Exploring Addiction and Faith: A Conversation with David Litwin on the Drug Prevention Power Hour

Hello, everyone, welcome back to another episode of the drug prevention Power Hour. I’m your host Jake white. And today I’m hanging out with a new friend, David Litwin. And I’m going to tell you a little bit about him. But before I do, it’s so funny that I went on this cruise. And I signed up with a buddy. He’s Brian, he’s our curriculum director. And Brian just tends to meet all these incredible people. And so he got invited into this cruise with a bunch of entrepreneurs, authors, speakers, a bunch of people that are, you know, gung ho about their faith. You know, me being a Christian. I was like, Yes, this sounds like a fantastic cruise to go on. We go. And to my surprise, it’s like 90% people in the entertainment industry. It was a huge surprise. But I met most incredible people. And one of the guys that I met him and his brother, I, their last name was Sailor, the Sailor brothers. And we got together, we started talking, and he’s like, Hey, I have a friend in Phoenix you need to meet. His name is David, you’re gonna love talking to him. And to tell you, that was not an understatement. Like I got on the phone called him. And we had the most fantastic conversation. I didn’t want it to end. But Emily and I are moving. So I had to end it. And I was like, Hey, can we chat about what you published because you’ve got this resource on addiction. And it’s, it’s pulling all these really interested in ideas in a way that I’ve never thought about it. So without further ado, here’s David’s intro. He’s a designer, inventor, artist, writer and speaker, who has spent the past two decades exploring his fate and life in profound and revolutionary ways. David has spoken at numerous seminars and conferences. He’s a sought after he sought after for his understanding of media culture, scriptural insight and worldview analysis. In the past five years, he’s offered, authored two books, became a top writer on medium.com, treated two Udemy courses, launched a fitness product and exercise program, and created one of the first AI modeling agencies in the world. He cites this broad range of accomplishments with getting up at 4am every morning. David’s motto is live inspired, and everyone he connects with. He hopes he leads provoked, challenged and liberated. He’s married to his bride, Cindy, and they have two beautiful daughters. So David, thank you for saying yes to come in on the show and chatting with me.

Oh, I’m excited to be here, man. And I got to tell you to Kyle said the same thing about it. He goes, Oh my gosh, you gotta meet this guy. Jake. You guys are gonna totally connect. And it wasn’t just the Phoenix connection. It was the heart connection. It was a mind connection. So yes, I’m stoked.

That is awesome. I love it. What you had sent me your, and I’m gonna call it a book. You know, it’s like a mini book, ebook. Yeah, an ebook and 38 pages great for a morning read. And getting through it. I, I, I want to bring up a couple things I hope we get to talk about is, you know, the movie, Ray. You know how to use that as the general idea to get us to understand addiction. And the couple points that you make. You are big Jack Johnson fan. It was that he was in the book too.

You know, of course he was ever he’s always in ever done.

From Avoidance to Advocacy: David’s Journey to Understanding and Preventing Drug Addiction

That’s all I had to talk more about that too. But before we get into all that, can you just tell us a little bit more about you? I read your intro. But as far as the topic of drug prevention or addiction and recovery, like how does that relate to your life and what you’ve seen or any background on how that relates to you.

