Human Up Season 2 Ep 8: When Structure, Service, and the 12 Steps Save Lives

This is a transcript of Human Up Podcast Season 2, Episode 8 with Dan Hill which you can watch and listen to here:

Dave: Welcome to the Human Up Podcast. I'm your host, Dave Marlon, and it is a huge honor to be joined by Dan Hill. Welcome, Dan!

Dan: Thanks, Dave.

Dave: I appreciate you spending the next 45-ish minutes with me. I'm super excited for this conversation. Any place specific you'd like to start?

Dan: No, fireway.

Dave: All right. To me, no conversation about Dan would be Serving It Justice without asking you to weave in your unique perspective about the Stoics and how they weave into your recovery.

Dan: I think that the big book is strongly infused with the Stoic movement. A big part of the Stoics is not letting things get to you and controlling your reaction to things, which is a big part of staying sober. One of my favorite Stoic aphorisms is you can have everything you want in the world because you're in control of what you want.

Dave: Now, a lot of people want to stay sober, but they feel they're not able to. What do you have to say to them?

Dan: They're in need of a psychic change that can only be brought about by a spiritual experience found in the 12 steps. And a big part of the 12 steps is getting rid of your baggage in steps four, five, six, and seven, which helps moderate the way you react to the world. And the big book says that anger is a dubious luxury of people who are non-alcoholics and they can behave that way if they want. But tempering your reaction to the world is a key component of staying sober in a spiritual program.

Dave: This is amazing. I've known you for over a decade and I love your deference to the 12 steps.

Dan: I don't believe in disrupting a process that works.

Dave: Well, it's clearly worked for me and I have some people question the statistics of recovery and I'll point out to them that I was a pretty hard case and it's been a hundred percent effective with me.

Dan: I think again, to harken back to the language, rarely have we seen a person fail who thoroughly follows our path. I mean, the success rate of people who actually put in the work has got to be damn near 100%.

Dave: Right. Yeah, agreed. I love the fact that I got my doctorate a few years ago and as part of that, we learn to study all the evidence-based research and I have all the substance use and addiction keywords put into my searches and literally I get more evidence-based data on the effectiveness of treatment from the 12-step program than I do the entire body of medication counseling and other treatments. So not only is it as effective as anything else, it's also been utilized the longest. What are we at 90 years?

Dan: 1935. I can't do that kind of

Dave: Math. Okay. Yeah, I'll call it 91 years. All right. One of my other favorite stories from Dan Hill is the fact, and I also look at it when you tell this story. I mean, I get the feeling a lot of us imagine going to seminary. A lot of us pondered that even if what that would be like, could you tell me a little bit about your experience in seminary?

Dan: Sure. I was in Roman Catholic seminary during my four years in college and I thrive. I think one of the reasons AA worked for me is I thrive in a structured environment and I can think of three structured environments where an alcoholic might end up being. A Roman Catholic Seminary, Alcoholics Anonymous, or prison. I think those are the three structured environments that we can end up in. So Catholic seminary is wonderful. We live in common. We eat in common. We pray in common. Every minute of the day is accounted for and there's just a great sense of purpose and spiritual calm. But unfortunately, my round in seminary was one of the first major casualties of my alcoholism. They gave me a ultimatum that at the time in my 20s I was unable to meet.

Dave: Well, I'm grateful that you still got to go through that whole experience to help shape you as a person. I get the feeling it makes you a better human.

Dan: I have what we would say in the Catholic world as a well-formed conscience, which other people might categorize as guilt, but we call in a well-formed conscience is I feel a certain tinge of guilt before taking any kind of action that I know I shouldn't be taking. And that is repetition and practice. It doesn't just happen that way. You have to train yourself to behave that way. And for me, aside from being a beautiful, ancient, historically rooted tradition, it's a guideline for living.

Dave: Now you're talking about the Roman Catholic religion. I am. A guideline for living. That's beautiful. I get the feeling you are on the outside of the bell curve on your ability to put your mind to something. Now, granted that didn't work with alcohol control, but I've seen you engage in some pretty draconian sleep practices, diet practices, fitness regimens. Do you acknowledge that you are on the end of the bell curve about your ability to make a decision and stick to something no matter how it makes you feel?

