How To Recover From Addiction With The Help Of Character Development & Spiritual Expansion (Ep. 181)

Matt Finch: And so internal locus of control is simply shifting from the government can help me, or maybe it's up to my wife to make me happy. And if she's not behaving the right way, or my husband, if they're not behaving the right way, well, my life's going to suck. That's why I started drinking because of an abuse. So that's why I started using drugs or my doctor prescribed me pills and didn't tell me that I could get addicted and now here I am. And that may very well be true. All of that might be true, but what I've realized for myself and for a lot of the clients I've worked with, it's developing that internal locus of control if you don't already have one, in that a 100% ownership.

Chris Scott: In no show or movie that I'm aware of. Share there's one with you, right? Almost none of the time, do you have a protagonist who has a victim mentality? They might do bad shit. They might be wrong. Often there's some chance at redemption, whether they get it or not sometimes, a mystery or a matter of debate, but they're almost never think like victims. There's certain amount of treating life strategically and like a game and accept at least taking responsibility for whatever the horrible situation they find themselves in and then fighting out.

Announcer: Thanks for tuning into the elevation recovery podcast, your hub for addiction recovery strategies. Hosted by Chris Scott and Matt Finch.

Matt Finch: Welcome everyone to episode 181 of the podcast. I'm Matt Finch and I'm here with my cohost. Chris Scott. How are you doing Chris.

New Speaker: Doing great. I always let you start the show because I never remember what the podcast episode is. So I appreciate that. It goes by fast, 181. I think the last two times were the only two times in the past year that I didn't have to look up what episode number it was first, almost every time, right before, "What's episode is this?" You'd think that doing it twice a week, it would be ingrained in my head what episode we're on. But anyways, you and I were just talking before this a little bit and I wanted to mention, I don't care where this goes, but I wanted to start off the topic of internal locus of control versus external locus of control. So back in my old life, we'll say when I had mental health disorders, substance use disorder and not a lot of life skills, not a lot of... I had a fixed mindset instead of a growth mindset back then.

Matt Finch: So my thought processes with a external locus of control was based on what's happening in the world. What's happening in my community based on external events. That's going to be how my life's going to go. Maybe I'll get lucky. Maybe something good will come along, right? It's all about like hoping. Hoping that things will change or complaining oftentimes. Well, like the reason I'm not successful, the reason I'm not doing how I want to is because of this and it's because of this. It's because of the government. It's because of the administration in office. It's because of my wife it's because of my kids or it's because of something. And that really puts too much responsibility on external things and so when I shifted to an internal locus of control, which is wait a second here. All of those things may actually be playing a role, but the biggest role into whether I achieve what I want to or not is my own self and it's how...

Matt Finch: So it's really not about all these external things. It's about total extreme owner, this is for myself, I don't care how other people are, but extreme ownership of I created all this stuff, like everything around me right now in my life, I created that. And it was because of my decisions and it was because of my actions. It was because of all the little things, big decisions, small decisions, daily habit things, and everything that has a mass to now is where I am. And so internal locus of control is simply shifting from the government can help me, or maybe it's up to my wife to make me happy and if she's not behaving the right way or my husband, if they're not behaving the right way, well, my life's going to suck. That's why I started drinking because of an abuse.

Matt Finch: So that's why I started using drugs or my doctor prescribed me pills. And didn't tell me that I could get addicted and now here I am and that may very well be true. All of that might be true, but what I've realized for myself and for a lot of the clients I've worked with, it's developing that internal locus of control if you don't already have one in that a 100% ownership. Jocko Willink former Navy seal, who did a great Ted talk and has a few awesome books, even kids' books too, that my daughter and I have listened to together on audible, but he co-authored a book called Extreme Ownership and living your life from a place of, if goes wrong, taking ownership for it, if you had anything to do with it all.

Matt Finch: It's completely counterintuitive to because most people, and I used to be this way, big time, I was really defensive, very defensive. If girlfriends or other people would bring up shortcomings or weaknesses, I was so defensive and so unaware to those behavioral blind spots. So I don't care where we take this. I see so much stuff going on in the world right now. And I want to remind the people that need to hear it, that despite all the things that are going on, it may seem some countries are going mad. It may seem like thing... But really most of the things on earth are good things going on.

