Justin McMillen: A 360° Reinvention of Addiction, Purpose, and the Future of Behavioral Health

22:40Justin McMillen:Finley, North Dakota to South Dakota, Montana, then Washington, that's where I went to high school. Then down to California, you go to college. And then this is like in and out of college for six years. And then I think I'm going to be an architect and that doesn't work. And then I dive hard and then all this stuff happens. So after a little while, I'm making money, like cash. I move in with this girl who's now my wife. And I'm kind of like, this is, I'm being blessed right now. And I don't really understand it, but just don't fuck it up. And I honestly, to this day, it's like, don't fuck it up.

23:20Justin McMillen:That's like my mind frame. It's just don't mess this up. Like doors keep opening. It's beyond my comprehension at this point what's happening. and I just don't want to screw it up. I just want to keep doing the right next best thing. So now more houses. I start leasing houses, and we're getting known. We're not involved in any way in this sober living or treatment conversation. It's the not-in-my-backyard thing at all. It's like people are seeing us as taking homeless people off the street. Sobriety is sort of a product of that. And my brother calls me. He's not happy in his job. And he's like, I want to do what you do.

23:57Justin McMillen:I'm like, no, you don't, dude. It's not like you don't want to this is not. And he's like, you're so happy. You feel good. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could do something together? And he's like, what if we did treatment? And I was like, treatment's bullshit. It doesn't work. The success rate of it's terrible. It's filled with predators. It just doesn't work. And he was like, well, what would you do if you could do it your way? And that was a really important question that like started to haunt me. And at the time I was also because my brain was repairing itself. I was going in and out of like minor psychosis to a point where it was pretty scary.

24:33Justin McMillen:Like I would be in the bathroom, you know, thinking like I'm not right. And this is like a year and a half into two years into sobriety and thinking like someone's going to find out like I'm schizophrenic. Like I'm not well. So so that led me to really getting involved heavily with exercise. So I was doing these long runs, long swims, and I was becoming obsessed with how do I fix my brain? And so then Clayton, my brother, brings up this thing. And my brother is like one of the most amazing people you'd ever meet. He's like, I don't know how to describe him. He's like, he's very analytical. He's constitutionally incapable of bullshit.

25:12Justin McMillen:Everything is just clear and direct. He's got a huge heart, and we argue all the time. It's like amazing. So anyways, he's like, what would you do if you could do it yourself? And then that was this important question that led me to thinking about why all the people that were living at the houses were getting well and staying sober. And because I'd never gone to treatment, I had no understanding of what treatment looked like, which was a huge blessing. Because, yeah, in hindsight, it's just like, how did it all happen the way it did? So what I ended up doing was I knew, I was like, well, let's start with like, how do you assess somebody who has addiction?

25:51Justin McMillen:So, you know, there's a pretty standard approach. It's biopsych social. Like you look through the three dimensions of health. Behavioral health is biopsych social. So I start reading these assessment tools and learning about it. I'm like, okay, all this makes sense. And then I'm like, okay, so how do you treat these things? Well, then you look at biology and there's no interventions to treat biology and addiction other than giving people drugs. And that was like, well, if you offer a drug addict as many drugs as they want, they're going to take as many drugs as they can. And so I was pretty dogmatic about that at first because I was like, drugs should not be involved in substance abuse, right?

26:29That's the – so I'm looking at that.

26:31Justin McMillen:I'm like, that doesn't make sense. Then psychology, you know, biopsych, social. So there's tons of ways to treat the psychological aspects of addiction, lots of different kinds of therapies. In fact, all treatment now, if you go, you sit in groups all day and you do one-on-ones, and that's how they treat addiction. And even though they're saying people are sick across these dimensions, they're only really treating psychology and then a little biology through psychopharmacological interventions and nothing socially. So as I came through that, then I started to look at the whole picture, and basically that led me to creating this big Venn diagram of how I could put these different kinds of modalities together that would treat people across all these different dimensions of health.

27:19Justin McMillen:And to do that, trying to find out what healthy looks like was really interesting, and you can relate to this, I'm sure. It's like, what does being biologically optimized look like? Who knows the answer to that? You could go on YouTube and find a hundred different versions, thousands of different versions of what people think that is. And then psychologically healthy. Every treatment center is saying they're treating these things, but they're not aiming for anything. It's like we just treat them. Well, it's like you don't go anywhere in life unless you're aiming for something. So over a course of about a year and a half, I put all this stuff together.

27:56Justin McMillen:I start talking to different people that I want to get involved. And Darren, it was incredible. All these people quit their jobs. My brother quit his job. People came to work for free. My best friend that I grew up with moved from Seattle down. He was doing architecture. He came down. this Navy SEAL that I used to run around with in my early 20s, he came in, he helped me develop this modality that focuses on social health, modality being a treatment intervention. And then the Treehouse treatment model was born. And before it was born, and I was talking to other treatment centers and stuff, and they were like, this is never going to work.

28:29Justin McMillen:You can't get drug addicts to wake up at 4.30 in the morning. You're not going to get them to work out all the time. You have to put them on medication or insurance will never pay you. It was gross. I mean, all these meetings I was having, I was just like, this is crazy, people's perceptions. But we started going, and it started slow, and then it grew, and it became everybody we treated stayed well. And two years in, well, meaning they didn't relapse. So two years in, we were like, did we cure addiction? You know, we were very bold and bullshit. We solved the problem, right? Like, this is how you have to do this.

29:08Justin McMillen:and at that point we ran our first data collection so my brother being an engineer is like if you can't measure it didn't happen kind of a thing right and uh we developed these 28 dimensions of health we started looking at people who were healthy had been through our program and we were like how do they live their lives and we learned a ton about it i should rewind back too though because when i was talking about what are you aiming for uh i've always been obsessed with the human condition and where people are at. And so when I was thinking what's biologically optimized look like, it led me down a road and I've gotten way into this sense, but around genetics and evolution.

29:48Justin McMillen:And there absolutely is a way in which to live that is best for our genetics and how they evolved over time. And so if you look at ancestral fitness, there's a certain amount of movement that we need to engage in every day. And if we don't, we don't remain healthy. It's just a fact. Our genes are the same as they've been for 20 ,000 years. You and I are built for a completely different environment than we live in. And we all forgot that. Like our grandmas didn't. They knew that you had to move. And so treating biology, the idea was how do you get people to a level of fitness that was similar to our ancestors?

30:28If you can get them there, then the hypothesis would

30:32Justin McMillen:be that a lot of the issues with addiction would either go away or subside. And again, we've learned so much since then. But that was a huge part. So biology and then psychology, like psychological health. Well, a big part of addiction is avoiding pain and chasing pleasure, right? And this is all limbic stuff. And so what is the right psychological profile to remain sober? And it has to do with resilience and being able to face things rather than hide from them. And so all of our psychological interventions are focused on strength-based psychology and keeping people mentally strong. And then the social side, this one was really interesting.

