Episode 523 Mark Haddad Why Veterans Crave Chaos Transcript
This transcript is from episode 523 with guest Mark Haddad.
Scott DeLuzio: [00:00:00] Do you ever feel like the world just isn’t loud enough anymore? Like after everything you’ve seen and done, the normal pace of life feels flat. That dullness where nothing hits quite the same, isn’t just in your head. It’s chemistry, it’s wiring. And for guys like us, it’s survival instincts turned inward.
And what if I told you that the. Adrenaline, the chaos, the need to chase danger. It all comes down to one thing. This bar that got raised too high during combat or whatever you might have found yourself in that, raised that bar, and now it seems like it’s refusing to come back down. Today’s guest, Mark Haddad gets it.
He’s been there through combat contracting, crashing hard, and questioning everything. He breaks down how the mind, body, soul system works like a machine and what to do when your dashboard’s been blown out, and you’re just guessing about what’s wrong under the hood. This one’s not about necessarily fixing you.
It’s about helping you understand the machine that you’re driving. [00:01:00] But before we dive in, make sure you’re subscribed to the email newsletter at DriveOnPodcast.com/subscribe You’ll get my five favorite episodes sent straight to your inbox. No fluff, just the best insights to help you drive on.
I also wanna take a moment to raise awareness for something deeply important to our community, the Global War on Terrorism. Memorial Foundation. This organization is working to build a permanent national memorial in Washington DC to honor the service members, families, and civilians impacted by the global war on terrorism.
This memorial serves as both a tribute to those who served and a way to ensure that their sacrifices are recognized and remembered for generations to come. If you want to learn more or find out how you can support that mission, visit GWOTmemorialfoundation.org Now, let’s get into today’s episode.
[00:02:00]
Scott DeLuzio: Hey, Mark, welcome to the show. Really glad to have you here. I’m looking forward to having you share some of your experiences, your insights from your time in the Army, and share a little bit about your book that that’s how, and yeah, welcome to the show.
Mark Haddad: Hey, thanks Scott. Really excited to be here. And yeah, you know, and I, I looked all over your stuff. I mean, I, sorry, and Wow. You know, so,
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah, those are, those are two interesting responses there.
Mark Haddad: yeah.
Scott DeLuzio: But I do appreciate it. You know, especially, you know, that you know, given everything that, you know, families like ours have, have gone through over the last 20 plus years and, and even further back, you know, that it’s not just unique to the global war on terrorism.
It’s, it’s stuff that goes back, you know, centuries and, you know, families have to move on. Not, not forget and, you know, anything like that. But you gotta, you gotta [00:03:00] just keep living life. And, and that’s, I think, an important piece. Before we dive too much more into you know, this type stuff, would, would you mind telling us just a little bit about your, your background time serving in the Army and, and kind of some of the stuff that you experienced and maybe how that influenced what you’re, you’re up to now?
Mark Haddad: Yeah. So, I went in in 94 and got out in 99. I got in, I went to selection in 97 and I be, I was known as the, as a hundred mile an hour guy. ’cause I duct taped my foot together to get through it. And so that was kind of interesting. After I got out, I also had a parachute accident at the end. So, it was a, it was a just a, it was supposed to be a Hollywood jump that it turned into a full gear jump and my shoot was inside out.
Scott DeLuzio: Oh no.
Mark Haddad: And so I came down, I was looking around, I was like, oh, everything’s open. And I noticed the guy in front of me, I’m, I’m passing him. I’m like, how am I passing him?
And I, I [00:04:00] look up again and everything’s fine. I looked, I’m passing the next guy, and we were at like a 1200 foot, you know, exit. then I bounced my head back and I realized my risers were crossed. And so, I mean, it took a while to bounce back and I was like, oh my God. So then I looked down and there was the ground coming up.
I dropped my rock and am trying to pull myself up as much as possible like this to kind of just like, you know, so I’m not compressing
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: it doesn’t work in a parachute. You just slipped to the right. And that’s what I did. So I just increased speed and you know. I broke, I had a open fracture in my, in my lower leg.
And yeah, that was the end of it for a bit. So, fast forward a bit in oh three, I had to get back in. I I had, I had a cushy tech job. I was married at the time, no kids. Cushy tech job. And I was like, I, I gotta do it. So, I went to, when I was living in New Hampshire at the time, I went to the [00:05:00] 20th, group, which was in Westover Air Force Base.
Scott DeLuzio: I’m familiar with that,
Mark Haddad: close by where you were?
Scott DeLuzio: that that’s where, that’s where I went to meps.