Matt Finch: If you look at it as a whole, and we have so much fucking power within us to create change, if we only step into the present moment, figure out exactly what we want or what would be good for us, come up with at least the starting point and then just keep trying along the way, keep sourcing information, model success, success leaves clues, because I see an epidemic getting bigger of people with the victim, consciousness, victim mindset, external locus of control, poverty consciousness, victim consciousness, defensive, argumentative, black and white thinking and people are turning into curmudgeons and just argh, and to me that's a sign that someone's unhappy. It's not a sign that the world's out of sorts. It's a sign to me that person's out of sorts.

Chris Scott: Yeah. That's a great place to start. There are infinite directions in which we could take this. I'm trying to narrow down the thoughts so I can be coherent here. But I think we were talking, here's one way to put it, we were talking before this podcast about some of the shows that we like to watch. There are a lot of shows out there. I'm not a show buff or a movie buff. We were talking about Vikings and Peaky blinders. Now, obviously there are some famously dualistic and flawed heroes protagonists in both of those films and not all, I'll share this, and not all shows follow the similar themes. There was a particularly manly show, I guess you could say. But I've noticed that in no show or movie that I'm aware of, I'm sure there's one or two, but almost none of the time, do you have a protagonist who has a victim mentality?

Chris Scott: They might do bad shit. They might be wrong. Often, there's some chance at redemption, whether they get it or not is sometimes a mystery or a matter of debate, but they almost never think like victims. There's a certain amount of tweeting life strategically and like a game and accepted at least taking responsibility for whatever that horrible situation they find themselves in and then fighting out. For all that our culture has changed over the last 100 years or a couple of decades, that still seems to be something admired. Someone who by circumstance or by birth is in a bad situation and they clawed their way out, maybe they do bad stuff on the way that makes it interesting. So I'm not saying people should do bad stuff on the way or join an English razor gang or kill people with axes.

Chris Scott: But it seems to be like an almost permanent aspect of human nature. Like this is, we still find this uplifting. Even if being a victim is somewhat invoke these days in certain contexts, that's still something we look up to. We admire it when we see it, especially people who might otherwise have a claim to being victims in some ways. Now, when I was finishing up my drinking career I had started to slide into nihilism and despair and something of a victim mentality which was completely at odds with everything I'd ever been taught. And then surely in some ways I was extremely lucky growing up, but like everyone I always say scratch the surface of someone you'll find some traumas or some things that they've had to overcome. So to whatever degree being adopted and having 60% hearing loss in both of my ears, I sometimes think that I could have pursued things differently.

Chris Scott: I could have totally avoided people. I've read stories of people with severe hearing loss of such as I have who have serious problems interpersonally. But I never, and I'm not saying that I should have some kind of hero for people with hearing impairments. It's pretty common and a lot of people lose their hearing, but I think that they're not letting that define me and not really thinking of it, almost transcending it in a sense gave me a model for how I dealt with alcohol addiction later. Because I remember joking to a friend after I quit drinking and I said, "Well I'm a deaf bald alcoholic." And he was like, "Stop no more disparaging adjectives." You can go down that path of feeling like a victim. I didn't lose my hair until I was 25. Although it was pretty early for most people.

Chris Scott: And I was flattered to see that some of my friends after I quit drinking got in shape and lost my hair, some of them started shaving their heads. So imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But there was also, I talk a lot about the biochemical and fitness transformation. So I think those are super important. We touched a lot on that in the last episode, but there also this simultaneous or maybe slightly lagged spiritual transformation that occurred as well. I'm far from enlightened. But I went from there assuming during my drinking years that external forces is controlled my fate to not even worrying about whether that was the case, try it to find as much contentment and happiness as I could from within being able to sit with myself, close my eyes, direct consciousness into my body, feel relaxed, feel at peace with the universe, even if asteroids about to crash into the earth and obliterate everything we know, at least I have that centeredness.

