Unconditional Love and Second Chances

00:00:04 Speaker 1: Comeback Stories is a production of Inflection Network and iHeartRadio. All Right, welcome back, everybody. We are here for another episode of Comeback Stories. I am always here with my guy for life, Darren Waller. How you doing, my man, I'm blessed, bro. I'm excited for this episode. Man, I'm so excited for this episode. So today's guest. He's the co founder of Marley's Mutt's Dog Rescue and Positive Change program. This dude has a story that I absolutely love and I can relate to so much. And when I think about the service work that he's doing, it really makes me realize that I need to step up my game. The work he's doing is incredible. So we're here with Zach scou Zach has a story where dogs actually rescued Zach from addiction. Then he took that experience to start Marlee's Mutts, taking rescued dogs to help rescue people, and from there he started Positive Change program, pairing death row dogs with incarcerated people. So, Zach, welcome to the show, my man. Mo Man, it is great to see my brother, you too, Darren, Thanks for having me on. Hey, We're always getting right into it here on the show. And we want to know for you. Tell us a little bit what it was like growing up for you. Let's get vulnerable towny life. Growing up for me was was kind of quintessential when I think about it, I grew up. I'm actually down here in Manhattan Beach right now. I grew up in Hermosa Beach, California and what's called the South Bay, Redondo, Manhattan, Hermosa Torrents. And it was an incredible place to grow up, you know, an absolutely incredible place to grow up. We were baby sat by the beach, you know, we were all latch key kids. We have this little incubated bubble that is the South Bay where pH and the refinery to the north and other kind of barricades created this this really incredible place to grow up. Just a very unique place where we surfed and we skated and we got into trouble. It had a very drinking, heavy, drug heavy culture, that's to be certain. I grew up in a broken home. You know. My parents separated when my twin brother and I were very young. They got divorced right when we got out of the hospital. Both my brother and I were very ill when we were born. So yeah, life started out that way in a broken home with a lot of different you know, advantages to that as well. I don't want to just say there were disadvantages. I got to grow up in two beautiful homes. My mom was my primary, and we grew up in a house with another single family, another female lead family, And that was how I kind of eased into two adulthood, which was that beach culture. I was inundated with beach culture and all that that implies. When you look back on your childhood, is there an early memory of pain that really stands out to you? Yeah? There are. There are some some definite painful moments that stand out from my childhood. Some of those would manifest and become real issues as I got older. Some of us had to do with you know, inappropriate contact, that contact and conduct as a child, things that I that I received and went through as a kid in terms of you know, inappropriate sexual contact and things that I didn't know at the time would affect me like they would in adulthood. I think I was a lot like everybody else man. I really wanted to to fit in, I really wanted to be a part of and I think some of my earliest memories of in terms of painful memories, were not feeling a part of and certainly not feeling as connecting to my parents as I wanted to. My parents were both working professionals, so they were gone all the time, you know, and much of my childhood was spent with you know, with sitters and with caretakers, So I didn't get to spend much time with my mom, didn't get to send as much time with my dad as I would have wanted, you because they were hustling, you know, trying to make a living to support us kids. So that's one of the things that I think about now, you know, in adulthood that that kind of pained me when I was younger, was just wanting a deeper connection, you know, as a child, and a deeper connection with specifically your mom or was it just yearning for something deeper? Definitely with my mom, for sure. My mom was a professional at ABC. She was an executive, one of the youngest female executives ever at ABC and Disney. So you know that that time, were you looking back on it, Where I really craved when I was younger was just that feeling safe, feeling supported, and feeling safe within that family structure, and I and we were very much children of the streets, very much running amock kind of constantly, and I didn't and we had Like I said, you know, these were wonderful people that helped raise us, you know, Isabelle and Juan and Sadie or it were and still are family members, but they weren't my parents, and so I look about older in life. That's something that I that I definitely have tried to make up for in adulthood in terms of kind of recreating that narrative, recreating the relationship, and kind of also just accepting that my parents did their absolute best. We tend to hold our parents to this unreachable standard and we tend to not view them as just normal people who are doing their best. They were single parents too, just like I am now and a single dad, and that's a tough life to try to figure out. You got two twin babies, you know. Like I said, my brother and I were extremely sick. My brother was at Cedar Sinai Medical Center for four months before he got to come home. So it was a tough time to come into the world and have our family kind of split apart. But they absolutely did their best with what they had, and I'm trying to give them credit as opposed to just kind of, you know, knock them as I'm in my forties, Zach, I appreciate your vulnerability first and foremost, something that we appreciate and try to hold space for on this platform. And the fact that you're leading off with it is amazing. And I know you talked about wanting to feel safe for me when I was fifteen years old. I think I started to feel safe via percocets and people pleasing. Where do you feel like you first started to turn tours to start to feel safe or feel some sort of peace. Yeah, people pleasing is my big one. I always grew up very quickly, so I was an eighteen year old when I was ten. I was always running around with parents. I grew up in a household that out of a lot of other kids that I sort of had to keep an eye out. My twin brother included. He kind of just how we were raised. He was sort of my little brother. So I was doing a tremendous amount of parenting and trying to just keep the vibe tolerable. I was trying to put out fires and not create, not feed into the chaos that is a single mother household with all the comings and goings, and yeah, I started to medicate very early on, very early on, like ten years old, eleven years old is when I remember first getting into my mom's wine. A lot of that was just related to wanting to be an adult. Was just seeing what all the adults did every single night, and wanting to be considered an adult, wanting to be a grown up, and wanting