31:14Justin McMillen:I firmly believe, and I say it all the time, that if people don't have humans to connect with, that we're built for bonding. And if we don't have people to bond with, we'll bond with anything that produces the same neurochemical response. It could be technology, It could be material things. Right. Drugs are really good at that. Exactly. They produce all the same neurochemical responses. And so humans are built for bonding. They're built for moving. And if you don't do those two things, a symptom could become addiction. And again, it's evolved because we've learned so much more around genetics.

31:47Justin McMillen:And I could talk to you a ton about your dad and probably you as well. because what we come to understand is that the same traits that predispose people to addiction are the exact same traits that predispose people to high performance, which is extraordinary because what that means is that this idea that if you're born and you become an addict, that you actually could just be sort of a high performer of the species that got lost and didn't have the right environmental conditioning.

32:21Darin Olien:Right, it's like the other side of the coin. Exactly. Like instead of seeing it, that's the problem, but it's an unexpressed, healthier version of whatever you're perceiving or potentially want to do but not giving yourself the permission to do. My dad was that.

32:39Justin McMillen:Yeah, yeah. 100%. Yeah, I mean, you described him being... So one of the things we know now is that there's... so historically, they've been trying to find the genetic answers to addiction for a long time. And they've been looking at it through the idea that we metabolize substances differently. So some people are rapid metabolizers of opiates, and so they're more likely to become addicted to opiates. And there's been a lot of research on that, and it's good. But what we're focused on, and we did it accidentally in the beginning, and now we're purposeful on it, is that there are genes that code for how our dopaminergic system works and how our executive functioning works and how these two parts of our brain work together, that if you have a certain type of polymorphism and certain genes like DRD4 and DRD2, that you will have this constant feeling of being...

33:32Justin McMillen:It's hard for people that are built like me to be satisfied. You always feel like there's something more. There's something that I should be doing. There's something out there. There's this thing that I should have. and if you don't feed that anything that you put in exogenously that activates that and satiates it becomes the answer and so your dad not expressing himself to the greatest ability was incredibly painful for him and we know that there's genes that code for sensitivity as well that not all of us experience the world the same way some of us are very sensitive to the environment and why that matters is that if you're sensitive to the environment you drop somebody and a modern world, it can turn out to look like a combination of these genes as ADD.

34:19Justin McMillen:You can feel incredibly uncomfortable in your own skin, like something's wrong all the time. And these things were advantages for all of human history, but in the modern world, they're not because everything's overstimulation and there's extremes. And then you have this dissatisfaction and you want to go, go, go. And then there's other genes that are related to how we bond and form connections to things. And these can become obsession. So you'll find that people that have a history of addiction or, you know, or are addicts or in recovery, that there's this obsession with anything. It could be when they get sober, they're obsessed with cars or guns or, you know, whatever, or they process addictions.

35:03Justin McMillen:It's like there's this attachment thing. Well, that in early history was very beautiful because when we lived in tribes, forming deep bonds with others was the key to our survival and being sensitive to our environment allowed us to notice everything around us to be able to hunt and do what we needed to do and not being satisfied. Or protect or whatever. Yeah, exactly. So they've even named it warrior and warrior gene. So this is the new frontier of all of this stuff. And we kind of stumbled onto it through our work by not knowing enough, but then ending up discovering all of these amazing things.

35:41Justin McMillen:So a couple years into our work, the first big win was Harvard heard about what we were doing or some people at Harvard. These are like world-renowned scientists. One is Dr. John Rady, who wrote a book called Spark, and he's kind of the world's foremost authority on exercise and its effects on neurochemistry. And he'd done all this research on it his whole life. And then the other one was Bessel van der Kock, who he's sort of the king of trauma. He was the guy. He wrote a book called Body Keeps the Score. He's super famous in our world, international bestselling author and all that. So they invite us out to Harvard, and they're going, we've been studying this our whole lives.

36:16Justin McMillen:You guys are practically applying this stuff. And you think you know why it works, but let us tell you really why it works, right? And so we're idiots. But we discovered they needed us as much as we needed them because we were able to demonstrate what they'd been saying was true. Wow. Yeah. So that was a huge milestone because it was like, this is kind of real. And, you know, we never, no investors, no nothing, bootstrap, family-owned business. It was like, at the same time also, Darren, this is the other big kind of wake-up call was, there was another treatment center that started the same time as us.

36:52Justin McMillen:And people were dying constantly in their care. And they grew to 100. In their care. Around their care. They were doing all these things. And they grew to$100 million a year in revenue. And we're barely scraping by. And yet everybody, I mean, to this day, if you mention our name in circles, and now it's circles at HHS, RFK. I mean, it's people know about us. It's always with the, it always is followed with these guys know exactly what they're doing and they do great work. So this company grew so massive, people were dying right and left. And we were looking at it. My brother's like, how does this make any sense?

37:26Justin McMillen:And this is the perverse incentives issue with medicine in general, which is everything is rewarding failure, right? So if everybody at my center's relapsed right now, I would make more money. And that's a problem because insurance clocks start over. And so we learned that if we were going to continue to do the work we were doing, we had to make a choice between are we going to make the most amount of money possible or are we going to continue to provide the best care and be able to stand behind what we were doing. We've had to make that choice every year, year after year. but from a business standpoint and I think you're an entrepreneur right yeah yeah so from a business standpoint you look at a field that's failing the public and it's like

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40:05Justin McMillen:There's a huge opportunity here because if we can just demonstrate over time that we're really good at what we do eventually people will notice and that's what started to happen so we just continued to get these sort of advocates in the space that you know were appearing and showing up and promoting us and pushing us forward and then and then we made this big move to not meet people running a treatment center we started treehouse academy and research institute so now we became a company that would study addiction and build treatment centers and build treatment models and then we got we gained the trust of the u.s military and department of defense so we started working with special operations forces like active duty uh and transitioning and veterans and uh yeah it was a big big one yeah so and it makes sense because we return all of the all the war fighters return to work operationally fit and they're ready to go so they come to us they get you know they work through all their stuff and then we bring them back and there's still this incredible asset to the U.S.

41:09Justin McMillen:government. That's the way they see it, right? Is the U.S. government helping to support them financially? It's always a struggle getting paid for things. But, yeah, I mean, it's TRICARE and there's also contracts that you can get that we're playing with too just to have like an easy button, you know. But working with all the major bases, we've treated guys from Delta to on down the line, you know. And that's been an incredible thing. So we've done really well on the military side. Then first responders. We've been asked to build programs for police and firefighters. We built a jujitsu as therapy program up in Oregon.

41:50Justin McMillen:We did a healing heroes program to combat compassion fatigue for firefighters in Nashville. So we opened more centers. We've got five now. and then we had this crazy thing happen last year which is we got a call from rfk's team and they're like he's like bobby wants to come see what you guys are doing so he shows up and he spends two hours with us and then to our complete mind like it just melted our brains he publicly endorsed us and then put it up on the hhs website so he hasn't ever done that with any people were like oh he paid him or something and he was like i can't be bought and you know there was even attorneys pushing back on him doing that so that pulled me into dc and they connected me to this former chief scientist at crisper who's also he was head of bioinformatics of the fda and now we're building the comprehensive addiction research network and it's crazy, Darren.