Chris Scott: When I started meditating centered was my first mantra. Eventually I came up with a different one that I found on the internet actually, and that became my mantra to this day. It's like an anchor for just letting go. I had someone in my online course who had serious problems with getting into conflicts with people at work, especially her boss. And she said that, disengage became her mantra and she actually found that she was able to increase her power by disengaging at times that she used to get revved up and ultimately act self destructively. So there is a certain power ironically that you get from directing some of your consciousness and energy inwards and sorting that out first, replacing some of the inner chaos with order. And that's a theme that we've seen from people like Jordan Peterson, who his mantra was clean your room.

Chris Scott: And I think there was something to that now being mildly OCD, I've always made my bed. It doesn't matter if the sun is outside and I've just won the lottery. It doesn't matter if my bed isn't made, I'm not going to feel like the world is right. So I've always had a little bit of that, people are different. But as long as you have some order in your inner life and you can sit with yourself, it takes a while. Telling people in early recovery who are going through withdrawal or post-acute withdrawal to sit with themselves can be a torturous thing. I remember the first few times I tried to meditate in detox, which is where I was one of the few really good things that they did there. They had this old man who he had been a priest and he'd also been severely addicted to alcohol. And he had quit decades ago and followed the traditional model.

Chris Scott: Here's a very soothing guy and he would lead these meditation sessions and encourage just to come up with a mantra, put on like rain sounds or reads, or I don't know if they were binaural beats. I didn't know what those were at the time, but something like that. And we would all just kind of sit and try to be with ourselves. And I remember spassing out, like the second I close my eyes and try to direct consciousness inwards. I would like get kicked out of my own head. It was the most frustrating thing, like I wasn't allowed in there. And now fast forward almost seven years, I've had a bit of practice. I've had phases where I meditate phases where I don't.

Chris Scott: But I always know when I need to come back to it because it's when I start feeling overwhelmed. Like the energy in my head, my mind activity is greater than whatever the centered energy field of my body should be. That's probably the most googled thing I've ever said, but that when I start feeling like that, like my mind's racing and I've lost touch with my body. Then I know I need to start meditating again, to try to reduce that mental activity, get some inner centeredness. And that's what helps me create inner order, which manifests in things like, I guess, for some people making their bed, I would've done that anyway, but I'm proactively tackling things that I might put off. Like I had mail from the IRS after I quit drinking that I wouldn't even open because I was terrified, every time I would see it, I would get like a jolt of adrenaline and my heart would start racing.

Chris Scott: It turned out, I owed like $7 for taxes several years before when I finally opened it. But now I pull out the weeds. I think that's a Tony Robbins saying like don't put on rose colored glasses and say, "All the weeds are growing. It's fine." Just proactively pull them out and immerse yourself in the moment as you pull them out. And that's a good way to make things better that you otherwise might not understand that you have the power to make the better. You stay on top of things. I think there's a certain level of enlightenment that maybe I'm not quite at, but I've realized is may be possible where you're simultaneously engaged in your own life and making things better, which does have unintended yet positive consequences for what you might otherwise label external events later on.

Chris Scott: But you can simultaneously deal with your personal life, your professional life, all of these external things going on and be so centered spiritually that the world itself just seems like a game to you. A game, an important game, but nonetheless, something that you can withdraw from without fleeing to drugs or alcohol, that you can withdraw from at any time in the form of meditation or yoga or whatever your practices, or even just a method of motive consciousness. I read recently The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I don't know if that's how you pronounce his name, but he brought up that idea. It kind of built on Michael Singer's The Untethered Soul. Having a mode of consciousness whereby you are like supremely conscious. So much so that what he calls, what Tolle calls, psychological time sees this to be something that rules your life.

Chris Scott: His whole point in that book is that, the only thing that ever exists is the present moment, unless fully immersed in the present moment, you're either stuck in the past or you're stuck in the future both of which are illusions because you will never exist in the past or the future, you will only exist now. And if you can do that effectively, then you will be conscious. You'll exist in a mode of consciousness. That's higher in a sense than what most people are doing, who are stressing about the lists that they wrote down and things that happened to them in the past and the things that they need to do in the future, and then they miss their whole lives.

Chris Scott: So I think it's kind of ironic because we assume that we have to worry a lot about the past and make sure that doesn't happen again. And we have to worry a lot about the future and make sure we're set up for the future. But if that's all we're doing, then we're not centered because we're not in the here and now. And so there is a way to be in the here and now without becoming a monk who is sitting in a cave. And as I said, I'm not fully enlightened, but it's an interesting idea. And I think I've gotten glimpses of it during yoga and during meditation, sometimes during a walk in nature.