Sure, sure. Okay, I’ll give you I’ll give you the history of me from a young age, and then I’ll give you the history of what happened and got me to where I am. So when I was younger, you know, in junior high and that kind of thing. We had to do those drug prevention, you know, essays and stuff like that. I never did drugs. I never wanted to get into needles, right? I knew I was eventually going to get into heroin. So it’s like, oh, I don’t want to do this. You know, I don’t like needles. I don’t like getting shots. So I pretty much avoided drugs all through high school. In my junior year of high school. I had a friend of mine who cried who started the first day of school in in, he was a freshman that show you how dynamic this guy was the first day of school. The senior head cheerleader asked him out. He wasn’t much of an influential guy that good looking that and he was just amazing. He would have been Brad Pitt in the world. He started doing marijuana in his freshman year hung out kind of with this crowd. By the time he was a junior he was completely washed out. He had a stomach pumped. He was shipped back to Iowa. A lot of things happened in his life and I just watched the degradation of the most amazing human being amazing soul just get destroyed by drugs and So that was a moment for me to realize it’s like, look, this is what’s really going on here. This that is the purpose. We’ll talk about that I’m sure in a minute. But I tell my daughter that it’s like, look, the purpose of drugs is not the high. I’m jumping ahead a little bit, but nobody has drunk at the highest merely the mechanism that the purpose of the drug is to destroy your life, the highest, nearly the mechanism is strong enough to get you to not question the fact that you’re destroying your life. Right? It’s so understanding that if you see this over and over again, to Hollywood stories, you know, I mean, every single nobody comes out unscathed. Right? Jack Johnson to quote him really quick, he says, Hey, talking about the world, he’s like, Hey, we’re the ones to blame them, the fruit shouldn’t taste so good. Right? That’s their mentality of like, Hey, this is good for me. It feels good to me. So why are you blaming me for it? And then that the next line is, but we were used, losing everything but the truth. Right, and so it’s that you’re gonna get a lot of gesture. But so that was that. So fast forward 20 years, and I am writing a movie script, I’m doing a number of other things. I go to a conference in LA, I speak at the conference, I come back, some very weird, scary things happen in my life. And I go through a moment of feeling like God says to me, shut everything now. You’re too connected to all of that noise, right? Switch, but we’ll call it a Switchfoot song, right? If you’re, if you’re adding to the noise, get off this, you know, get off this, right, whatever that word is. So I shut everything down for two years. And forget what I call the media fast. No internet, no radio, no TV, no, no movies, no nothing, read 70 books, read the Bible, read Proverbs every day and meditated every day. And within six months, people started asking me where I got the philosophy degree that I did not have. And so literally, I was just an explosion of ideas and journaled all the time, and started writing, you know, numerous things in the process and started connecting and realizing that the internet is the most amazing, you know, everybody kind of, you know, hands the internet for oh my gosh, it’s just so much to base it in such a bit, you know, vitriol and everything else on the internet. It’s also the biggest library you’re ever going to find. And it’s an inspired library. So God can give you an idea on something and you can look it up and come up with an idea that no one has ever come up with, because you’re looking at things through a different lens. So I always say it from the standpoint of like, I use the biblical worldview, as the lens to look at the world, but the voice of the culture is the way to get it out. Because nobody cares about chapter and verse per se except for us, right? We gel with that the world does not. So recognize that and to speak in a way that the scientists are speaking. And the academics are speaking and the culture is speaking. You can say things without quoting chapter and verse that tie back into chapter and verse that will blow their minds, you can use the foolish things of the world to confound the what? That’s where all that came from.

Understanding Addiction: The Neuroscience of Pleasure and the Battle Between Body and Will

Wow, it makes so much sense because, you know, growing up not being a Christian for all the way through college. And people would say things like, Oh, well, no, it’s true, because the Bible says this. But to someone who doesn’t validate the Bible, it’s like, Wait, why would you base your entire belief system on this one book? Exactly. But I don’t even know what that book is. So I’m not. It’s not going to sway my decisions? For sure. And but yeah, once you it’s almost like God comes first. When that happens, then you can validate the Bible, you understand that is real, and that his plan is better than mine, and you understand the cross. But it’s, I love the way that you said that is like, you can use that science and data and all the supporting materials. And honestly, we shouldn’t be doing that. Because there you see the parallel about God created all these mechanisms, and whatnot. Yeah, that we use. So let’s do this, you know, got off to the races. Okay, well, because I want to pick apart your book, and then yeah, if people stick around till the end, you’re gonna give us a way that we can, we can read it as well. So the first thing that will kind of piggyback of what you had mentioned before, so the natural impulse of human preservation prevents the willful and deliberate destruction of the body, or even the society addiction first requires a mechanism pleasure, even if it’s distorted, it serves as a mechanism. So I feel like let’s talk a little bit about this idea of neuroscience and pleasure. And how it plays in because I think the what we’re understanding now about addiction and how it’s changed over the last couple of decades is we used to think, hey, the person struggling with addiction, they are beyond help, they cannot get help. There’s something wrong with them. Why would they throw away their life and And that’s not the case. It’s not like we’re willingly saying, oh, yeah, let’s destroy my life by doing this thing. Exactly. It’s there’s a body reaction to using a substance. Can you talk to us about that.