42:53Justin McMillen:All this stuff is like, yeah. What's so cool is that the future of healthcare is actually going to look a lot more like behavioral health because they're saying, we can treat cancer using these kinds of models. You can treat diabetes. Someone started to figure out that it's one thing to wait until people get sick and then to give them medications, but at the end of the day, 90 % of the healthcare spend is on chronic disease. and chronic disease is almost always, almost always poor choices. So you got to treat people's choice making, the part of their brain that makes a choice. Well, what area of healthcare do they make the worst choices and it's the most extreme?

43:33Justin McMillen:Well, it's addiction. So it makes sense that they go and find the people who are doing the best in that regard and they go, how are you changing behavior the way you're doing it in such an extreme case and can we apply this to diabetes? heart disease and all these that's starting to open it's opening yeah and they're into it like i just flew in from dc yesterday i was in it was all over the news i was in this like meet the press thing and it was like dr oz and patrick kennedy rfk and everybody and the whole thing was behavioral health and how the future of america is health care is behavioral health and that well yeah it's so good for us guys like you and what we're doing because these are the things that we've been saying forever and it's finally we're getting actual a voice you know um so yeah i'm in a we are in an incredible position and it's mind-blowing and it's hard for me to even wrap my head around and and of course there's value i mean our organization has got value now and but i just It's the same thing.

44:40Justin McMillen:It's like, don't fuck this up. Just do the next best thing.

44:43Darin Olien:We know it's interesting. That was a lot. I just talked about it. No, no, no. That's perfect. It's unbelievable. It's a good scaffolding for me to understand because, wow, I barely could grasp just by reading what you were doing. And then by that, it makes a lot more sense. but it's interesting kind of going back to your origin that you know you didn't come from you even like you're focused on like what's going on in my own head so let me start applying like a almost common sense but also it isn't when you're in an addiction but there is something pulling you towards a different way of applying what can I do for me that could create a different outcome.

45:36Darin Olien:And then the beautiful thing, it's not coming from the space, you asked other questions. Yeah. You created the architecture of, you know, there's so many missing elements in addiction care. I actually got, I went into it. I was lecturing in nutrition stuff at a few centers. Because I don't know. I felt like after my dad passed, I don't know, it was like a way to kind of give something back to people. But also the failure rate was just heartbreaking. Like you were just with someone and they seemed good and then boom. And it was just you wanted to see they were trying to holistic, but there was these elements that were missing.

46:26Darin Olien:and and and so to break it down describe those elements again so like the the the you said a

46:37Justin McMillen:social element yeah yeah yeah you teach people how to bond with other people and you use like tribal so the thing about you could you could somebody could try to recreate treehouse right now and they could bring all this stuff together and just like you you could go and lecture on nutrition, but if it's about engagement with that, right? And so even though you have all of these different variables within a treatment environment, what you're really treating is the person's ability to engage with that stuff and then to sustain that over their life. And so you have to get into, so this is where the social side comes into play is that like to come to Treehouse, you have to interview to get in, which everyone told us never do that.

47:18Justin McMillen:It won't work. You're begging people to come in. You can't make them interview, which totally works guys come in and they're like i want to be here and they sit with the other guys in treatment and without any of us in the room and they get interviewed and then they get accepted into their community right the peers the peers do it oh no way yeah yeah and everyone's like this is business suicide like what but the the reality is that the peers and their common struggle having a conversation with the person who's trying to come in is actually one of the most healing things that could ever happen guys come out of these rooms in sobbing grown men who are tough as nails come out and they're like this is exactly where i need to be and it's like they get wrapped up by this group it's each team is no more than 12 these guys all live together and they're like hip to hip for six months so they they go through that whole experience and then they're living so I'll kind of rewind to when I brought Neil on board, who's the Navy SEAL that still works with me to this day.

48:23Justin McMillen:I came to him, and I was like, I want to make this program, and I want it to be like the SEALs. I want everyone to be as close as the SEAL teams, and he's just like, Justin, he's laughing. He's like, that'll never happen. And I'm like, well, how would you do it if you could do it? He's like, oh, he's like, okay, okay. Well, you need to have guys on top of each other. They got to be competing with each other but also wanting each other to win. And they got to know each other's sleeping habits and farting habits. And it's like you got to have them enmeshed nonstop all day long every day. And I was like, okay.

48:56Justin McMillen:And then he shows me this surf passage exercise, which is like guys paddling boats through the surf together. I don't know if you've ever seen that. And he goes, this is how we determine if people are good team players. And that was a very important moment because I went home that night and started learning about it. And I thought if I could put people on boats, have them paddle through surf, and I had clinicians on the beach, I would be able to know who's really failing in terms of dealing with common struggle and how well they support each other. And that became action-based induction therapy, which later, it was like later we brought in all the evidence-based practices to support this idea.

49:36Justin McMillen:But that happens at Treehouse. That's Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning. These guys are paddling through the surf together. Oh, my God. Guys from the Midwest who've never been in the ocean, coming out next to an operator that's been doing that in the SEAL teams. They're all together. They're paddling through the surf. It feels scary, but it's not. And you learn how people are interacting. So these guys are constantly building connections and support with one another. And these bonds go on well after treatment. So once a person, the most natural way for us to feel that feeling we get from booze or something else is to find a connection to a human.

50:13Justin McMillen:So all treatment should be focused on promoting those connections in every way we possibly can. What we learned later, which was so cool, is that the part of our brain, our frontal cortex, there's different ideas around this, but there's a pretty decent body of evidence and a lot of support for the idea that our prefrontal cortex developed for us to be social. There's a direct correlation between the complexity of a mammal's social structure and a size to body weight ratio of the prefrontal cortex. And we also know that animals that don't have social structures don't have PFCs. And so what's interesting about that is the PFC is also the governor for the limbic system.

50:55Justin McMillen:So we have our limbic system saying run away, hide, chase pleasure, fight. This is the part that drives, this is our pressure, our force forward. And then you have the frontal cortex. it's kind of like a sail that manages the wind coming off of here. Well, if this all developed for socialization and you want to make it stronger, then maybe the best way to do it is to put people in complex social situations and stress this muscle, for lack of a better way to put it, so that it's better at keeping the limbic system in check. So one of our hypotheses is that because we do so much intense social stuff, that that's strengthening the prefrontal cortex in such a way that it can keep the limbic system in check.

51:33Justin McMillen:So it's like literally working on the two parts of the brain that have to be sort of dancing well together for a human to be able to not destroy themselves with chasing pleasure and avoiding pain. And yeah.