to do the things that the people I admired did. But that you know, I think, throughout my entire life, if I'm being honest, I always felt different. I always felt a level of anxiety maybe maybe like a simmering level of anxiety might not even be the right word, but just uneasiness. I always felt a little bit uneasy. And when I found alcohol and drugs, I found acceptance of myself. I found being accepted by others, you know, I found it gave me a lot of the things that I thought you needed to be a successful person. Right. I was funnier, I was more affable, I could kind of fall I could slide into that role and portray myself as older than I was. I thought that was one of the ways you grew up was by learning how to drink. And I took that very seriously. All my heroes were you know, I don't want to say functioning alcoholics, they were just alcoholics. I set my sights early on to try to, I mean literally try to integrate that into my life. I knew drinking was I knew drinking was important. I mean it was prioritized in terms of my social circles and my culture. That was something that it helped if you were really good at And I started to bury a whole lot of discomfort, uneasiness, anxiety. I also had this you know, they called me Golden Boy when I was a kid. That was the moniker I had. It was everybody had this idea of me that I was this golden child, that I was this handsome kid that could do really well in school. And I played every sport very well. So I was good at everything. And I peaked when I was like twelve. So as soon as I started to not make those expectations and I started to do less good in school, I started to have get into fights, I started to do whatever. You know, it really facilitated a spiral because I couldn't meet up to those expectations. And I think a lot of us fight meeting expectations of ourselves at a young age and then never really being able to catch up with and accept who we atually are and love that person. You know, I've always thought people loved the idea of me and the expectation of me as opposed to who I actually am. You know what I'm saying. Oh man, I know I know too much of what you're saying. I felt that way three years into the NFL, with every goal, every dream on my list checked off as far as what would be the blueprint to happiness and success, and I just like this, this ain't it Because from when I was a kid, you know, I wasn't black enough around the kids I was growing up around, and I had no identity in that. But I found identity in how many peels I could pop or how many how many beers I could drink. And it's like that, you know that that identity around alcohol is real because nothing ever made me feel good, but we told me I could out drink people that made me feel great, and I started to get Yeah, I started to get that credibility as like a social facilitator, right too. You get that credibility for how much you can drink, how much you can use Do you got the hookups? Do you and know all the different kids and how the different prayers hook up so that you can facilitate party time? Do you know all the different phone numbers to call? And I became that party facilitator, that social coordinator early on. And that's another way that I got a lot of my like worth and my value was like facilitating a good time. Yeah, how long did it go on for? So you started drinking, your experimenting at ten or eleven? Where did that end up? Like? What was I mean? Walk us through a little bit of the path and the progression of the drinking and what else it led to and ultimately to your lowest point. Well, I think culturally I was always striving towards some level of alcoholism. That sounds strange, but where I come from, You know, you were kind of your adolescents in your early adulthood are spent kind of like honing your social capability, which means how you drink, how you use drugs, et cetera. So I got into daily drinking, you know, drinking as often as I could really when I was fifteen six, see always drinking at parties, drinking every weekend. That progressed into you know, weed and cocaine and other things nitrous oxide, acid, mushrooms, things like that at a at a young age, all through high school, and then by the time I went up to college at San Diego State University, I was a you know, I drank as often as you can put it in front of me, So any excuse to consume alcohol or drugs, I would gravitate towards and pursue, and that quickly I became enslaved to alcohol. By the time I was eighteen, I knew I was an alcoholic. I used to listen to the alcoholics of the Rat group that was like my we we would party to the alcoholics, and all they do is sing anthems about you know, grotesque consumption of alcohol and just overt alcoholism, and those are our those are our theme songs. You know. I really pursued that level of oblivion as often as I could because I needed it internally, and because it was a status symbol, Like that was acceptance where I was running, and you know, your access to drugs and alcohol and your ability to consume, to do to be the life of the party, was how you found acceptance. So I felt like I really needed those things in order to be participating in society and to gain any acceptance. But I made a decision really early on. I knew I was an alcoholic, and I knew I was physically addicted too, because I went, like one weekend tried out to drink when I was in college, and I thought, all right, I'm just going to commit myself just like my parents do, to drinking every night. That's what everybody else does. I can make the adjustment. I'll figure out how to drink, you know, even to oblivion on the regular, and we'll just figure it out. We'll be okay. And that that gave way to sell and weed at first to try to, you know, support my habits. I didn't have any money, you know, I've not had any money up until recently, to be honest, in terms of saving because of you, A lot of my wife my life has spent giving back. But yeah, my, my, my relationship with alcohol and drugs completely overtook my life very early on, and it totally occupied my transom, my son up to sun down until I got somewhere. I mean, I was completely enveloped by the devils of addiction in every way, shape and form, every place that that leads you everything that it just to you physically, emotionally, relationship wise. It completely took over my life and took it took my body completely failing. In order for me to have that the realization I needed to, I tried, man, I tried to go to meetings, I tried to link up with people. I tried to go cold turkey. I tried everything to eliminate alcohol and drugs for my life, or to drink like a gentleman, or to do this, that and the other, and it just wasn't possible for me. I needed that absolute rock bottom in order to facilitate any kind of recovery. So what were the physical ramifications of that much drinking for you? Well, it was interesting. You know, I was drinking twenty four hours a day. I got in a car accident in two thousand and three. I broke my chest and my shoulder. I broke my sternum and my shoulder got and you know, I got knocked out, and I was I was driving