Yeah, yeah so the first thing to understand is that your body is its own entity. Okay, it is a self functioning being. And so when we recognize when we engage in any pleasure, right, so if we, let’s say, we take, I don’t know, cocaine, Cisco, or something like Molly, right? So you take Molly, and it feels really good to you. And you’re like, man, that felt really good. Well, it also felt really good to that independent body that functions and pumps blood without you asking it to that depresses and compresses your lungs without you asking to that fire synapses in your brain without you asking, too. And that body goes, Hey, wait a minute, I really liked that. And your body will then move you to engage in that process, again, whether it’s through thought, whether it’s through sweat, whether it’s through it, we’ll do anything it can to engage in what you just did. And you think it’s you. Right? So you’re like, Oh, well, I need to get into this again, because it feels really good. And your body wants you to become taken over. Because then your body can have what it wants at any given time. Okay, the problem is that we stand in the way of that to an extent, but the more we give into what I call addiction producing actions, the more our bodies begin to take over. So addiction is the moment when the will of the person has been completely supplanted by the body of the person. And your body wants to benefit, you know, this is this is its, its its ultimate state is to function well, okay. But when it experiences things that it likes, it goes out of its way to enjoy them. And it’s a incredibly selfish unit. That’s the amazing part about it is that your body wants what it wants, but it’s not correlating to the other aspects of your body. So for example, just take it over eating right? My tastebuds want fatty food, but my skin, my heart, my epidermal, you know, my my lungs, my liver, my colon can’t handle it. Right. So understanding that some of my body doesn’t care. Because this this side of me my tastebuds want it. So it’s not regulating, right? So once you get out of whack from that perspective, now your body’s trying to take over. So we think about ourselves as like, hey, I want to go to the you know, I want to go to the kitchen and get some juice and your body, if you’re in good standing goes, Okay, let’s go get some juice. And so it goes with you to go get juice. And when I went like this, my body’s performed all those functions, right? But if I’m a meth addict, and I go, I want some juice, my body’s like, No, you’re getting meth first. I will mess you up until we get math. Yeah. And that destructive quality is so amazing, is that your body is slowly deteriorating itself. And it doesn’t even recognize it. Because it’s so it’s so Id oriented. If you want to go with like, the concept of ego and super ego, it is where you want everything when you want it. And you don’t care. And here is the ultimate form of it. Right? Yeah, that to the super ego, which is basically conscience, right? To stop it from happening. But there’s this whole in between the whole time it’s happening, and so good.

Well, you that’s, I like this part of what you talked about, too, because you, I mean, you just illustrated the fact of how we produce dopamine. And when you use a substance, right, like you, oh, I want some juice. Well, eating healthy produces dopamine, it makes you feel good, because you need it to survive. When you use a drug, like your body turns on this style of dopamine, that you get more, and it leads to that feeling that impulse to do it again. But you talked about this in the book, too, is like, our our society is now saying, yes, yes. Do what feels good, do what feels right. Like, there’s not a consistent plan for for you to feel good. Unless you indulge in what you want right now you call it ID. But like that, that that it’s celebrated, even though we see the aftermath of it, right? But that’s the money is made when you indulge yourself daily. It feeds all the rest.