51:47Darin Olien:Well, it certainly makes sense from when you hear, I've met a bunch of special forces guys and guys in that community type over the years and, you know, what they say about their team. Yeah. Like it seems as though then by what you're saying that that is naturally built in within they'll literally die for each other. Yeah. You know, so it's not I'm going to run into this, you know, situation by myself and blah, you know, as opposed to this. I'm protected by my backside. Like I'm not the expert, but I'm just kind of pontificating with. then all of a sudden you are locked you are family you are and and then they're all tight because because they they understand this yes yeah so you've created that system in a safe way without the guns to to provide the balance that wasn't there before exactly and and we know now

52:53Justin McMillen:that there's deep roots in evolutionary theory that support it. So every organism's job is to survive. That's what we're here for. And most evolutionary biologists would say that the main reasons humans made it to here is because of our ability to collaborate and work together. Okay, so if you think about that, we used to live in tribes of 100. Everybody had their role. My job was to maybe weave baskets, you kill antelope. and our ability to survive was totally dependent on our ability to have a relationship. I had to be necessary, right? The worst thing a human can be is unnecessary. When you're unnecessary, this is why people die right after they retire, is if you're not necessary, you get sick and depressed and sad and you perish.

53:39Justin McMillen:It's the same reason why it's the most painful thing you can do to a person is put them in solitary confinement because...

53:45Darin Olien:Okay, everybody, are you ready to upgrade your operating system? I know I am. I'm always game to do that. Not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. That's what we're doing over at Super Life Patreon. This isn't just behind-the-scenes membership. It's a global experiment in conscious living that I am connected to, committed with, in every cell of my body. Each week, you'll get exclusive access to deeper podcast conversations, extended interviews, voice notes from the road of me personally, personal reflections, behind-the-scenes footage, community wellness challenges, and even surprise drop-ins that I no longer do on social media because I don't really dig it anymore.

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55:18Justin McMillen:It's a signal that when I don't have humans, I'm going to die because if you were ostracized out of a tribe, you died. We evolved for this. Anyone who couldn't collaborate died off and the species just continued to evolve. So move us into modernity in a time where human beings don't have to be necessary. We work on assembly lines. We don't see the product of our work. Most people, this is why purpose is so important. Everyone's like, I've got to find my purpose. We have to know what we bring. And so all, you know, again, going back to this managing culture or the social dimension of addiction, every single person in any health care environment needs to know what it is that I bring to the table and why I'm necessary.

56:02Justin McMillen:and what I need, right? So like I'm not good at certain things, and I need that from you. When you have that, you form attachments and bonds that are incredibly powerful. And we know from there's a great book called Tribe from Sebastian Junger, who's an amazing person. I've had a chance to talk to him a few times. He's just an incredible guy. And the whole book basically explains how adversity causes humans to come together. And there's so much statistics on this where after 9-11, everybody comes together, right? Like we appear to need some sort of external force for us to bond, which sucks because it sort of perpetuates war.

56:42Justin McMillen:And like, you know. That's the bad expression of it. Yeah, yeah. But we need, so why is that? Well, in history, what happened? We had a famine or we had something going on. We lived in tribes and then something bad would happen and we collaborate, come together. Okay, who's going to do what? And we all get close. Wartime. You have someone trying to kill you. Everyone comes together. These soldiers get close. So it activates this very old and powerful signal inside of us that says, this is the time to get close. And we form these attachments that are powerful. And if you don't have that in life and you're built, you're sort of built differently than everyone else, this genetic thing, life is incredibly painful.

57:23Justin McMillen:And again, any exogenous substance that produces that same response will lead you to your own self-destruction, potentially.

57:32Darin Olien:Yeah, Jesus. I mean, there's so much power in what you're saying because it's now that I kind of go back to my dad not expressing what he actually knew he wanted to express. And I said to myself, I'm not going to not do that. And I started, I still have a desire. I can't stop. Like, let's build community. That's super life. Like, let's keep, I can't stop. And I'm afflicted sometimes by it because I keep getting more information and I keep seeing another world that we can create. So I have some interesting questions here that because of, that you know we're we are geared for that tribal you know max 150 people right 100 150 people whatever that tribe is because we can we can we're aware of all of those people we have connections intimate relationships with them yeah exactly and so once it goes beyond that it almost goes it flips and it goes that's why you can go to new york and feel lonely yeah so you can be in LA and be lonely.

58:57Darin Olien:Like it's, we can't grok the entirety of that thing. And it breaks apart this kind of deep need. And so all longevity research, all happiness research, all contented research goes back to community over anything else. So I think it goes, what you're saying, it goes into these bonded necessities that we still have. So I guess a question I have is, how the hell, aside from addiction, how do we find that again in this modern world that seems to be flying in a completely different direction and separating us, isolating us, taking our attention, literally cultivating our attention to nothing. You have nothing for it.

59:55Darin Olien:Scrolling or something, you're gaining nothing from it except a dopamine hit. But then potentially even worse off as a result. That is an absolute addiction. So at a massive scale.

1:00:11Justin McMillen:How do we get out of this mess?

1:00:13Darin Olien:Yeah, I think about that all the time. I do too. I think about that all. At times that I've put health cleanses together or things to move people in a healthier direction, both exercise or whatever, the biggest juggernaut for all of it is when I put people together. And they digitally didn't even have to meet. They just were like, oh, we're going through this thing. Yeah, I drank my water today. I exercised today. And those people, years later, were still friends. And they were in different countries. It even worked through technology in a certain sense. Because that biology is still the same.

1:00:55So how do we build this alternate reality?

1:01:04Justin McMillen:We should figure that out in this podcast today. We're going to figure it all out right now. I think it starts with a real deep environmental assessment of where we're at. I think people, it starts with conversations like this and for us to look at this in a way, and it's hard because they're simple ideas, but they're complicated. So figuring out how to talk about them in a simple way, I think they're just, we have to, let's see, you said a lot of stuff. So there's ways to, I think, I think that the immediate situation that we have is that we've got a country that's deeply distracted, like you said, that we solved a lot of problems with modernity, but then we're left with being sick and unhealthy.

1:01:53Justin McMillen:And I think we have a responsibility. I think this country has a responsibility to show the world how to engage with all of these technological advancements in a way that doesn't destroy us. I think we have to realize the answers can be found by looking through a rearview mirror into our history and we have to bring some of these old ideas back and it can't be It can't be, it can start really simple with just you knowing everybody in your neighborhood when you go to the store, knowing people's names. You understanding what it is that you bring to the table. Like for example, I went through a ton of, I looked at, I did a little bit of research on you.

1:02:32Justin McMillen:You have a, you've created a, you have a position in a space. You're necessary. If you weren't here, there would be a missing voice. You know that. You feel it. And the more that you want to do that, you could say, oh, it's because I want to be more successful. I want to make more money. But the driving force in that is you want to be necessary. I think everybody understanding how they're necessary and how the world would be different if they weren't in it is really important. That's a huge piece of it. I think you could see evidence of us wanting this so badly by looking at how tribal our country has become.

1:03:12Justin McMillen:You know, people are so desperate for human connection that we're forming all these little micro tribes all over the place. There's two big camps. They're fighting. It's us against them. You know, like the current administration, there's so much bagging on the other side, right, and both sides, but it's really bad. But if you look at it through this lens, it makes sense because by creating an oppositional force, it could be an existential threat, just like a famine or saber-tooth tigers that are hunting for us in the woods. That kind of rhetoric produces a bond within that particular tribe. So it's just understanding the mechanisms first.

