.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:47:10
So I just want to say this, because I can tell what's happening about me right now. I probably have like 10 to 15 minutes left before this house becomes a mess. So don't worry.
Martin O'Toole 1:47:23
We're going to wrap up in five anyway, because we are conscious we've we've overrun. Yeah, and we've started to fog for mosquitoes down the street. Hail carcinogenic gas in a minute. She's always the nice thing about living in Bali.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:47:39
I've never been I gotta go.
Martin O'Toole 1:47:41
Oh, yeah. Well, hey, listen, come and see us. Come and see us. Excuse me. Frogs.
Julia Malcolmson 1:47:48
So we just want to know what's next for you? What's, what's in the plans.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:47:54
I'm working on another book. I'm excited about it's been four or five years since the last one. And then I think I mentioned this before, but we're having really some of the most exciting conversations in the corrections space, which given what we just talked about. In my history, I didn't think I would ever touch with a 10 foot pole, if I'm honest. I thought my history precluded me from being able to do much good there. And I thought the correction space wasn't ready for this kind of conversation. But there's been a huge shift in at least certain pockets in the corrections world. And I don't know if people know this, but 85 to 90% of people incarcerated in the United States either have an active drug problem, or in jail or prison for a drug related offence. 85 to 90%. So why is this? I feel like I'm getting this opportunity. We're talking to Wisconsin, we're talking to Colorado, we're talking in Illinois, we're talking in North Carolina, we're talking in Washington State and Seattle, and having amazing conversations that could impact hundreds of 1000s of lives of the most disenfranchised, right, the people who are I hate saying it, but they're not even plugged into the front part of the matrix. Like at least our part of the matrix is, like, full of, you know, toys and candy and all this other bullshit, but still does the same thing to us still causes stress and misery, etc, etc. But like, there are people that don't even have the ability to play with the toys and use the candy. Right? Their programme has been so limited. And the idea that I get to help in that space is so exciting for me. Because when I started ignited, I had a singular goal and the goal was to help millions of people. That was kind of what I said. We've helped 1000s We're getting close to 10s of 1000s. But you know, we're nowhere near millions and that's that's where I want to go I mean, the only way that I know that we reached anywhere near my goal for the work we're doing right now is when we see that little addiction overdose curve that everybody keeps showing every year actually been down. And when we flip that equation, so instead of 97% of people not getting help, it's like 510 20% of people not getting help, and everybody else has something to plug into. So that's on the professional side, that's where I want to go. And, you know, on the personal side, because I'm also battling the exact same matrix as everybody else that I help is right and, and what I've learned, and I'm really grateful for learning this, but I've had the privilege of literally working with some of the most incredible humans on the face of the planet, some of them creative geniuses, some of them financial geniuses, you know, the Jets, all this stuff. And what it taught me more than anything, is that those accoutrements, if you will, create absolutely no more joy than driving a Toyota Camry or a rav4, or, you know, being on a bicycle. And it gave me massive freedom, to disconnect and not have money as a goal. But I just want to say this, there's a way I want to live my life with my family, there's a manner in which I want the day to day behaviour to happen. And that's something I'm working on on a constant basis to refine what I learned was parenting into what I want my parenting to look like, you know, what work is like, and what my relationship with my wife is, like. So that's a game. We're playing forever. And I don't think it's going to add, so that's the personal side of my life is always refining what my version of the programme looks like.
Martin O'Toole 1:51:51
That's beautiful, and plays to the whole conversation, doesn't it? So, so few of us, for whatever reason, through societal programming, through the trauma through the just the necessity of of living everyday life, we don't get to spend enough time thinking about this stuff, having this level of self awareness, observing our mental health, our behaviour, our interactions, and with betterment in mind, you know, and I, am I for 1am immensely grateful for whatever reason that I managed to make that switch and to become self aware and to then decide, okay, yeah, like, I could spend the rest of my life learning about life. Isn't it
Julia Malcolmson 1:52:40
so much fun, when you realise that we can create whatever we want, and we can make those decisions that this is the way I want my relationships be or my family life? And exciting?
Martin O'Toole 1:52:49
Yeah, it is.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:52:50
And we can change it, right? Like we can make one set of decisions, learn something new, and shift. I think it's, it's some of the most fun I've ever had my life and and I know it's just gonna keep getting better. So it's really exciting. How to
Martin O'Toole 1:53:08
that? Well, this has been a really great conversation, Addy. I obviously, for various reasons, as you've probably gathered, I've been looking forward to having this conversation with you. And as he's always the way, there's no way we can unpack all of this in in a podcast. So of course, perhaps we could talk to you again at some point in the future because you've been you've been a delightful guest to speak to and thinking man,
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:53:33
this would be this was a lot of fun.
Martin O'Toole 1:53:36
Likewise, do you want to drop your social handles and your web address and all of that sort of stuff for people listening who want to find out more about you and ignited? I try to
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:53:45
keep it consistent. So it's pretty much at Dr. At the Jaffe everywhere. So that's Dr. Dr. Dr. Addy Jaffe. And ignited is simply I don't have a hat right here. But it's IG and TD, I tried to be clever with the name of the company and take out some vowels and all I've done is confused the shit out of most people that I talked to
Martin O'Toole 1:54:06
but as a branding expert, I could to talk to you about that.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:54:11
I G NT de is is how you spell ignited. But um, you know, seeing them everywhere is is not quite right. But if you look up Dr. DE Jaffe, I'm pretty much the only one that comes up. So it's pretty easy to find me that way.
Martin O'Toole 1:54:26
Thank you, thank you for your time for your attention for your energy for what you're doing in this space. Funny, you talk about a tiny sliver of people you know, I have this idea that actually if we all could just help one person each, you know, done, it'd be done. Then fuck yeah, we
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:54:51
just be done though. Amen. Yeah, helping
Martin O'Toole 1:54:53
10s of 1000s of that the fact that you want to expand this proposition, you know, you know, you have All of my love and support and I'm sure
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:55:02
thank you and to be fair, it takes all the people who help us our coaches, Maddie, who's my right hand person who has been helping me for almost four years now and obviously the support of Sophie and everybody else who's come before me it's it's it all builds on itself.
Martin O'Toole 1:55:18
Long may that rain and we hope to speak to you again,
Julia Malcolmson 1:55:21
so much for joining.
Dr Adi Jaffe 1:55:22
Thank you for having me.