Dan: No, I've never considered that. No. I thought everyone made a decision to do something and did it. That's not the case.

Dave: At all costs. Yeah, no, you're at the edges of the bell curve from my perspective. Could you describe how you addressed your sleep challenge?

Dan:

Sure. It started, I had a beloved dog that I lost and he was a huge part of my evening ritual and the rhythm to the house and the movement of the house. So when he was gone and he came with me to the office every day, so when he was gone, I had a pretty bad onset of acute insomnia and I had been using Zequiel to sleep for quite some time, which is not good, especially now that the studies are coming out on the negative effects of the long-term use of anticholinergics, which is Alzheimer's generally. So one day I took the Zequiel and I didn't sleep and this was probably night two after I lost my dog. And night two, number two, number three didn't work. So I did some research and I'm a big believer that the mind and the soul are both very trainable.

So I gravitate towards cognitive behavioral therapy and they have one CBTI, cognitive behavioral therapy insomnia. And basically it starts with a very, very compressed sleep window. So I had a four-hour sleep because there was nothing physically wrong with me and the body makes all the chemicals it needs to sleep and everything like that. It's centered in the mind like almost all of my problems. So you start with a very compressed sleep window and mine was 20 AM to 60 AM, so four hours and no nodding off or napping or anything like that. At 20 AM, I would lay down. And if I wasn't asleep in about 10 or 15 minutes, I'd get back up, do a couple of other things, read whatever, go back and lay down so on and so forth until I'm asleep. At 6:00 AM, no matter what, and for the first week or so, I didn't really get more than a couple of minutes of sleep.

You get up at 6:00 AM and I kept that. Now I'm journaling what my sleep was. So I kept that four-hour window until my sleep efficiency was 85% 14 days in a row so that I was sleeping 85% of that window for 14 days straight. And then you expand the window one way or the other 15 minutes at a time.

Again, maintaining an 85% sleep efficiency. And this trains the brain not to fear going to sleep and it trains the brain to not flip out if you have a night of no sleep because the first couple hours are unpleasant. We've all had sleepless nights and you just power through it. So anyway, it was about a six month long process, but now for the first time in my life after going through that, I sleep seven hours a night and I fall asleep as soon as I lay down. I wake up when my alarm goes off and I take absolutely nothing to sleep ever.

Dave: Nice. Well, to me, that shows your draconian approach to things because I think many people would not have the fortitude when they didn't go to sleep at two and they puttered around and then they ended up stealing two hours of sleep or an hour of sleep or three hours of sleep. But when that alarm comes at six, you had the ability to say, "You know what? I'm doing this no matter what. " And then you stayed up until 2:00 AM the next day.

Dan: Again, the next day. Yeah. And I researched, I says, "What if this is going to be me forever? What if I'm one of these lifelong insomnia people? " And the research is that the lifelong insomniacs are the people who in day seven or even day 20, they just say, "Ah, screw it. I'm going to go back to the Ambien and not set my alarm." And they revert to bad sleep hygiene. That's what gives you a lifelong of insomnia.

Dave: Well, I applaud your good sleep hygiene. That's awesome. Yeah, it's one of the keys to happiness and health. What did you study in Georgetown?

Dan: I studied very marketable Greek and Latin.

Dave: Do you speak Greek and Latin?

Dan: I'm a little rusty, but I can read these days with the help of a dictionary Attic, Greek, Latin and biblical Hebrew.

Dave: Wow. Oh, I didn't even know about the Hebrew. And you did that in four years?

Dan: Right.

Dave: And what degree did you get?

Dan: I got a classical philosophy degree, which required proficiency in two ancient philosophical languages and one modern one. But I talked to the staff or the dean there into letting me do biblical Hebrew instead of one of the modern philosophical languages would typically be German. And part of getting that degree is I get assigned randomly one of my ancient languages. I happen to get assigned Greek and I sat down with a panel of Greek PhDs who handed me a cold, a Greek one page of a Greek philosophical document that I then had to translate in front of them.

Dave: Wow, that is impressive. I can't believe I didn't know that. Is this where you got into some of your studying of the Bible?