intoxicated. I rolled my truck off a cliff, like off a cliff and rolled down the cliff and got knocked out and hurt myself severely, and that, you know, that experience. Just healing from that experience, I had to drink to get through that. I had to drink a lot to get through that. I'm now I was drinking a box of wine a day just to get through the physical pain of healing from that injury. And that's what initiated twenty four hours a day drinking. That was like, there's this there's this fine edge when you get when you commit yourself to alcoholic, to alcoholism, and just the danger of doing that dance where it can push you over into twenty four hours a day to that physical dependency, not just emotional, but true physical dependency. And after I healed from that injury, I tried to go cold tricky, and I my the physical, emotional, every that kind of withdraw was brutal, was brutal. And I again, before I got really sick, I committed myself to alcoholism. I had another conversation with my after that crash, and I said, all right, well, I guess I'm addicted to alcohol, and I guess we're just going to have to figure out how to live addicted to alcohol as opposed to trying to pull the ripcord, ask for help figure out away. It was just too daunting. Trying to come up against society's norms. How well wellbn alcohol and alcoholism is to our social fabric was just overwhelming to me. I couldn't contemplate fitting into my skin, fitting into society, fitting into my family as a sober individual, and underneath at all. I think the main part was that I couldn't tolerate myself. You know, when those voices would creep in. As soon as alcohol drugs would seep out of my system, and those voices would start to creep in, is a overwhelming panic that would take over my body. If I got to run away for myself, I got to run away from myself, I can't. I can't tolerate you. I just cannot tolerate you, dude. And the only way I could get myself out of my head is through alcohol. So it just facilitated this brutal, brutal cycle until my liver finally failed. You know, I went into full blown alcoholic liver failure, and I tried every with all of my power to avoid getting that diagnosis. And to the part I just wouldn't go to the doctor. I mean, I was leaking blood from both ends of my body. And by the time I finally went to the doctor and got you know, blood tests and checked up on I'll never forget she came. The nurse came out and sat down next to me. She put her hands on my hand and she said, honey, you know these are your your blood test results, and you're in liver failure and you need to go to a hospital right now. And I was at a hospital, but not a very good one, and she said, you know, this is very serious, and I said okay, and I just completely brushed it off. I went home alied to my dad. I started wearing baggy. I was turning yellow, so I started to turn bright yellow. Had my belly started to fill up with blood and bile. So I was like nine months pregnant. I had these varicose veins feeding this huge mass inside of my stomach. My belly button was her head, and my ankles were full of liquid. My feet were full of liquid. And I couldn't come to grip with that diagnosis because I knew it meant no more alcohol for me forever, so I just avoided it. I just lied and avoided it, and then finally I started to have ammonia build up on my brain, where you really you forget where you are, You lose your balance, you don't understand who you are. Sometimes you kind of vacillate between coherence and total incoherence. And it was at that point that my dad took me to the hospital to Bakershield Memorial Hospital for long term stay and I stayed there for almost six weeks. The first thing the doctor said when after they got me stabilized, was, you know, your son needs a liver transplant and he's not going to get one. Period. I was given, you know, an eighty percent chance of dying within ninety days if I didn't have a liver transplant. So it was very cutting, you know, cutt and dry. It was, you need a liver transplant immediately or you're going to die. And they don't give alcoholics liver transplants. Period. You needs six months of recovery just to apply, just to be considered for the transplant program. I didn't have six hours of sobriety, you know. It was it was a terribly dire situation, you know, So do you end up getting the transplant or what happens next. So there's only seven hospitals in the state of California that do liver transplant, and I was not at one of them, and I was not in a transplant program, So there was no chance and no hope of me getting a liver transplant. The only hope was to get into one of those hospitals, and my dad is in there. This is so much of my sobriety story. So much of my comeback story is really a love story between a dad and his son. You know, a dad who just refused to give up on his son and refused to say, this is our lot in life. You know, he's not going to make it, and we just have to accept that. He just never entered his mind for a second that I wasn't gonna make it, and he did everything in his power to get me to a hospital that would care for me. And we finally got a meeting through a very child, through a nurse who worked for our insurance company, and she got us a very chance interview with the Cedar Sinai Comprehensive Transplant Center. So that's the best transplant center in America. It's at the hospital I was born at and they said, if you can get here within the next two days, we will get you a meeting with doctor Tram, trans the head of transplant. So my dad said, we're going, you know, pull all this shit out of your body. We're going. And the doctor said, no, you're not. You can't leave here. He'll he'll die if you leave here. I mean, I was the sickest the sick person could get. You know, I'd gone through alcohol withdrow in the hospital. I got addicted to delauded in the hospital. That's a whole other story. I got heavily addicted to opiates that six weeks that I was in the hospital, So I was I was in a very delicate state to be moved period, but my dad didn't, and he signed me out against doctor's orders. We did a burnout in the parking lot to get as far away from that place seemingly possible because I was dying there. They were not doing anything to help me. I was simply diet and making life a living hell for the nurses that were there because I'd even dope, you know, every four hours. And we got meeting with the Comprehensive transplant Center, doctor Tram tram, sat me down, went over all my information and she said, look, if we check you into this hospital, you're going to die here. And this is very touch and go, but we're going to send you home. You've been admitted to the Comprehensive transplant program. If you can get sorry it's emotional, If you can get six months sober, we will get you a liver transplant. But you have to get six We have to survive six months. And you know, the numbers said I wasn't going to make it ninety days, much last six months, so there wasn't a lot of hope, you know. And they sent us home and they said, look, he's going to have to kick dope, so stay near an emergency