1:03:52Darin Olien:That's huge, though. I mean, understanding the mechanism, I mean, it's expressing itself not in a healthy way. But that polarity then creates like, okay, I know this and they're wrong, so therefore I'm valuable over here in my camp. Yes. And I'm doing the same thing over here trying to create value, and then people throw all kinds of weird-ass things on social media and everything else. And not understanding the mechanism, they're just kind of, they are expressing it. Yeah. But it's like, but how do we do it? They don't know why it's happening.

1:04:27Justin McMillen:They don't know why it's happening. And if you just look at it, you'll see that every time, all you have to do is produce an external threat. You don't want to produce external threats. But if there's any external, this is why we love sports teams and why everybody comes together because it's like, it's the other side and we're this, we're the patriots and you guys are this, whatever it is. It's like, this is my tribe. It's super old. This is a very deep part of who we are. Again, anyone who couldn't do that in our species through human history died off because they weren't part of and so we got better and better at forming attachments to survive and so i don't know what you do about that because well they're

1:05:06Darin Olien:using it yeah so all the algorithms and all of that stuff it's actually using this system yeah it's hijacking the system to to to but but but breaking out of it because then i'm just my limbic then is just reacting to like oh my god that's threat now that now that's all i'm seeing and so now i'm thinking that that's threatened it's made some of it just made up yeah right so it's but it's hitting these systems and so how do i then and then it goes back to purpose it goes back to what am i doing today and that's where it's like man like if there's anything we got to stop doing is thinking that these are real threats.

1:05:55Darin Olien:Right. Because they're really not. Well, I mean, I want to be light and say that. I understand what you mean. Of course there's threats, but you don't even know what's real anymore. You don't. Unless you came over the table, I know, started swinging, I know there's a threat. Right. That's as much, but we're so lost in it because something's showing up here, That's a threat. And now we're being yanked around by this very old system. Yeah. Yeah.

1:06:28Justin McMillen:I mean, you're exactly right. And I think, I mean, that's a huge piece, too, is that all the messaging we get. So Google got pretty smart. And I forget the name of that movie that came out, that documentary. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What was it called? Where it shows, like, how Google knows everything about us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, what's that? I don't know. We'll put it in the link or whatever. Yeah, whatever that movie is. But the idea is like it used to be just search for what you want. And then Google got really hip to the idea of the reticular activating system, which is everybody, we spend more time trying to ignore what we don't believe to be true than we do actually.

1:07:09Justin McMillen:That's the whole reason why when you buy a car, you see that car everywhere. Our brains are designed to just focus on our beliefs. and so once Google figured that out and again it's all about engagement it's what do these people believe and how can we give them more of what they believe because it's a reinforcement move well then what that creates is these tribes and communities of people who can find all day long reinforcement of their beliefs and so what do we do about that I think it has to do with I don't think Google's going to change you could say just take this thing away from me or we can learn to engage with this stuff and use it as a superpower rather than something that destroys us.

1:07:53And so that's, you know, I watched during COVID.

1:07:55Justin McMillen:It was so interesting to see how many people were, like, intoxicated with being controlled. It was, like, pretty unreal. Like, people wanted it so badly. And I was like, why is this happening? Like, people were like, I'm going to put on 15 masks. I'm going to do this, you know. And I didn't judge them. I was just like, I'm always curious. Like, why is this happening? And I think there's, in our society right now, I think people know that they're out of control and they know that they're constantly being bombarded and they're just constantly in a limbic state, chasing pleasure, avoiding pain. That it's sort of like the dog whisperer when a dog's out of control.

1:08:33Justin McMillen:And it's because there's nobody, there's no leader, right? And so when a leader shows up and says, stay in your house, do this, it feels really good for people because they're like, I can't handle myself.

1:08:46Darin Olien:Because I'm scared. I'm scared.

1:08:47Justin McMillen:Take this stuff away from me. I'm out of control. Similar to like I have four children. Like if I raise my kids and I didn't give them values to engage with freedom, they'd self-destruct. So that was that. I mean, this is like, this gets into a bigger conversation about the state of the country because America is so amazing. I like to think of it, I've become really patriotic over the years, and I grew up with a military father, and I was very, everything, you know, different than you. It was like whatever dad did, I was like the opposite, you know. It was like I didn't want to, and we fought about it a lot.

1:09:23Justin McMillen:Now I see it that you look at the whole world, and a large group of people came here, dissatisfied people came here, and there's a whole, obviously, the indigenous population. I don't want to even get into that. But there's people that came here to start something new.

1:09:39Darin Olien:The way they went about it is however they went about it. But they did it. They did it.

1:09:43Justin McMillen:They did it. And they came here, and it was like they all started procreating. And the people that got here were the most adventurous ones. They were, you know, the ones that made it were the ones that were dissatisfied. And so they came to this country, and then they produced a system that was meant to be the greatest expression of human nature possible. Freedom. Right? And so cool. What happened? Like, boom, the explosion of innovation and ideas that brought most of the world out of poverty and a lot of good things happened. But the founding fathers, they were, they had, there was a lot of values because there was a pure, you know, there was a puritanical element to it.

1:10:19Justin McMillen:There was a lot of religion that was tied to it. So freedom alone is dangerous, but freedom with a set of values that's wrapped around that so you can engage with the freedom is the key. So I think people need to find values. They've got to have their own personal constitution. Like, what is the rules I use to engage with the world that I live in? And you get that in different ways. I think we're seeing a big push towards the spiritual side of things, especially Christianity is like on a huge uprise. And I think it's because people want a rule set to engage with freedom. And if we don't do it, the freedom is going away.

1:10:59Justin McMillen:I get some point if we get too far out of line the country's not gonna not exist anymore the government's gonna say you guys are out of control we're gonna start pulling freedoms it's happening right now with with health care there's like there's big questions on the table around privacy right like like there's a lot of push to remove people's right to privacy around their healthcare information. And it's because things have gotten so bad that it's almost like, we'll just do this. Or regulating the internet. It's like, oh, these guys can't, they're wasting all their time on their phones. Let's do what China's doing.

1:11:38Justin McMillen:We'll regulate TikTok. Well, that sounds really good. But the reality is that if you regulate, you remove freedom. And what would be better is if we learn to engage with freedom. But to do that, we have to have a conversation about how we engage with freedom. And then that gets into Why do people make the choices they make? And what's driving us to make choices? And this is why the work I'm doing all kind of relates to that because I'm dealing with people that are so limbic that they, yeah, that's.