Matt Finch: One of the things you said was that you don't feel like necessarily a like this huge hero for the hearing impaired community, right?

Chris Scott: No, I've never considered it until I said that. So yeah, I think I'd say no.

Matt Finch: It's very funny that you said that exact wording, because the last episode we did on the video, I forget which HYLETE shirt you were wearing, but you looked at especially pumped up and the shirt was in such a way. I was like, I finally understood. I mean, I've understood, but I really understood. I was watching the video watching you talk about addiction, recovery, alcohol recovery, looking like a fucking alcohol recovery superhero, like seriously, like you're two kinds AmeriCorps, the persona, the way that you look, the way that you hold yourself and communicate it's just all it just made so much sense why fit recovery has blown up on YouTube and everywhere basically. And why so many people are using your course and using your free content too, to totally just obliterate their alcohol addiction and get their shit in order.

Matt Finch: And it's because they've got someone such as you, that's compassionate, bold in so many other adjectives. That's ridiculous where all you're really doing is teaching people from life experience plus from all the other things that you've learned on how to customize their own alcohol quitting plan, or even get their drinking under control because some people have that ability too. And now I look at view at you as also a superstar hero for the hearing impaired community because that's a lot of hearing loss, big time and I often forget that about you because you don't seem to be disabled in any way from it. Seems like you've adjusted very well.

Chris Scott: Well, that's a lot of kind words. I'm not sure I deserve all that, but I really appreciate it. And as far as the hearing thing, honestly, I forget it. I don't label myself as hearing impaired. And I have the kind of hearing impairment that is not really fixed with hearing aids. In my experience that caused some pain for my parents when I was growing up because they thought I didn't want to wear the hearing aids out of embarrassment. It wasn't that it's a decibel issue. It's not, sorry, it's not a decibel issue, it's a clarity issue. So increasing the noise while leaving the clarity on fixed, it would just because me anxiety. And so with no solution at hand, I decided to forget about it. It's a combination of lip reading and maybe some weird part of my brain is compensating turning the auditory gook into actual words.

Chris Scott: I don't know, but I don't think about it. I haven't transcended hearing loss. I still have it, but I'm very glad I don't walk around thinking of myself primarily defined by the something that is a birth defect. And actually it was speculated by the doctors that it was caused by alcohol exposure in the room. So I don't blame my birth mother for that. At some point she must've stopped. Otherwise, I could have had full blown fetal alcohol syndrome. So that's just the thing, it's one of those things, and life is too short for me to think about that. But for anyone out there who happens to be, especially if there's anyone out there who's both addicted to alcohol and has a hearing impairment I'm more than happy to share my perspective on that.

Chris Scott: And obviously for someone who's totally deaf and if they're communicating, using sign language, my hearing's not at that level. I'm probably borderline. And if I hadn't learned to read lips and process sounds a little differently, I probably would have had to learn sign language. But for those people that then there's an obvious, there's an actual community because not everyone knows sign language. So I'm not saying it's bad if you have a community of people who do similar things because of a particular issue. But in my case, I'm grateful that I was able to not define myself by that disability, I guess you say. it's not something that ever went on a piece of papers, whereas I know, except for my doctors have known about it, but not something that went on a college application or a job application is always, I would tell people who back when I worked in corporate life, that you might not want to call my name from 60 feet behind me if I can't see you and I'm not blowing you off.

Chris Scott: But other than that, it's been kind of a non-issue. I like to make things non-issues and it's taboo to make alcohol addiction a non-issue even if you're 50 years alcohol free they're in according to traditional treatment approaches, you're not supposed to do that. Then you're at risk of relapse or death or institutionalization or jail. I don't see it that way. I see life as short, it's important to be in the present and you don't want to be dwelling on things that are depressing except to the extent that you have to, to figure some things out. But it's always worth transcending going to the next level, crowding out the bad things with the good things and having so many good things to focus on that the bad things don't enter your mind unless they have to for practical reasons and usually that's temporary.