room. You're going to need it, and you're on your own. You're going to have to check in with us, you know, every twenty four hours. And they sent me home, and my dad's thinking to himself, you know, you just released him to the care of our dogs. And instead of a you know, a medical facility, you want our dogs and me to take care of a drug addicted, recovering alcoholic with zero sobriety who needs a liver transplant. And that's like you got to be kidding me. What am I going to do with this kid? You know? And as I'm sure that both of you can imagine, I convinced him to take me to the hospital for shock. You know. That was how we spent the first two weeks, was me trying to go through OPI withdrawal but to chicken ship, to kiss the dragon on the nose, and struggling through every second of it. You know, I mean, you know it is your central preoccupation. You can't help but have your central preoccupation be drugs. When you're addicted to drugs, nothing else can really enter, nothing else can permeate that boundary layer. And that was my focus. And to tell so long story short, we finally got through that. We got through that OPIE withdrawal. That was the first big miracle. My dogs helped me get through. You know. I had three rescue dogs that I'd gotten from the Mohabby Animals well, that I had gotten through from our community, a couple of them from the Mahabi Animal Shelter and kicking the lauded going through OPI withdrawal with those dogs helped me to a tremendous degree because that was one of the scariest things I've ever been through. That was like two days of hallucinations and now being able to trust what I was hearing seeing, you know, a full body fear too, like a full spiritual fear that the life of which you can't imagine. I just remember going through that and rooting down in my dog, feeling my big Rottweiler pitbull, Marley, and just just touching him to try to get through it and try to remind me what was real and what was not real, you know what I mean. That was the first big miracle that helped kind of facilitate my life. Was getting offed out. Man. This wow. And obviously there's a lot more to this story. It keeps kicking on as as the recovery happened. So after I got home, we were able to kick, you know, get through the opiate withdrawal process. And after I got through that, you know, I had soiled myself in the bed. I couldn't control my bowels. I was on a whole lot of very intense medication and how they keep ammonia build up off your brain when you're liver failures, This medication called angulo. So I had gone to the bathroom in bed, which happened regularly, and rather than wake my dad up, I went into the mirror into the bathroom to clean myself off. And I'll never forget walking past the mirror and looking at myself and seeing this, this like hollowed out human being that I did not recognize at all. I was completely naked, you know, because I had to take all my clothes off to clean myself up. And I was totally yellow, and every part of my body was purple. Was bruised from needles going in and from bumping into things. You bruise really easily when you're in river failure. I didn't recognize my eyes. I didn't recognize who was looking back. I mean quite literally, you know. I looked much much older, and I looked like a person I didn't recognize. And I just started to cry, like just that this is the end to cry, like soul crushing, defeated, sob of I can't believe this is what I've done to myself, you know, I cannot believe I've done this to myself and I and I mean the way I looked, and I'll never forget it. The veins and my stomach or the most intimidating, and you could see them on my throat too. And I look over my dogs in this like terrible moment of just self loathing and pity, and all my dogs are looking at that me next to the toilet, because I'd always like sit around the toilet, and they're looking up at me like I'm the world's greatest human beings, like like they see all of the nuke everything innate to me. Oh the love, the compassion and empathy, the potential, like all the human potential that was still locked inside of me, and all the things that were good about me that I did know we're in there. They lashed on too, Like they looked at me with all that adoration and that love and that and maybe even a little bit of sympathy, but like this attitude of we're good, you're good, you're good, right now, you're good. And I didn't see any of that. Man, I saw it. I saw this is time to let it go, like this is time to pull the plug. And they saw it. You're good, you know, you're all right. And I'll never forget looking at them and thinking, first of all, what's going to happen to my dogs if something happens to me. And two, you know, just feeling what they were giving me, feeling the emotions that they were sending me. This ultimate except unconditional love, unconditional love for us in recovery. Unconditional love is the north star, you know. It's something we're always striding towards this, that unconditional love. And our dogs give us that medicine in a form that is so digestible and so relatable and so warm and so imperturbed by other variables or other qualifications. It's just there. It's raw, it's real, and if you let it in, it will help you rebuild yourself, you know. So just that little bit of confidence they gave me in that they they knew everything could be okay and that it would be okay, and that kind of facilitated the first day of the rest of our life. Just that experience with my dogs at that really low moment catalyze me to say, all right, we're going to give it a shot, man, We're going to try to figure this out, and we're going to try to put one foot in front of the other literally, And that morning I didn't go back to sleep. I took a picture of the sunrise. I journaled in my journal and I remember thinking to myself on that first journal entry, he guys, I love this. I remember thinking on that first journal entry, I'm probably still going to die, and if they're going to find this journal and they're going to be like Jesus Christ, this guy can't spell for shit and his handwriting is terrible. Like that's what I was thinking, is that when I die, and this will be the only record of my last few months and people are going to make fun of me instead of you know, that's just how sick we are in the mind and how self absorbed, and you know we can be. But that really did. It kicked off the first day of the rest of our life. And every day for years after that, several times a day we just went for a walk. So every morning was walking in the mountains with those dogs, tried to put one foot in front of the other towards wellness and whatever happened on the road right And through just that simple process of focusing on those rescue dogs and that walk, it started to give me. One was very important was the concept of divinity in a relationship with God. I started to recognize my surroundings. I started to see God in my dogs and started to feel God in myself. I started to see it in the mountains, and then the people I interacted with. It was all around me. It was all around me. This loving