1:12:08Darin Olien:Yeah, it's a big one. It's a big one, and it keeps me up at night sometimes in terms of whether this is right or wrong. I know enough of what's going on in the world to not need to feed myself with it anymore. Because I'm like, okay, how about we create something better? How about we bring a dry sponge to water around joy, contentment, freedom, sovereignty, all of that stuff. And so I'm at a point where I don't like to wane around for people. And I'm certainly not putting my bet on governments to do it. right and so it's like well what can we do as people who get to live in on this world on this planet in this country and anyone in any country like what can we do how can we build how can we feel a sense of purpose uh and and and and that i think is is some of the things that you can start building the architecture yeah right now absolutely right and what you're doing you're you're creating your own you're you're creating a model that seemed to be about addiction but it's actually about the human expression yeah and the human experience and when supplying those things and again i love the the the the addict that came in didn't become an addict was from the prison system and created structure.

1:13:48Darin Olien:And then there's this thrivability that you even stumbled upon. And then you stumbled upon your own purpose with reluctancy, right? But you kept take something about that. You kept taking steps in that. And now you're further expressing that in helping people. So I guess going back to what you're doing, opening up these other facilities. So what's the future look like for you with what you're doing?

1:14:18Justin McMillen:I want to work. I'm working on a policy level now. So I'm working directly with the U.S. government. I'm in every room when it comes to addiction at the highest level possible. And I want to do research to demonstrate that there's a highly effective way to treat addiction. Comprehensive Addiction Research Network is more than that too, though, because it's about, so this is so cool. So we're going to take people who are in sobriety, 10 years, five years, two years and one year, 250 of each. We're going to get their genetics, look at these nine genes. There's 512 different combinations of those nine genes.

1:15:04Justin McMillen:So imagine 512 different types of people who are sober. Then we've been talking to aura. We're going to put aura rings on all of them. We're going to run them through extensive, validated psychometric testing. We're going to look at all their sleep patterns. We're going to scan their brains and look at the anterior mid-cingulate cortex. And we're going to develop what healthy looks like for number 405 or number 352 or whatever. So what is their psychological profile? What does their daily activity look like? Gut biome? We're doing a whole bunch of stuff. We're measuring all of that. And why that matters, this goes back to that.

1:15:45Justin McMillen:There's no targets. We need targets. So addiction treatment's just been throwing shit at the wall and praying that it's going to work for years. The people I'm working with did a thing with cancer where they applied personalized medicine to cancer and they reduced death rate of cancer by over 30%, all cancers. It's still a mess, but there's progress. So now it's like, let's figure out what healthy looks like, figure out what the pattern of life is for these people and the way that they conduct themselves, and everyone will be different. And then now you take that information, and when somebody comes into treatment, you swab them.

1:16:21Justin McMillen:And if they don't want to be swabbed, you can ask them a bunch of questions that will get you close to the same answers because not everyone wants to have their genes looked at. and then you now know that this person, say they're number 351 type, you know that this kind of person, the most important thing for them is sleep. This person, it's gut biome. This type of genetics, it's going to be the amount of social relationships they have. And the exercise is not as important. Why that matters, Darren, is because now the treatment plan becomes dynamic and it auto-populates, and that's the research network, is basically this massive infrastructure that will, all the data that's collected on that person as they're going through treatment will go into something called the hive, which is like every person can have their own honeycomb on it.

1:17:11Justin McMillen:It's blockchain, similar to like a crypto wallet where nobody else can access it. And super computation can analyze it. And it's constantly updating treatment plans so that as the person goes through treatment, that they're adjusting what's focused on. and we're going to see outcomes like, wow. Yeah, and it'll be the same for, we're going to do it for other things as well.

1:17:32Darin Olien:So that's where I went, like going in terms of healthcare. Yeah. So it's reacting to the biochemical individuality and whoever that person is.

1:17:43Justin McMillen:Yep, that's the future. Wow. That's the, that's the, and it's got, we've got support from several different agencies. They asked us to do it. And it's the right people, and I'm excited about that. So that's part of what we're doing. That's one layer. Another thing we're working on is value-based care. So we've never taken on investors because we've never wanted anyone to control what we do because there's a way to do what we do and make a lot more money. So what my brother has said from the beginning, and it's been incredible, he's like, we have to figure out a way to align the dollars we make with outcomes.

1:18:22Justin McMillen:and so that's happening in healthcare already a little bit. There's certain sections of healthcare where they're paying more for people to stay well. And what's cool... A little bit. Yeah, a little bit, yeah. What's cool is that this is a big initiative with Dr. Oz for CMS and there's a huge initiative. Like this is, RFK is all about this. It's also opened up.

1:18:43Darin Olien:I have a consultant who deals with the FDA all the time and they're so overwhelmed they don't know what to do, which is why they ask her all the time. she does a lot of IRB stuff as well. And that's what she's also saying. There's doors opening that weren't open. There's opportunity here. That's still behind the scenes, but you're also expressing it too.

1:19:04Justin McMillen:Yeah, it's definitely happening. And there's this sentiment in D.C. of just, I know there's this kind of thing, like I know a lot of people are pissed off. Things are changing quickly. Not everyone's going to be happy, but we have to do this to get to this place where things make sense. And if you really listen, the focus is on the right areas. They're saying, I mean, literally two days ago, I sat from here to the wall from Dr. Oz, and he's saying we have got to get rid of all the big monsters in health care that are just making tons of money off of failure. Going back to my story, right? I was sitting there, I was just like, I can't believe after 13 years I'm listening to this coming directly from the U.S.

1:19:44Justin McMillen:government, right? Making money off of failure. Yeah, it's perverse incentives. It's just like the person gets sick, they stay sick. And it's not like somebody in the background is like this monster person who's like, yeah, we're going to do this terrible thing. It's just the nature of how things unfolded, but it has to change.

1:20:03Darin Olien:It's changed by a thousand steps. It's slowly profit, board, shares, all of that stuff. And slowly, all of a sudden, we find ourselves in a completely different reality.

1:20:15Justin McMillen:Right, right. And that's why the country is so sick. And so what's cool about this country is that capitalism, people are like, if they can get rewarded for innovation, then money flows that direction. So value-based care for substance use disorder, mental health issues is incredible because the future, I'm doing something with Blue Cross Blue Shield right now in North Carolina. Basically, we're doing an analysis of their substance use disorder population. we're looking at a total cost over a three-year time horizon for a person that gets diagnosed with substance use disorder i'll just use random numbers but let's say joe comes in joe random you know made up name comes in and has his first episode of needing detox over a three-year time horizon that insurance company would say we'll pay three hundred thousand dollars for all these different issues that Joe's gonna have so and he might go to treatment ten times so in their mind everyone's like the insurance companies are terrible they're just trying to not spend all their money they're like we'll just give thirty thousand dollars to each person no matter what they do but what they're excited about no one else wants to sign very few people want to sign up for it I'm like let's do it they pay a smaller amount of money up front and then every month that goes by that Joe doesn't go and get more care.

1:21:38Justin McMillen:The progress. I get paid. Our organization gets paid, which means that the upside is substantial. I can save them a ton of money, but I can make more money. Now, it's not about - Getting results. Getting results. Yeah. Right? And what's so cool about that is that as that unfolds, other people that can innovate will come in and be like, I can produce results and they'll be paid well. And then the ones that are doing crap work will disappear. And then we'll see this innovation in health care. Because, again, as long as you can attach dollars to outcomes, you're going to bring money in from all over the place.