Mark Haddad: Oh yeah.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: Yeah. So, sorry. So, I did a, I was doing some time there getting, get, trying to get reacclimated and seeing, you know, is it gonna make sense bringing now my new wife down to Bragg and then get deployed right away and then all this other stuff and, know, going from a civilian tech job to back at Bragg.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: With a wife who doesn’t know anything about that stuff, who doesn’t know anyone down there. I mean, you would just be writing it off, right? And at, at one point, because the docs saw the ankle and all that stuff, they put a big fat stamp on my, on my me on the a the application said permanently disqualified, you know?
So, I, I’d spent the year doing some stuff and then that was, that was it. So kind of carried on a little bit. And then oh seven I had a startup sold it, made some money and I was like, what am I gonna do now? [00:06:00] And I was like, alright, well, if I can’t go in served, I’m gonna go in as a contractor. So, while I served, I was in Africa, Panama did some stuff. Across the Sub-Saharan Desert. Right. My language skill sets were French and Arabic. So going back to that place was interesting. So I went to work for State Department so you, you probably can guess what are some of the, the acronyms under there.
Scott DeLuzio: Sure.
Mark Haddad: So we were doing strategic advice advising and then what I call battle coaching, which is kind of like kinda going along with them at times, making sure they’re doing the right thing. So like of the units that we were training, like in Burundi, they were gonna go fight in Somalia and they were gonna get lit up like annihilated.
They had no, I, these guys, half of ’em are gala, the other half don’t speak French. They’re all tribal. It was, it is just a mess over there, right?
Scott DeLuzio: Mm-hmm.
Mark Haddad: I did that for [00:07:00] about four years. something really nasty happened in my time in Burundi. Where some, there was a, there was a village that got hit and we weren’t doing any kind of security on that stuff or anything like that, were called to go check out what was going on. some, you know, I don’t want to get into the details here. Maybe that’ll be a book or a movie or something, but there was a really bad shit that happened with the kids
And I kinda, I kind of lost it at that time. I was wondering, what the hell’s going on? Let’s go after these guys. You know, you know those moments, you’re just filled with anger,
Scott DeLuzio: oh. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Mark Haddad: hate, you know, all this movie shit around, oh, you know, save it for the, nah, gonna, you gonna, you’re gonna die with that. You gotta, you gotta hate. So we were we got back to the hooch and I started thinking, I’m like, what am I doing here? Every time we take out a bad guy to [00:08:00] pop up.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: You just, you had Al Shabab, HEZ, B Islam, Boko Haram, all doing stuff in Africa. Taking kids, taking girls. I mean, like, is nonstop. And you can leave a, a village and the next morning they might be gone.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: And so I was thinking, you know, what am I doing? What am I, what is my purpose?
And I realized that my, you know, human’s purpose is to bring up our kids. Now, of course, everyone’s gotta go through their own path to get to where they want to be, but for me, I realized that the people that I was responsible for were 8,000 miles
Scott DeLuzio: Mm-hmm.
Mark Haddad: And so at that point I was like, all right, that’s it. Went back home. Because ultimately, you know, no matter how much I wanted to be out there, you know, it’s like that bigger, it’s the bigger calling, it’s doing the bigger mission. It’s saving people. It’s. You know, getting rid of bad guys. the end of the day, your kids don’t know [00:09:00] that.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah,
Mark Haddad: don’t care.
They don’t even understand, you know, all they know is that dad wasn’t
Scott DeLuzio: that’s right. Yeah.
Mark Haddad: And I didn’t want that. I had my time. I tried to go back. I got stopped. Someone was watching over me. And even in Africa was kind of interesting. So, I went back home and that, that mantra kind of stuck to me even in business.
And and I, I was just kind of just climbing the corporate ladder one role after the next and, and getting getting to the point where I was running software company for North America for, you know, it was a multinational company. and at that point, you know, I always had the old off Mark sitting here yelling at me, what are you doing selling software? Like, what is this bullshit? You know, get back over there. You know? So it was always self-sabotage. And so the reason why I wanted to give that point. Is that we have that all the time.
Scott DeLuzio: Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Mark Haddad: ourselves like all the time. And I help in some like [00:10:00] military groups where, you know, some of the guys get, you know, trouble and you always hear this thing around, well, you know, we, there’s basically, there’s no one to talk to. And then they get, they get triggered by other things
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: and I gotta stop ’em. Like, triggers the only one place for a trigger and that’s a
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. Right.
Mark Haddad: You, you know, we gotta, we have to think about how we acted when we were, when we were over there. Just even go back to your first duty station before anything happened, right. When you were there, how did you act? You acted with discipline. You thought you executed because it was structure. didn’t have to talk to anyone ’cause someone said something to you passing by. You had respect for
Scott DeLuzio: Mm-hmm.
Mark Haddad: Right.
Scott DeLuzio: That’s right.
Mark Haddad: You had respect for someone that someone said something to you, you’re not gonna go car.
You know, you’re not gonna go road rage over them. You know, it was a, it was a brotherhood vote because we respected each other. But when you come back here, all of a sudden someone can set you off just because they said something to you.