and this unconditional loving energy that I always pushed away as atheists was around me everywhere. And another really cool thing about recovery is that you get you get to create and adapt and your own idea of what God means to you. I was so uplifting and fulfilling and exciting to me and even creative about recovery is that you get to come up with and manifest a God of your understanding, no one else's, it's mine. It's my understanding. You don't have to ascribe to it. But you know, my God gets to consist of a whole lot of ideas essences that aren't associated with conventional really and dogma, you know. And I really really appreciated that about recovery. But just that process of working with my dogs led to more working with dogs, led to bringing in foster dogs into my pack. I've been working with the Humane Society a couple of local organizations before I got sick. I started to volunteer with them again. I started to totally dedicate my life to these animals. So while I'm in recovery, it's very interesting. What dogs need in rehabilitation is exactly what people need in recovery. Dogs need exercise, discipline, affection, rules, boundaries, limitations. Right, those are the prayers we need to set up for a dog's rehabilitation. A human being likewise needs all those same things in order to re establish and reboot their life and refocus it on healthy living and sobriety and the principles of the program. And so that it just started to naturally happen. As I rehabilitated, the dogs started to rehabilitate, and I also got to get create native for the first time. This is really neat. I got to write their stories, I got to tick their pictures. So all of a sudden, I got this purpose. All of a sudden, all my purpose has been has been hoarding alcohol and drugs and ingesting it as much as possible. It's been my central preoccupation for as long as I can imagine. Drugs and alcohol were my God. They were my everything, right, they were my purpose. They were my reason to wake up in the morning. They were central to every part of my existence, and that got replaced by dogs, that got replaced by rehabilitating dogs and rescue work. And holy shit, was that transformative? You know, because you'll never recover unless you find a purpose. You can't. Recovery is so fickle unless you have something to hang your hat on, unless you have a purpose to plug yourself into. And then it becomes different. You know, it really becomes different once you found service, Darren. I got to say, Man, I'm loving how you've really made yourself at home in the big city. I'm curious, how are you getting around? You a subway guy, cab uber. I'm glad you're asked, Donnie Man, I'm a got the honor to partner with All American Forward over in New Jersey. They've been taking really good care of me since I got out here, and that's why I love the most about it. Man. They treat me like I'm family, not just a customer trying to get a deal or just a statistic. You know, they give me great service. You could tell they got to commitment to quality. The innovation is unmatched, and just so if anybody's you know, like me, trying to get around in New Jersey, don't know where to go. I'm telling you go check out All American Forward here in Jersey. They're gonna take real good care of you. When we come back, you'll hear more of this inspiring comeback story. Wow, man, I can't you know, get the image of when you were talking about the dogs looking at you as you were like in the bathroom and seeing the good in you? What was you know, as you started to go on the walks and you started to find purpose and you started to things started to change, Like, what was some of that good that you started to see in yourself that was always there that just had to kind of be you know, dug up, Yeah, yeah, it was really interesting. So what happened was, you know, all along, I'm trying to get six months of sobriety just to get this slipper transplant. But I'm now out and about in my community. I was very terrified to get out into public. I couldn't have done it on my own, but I had my dogs with me, So I start venturing out into public. I start putting up all these adoption posters for advertisement all over town. So people start to notice this yellow, sick guy with a black pit bull that is schlepping all over town talking to everybody, and I looked very significant, I looked very ill. So people took a big notice of me, and I started to see the positive. You know, I started to feel myself moved through the world with a positive frequency, with an energy and a vibe that people were recepted to. I never had a sober No one moved towards me like receptive to my positive energy when I was drinking, or maybe they did it. They were drinking and I was drinking. You were using drugs together. But people on the streets never felt my positivity. People on the streets didn't absorb the positive streak I was trying to leave back. So what animals did for me is help me leave a positive streak wherever I went. Wherever I went, I left a positive streak, and the people that walked through that streak, they could pick up that energy and take it with them wherever they went. So I started to notice this concrete, this wonderful interaction that we'd have with virtually everybody we came in contact with, because I would always have at least one dog with me, and that would facilitate and you know, if anything in the early days, it was very very concerned being in public. It was very hard for me. I had tremendous social anxiety, and so to not only get used to that and address that social anxiety, but to push through it and recognize yourself as an asset, as a societal asset, and start thinking of yourself as having this really wonderful frequency to share with the wold. I started to get excited to leave. I started to get excited to go out in public. That was considering how I looked, that would have been unthinkable. But I was in my sobriety, in this new uh, this new vibe I was able to inherit, you know, had the ability to positively affect anybody I came in contact with. And that was just critically important. And that really gave me this like catalyzed me to keep going and to just keep trying to figure out who this new person is. Who is this purser of service Zach scout, you know, who is this? Who is this? Am I a dog rescueer? I got to also pick I got to find several things that presented themselves as places to put my energy, you know, animal rescue being one, and then and then people rescue being another. So by the time I finally got six months of sobriety, by the time I finally qualified for a liver transplant, I no longer needed a liver transplant. All of this walking in the in the mountains every single day, all of this work. By throwing myself into the work I was doing, I was able to really change everything about my life. I changed when I put my body, everything I ate, everything I put in my body. I changed all of my habits before you know it, through this process of rehabilitating my dogs, of just walking these dogs in the mountains and trying to get them adoptable, trying to teach them rules, boundary