Dan: Yeah, I read the entirety of the New Testament in Greek over the course of the four years, very slowly and analytically and then also the entirety of the Hebrew scriptures in the original ... Well, as close as we can get, we would call it the masoretic text in the original Hebrew.

Dave: That would be just of the Old Testament?

Dan: Right.

Dave: Is that also the Torah?

Dan: Yeah. So we would call it the Torah and then the New Testament in their original tongues.

Dave: Now, when you say there were original tongues, they weren't originally written in Greek.

Dan: The New Testament was originally written in Greek and the Torah would've gone unwritten until the Babylonian exile when the vast majority of it was written down by the elites in Babylonian exile reduced the Torah, which was oral until that point to writing.

Dave: Is that around 400AD?

Dan: Right around 500 BC, the Babylonian exile.

Dave: Oh, so before Christ, the Old Testament was written?

Dan: Correct.

Dave: Now you kind of blew my mind when you talked to me just a few weeks ago about the Bible and then how it's not so much a book as it is a collection of many books.

Dan: So if you've been to synagogue, as I know you have, they have the Torah scrolls

And each book of the Torah is in a separate scroll. The notion of having them all together in one volume is a modern contrivance of convenience. So for example, even in the Greek Orthodox tradition, the churches in the course of the liturgical presentation, all of the books are kept separate and individually. The Hebrew scriptures are a little bit more cohesive because they were written kind of in the large part, they were written in one generational era in the Babylonian exile, which is when the Israelites decided when the Babylonians conquered the Southern kingdom, which we would ... Judah, they conquered the Southern kingdom and exiled the elites of Israel so that there wouldn't be any political influence from the elites in the newly conquered territory. They would traditionally take all of the smart people and exile them to the homeland, in this case Babylon, and just leave the workers.

When they conquered it, gone would've been the Hites, the Moabites, the Samaritans, dozens of small regional tribes, which were all kind of governed by the thought of war gods. And so when the Babylonians came in, almost all of the other little local Canaanite tribes arrived at the conclusion, while the Babylonians' war God is obviously more powerful than our war god, or they wouldn't have been allowed to conquer us. And so they assimilate and they become part of the Babylonian cult, we would call it.

Very atypical is that the Israelites took a different thought and in exile the elite said, no, ours is definitely stronger. And so why was this allowed to happen? Why was our land taken from us and we're an exile? Because we weren't following the rules close enough and Yahweh, our war god, is upset with us because we weren't following the rules. So then they set about taking all of these oral stories that have been told for generations and generations and generations, all of which we know now, Moses, parting the Red Sea, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Numbers, all of the prophets and they reduced them to writing in exile and now they come back a generation later, the Babylonians let everyone return to Israel and what we would now call the Pharisees came back from exile and said, "These are the rules that we've been very lax about. " You would not have found dietary restrictions, for example, in pre-exilic Israel.

They wouldn't have had been paying any attention to that. When they come back from exile, now they say, "Look, the reason we were conquered is because God was upset with us for not following all these rules." So now that's what actually this religion is about is following all of these rules. That's what God wants from us. It's from that context that Jesus is born and comes into being. And I think one of the overarching summaries of his ministry would be, you're wrong. This is something that you decided about God while you were in exile in Babylon and now you're coming back and saying the real way to live life is by following all of these rules and that's why you're wrong. It doesn't matter whether you own your land or not. It doesn't matter who the king is. God's kingdom is actually something much different than that.

And so it was out of that post-exilic kind of restructuring of the Israelite way of life in that context, Jesus's ministry starts.

Dave: Wow, that's much more stark and dramatic than, I don't know, the Jesus I was always taught about, but that history makes sense. And since I've been exploring my Judaism, it seems that they've maintained a lot of these rules to this day.

Dan: Yeah, all 613.

Dave: Although I do see how the order and the rules provide structure and comfort.

Dan: And they all have a theological basis.

Dave: Yeah. Amazing.

Dan: And certainly must have been talked about before the exile or they wouldn't have ended up being written down in exile. I think the Pharisaic interpretation, I mean, when your land is conquered and your religion is tied to the land and a promise to own this land, God promised this land to us and then the land is taken, you have to reckon and you have to propose a theological answer to that. Why?