Understanding the Christian Perspective on Addiction and the Power of Love Over Judgment

It feeds a see this now this ties into why we’re doing right. I had a conversation with a friend of mine a little while ago, because you know, if it wasn’t for God, people actually wouldn’t do all this type of stuff. And I was like, Oh, that’s really profound. It’s almost like, What are you talking about? But the whole idea is like, we would see the pain. We would avoid the pain and we would move on with life. Why we don’t is we have a bunch of people around us that takes scripture and say you shouldn’t do that. God said that’s it. So I say it this way, right. Sin or addiction is shards of glass coated in chocolate, which tastes wonderful in the mouth. And then they lacerate the organs on the way down. Right? But sure screams that people for eating the chocolate because God said not to that’s the moralistic stance, right? The world just sucks at the chocolate coating and says you’re missing out on life’s biggest delicacies. You’re an idiot. What we all should be saying is, of course, it’s chocolate. You’d never swallow glass without it but we don’t do that. Well, well, that’s, that’s the problem. So basically, because of that, they just, they just basically go this side over here, this Christian side is more or less excited, says don’t do something, therefore we’re gonna run to it. Right? In running to it, they don’t recognize that it wasn’t just that this person said it, it was like God said it, because He wants your body to operate as optimal state because it’s just, he’s just the Creator. Right? It’s like a, it’s just like a, you know, buying a brand new BMW and reading the instruction manual. And here’s the high performance way to function your vehicle, right? It’s the same type of thing, right? So he wants us to highly function. Why? Because it gives him glory. When we succeed, when we accelerate, God gets glory. Right? Everybody goes, and look at your life, man. I mean, you’ve heard this phrase from religious people was like, praise god, this is going on in your life, you know what I mean? And same type of thing can happen from that perspective. And then who gets quick who’ve just got glory God did. So the more optimally we live, the better. But the world goes, I don’t want that religious angry. You know, there’s a great, there’s a great song, I forget who sings it. But it’s like, why would I want to be like you, you always look so angry, you always look so you know, so downtrodden. He is supposed to be but I understand why they feel that way. So they saw this stuff. And then what happens is we’re shackled to our bodies. And then the key is thrown away, because there’s nothing pushing back against the actions were committed. Yeah, so we’re free to do and we’re not even addicted. We’re just enjoying something more than most right to do, right. When you have something that pushes back against it. If there’s no push backs, at least until a certain point, which you know about in the book. You know, if there’s no push backs, then you just give your body complete, slaved for longer and longer periods of time until there is the till the final push back is the worst. You know what that is.

Yeah, exactly. And I think the similarity too, is that when it makes me cringe when I see, you know, like the Christians with the picketing and like, saying, Don’t do this, like when did when did that ever work? Even a Christian when did that ever change anyone’s mind? But since you say you are a Christian, why did Jesus ever do that? Rog always responded with love.

He always work for you, right? Like we forget, like, if it worked for us, you know, this is what I believe, okay? Sin is the term missing the mark, it’s an archery term. Okay. And it literally means you got an arrow, here’s perfection. Everywhere that arrow hits, that is an imperfection is called the sin line. I don’t know if you knew this, and this is I love this concept, right? It’s called the sin line. So the distance between the arrow and the location is sin. If you tell people they’re sitting if you go attack people, and you don’t give them the perfect to measure by, they’re just shooting arrows. The problem and that what we need to address is twofold. One, give him an arrow to hit but before that, tell them that the arrows are shooting are turning around like a boomerang and coming back and striking them on the arms. And the liver and the lungs and the mind and the in the in the heart. Right. Wow.

From Fear to Empowerment: Transforming Drug Prevention Strategies with Positive Messaging and Purposeful Living

Yeah, well, okay, this is so cool. The people were doing this in prevention 20 years ago, the just say, no campaign. It ruins your life. Yeah, but it’s all these scare tactics, showing them they’re missing the mark, not showing him, Hey, this is the great life that you can have, like true prevention is, is not just showing them what not to do. It’s well, if I don’t do this, what can I do? How great life can be I can achieve my goals. I can have valuable friendships, I can have a meaningful purpose in life. And that’s why all the protective factors surrounding a healthy person that helped create them. It’s not a bunch of don’ts. It’s not a bunch of sin, which I think in Spanish Sin means without, like, sin sin salt

I’m not doing Duolingo right now. So I learned that. Yeah. So like, it’s not about all the things with the you don’t have all your without, but what do you have, and what can you create? And that’s true prevention, which is why showing students even even in our assemblies, right, it’s like, there’s the assemblies that scare students and have been proven scientifically not to be effective, but I noticed the ones that empower them and bolded them to create a better future, which they think oh, I another motivational assembly. You know, the administrator administrators might say, hey, we don’t want a motivational assembly, we want you to scare the crap of our crap out of our kids. Because drugs, right? It’s like, No, you need something uplifting, they need a reason not to use because right now there’s so hopeless, they’re looking for that little bit of dopamine or escape, or what? No, they have nothing better than something better. 