structure, exercise, all those things I had taught myself. And so I'm rehabilitating these rescue dogs while rehabilitating myself in my body. The resiliency of the body is remarkable. I was twenty eight years old when I got sick. I was twenty nine when I got all the hospital, and my body bounced back to a degree, which is incredibly surprising and really miraculous. So yeah, by the time I got my six months sober and qualified for that transplant, I no longer needed one. Now I'm still enrolled in the comprehensive transplant program. I'm your a patients for life. Once you are end to stage and when you're in liver failure, it's not even called like stage four or five, they call it e n D end to stage liver disease because you get a liver transplant or you die. That is, those are your outcomes. So for my outcome, for my liver to have actually healed itself and regressed from stage four sorosis was completely miraculous, and I'll never forget that meeting at six months where trans said my doctor said that, look, man, I don't know what you're doing up there in the mountains, but keep doing it. You know, you need to keep doing it. Keep doing it because there's a chance your body will be resilient enough for you to continue and not need a liver transplant. So here we are now, fourteen years later, almost fifteen years later, after I got out of the hospital, and I still have my same liver, but actually regressed to what's called stage three five process, so I don't even have sorosis anymore, which is again it's completely miraculous. Part of a couple of studies at cedars On a medical center for those who have who have come back from end stage failure without a liver transplant. So I'm involved in trying to help give some insight and some guidance to those who are suffering with this disease and need some hope, and hopefully some they'll come up with some answers within that program. But yeah, it's even just talking to you guys about it this far on, it's really remarkable to recount. It's really been almost feels like it happened to somebody else. As I heard you explain, I could hear the and feel the emotion come up when you were talking about your dad, and I couldn't help but get emotional also just thinking about my dad and how he would do anything like you know, it's almost like it was part of his purpose where he would really felt like he was in his purpose trying to help me, you know, do anything he could to get me out of this disease. And so that was a big piece I wanted to circle back to. And then also that you know, I remember my rock bottom. I mean the image that I have of myself lying on a couch in Cincinnati, Ohio completely isolated, not wanting to be around anybody, nobody wanting to be around me. And my dog would come up with She was a rescue boxer named Roxy, and she would come up with a with a ball in her mouth and she would I would I couldn't even get off my couch and she would sit there and nudge me with the ball and then eventually give up. I can remember her licking the tears off of my face and I couldn't even step foot outside to go throw the ball with her. And that unconditional love. And she lived till about thirteen. She passed away about five years ago, but super emotional for me because she saw both sides of me and that unconditional love. Man, I mean, we can learn, we can learn a lot from our dogs. As you're explaining, I'd like to know now, like, how then, how do you get into working with incarcerated people. Yeah. So the way we got into the Positive into creating the Positive Change program was I had a dog that I was fostering that had been shot as a pitbull mix, and we paired that with a gentleman who had just been released from prison. He had been incarcerated since he was thirty since he was seventeen for thirteen years, and we paired him with that dog, and it fundamentally changed the entire trajectory of his life. He was kind of a a lot of people when they get released from prison are somewhat feral to the cultural standards that we kind of abide by. They have been living in a very different system for a very long time, so trying to for him to reinterer society was very challenging. But once we got him that dog. For the same reasons that it is for us in recovery, right, you're nervous about getting out of the world, you're nervousing, you know you're going to be sizing up a dude or feeling like you're being sized up. He's going to not understand how to interact potentially with people of the opposite sex. So he hasn't really interacted with properly in decades, right, So there's all these things that make it different, difficult to assimilate. And we adopted him that dog, and it just changed everything. He started to give his testimonial with me. He started to share at the mission at Kerrent County where my mom was getting sober at the time, and he became one of our employees. He then got hired to work as a shelter manager for another organization at Oklahoma. So it's just this simple dog adoption with this individual created this positive trajectory that is still beneficial today. He has his own dog riscue organization up in Linke, Isabella and it's called Strength the Shadow, and it's a big deal, you know. So that I saw it, had a kind of an Aha moment there, and I started researching dog programs and I thought out how incredibly difficult it is to get in the prison system. So spent four years trying to find a way and just trying to shoehorn my way in write emails, and nobody was having it until finally, January of twenty sixteen, Warden David Long at California City Correctional Facility took a chance on us and he piloted our program at their prison, and the rest is sort of history. We started off that program somewhat slow, and then we quickly went to thirty students, ten dogs at a time. So it's a fourteen week long program, three months of which the dogs these are dogs straight from the shelter, almost all ethan asilist young large dogs. So young large dogs are the most youuthanized. They have the smallest chance of being adopted because their adoption liabilities. They don't have the skills to be adopted, right, So we rehabilitate those dogs in that prison setup. They work on their canaan Good Citizen certification and with that certification graduate and then they can roll again in that program. So Positive Change really took the blessing and the acceptance of a warden who is down and an administrative staff who's down as well. And then truly are our staff the trainers that we had running that program. Positive Change is all about the trainers, the people that give of themselves in the institution and share dog psychology and all the things that we've learned over the last fifteen years. And the program has just been it's been magical. I mean it has been. It has been my life's work, to say the least. Like I feel so lucky to be involved in Positive Change work, to get to go into prisons all over the state of California, juvenile facilities, female federal prisons and really do the Lord's work, like do God's work. It's we're now in six facilities. We have three men's state prison