Scott DeLuzio: Right.
Mark Haddad: do we not have that [00:11:00] control? Right. So that, I’ll just pause there, but sort of where ended up.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. And your point about the self-sabotage that is a hundred percent true. That happens all the time. And you know, a lot of guys get maybe addicted to the adrenaline rush or, or the chaos that comes with deployments in, in combat and war, and the things that, yeah, you might have a plan, but then that plan goes to shit.
As soon as you walk outside the wire, after that first bullet flies, that whole plan is gone. And now you have to figure out how do I, you know. How do I survive this attack? How do I move on? Can we continue the mission for whatever it was? Or do we have to fall back? What do we need to do? Do we need QRF?
Do we need, you know, all these things are going through your head at that point, and it’s chaotic. It’s, it, a lot of times it’s [00:12:00] just quite frankly, crazy that people do this to each other, but you know, when you’re, you’re in that situation, it, it’s, it’s chaos. And, and some people thrive in the chaos. Like they, that’s when their, their true colors come out and they, they shine a little bit in that, that chaos.
And when they get back to a calm environment, a normal, safe home, loving people around them and living in a safe neighborhood, it’s like, this isn’t crazy enough for me. I need to. Go get drunk and drive a hundred miles an hour in my car and create some chaos in my life. Right? But that, again, that’s self sabotaging, you know, that’s, that’s not the thing that you need to be to be doing.
Mark Haddad: Yeah. In the, in, in, when I, when I go through the chapters, it’s, it’s the book’s. A Soul spoke to me, but, you know, it’s really about the reality of soul, right? You
Scott DeLuzio: okay. Yeah.
Mark Haddad: and instance, when you’re going through selection or you’re going through boot, or you’re going through whatever, right? You [00:13:00] gotta have purpose or else you’re gonna quit.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: Right. And it’s not body, it’s not body strength, and it’s not mental strength. I know we talk about that like in sports, it’s all in the game. It’s all in the head, you know, that sort of thing. But what happens when you’re at, you know, when, when you’re getting, when you’re getting rained on and you gotta, you gotta move. It’s not the, not the mind anymore, it’s the soul. Right? When you’re, when you’re exhausted and you can’t run anymore, you gotta go, that’s the soul, right? Think about football games, right? When you go to, when you go halftime and you’re losing coaches, like all up in your ass, right?
Scott DeLuzio: Right, right.
Mark Haddad: yeah. They’re not saying, oh, you gotta think better.
I mean, maybe in some cases, but the majority of the situation is who wants it more?
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: play with all heart, right? They’d say that stuff, right? So they know. And then at the end of the game when the team wins, it was like a tie game. It was all the way to the end. What do they say about the team that won? They wanted it more.
Scott DeLuzio: They wanted it. Yeah.
Mark Haddad: It was not, they fought harder. [00:14:00] All things being equal. It’s, they wanted it more. You know, we see these stories all the time pushing beyond, you know, even knowledge. You know, I was, when I was in selection, I was whistling whistle while you worked during some of the road marches just to kind of keep myself awake.
’cause all the stars were just shifting on me as I was walking, you
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah, sure.
Mark Haddad: So you, you have to understand that the, the soul is there and it does give you that driving compass of where to go. Your mind and your body are just like your, your machinery right now,
Scott DeLuzio: Right.
Mark Haddad: existence. And I’m not gonna talk about religion or spiritual, it’s all the same. And science is actually proving that a religion exists. I work in the quantum, I do some quantum computing stuff at my, at my work. You know, I’m take, I, you know, I’m in the quantum physics graduate studies, and I tell you what, this is one of the only fields in science where people believe that there is a God,
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: that has created stuff, right?
’cause there’s just [00:15:00] scaffolding around reality. But we’re in this thing right now, right?
Scott DeLuzio: Mm-hmm.
Mark Haddad: And when you’re in it, your mind and your body work together. Your body’s the chemistry, it’s the radio antenna stimulus receptor, right? We see with our eyes smell here, et cetera.
Scott DeLuzio: Mm-hmm.
Mark Haddad: And then it creates chemistry, oxytocin, serotonin, adrenaline, cortisol, you know, norepinephrine, all these different hormonal hormones or chemistry that goes into the body that is then translated by the mind into and experience of emotion. So the soul is the recipient of this.
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: the reason why I’m telling you this is because when you, when you went the combat the first time, many people around you froze?
Scott DeLuzio: Prob probably a few. Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Haddad: And people are, you know, they just can’t
Scott DeLuzio: Mm-hmm.
Mark Haddad: And there’s other people that thrive. It’s not the soul, it’s the way that your mind handles the chemistry. [00:16:00] And the reason why that’s important is because at the end when we talk about when you come home, it’s the same thing.