Chris Scott: But yeah, and that's another part of taking responsibility for your life. Control is often used in a negative context, but it's a good thing. I think, to control certain elements of your life as with anything there's a certain duality. I don't know if that's the right word, but there's a push and pull a yin and a yang. I've noticed this a lot. Letting go in the right context is really important, but so is control, right? Self-Control for example, is going to be really important. Relaxation is really important, but hard work is really important too. It's like we have, we have not gurus that sounds derogatory, but we have an inspiring figures Jocko Willink on one hand who can help us increase our self control and our control over our lives and shape our futures. Then we have people like Wayne Dyer it was more in the zone of letting go and being happy and figuring out what happiness is.

Chris Scott: I think it's important to have a push and a pull with certain traits. It's almost like there aren't that many traits that are all bad, even being lazy for a night can be a good thing. So of course, I guess then it all comes back down to cliches about having balance, which I really don't like, honestly, I don't really have a balanced diet. I don't have a balanced exercise regimen. I tend to be an extremist in some ways, not ideologically, but with my lifestyle, it's kind of like a little bit of black and white, but they tend to even each other out in other ways.

Matt Finch: I love it, man. I love it. And you touched on a topic, well, many topics. But a topic that I really am fascinated by. And there's multiple aspects of being a human being. One is human animal. We're animals. We're the apex predators of earth. The other aspect of it is human spirit. So if you look a few hundred years ago into history. Yeah, people were murdering and colonialism and just lots of stuff was going on. That was hundreds of years ago, that was before the human spirit and the collective of all of the population started to evolve. We were a 100 years ago, we were aware we were a few hundred years ago. Things have gotten way better now, but we're still, maybe one day we'll be so advanced that these won't be issues. But right now I see this as a huge problem for a lot of people.

Matt Finch: We're both human spirit and human animal, but oftentimes it's the human animal that is giving us the impulses that is leading to the actions. So human animal is the stuff, having the cravings for going to have an orgy or going to eat a whole bunch of food and do a whole bunch of drugs, that's human animal cravings, biological organism. We need food, water, shelter, all that type of stuff. Humans are driven by pleasure and driven away from pain. So everything we do is to either avoid pain and, or gain pleasure, and we'll do much more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure. So that's one huge problem. The other huge problem is we are human spirit, but oftentimes human spirit isn't in the driver's seat regarding laying out your schedule for the week. And so there are these different aspects of us where there's an emotional aspect of physical aspect, a mental aspect, a spiritual aspect.

Matt Finch: And oftentimes traditional Western medicine just looks generally. They look for something, they find out what it is, and then they'll treat the symptoms with drugs, fine. But we also have to take into account the other more nuanced areas of us. Yes, we're physical, that's why medicines can do things to us, but we're also the human spirit and that's invisible to most people. There's very there's psychic people and there's people that have been, I think, proven to be able to even see orders and reorders, but that's this huge topic to me. It's like, wait, we are, this is my belief. I don't know if it's true. I certainly can't prove it. But I do believe that there is a spiritual element of us that leaves once the physical body dies. And it goes to the next phase, which is not of the physical world at all. It's the realm of souls.

Matt Finch: That's my book. And I also believe that before we come to earth in this lifetime, that we chose our parents, that we chose the ex our exact parents, and we chose the life. And I certainly can't prove this at all, but I've read a lot of books that we chose this particular incarnation, and there've been many therapists or hypnotherapists that don't even know each other that live in different places that have published texts on their decades of work, hypnotizing people into their life between lives, phase of their journey of souls. So according to many different people that have done this, and certainly you could call him a quack if you want it to certainly it goes against a lot of different beliefs and I can't prove it, like I said, but if we do have different lifetimes to learn different lessons, and if we did actually as souls in the soul world, choose the parents and choose a lot of different things of our life, wouldn't that be ironic, if that was the truth, to see all these people being victims for their for their circumstances. when literally, if this is true, they literally chose those dire circumstances to learn those lessons, to have that human experience. And then maybe next.