programs, we have a women's federal prison program, and we have two juvenile programs, both the boys and the girls, one in Los Angeles at Camp Kilpatrick, which is actually taught by two of our formerly incarcerated trainers. And over in that time, in the seven and a half almost eight years we've been going, we've rehabilitated, We've graduated more than a thousand students and I think it's six hundred plus dogs, so a tremendous amount of lives have been saved. And with that program, we've been able to facilitate professional careers for twenty six formally incarcerated dog trainers. So we have twenty six of our former students. Many of them, if not most of them, are you know, black and brown, former gang members who have now entered the pet industry, which is one hundred billion dollar recession proof industry, to have tremendous opportunity as kennel technicians, trainers, behaviorists, pet walkers, daycare and facilitators. There is so much opportunity within this industry and it just fills me up with a tremendous amount of joy and pride to be able to showcase the potential that our students have to make a difference in the world. And to know that several dozen of our dudes are out there making it work and making a difference and contributing to not only our society and culture, but their own more particular societies and cultures where they come from, is just the best thing in the world. Man. I think you're painting an incredible picture of a blueprint for purpose for so many people, especially people that are listening because you, as young Zach, as you described earlier, just trying to feel safe, trying to figure out what life was all about through consuming like drugs and alcohol, consuming everything, when really all it took was finding something to contribute to finding something to give to the world is what ultimately filled you up. And just how ass backwards our world and our culture has those things as far as what life really means men, And I just think it's amazing, and I want to know now, like now that you have such an incredible purpose in your life, like, how do you balance that what's still taking care of yourself and not allowing that area of your life to maybe slack or drift. Yeah, that's a good one, man, it's it's it's very The self care element of service is tough, right, because that tends to happen. We go from throttled just to addiction and alcoholism or whatever else, to them throttling ourself in service, right, you know, and before you know it, you're you've aged yourself twenty years and three years and all the rest of it because you're you know, you're you're going at an unsustainable rate. That's a very good question. And I don't know that I do the greatest job balancing my self care with you know, all that I have happening around me. I will tell you that one of one of the variables I use for self care in my life is literally sitting next to you, connecting myself with with people like Dontie and communities like Donnie has has created of like minded people that you feel accepted by without any effort has done the world for me. Just having that group of people that you feel radical acceptance with is so so important in terms of my spiritual wellness, in terms of feeling okay with me. My recovery community, you know, the Donnie's community, and other you know, and even my prison graduate community. The thing that works best for me in terms of my mental health is staying close to those people. Staying close to people no love me and appreciate me for the right reasons, so I have no alteriar motives and who can always remind me of the worth that I have, you know, if I need it, because I have that lingering worthlessness that is just always like always beneath the surface, just waiting to breach, you know, with vengeance. And I think the other thing is are kind of the basic, man, the things that we all know what we have to do to keep ourselves well, we really do. It doesn't take reading the Daily Stoic or going through seventeen different you know, Instagram posts to understand how to take care of yourself. For me, it's about prayer, meditation, and exercise. If I'm doing those things, if I'm meditating and praying and exercising daily, I'm okay. You know, I'm okay. And then obviously I have the whole new component with my kids. That's a big for me. Rooting into my kids. Man, the best thing I can do for self, the best thing I can do for me and the people around me, is are root into my kids. Because every every second of time I spend with them is money in the bank. And because it constantly reminds me to be childlike, It constantly reminds me to have wonder and to be on inspiring and to be and to be buffoonical, like to just be a dipshit sometimes, to just like have a care free attitude and to be playful. You know, we forget how to be playful man. So I would say one of the best things for my spiritual state and my spiritual sort of easiness is really rooting into my kids and not just taking care of them or setting guy or this that idea, but really getting involved in how they you know what I mean, no doubt I'll never forget the story you told me about a prisoner who hadn't seen a dog in forty two years, and I I'm just curious, and you can tell the story or maybe just share, like what do you see, what are you observing? What are you getting to witness in those moments when because you know, I don't, I wouldn't even think about that, and to be able to witness, you know, a human being that has been locked away since they were a teenager for a dumb decision that they made when they didn't know better, hasn't seen a dog. What do you get to see? Wow, it's when I get to see When I bring dogs into prison is one of the greatest instantaneous transformations you can view. I get to see hardened incarcerated individuals who've been locked behind concrete walls for decades. I get to see them return to being unconditioned. We loved children. And that is so powerful to get to witness because you walk in on that yard and oftentimes I come to our program on an off day, so I'm just coming on with a couple of dogs, my two personal dogs, to go check in on everybody. So I'll come in on a Friday when we don't have program just to be like, what up everybody? You know, surprise them, And I'll always walk around the yard. I'll always take my time and walk around the yard and go to other housing units where they don't have programs, just so that guys can come mess with the dogs. And what happens when you see an these individual That individual in particular, he had just gotten moved. So this gentleman had just gotten moved to see yard at the Hatchbee and he'd been incarcerated for forty two years or forty five years. He hadn't seen a dog in forty two years. And to watch this stone cold expression on his face of and he had facial tattoos. Everything about him was stay back. Everything about him was fear me, stay back, stay away from me, and I'm definitely not going to let you in. And then as soon as you greet them, I always greet them with hugs. And I would always say and hug. It's not really with prison policy, but