Dave: What's the reason why our life is hard?

Dan: There's a really good book about this called The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis,

Highly recommended. It's an easy read and his general thesis is, in order for humanity to have separate identities, he starts with the proposition of we could all be just souls, non-corporeal souls without any pain receptors and no bodies and all just live as a soul mush. But then C.S. Lewis says, "Well, we wouldn't have individual identities if that were the case, and so all the souls would run together. And so we had to be separated for some reason or by some way. And so we had to have bodies in order to have separate identities and he keeps going and going and going and he's saying, in order to have this, we need that. And in order to have that, we need this. " And then the conclusion is that is why pain and suffering exists in the world is the natural conclusion of all of the things that we needed to be able to exist in the image of God.

That's the path theological answer. Now the stoic AA answer is life is not that hard because we get to decide how we react to things and we get to decide what we want. If we decide we don't want that much and that we're not going to let things get to us, life isn't that hard. Certainly it can be for those in the extreme fringes of poverty and misfortune, but that would be the stoic answer.

Dave: Yeah, I like them both. I like pointing out that 150 years ago they didn't have hot showers. The food supplies, the living accommodations were very different than today. So for any of us to complain is ludicrous at this point. What we actually should do is train harder and be more focused in service and through the hardship of those two activities develop meaning.

Dan: Well, what we need is socialization. I think the last study I saw, 80% of millennials, which is my generation, reports having zero close friends. And then when you go to Gen Alpha, over half of Gen Alpha relies on artificial intelligence for companionship. So something has happened that's resulted in isolation. Have you ever heard of a rat park? Do you remember that study, Rat Park?

Dave: Yeah, I have, yes. I've wrote articles about it refuting it.

Dan: You refute Rat Park?

Dave: I do. And let me tell you why. I believe addiction is a biologically based disease and I believe that roughly 10% of us are wired wrong, that we have a genetic gene defect and I respond different to drugs and alcohol than 90% of the people. And I believe that if you raised me in a rat park or you raised me in a tenement that I was basically a time bomb waiting to begin using a substance. And once that happened, all bets were off. I responded to it differently. I liked it more. I became compulsive quicker and it began to unravel my life.

One of my favorites is I treated this LDS lady who's a police officer who got divorced at 43 years old and at 43 she got divorced so she went out and she got drunk and she loved it. And by 44, she ended up in my rehab with her life in absolute shambles. Well, I recognize that connection is an important thing for humans and for socialization, but I don't attribute the disease of addiction to it since you got me started. I'm going to say the same thing with trauma. I have a lot of people say, "Oh, this bad thing happened to me so this was my response." I believe it's fundamentally, it's the same issue that yes, socialization or your environment could be factors, but my issue is are you an addict or are you not? Because I believe I was an addict before I put a substance in me and once I put the substance in me, all bets were off and I don't believe that trauma causes addiction and I don't believe tenements, unhealthy living situations cause addiction.

I believe addiction is a biologically based disease. What do you think?

Dan: Whether it is or it isn't, what I can tell you is it doesn't have a biological solution. There's no amount of SSRIs, electroshock therapy. Nothing is going to solve the problem, whether it's biological or not, other than a psychic change brought upon by a spiritual solution. So my read on the rat park would be maybe that the socialized ones maybe in their own little rat way had their own little rat spiritual experience because they were socialized and happy. Not to say that the rats on the socialized side of the cage, there weren't some of them that were adding. But they had the tools, their little rat tools to not need the substance to get by. So biological or not, there's no biological solution. And we've been saying for 90 years in AA, I remember I was listening to a new guy read more about alcoholism and he's reading it and there's a part in there that says, "Science may one day solve this problem." And he stopped right there and he said, "People are looking into this.

" And we said, "Well, it's been 90 years since that was written and science has not yet solved it.

Dave: Yep. I know as Ozempic came out, there is evidence that it reduces cravings and substance use numbers go down when you use it. Is that

Dan: Right?

Dave: Yes. But it does not appear to be a panacea.

Dan: I hadn't heard that it has a-

Dave: Oh yeah.

Dan: On substance.

Dave: It does. And in controlled groups, the GLP groups will be generally consuming less.