Yeah, see my generation or the year before the generation before mine, the boomer generation took four drugs to enter into something right? They were looking for Nirvana, they were looking for spiritual purpose. They were with Timothy Leary. He was combining all this and saying, Hey, we can get to a higher plane. This generation takes drugs to escape something, the behavior, the hopelessness, the nihilism, the family loss, all that type of stuff. Right? So you have to address that. That’s the thing on first.

Understanding Pushback: A Key to Overcoming Addiction and Building New Pathways

Can you talk to me about pushback? Because once someone starts using, you talk about this idea of pushback. And, and apas, can you kind of tell us that story, however, you you know you do in the book. And I love that.

So all right. So addiction producing actions are any actions that lead to addiction, right? A push back mechanism is I’ll give you the example from the movie ray. So in the movie, Ray Ray starts becoming an addict. And the first group that pushes back against him is his wife, she finds the coat, she finds the heroine, and she says you need to stop this. And he says, Hey, I could stop anytime I want. Don’t Don’t judge me for this, right? So he faced the push back, that moment determines in that push back, is he really addicted? Or is he just done something for a time and gotten over it? Okay, or he can reject the push back and distance himself from that domain, which was the family domain, which he does in the movie. And he just goes on the road all the time. Right now he’s no longer addicted anymore, because the push back has been eliminated. Okay, so things start happening and happening, there’s like three different push backs I talked about in the book, when you get to the last push back, it’s not a domain you can distance yourself from, because the final domain that is a push back against your addiction is your own body. And in the movie, Ray, what happens is his own body starts to reject the drug that he’s taking. And it starts to affect his look, it starts to affect his his condition, his health condition, etc. And now the thing that has the addiction, and the thing that wants to get rid of the dictionary, one in the sand, and you’re done, you’re done at that point. Now, the cool thing about what you said, this ties into neuroscientific reality, you can’t just attack your addiction by just stopping it being an app. Okay, you have to supplant because what that is, is that’s a neuron, that’s a synaptic pattern in the brain that has grown so substantially that everything is filtered through it. Okay, what you have to do is you have to create a new synaptic pattern. And that’s an optic pattern has to be said, and fueled. That’s why addicts go to homeless shelters and other things and go on retreats and set and go to other countries and do missions trips, they have to get away from what they’re doing is that to build a new synaptic pattern, we know this from the standpoint of even working out, right, it takes 21 days to build that new synaptic pattern. It’s a lot harder with drugs. But the tragedy of it is, is that because you’ve given in the dopamine rush is always stronger at first. So you see us Le calls it the law of diminishing returns, he understood this before neuroscience did as well, right? But the reality and this is where and I hope this hits somebody really hard is the understanding of I look at meth, not as a drug, but as a direct strategy. Because here’s what happens with meth. When you take meth, let’s say you’re just a sad person. So you decide, oh, that’s gonna make me feel better. Meth, low lowers that basically creates a dopamine level in the brain. Okay, that stagnates at this level, okay, you can never get higher than this again. And the only way to get back to the level that you were when you took them out that first time is to take math again. You don’t even get higher than you were when you started you just get to the same level and then it starts slowly diminishing down and diminishing down and diminishing down and it kills your desire to eat kills your desire to sleep. And what does that do that starts emaciated you that starts losing hair and this ties in the bottom I just found this out a couple days ago. If you were not healthy, okay? This body this amazing wonder his body that you have doesn’t have enough energy to sustain all the aspects of your function. So the first thing that goes is your hair and nails and skin because your body goes well that’s not essential. You can be bald and still function I can still exist and have you bald, I don’t need perfect nails for you to exist. And it will then begin that’s why people lose their hair when they’re stressed. Right same thing happens that’s what’s happening with with meth and these drugs. You get to the point where it’s trickery, and it’s just destroying you. So there’s an incredible passage in Jeremiah that says All men are like grass. And the glory of men is like the flower of the grass, the flower withers and the grass fades. If he can destroy the grass, he can kill the glory. Right? All the amazing wonder of who you are is tied up in that flower, just wither the grass, flowers done.