for me, my job in there is to love them. My job is to go in there with bright energy, with that positive streak just trailing behind me, and be as positive as I can. When I walk up to an inmate who hasn't seen a dog in decades and they get down on a knee with Beto or with Cora, they change instantaneously. They go from an individual in tremendous, unfathomable pain and helplessness to a child who feels unconditionally loved. And you see this just ear to ear, grim come on their face. And they will oftentimes be guys in different races, you know, rival prison gangs who are petting these dogs all together, kind of looking at each other noticing one another going whatever, let's just keep going. And so it really brings everybody together in the most magical ways. And I think it helps these guys feel loved, helps them feel accepted, and helps them plug into like a hope and a childishness, a positive childishness that they haven't felt, you know, a kid like way about them that they haven't plugged into it a very long time, you know, because everything about being a kid is potential. When you're a kid, everything is possible. Everything is possible, you know. And the other thing that happens when you bring dogs into prison is they feel one step closer to home. Nothing in that place feels like home. Nothing there feels like home. But when you bring dogs in, they all have this idea, oh shit, we're a little closer to home. This is a really good sign. We're doing good. We're one step closer to home. And I think prison is about rehabilitation. It shouldn't be about we know, the punitive model doesn't work. This is scientifically. We don't need to have long drawn out conversations about this. The punitive model of incarceration doesn't work. And locking dudes, all locking human beings in inorganic concrete cells and incubating them in a culture of negativity for decades and then spitting them out the other end and just throwing them into society to then reoffend and end up back in prison is an absolutely terrible illogical system. What we need to be doing is is is infiltrating those those prisons with positive energy and that those programs that positive energy has to come from without It does not come from within the prison system. They don't have their own indigenous prison programs. NGOs, nonprofit organizations have to develop these mechanisms and then bring them into the usually a great cost to themselves, and bring them into the prison system. And when we do, you know, because you can't rehabilitate until you get a person to a state. Rehabilitation doesn't start until they start to love themselves, have some sort of acceptance for themselves. It's very hard to fight against someone when they're dealing with rampant fear and a bunch of things that they're fundamentally hung up on. But when you when you inject dogs into the system, when you inject canine rehabilitation into their day to day, it kind of puts you on this track of wellness of improving yourself, you're also of service. So every day at six o'clock, when those cells pop, your response, You've got to go get your ass up, Go to that crate, let that dog out, go evacuate, feedom, get them them the CA. I'll get them walked before you go to chow, and then you have to work with your teammate on how that dog is going to be enriched for fourteen hours that day while the hum drum of the prison is going on all around you. So there's a you know, with programs like positive Change, and by by infusing a certain level of acceptance and love and hope into the that kind of a system, then real change starts to happen because guys start to think there's a way up and there's a way out. And I what I One of the reasons why I see the prison system fail to the degree that it does is because there is no hope. And when you have that many dudes, you have that many l wops, you know, that many life without parole individuals, it brings the entire frequency of that place too hopeless, and you have to inject hope in order to be successful and facilitate rehabilitation. And man, it was you and bn only have you helped to inject hope into those environments, but you've definitely helped inject hope and the people that are listening, because yeah, I feel like you put them eyes everything that comeback stories is and that's having an opportunity to rewrite your story and starting from wherever it is that you are, no matter how low it may be, there is an opportunity for you not only to get your life back, but to and the makings of giving somebody else theirs back to man. So I just want to say thank you to spit it hon her. Thank you brother. And that's what it is like what you guys have done. You've made getting You guys have made recovery cool. We got to make recovery cool again. Fact you know what I mean? That out that it ever wasn't But when you guys get out there and lead with your stories and show what's possible. Because man, let me think about it. When you guys we were back in your addictions, it was unfathomable for me to think about getting sober. It was just an impossibility for me to merit it on. But then if I see, if I see you out there getting after it. Then I got some hope, and then I got I have a you know, a couple of people I can emulate and seek to, you know, seek to take a page out of your books. Yeah, one of What a crazy right it's been, man, I'm extremely proud of you guys. I'm very proud to be on the show with you guys. Yeah, zach Man, it's been an honor. I mean, I hear about your story and there's so many facets of coming back, like your own comeback story and the dogs and the prisoners, and it's like it's just really calling me to step up my game when it comes to service. I know I talk about it and have my own ways of being of service, but it's like, man, I doing shit compared to this guy. So thank you for trying me, and thank you for showing up and sharing your story. Man, I know a lot of people are going to be inspired by your story. So where can people find you? Where can they track you down? Where can they donate? In terms of following the program, you guys can find all about our organization at Marlesmonts dot org. You can find us on social media at Marley's Mott's at Positive Change Program. That's pa w s I t IB and you can find me at zach Scout's the Ahskow and yeah, Marley's Monscout organ Is that the main place for all of our information into darnate and we get involved. Yeah, your your Instagram is you know, it's one of the accounts that I enjoy following the most, not just because I know you personally, just because of the content and what you're putting out there. So man, thank you again. We might have to go back for round two of this with this went pretty deep and yeah, it's just been it's been an honor to chop it up with you, my man. Yeah, YouTube brother, and a big shout out as we touched on to my dad for helping me be here, for having NB the integral variable to my comeback story. And here's to dad, so don't Yeah, all right, everybody, we're out. Comeback Stories is a production of Inflection Network and iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.