Dan: Interesting.

Dave: Now you migrated, I'm changing the subject completely to move things along. You migrated. You were a criminal attorney here in Las Vegas and you tried some front page of the New York Times cases and it developed quite a reputation for yourself. And I know you represented the Bundys in a famous case successfully and won. What brought about the change in your career to go from an accomplished criminal attorney to switch over to this totally new vein of litigation called personal injury?

Dan: I think it's as simple as burnout. I was doing about 500 cases a year and I had 10 to 20 court appearances every morning and I think I peaked. I think I peaked in that world with a couple of cases that I had and I miss it sometimes still, but I also don't miss it.

Dave: You don't try as many cases on the PI side.

Dan: That's true. I think I did probably maybe 50 jury trials.

Dave: Knowing you actually very well and actually speaking of knowing you very well, I think it's sad that millennials don't have friends. I consider you one of my dear friends. I was a little bothered. One of my associates at work saw the picture of us having dinner and he said, "Dave, who'd you have dinner with this weekend? Was that your son?" And I was like, "No, that's my friend.”

Dan: Why take that as a compliment?

Dave: There's a Russian picture in your office about somebody who is told not to talk. Could you describe it to us?

Dan: So this comes obviously from my inheritance as a criminal attorney. My mentor had a big fish on his wall and under the fish the plaque said, "I should have kept my big mouth shut." So I have a piece of Soviet propaganda with an old babushka with her finger up to her lips. And the Russian says naval tie, which is don't bla. And of course the American version at the same time was loose lips sink ships.

Dave: Good counsel to receive from your criminal defense lawyer. Who was your favorite president?

Dan: I'll still go with Richard Nixon.

Dave: That's probably not the average person's pick. Why did you like Tricky Dick?

Dan: So one of my professors at Georgetown was Henry Kissinger

Dave: Who was- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Henry Kissinger was your professor?

Dan: Yeah. You didn't know that?

Dave: The smartest man in the world.

Dan: Yeah, Dr. Kissinger. And that just kind of sparked a lifelong fascination with Nixon as one of the most idiosyncratic, unusual, fascinating, historical figures in recent history. I don't know that I would stand and say and defend his policymaking as the best that I ever was or his economic plan is the best there ever was, but just as a study of history and a matter of very interesting reading, he is my favorite president to learn about.

Dave: Is there a book you'd recommend reading?

Dan: I would say Nixonland. It's all one word, Nixon Land.

Dave: Nixon Land. All right. In this podcast, I picked up Problem Pain by C.S. Lewis and Nixon Land, two good reads, right on. I don't know if you helped piece it together by now, but the name of my podcast is Human Up. What do you think that means to you?

Dan: To me, I would say my number one and number two duties as a human are to be of maximal service to my fellow man, which we all know is especially in working in AA program. The book says, "Nothing so ensures immunity from drinking as intensive work with another alcoholic." Everyone's wrapped up in themself. Everyone is the star in their own Broadway show and the only way to stay human sized is to be of service to other people. We're hardwired for it and it's one of the biggest dopamine delivery systems around.

Dave: That's one. What else is human up?

Dan: Number two, I would say caretaking your community, whether that's the physical ... There's a lot of overlap there, of course, but good roads, good walls, good government.

Dave: Human up. I used to engage in some bad behaviors, drinking, drug use and some people I knew back ... I'm a boomer. Some people I knew would say, "Dave, you need to map." And as time went on and we've taken the gender out of man up and you get human up, but to me, human up's deeper that we all need to take care of each other as a human race. And it ends up being you were in seminary in Georgetown. I was in a state university in New York and I was experimenting with mushrooms and marijuana trying to say, "What's the meaning? What's the reason we're here?" And I wrote in journals and I've gone back and read them and I read a lot of philosophers and it wasn't until I was 41 years old until I found myself in Alcoholics Anonymous, which I really found out why we're here and we're here to help others and we do that by humaning up.

My name's Dave Marlon. I am so honored to have had Dan Hill, Esquire on as our guest today. Dan, thank you so much. I appreciate your candid conversation. Appreciate your friendship. Thanks for being on Human Up!

Dan: Thank you, Dave.