Practical Tips for Preventing Addiction: Embracing Wonder and Celebrating Life

Wow. By studying faith, I’ve learned more about prevention than it looks anything else. Right. And it’s, it’s, we’re catching up with the neuroscience and all that stuff. But I want to I want to close with this. Because I really enjoyed this being like that faith is such a big part of my life, and how we use that as the analogy for everything. So this has been really, really fun for me. And I want to leave people with any sort of practical tips for the people that are listening right now. Maybe they’re Christian, maybe they’re not. But they want to help save more lives from addiction. Yeah, what’s one thing they could do, or start doing today to just be a little bit better at that 5% better at helping save more lives from addiction, and then I want to have you tell us how to get in touch with you there.

So two things, first of all, focus on the wonder of your life and the wonder of other people’s lives. That’s the first thing you can do right get into and the goal for addiction or any of that kind of stuff is to get into your own head. And to fixate on yourself, right addiction is selflessness. Fear is all that type of stuff is just basically us dwelling on ourselves. First thing we can do. Secondly, when somebody says, Hey, I’m okay, doing drugs till I microdosing, or I’m whatever, right? You don’t know what your body that independent thing, when you recognize the independence of your body, it changes everything. Because now I can’t know if I can microdose because I don’t know if my body is genetically precluded, you know, inclined to engage in a level that I don’t want it to engage in. So there is you have to you can’t start, you can’t, you can’t go through and again, I’m not like this illegal, it’s like, I don’t really care from a legalistic standpoint, I’m looking at from a neuroscientific standpoint, I’m looking at it from an epigenetic standpoint, right? So when you have that freedom to go, I can’t do this. So you talked about it, like, how do I talk to my daughter, I’ll give you an example. She’s in high school. I said to her when she was 15. I said, somebody’s got to come up to you. She’s 18. Now this year, and they’re gonna say, You got to try this the highest so incredible. I said, what they don’t realize what the people who made the drug don’t realize you the people who grew the drug don’t realize or manufacture the drug in some house. And you know, wherever the purpose of the drug is not, is not to get you hot, the purpose of the drug is to destroy your lives. And the high is just a mechanism to get that that to happen. Recognize that. And then you have to have a life for celebrating, right? You have to recognize that your life is worth celebrating. So surround yourself with people that celebrate life.

Investing in Their Future and True Freedom

So reading your book was really, really helpful. If people want to read it, where can they go?

So I have a number of books on Amazon that you can get just by typing in David W Litwin. But if you go to Davidwlitwin.com. The book is called addictions tipping point, I actually wrote it 18 years ago, I’ll put it up there free PDF, download it, do anything you want with it, pass it out to every one of your friends, I don’t need money for it. I don’t need money. And they can just grab it from the.com.

Perfect. Well, I want to definitely end the show. Thank you so much for being on it. And I want to end it with something that you had said that I think we could all use a reminder of being in this field, investing in young people investing in their future, and really putting yourself on the line because you don’t get you don’t get the kudos you don’t get the great feels from doing this work. Oftentimes, you’re known as like the drug guy and the drug ladies and you give that away.

Knowing that they can’t do the thing that’s most fun in their lives. Or they think you have some hope, in a way. Right?

Exactly but what you’re doing though, is you’re actually when they see you restricting their freedom, you’re giving them true freedom and a life well lived, well designed, that’s for them. And just like the one the teacher and the adult in your life, who cared about you enough to set those boundaries, and you realize later, is you know, keep doing the incredible work that you’re doing because you are changing lives. You’re saving lives, and you’re not alone in doing it. There’s people out there like us, and like David who are in different fields, doing different things, but we’re all working towards the same mission. So keep it up. And we’ll see you next Monday for another episode.