Matt Finch: So I know that's a huge thing to throw out there. It could be totally false, but I like to think about stuff. I like to entertain stuff like that because if these people that were very... One of the guys like Dr. Michael Newton was totally atheist as a hypnotherapist, he wouldn't do anything like that. He only would do early childhood. He would regress people back to early childhood. He would laugh at people when they asked him to regress them into a past life. He's like, "Oh, that's... Oh shit." He did it on accident. So if people want to learn more about this topic, just check out the book called Journey of Souls by Dr. Michael Newton. You'll thank me later or you'll curse my name later because it's so blasphemous to certain beliefs. But I like to entertain those things.

Chris Scott: If we had THC oil, we can make this a four hour podcast and in person, but as I've often said I was a rationalist skeptic science evidence-based only person before I quit drinking.

Matt Finch: Before you met me.

Chris Scott: Before I met you? probably. But also it wasn't just that, I mean, it was in detox when I was sitting in the chapel, we had this like non-denominational chapel where you could sit and I would just meditate sometimes. But one particular time I went in there and a ray of lights into be dancing slowly towards me, but it seemed to be imbued with some odd sort of consciousness that I had never perceived before. So at the very least, I was in a different mode of consciousness there, I guess a scientist would say, "Well your brain was maybe functioning differently. You had more alpha waves at that time than..." I don't even know.

Chris Scott: That's one interpretation. And I was just trying to anthropomorphize is not the right word, but do something with the ray of light that wasn't there. Or there is something else there. And there are other dimensions that work literally or figuratively that we don't perceive and maybe we don't know everything as humans, even though it seems sometimes like we do. That seems more likely to me. We don't need to quantify it. One of the great things that were said to me in early recovery, actually, when I was still in detox by the old man who led those, the former priest, who led those meditation sessions, because I would come up to him with questions about all sorts of things and I wanted him to know exactly what the answer was so I could write it down and that's kind of how I've always been.

Chris Scott: I don't remember what I asked him, but it was probably some giant cosmological mystery. And I expected him to say, "Oh, well, yes, of course, this, this, this and that. A, B, C, D, and F." That kind of logical response but his response was, "Don't try to expunge the mystery in life because then you'll miss out on all the fun." And there's something to that effect if not verbatim, but that stayed with me like don't try to rationalize a way the mystery of life, if you do that, you're missing out. Life's too short to do that. And so why not entertain things? It's one thing to become a tin hat, conspiracy theorist, and kill yourself because you think there's aliens passing by earth.

Chris Scott: It's another thing to just be open to broader questions. And so I try to do that. But one thing that I've definitely started to believe since quitting drinking is that we don't live in a malevolent universe. Whatever's going on. It's not evil, it's not malevolent. There is evil in the world. There's malevolence, there's murder and all sorts of horrible things. But I don't think I no longer you're think that the universe is structured in such a way that that's the dominant force. It wasn't clear to me that that was the case. When I was a drinker, I was somehow simultaneously a nihilist and rationalist skeptic. And at the same time, I kind of just assumed that I lived in a malevolent universe mainly because I couldn't figure out why I drank and why I would be put here to live in pretty successful early life, only to drown in my own alcohol addiction.

Chris Scott: You can see how hopelessness and despair would creep into that. But it doesn't make sense to think that there's a certain dark malevolent force in your life and also be a rationalist skeptic nihilist. It doesn't make any sense. So eventually, luckily I stopped being the nihilistic rationalist skeptic person, and I started becoming more of an optimist. I had be an optimist. I had to fake it till I made it in many ways. That's part of reframing alcoholism root substance. I had to believe that it was a toxic, horrible substance before, I had to say that to myself before I really believed it. Even though we have evidence that shows that it's a toxin. But I also came to think that if despite the fact that not all of the events of our lives are benevolent, whatever the structure of the system is, I don't know what it is, but I don't think it's malevolent.

Chris Scott: And that helps me retreat into myself to try to be in touch with whatever the cosmos is. And I don't know what's going on there from a brain scan or science perspective, but it is an experience that I've certainly had. With my mantra, I can often, if I close my eyes, I can start to flood my body with consciousness. I could feel it coming out of my mind. So my mind is not thinking like, "Oh, what should we have for breakfast tomorrow? We've got to make an appointment for the dogs next week. And then, Oh, that happened last week." Sometimes there's weird stuff. My self-talk will be like, "I wonder how you say milk with a Russian accent." Like just crazy stuff. Just constantly going. Sometimes it's entertaining, but that sometimes it's wanting to shut up. And so I can kind of direct the energy into my body, not have my back brain going hyperactive.