1:22:14Justin McMillen:So we're going to see a collapse of people supporting health care models that reward failure. We're going to see a huge push in things that work over longitudinal, you know, like long periods of time. And it will change everything about the way that the country is going. So this is a huge push from the top. And all the, I mean, CEOs of all the major payers were there, and they're all like, we're on board with this. We just have to figure out how to do it.

1:22:40Darin Olien:And obviously you're in a legacy model, so you can't have people losing money straight away. There's got to be this economic model that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. And it has to be thought out. But to any major change, you have to work with them. Yes. Right? And that's where you have to go into the belly of the beast and start realizing that, hey, we're not creating this so that you no longer have a business of insurance or whatever, but hey, let's create this new infrastructure so that everybody wins. And that's a difference between all of the implosion models. We're all over the place. Every system is imploding because it was built that way.

1:23:24Darin Olien:It was never built. Energy systems the same way. We're seeing, I'm connected to a bunch of clean energy stuff that's behind the scenes, making massive shifts and non-fossil fuel, amazing technology that's being funded all over the world as we speak. Because of the systems that no longer are holding up the things that we need.

1:23:49Darin Olien:And thank God innovation is being supported a little more.

1:23:55Justin McMillen:yeah that's the exciting opportunities it's you know i'm actually i flip back and forth but i'm mostly hopeful about the future when it comes to all this kind of stuff i think that acutely it just gets gnarly it does when you were talking about looking at your phone i was thinking about how many times i get lost and i mean my wife i'll come home my wife's like i got i ran down a rabbit hole today and it's like i just she's all in her head and i'm like god this is terrible i was

1:24:22Darin Olien:reading a stat every time you get pinged on a notification and you react to it or look on a scroll you lose 23 minutes of your online thinking system so you're you're distracted it takes you to to go back to actually being a productive uh thought pattern you lose 23 minutes every time so turn off notifications turn off like take take the social apps and move them off the home screen that kind of shit yeah i need to do it you need to do it we all need to do it right because

1:24:57Justin McMillen:that's literally programmed to steal our time i know and there's no value like it's crazy yeah it's crazy there's a another thing that we're doing that um you know i'm really interested in in how to utilize software to double down on the things that we've created and i'm certain that healthcare ai is going to be a huge part of healthcare's future i actually think we're going to see i don't know if i want to go into it on here but i think there's going to be almost a complete rework of the entire health care system based on ai but but we built an app that's it's in beta right now so it's not done but it's called tribe but it stands for treehouse recoveries infinite bonding experience just because tribe we can't get you know from a trademark standpoint But the idea is like think of Instagram, but it's going back to what we said about being necessary.

1:25:50Justin McMillen:So closed network for just our community. But when you go in, you have to put in all of your skills. So you put in like these are the things I can do. And then that meta tags into the backbone of your profile. And then the idea is that we go to the app to find resources. so like I've treated lawyers and doctors and all different kinds of folks so anybody that's in this community can be like hey I need help with X and it'll bring up all these people and then you just click on it and you ask the person for help and before that person helps you he can look at your profile to see if you've been helping other people because it's all like you rate like does this person is he a good contributor to the tribe so instead of it being social media to doom scroll it's a useful thing where we're all supporting each other

1:26:38Darin Olien:Access and use.

1:26:40Justin McMillen:And then there's thousands of Treehouse graduates. So the idea that we can all come together through shared resources, no money exchange, it's just, hey, I need help with this. I'm trying to write a business plan. You're a VC guy. Can you teach me how to do it? So that produces a bond. And then it's kind of like this check-in thing where it's like a graph literally mind, body, social. So you can see how other people in the community are doing. so white labeling it to like we're gonna do it with a va so you can connect people in the va and it'll just be military police like we're so that's a really so there's ways to use technology for sure and then it also ports up all of your uh your wearable stuff and then eventually you'll be able to flip the whole thing over and then there'll be a like an ai avatar that asks you validated psychometric assessments so it's like the phq9 the gad7 all these things you want to collect for our field.

1:27:38Justin McMillen:And why that matters is the results of that. The backbone of this thing is in the hive. And the hive is this, think of it like, um, it was built for the FDA. By the way, your friend with the FDA, you should, if I'm going to connect, you should, I've got people working with me that are like, she's so, she's going to go. She's so talented. Okay. We should definitely talk. Cause I love networking people together. I'm not the FDA guy, but I have friends that are like so in it and yeah yeah she's like mind she's like okay yeah genetic like

1:28:12Darin Olien:geneticist okay and and has worked with the insurance companies government fda private like she she she tells me like if i'm working on a supplement or something if i'm thinking about something well here's how you say here's what you can say nice like that she knows that intimately involved and she's craving change making opportunities

1:28:40Justin McMillen:even if it's just I could get her consulting gigs and I could tie her into, so like my partner on Care Net was the former head of bioinformatics at the FDA and when he was there they asked him to solve this problem because they were having a really hard time managing data, it was all segmented and so he built DNA Hive which can sequence a genome, but it also, so the hive is like, it's got honeycombs, which, let's see how to explain this. So think of it like data could come in from several different areas, from imaging to whatever. It can standardize the data, and it's sort of like blocks. Like it goes in, it standardizes data, then it moves through, it breaks it all apart through blockchain, so it's anonymized, and then it does multifactorial analysis on it so it can find patterns.

1:29:30Justin McMillen:So right now, every drug that's being approved by the FDA has to use the Hive. So he built it and maintained ownership of it, and then he licenses it back to the FDA. So the app I was just talking about, the backbone is the Hive. So every person will have their own honeycomb, and all of their wearable data will get into the honeycomb, only accessible by them. Nobody else can touch it. It's fully blockchain like a crypto wallet. but also they can put their health record on it. Also, whenever they're asked questions, the results of their psychometrics go on it. Then the future is you could say, hey, because it has an AI backbone that can synthesize the information with an AI interface, you could say, how's my sleep affecting my mood?

1:30:18Justin McMillen:And it can give you information, insight about all of it through this, the other side of the same app. And I think eventually the AI you're talking to is going to be trained in every form of medicine. And at that point, you could spend eight hours in a night talking to a doctor who specializes in cancer if you want to. Because that's the AI you're talking to. There's so many other things.

1:30:42Darin Olien:I don't know if I can say it when we're filming, but there's some other stuff that we should touch. There's some other amazing technologies that you might know about. but I got to ask this before we wrap on this. It's not going to be our last conversation.

1:31:02Darin Olien:But just love to get your point of view on what the 12-step does and what it doesn't do. I mean, a lot of people use a 12-step. Yeah. You don't have to say anything about it. I'm going to. I'm going to.

1:31:21Justin McMillen:Well, the first thing I'll say is that the 12-step model has been the single most powerful way for people to be helped that are struggling with addiction and substance use disorder. Hands down, there's no question. The arguments about whether it is successful or not are mostly invalid because there's no way to really, first of all, you have to decide what the hell you're measuring and how you determine success. It certainly got the community thing down. The community thing is dialed. There are people that we've treated that I'm certain that they would be much better off just going to a 12-step program, for sure.

1:32:02Justin McMillen:In fact, I've learned to intuitively sort of say this is a type. Like what's written about in the big book, there is absolutely. So I come from that background, by the way. Like we have 12-step meetings at our houses. And I'll say this clearly. Treatment centers that run 12-step models and then charge for it, I don't think they should exist. I don't think it has any business being integrated into treatment. I don't think people should be billing insurance for giving people information they can get for free. And I think the people who are doing it know that. And I know that will piss a lot of people off, but that's my take.

1:32:37Justin McMillen:I think I know that our treatment model that is linked up with a 12-step approach post-treatment, they get integrated during treatment, but that has the highest probability of sustained sobriety that you can do. I think you asked, what is it getting right and what's it missing maybe? The community for sure, it's getting right. at the end of the day when people get sober, if you don't have a base, like why? Why would I do this? Like I feel this strong pull to drink and do these things. Why not do that? Well, because I don't want to feel bad. That's not enough. Like 12-step, there's a spiritual base to it that I find that when people find that their probability of staying sober is exponentially better.

1:33:36Justin McMillen:And so the fact that there's a big part of it too. So for example, there's a metric that I see, and we don't measure this. It's just something that anecdotally I see is that I can tell when someone's really gotten healthy when they start saying, you know, I saw this thing happen today and I realized it was perfect. You know, like this thing happened and that. You know, where you start seeing like the little signs, You can get woo-woo. It's like signs from the universe. I think that that's when a person's starting to acknowledge there's a perfection. There's a divine energy that's a lot bigger than you.

1:34:12Darin Olien:Yeah.

1:34:12Justin McMillen:And that is like AA does a beautiful job of pulling that into someone's being. And I think that's super vital. We do it at Treehouse, but we do it in a way that we set up the environment for that to happen. I have so much spiritual beliefs personally that I never wanted to bring that to the table because I didn't want it to become that kind of program. So the spiritual side, I think they've got dialed. I think you need a base that allows you to go, everything happened the way it was supposed to. That gives you peace with your past. I think the idea that helping another alcoholic is the key to getting rid of the obsession.

1:34:52Justin McMillen:If I said I didn't believe that, I'd be crazy. We're done.

1:34:55Darin Olien:No, just give me five minutes.

1:34:57Justin McMillen:I would be crazy because that's my whole life. So I think they get that right. I think what's missing is probably that if we don't honor the physiological role in addiction, I think we're fighting against ourselves. For example, if you think of it like a computer, you have hardware, software, network. Hardware is the physical structure. You could work so hard on getting the software working right. But if your hardware is not working right, you can't run the software on it. You could defrag it. You could get a person thinking right. But if the hardware is not right, they'll be depressed because their neurochemistry is off.

1:35:37Justin McMillen:If their gut biome is not right. Kind of push a boulder uphill. Yeah. So the physiology needs to be there. The social side, I think that it's almost miraculous what AA has figured out on that front. it really does feel like it's some sort of divine thing to me. I'm not an active, I don't go to 12-step meetings on a regular basis or anything like that. That's not my personal way. But if anyone asks me, I tell them they need to, which sounds hypocritical. But I feel like it's a, I have a huge infrastructure.

1:36:13Darin Olien:There's more things right than.

1:36:15Justin McMillen:Oh, 100%. Yeah, 100%. And the people that I know, I mean, RFK is really into it. I've heard him say it a million times, he asks somebody, how long do I have to go to these meetings? And the person says, well, you can stop going once you like them. And he's like, I still don't like them. But I go, and it's a structure to live your life where you can continue to remind yourself that you're one step away from complete self-destruction. That's the part I struggle with a little bit. I also feel early on I struggled with it because I'm asking if you came to me and you were struggling with addiction and you're trying to fight a monster, right?

1:36:58Justin McMillen:And I said to you, you need to submit. It would be counterintuitive because I need you to be strong. I got to help you find a reason to love yourself enough to push, right? And so a lot of people get hung up on the powerlessness idea, which is because they don't understand it. I didn't understand it early on. The thing that I've had trouble with is the, I understand it, but affirming that that's who you are. Yeah. That's like, yeah. We have a concept at Treehouse that I still teach leadership in Orange County, which is like a class that helps kind of like tie everything together, which means I get to be right in it still.

1:37:42Justin McMillen:And every time I stop, it's like I start feeling depressed. And so I just, no matter what I'm doing, I go back and I teach that class. And one of the concepts is called We Are Not Our Disease. And it's based off of this idea. There's a guy named Rosenthal who did an experiment where he developed a concept called outcome expectancy. What he did is he had 100 rats, and he divided them, arbitrarily divided them into two groups of 50. And he labeled one side dumb, May's dumb, and May's smart. And then he had students come in who were totally blind to the experiment, and they said, okay, I'm going to take the dumb rats and run them through a maze and the smart rats and run them through.

1:38:19Justin McMillen:And what happened, which was incredible, was that the ones that were labeled dumb performed poorly. And so if you're into manifestation and crystal balls, then you're like, oh, the energy transference. Or if you're a quantum physicist, you're like, there's a quantum field thing going on. What he learned, because he did the same thing in a classroom with kids, is that our beliefs about others affects their behavior. That matters, yeah. So if I see you as like, if you communicate to me what you want out of your life there, and hopefully at some point you tell me more, and then I get to be somebody who believes in you, and when I look at you, I'm just in awe of where you're headed, you're more likely to be successful.

1:39:02Justin McMillen:That's an incredible thing. So how does that relate to this labeling? well I think we can't society has a whole picture of what an addict looks like this is the stigma conversation and if I walk around and I wear that as my badge of who I am everybody has that story their reticular activating system is their set of beliefs the lenses that they're looking at you through and if that Rosenthal stuff's true then what you have is you have people doubting questioning and wanting to see you in that light and I think that's dangerous and so So I personally don't, I think you honor tradition when you're in rooms like that and you say, you know, just an alcoholic.

1:39:45Justin McMillen:And I used to say don't do it, which was completely ridiculous. Yeah, it's funny how just every year learning more things. But now I believe that you honor the tradition. But I also think you should be careful in terms of how we talk about ourselves. Words matter and people's perceptions of us matter. not because we want to like look good but because if you have people around you who believe in the greatest version of you these are not like accountability buddies this is like somebody who truly sees the greatness in you you're more likely to be successful and so i only want people around me like that and i only want to be that for other people amen yeah thank you my brother you're doing some incredible stuff thanks jaren yeah i appreciate it it's cool to meet you here i wish we could have met before this or some of the way, but this is a perfect starting point.

1:40:36Justin McMillen:It's a, it's a hell of a starting point. Yeah. Yeah.

1:40:39Darin Olien:Thank you for the work. All right. Thank you.

1:40:41Justin McMillen:I appreciate you. Fucking hell. All right. Woo.