Chris Scott: And it's almost like I'm in touch with something. I don't know what it is, but it is not a bad thing. With that said, I'm still terrified of psychedelics. So I don't want to go meet it. I'm not going to smoke DMT and figure out what it is. I feel like I probably would figure, maybe I'd figure it out. So I'm not quite there yet. All of this is a work in progress for me. I'm just I'm the supplement guy. I'm not spiritual guru. But it is interesting and I think it does have to play a role for everyone in addiction, recovery, at least to speculate about these things. Maybe not everyone's curious, although it'd be hard for me to see how you could exist on this earth and not wonder about such things.

Matt Finch: Yeah. And I grew up... My parents never took us to church when we were kids. They were always very spiritual, but actually my mom would go to church sometimes, she was in a church choir and we'd go see her sing and we'd go for Christmas and stuff. So my mom was into it, but I did start going to a Presbyterian church in around, maybe an age 11 or something on the Sunday morning service, I'd go with my best friend at the time and his mom it was just the two of them. The dad had passed away of cancer. So I'd go mostly just for the free donuts for breakfast and then we'd go to McDonald's for lunch afterwards. I didn't get that stuff growing up with two hippie meditating herbalists I was getting tofu and let's see tuna fish, salad on rice cakes with sprouts, alfalfa sprouts and stuff.

Matt Finch: So yeah, I didn't get like chicken nuggets, French fries, and Coca-Cola so that's why I would go, but it was also fun. Sometimes I did like the sermons, it was all positive people. I don't go to any organized religion right now, I've found a lot of the times, and of course there can be differences too, but I really liked that positive energy. I did the trust in youth group there too for a few years when I was a teenager. And the counselors, the other kids that were going, it was pretty wealthy church establishment. We did fun stuff. And I don't go to church anymore, but man, I don't want to live in a universe where there's not a God or some type of plan, like if this is an accident, well, man, that'd be pretty crazy.

Matt Finch: So what I've found for at least myself was, my life only started to get much better once I felt like I had some spiritual beliefs that made some sense to me. So it was only after I read Journey of Souls. I always wanted to know why are we here? What is our purpose? And then where are we going afterwards? And I had read many texts based on that and nothing ever like made perfect sense to me, some things made some sense, but this book was so like, it seems like a science fiction book. And I think that's the section it's under a science fiction. It's just the most wild stuff it's actual, a lot of it is the transcriptions of recorded audio sessions of Dr. Michael Newton interviewing or not interviewing, but regressing these people into their life between lives and then recording the conversation.

Matt Finch: And so it's them talking, not as their human self presently, but as their soul self before they came into this life. So it's trippy, even if people don't believe it's a really good book because it's so... Like it gets your brain thinking in ways you've probably never thought before. And at least for myself and for a lot of other people, it's a very popular book. It helped me feel okay, okay. I feel like this could be true and that's what I'm going to believe until I find something that makes more sense. So I'm not like attached to even that belief, if something else makes more sense, trying to always be permeable enough to where I can entertain those things and maybe disqualify them. But even then, that's just my belief and who cares? It's just me.

Matt Finch: It's only I've realized how my beliefs are the probably the biggest effect or determining my life. So I'm trying to keep good beliefs that make that... It's like David Goggins. He believes that when he dies, he's going to be face-to-face with God and God's going to have a checklist be like, "I had you down for this. You were supposed to become a Navy seal and that's about it. Right?" But all this other stuff, all these ultra marathons, these triathlons, the pull-up contest, Guinness book, world records, this becoming this YouTube or the social media star, helping so many people. That's his belief that God's going to be there with them. And that's what he believes and that's what drives him so hard as he really wants to meet face to face with God and say, "Ah, I went way past what you even had in store for me." He legit believes that and then look at his life because of that belief.

Chris Scott: Yeah. Well, I think let's keep this one short and sweet, because we'll probably revisit all of these topics and the not distant future.

Matt Finch: Sounds good.