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: think about when you, when, when you were younger, let’s flash back when you were younger and you decide to go, you know, now I want to go race car driving, or you wanna drive a hundred miles an hour, and then that’s no longer enough.
Right Now you’re like, I wanna go skydiving.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: And you have a friend that goes skydiving and then they come back and now they just all talk about skydiving all the time. They’re trying to get you to go skydiving and anything else that you do beforehand is dull.
Scott DeLuzio: That right?
Mark Haddad: all dull. So the world’s dull unless you do this thing.
It’s like extreme as a
Scott DeLuzio: Mm-hmm.
Mark Haddad: It’s because of the chemistry that we’re creating, which is the same mechanism that when people take chemist chemicals like drugs, meth, all that stuff, body, your mind has to raise this bar so it can handle the chemistry. So think of it like a high jump,
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: and every time you do this action, this activity and the chemistry hits the bar has to go up so you can handle it all.
Unless, or else [00:17:00] you’re gonna go, you, you, you’re, you’re gonna go, you’re gonna freeze.
Scott DeLuzio: Okay. Yep.
Mark Haddad: Alright? So the bar keeps going up and that way it’s very hard for the bar to come down,
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: but the bar is easy to go up. people who, you know, had trauma, the bar didn’t go up and they’re screwed for like the rest of the world. Other people that had a severe trauma, the bar gets pushed up, unnaturally, and now normal stuff is down here, is
Scott DeLuzio: It’s just boring, you know, everyday normal routine type stuff becomes probably almost unbearable to. Some people who are used to it.
Mark Haddad: you, you have, you have the dull story. Everything’s dull when I come back, you know? So think about self-sabotage, right? How many times you did a 25 mile road march that turned into a ruck run right? Now when you come back, I remember I was at work, people were like, oh, let’s go do the Boston Marathon.
I was like, what the, what are you talking about? Marathon? I used do 25 miles with a [00:18:00] rock rifle in boots. I’ve already done that thing. Thank you very
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: Okay, well friends say let’s go zip lining in Costa Rica. I said, you know what? You know what I’ve fucking been doing in my life? I don’t zip lining.
Okay. So we self-sabotage because in of experiences, because we’ve done it or we think that our bar is too
Scott DeLuzio: Uhhuh.
Mark Haddad: so that we don’t want to do these ones ’cause it’s never gonna catch up with these.
Scott DeLuzio: That’s right.
Mark Haddad: In reality it does. But the problem is we have to learn how to lower the bar.
Scott DeLuzio: Right, which you said is not an easy thing to do, but that it’s not an impossible thing to do either.
Mark Haddad: it’s not impossible when you know that that’s what it is. When you, when you’re aware that it’s the chemistry. Like for instance, if you have a daughter, my daughter was young. She started, wanted to watch a scary movie when she was like seven or eight. It was like a cartoon,
Scott DeLuzio: Uhhuh
Mark Haddad: sitting there going, ah, it’s, it’s, you know, But she’s excited, right? And then by the time she’s 16, she’s like watching Insidious, [00:19:00] you know, it’s like
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah,
Mark Haddad: going up, right?
Scott DeLuzio: sure. Sure.
Mark Haddad: watch this cartoon anymore. You know? it’s the same thing in everything we do. so when, when we come back specifically people come back, we have to like sort of take yourself out of you, right?
And then watch from perspective what is actually
Scott DeLuzio: Mm-hmm.
Mark Haddad: Your soul’s asking for something. It’s like Julius Caesar back in the day and the glass, it was like sitting like this and you do something that’s like, ah, you
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. Yeah. Thumbs up or thumbs down. Yeah. That type of thing. Yeah.
Mark Haddad: And that’s why we do dumb shit and we wanna drink and then go drive in a hundred miles an hour
Scott DeLuzio: Uhhuh.
Mark Haddad: because we want that thrill. It’s all a chemistry thing. And it’s the same thing we do to get people to surprise. So the business, when we try to get, you know, people to listen to us or, or have an emotional connection about something, remember we only remember negative emotional situations easily. it outweighs the positive.
It’s
Scott DeLuzio: [00:20:00] Mm-hmm.
Mark Haddad: negative will remember positive. It has to be great to remember
Scott DeLuzio: it, and it makes sense that from a evolution standpoint, because you wanna do a whole lot less of the negative stuff or have a lot less of that negative stuff happen to you because that’s how you survive. And the good stuff. Well, yeah, it’s good. It maybe, it feels good, it’s enjoyable, pleasurable, whatever word you wanna put to it.
It doesn’t ensure your survival. Right. So, so that makes a whole lot of sense that, that you would do that. But you know, there, there’s a whole lot of things that you can point out and notice that that bar keeps getting higher and higher and higher. When my kids were young, the toys that they had were all super loud, flashing lights, all the, that type of thing.
Right. I remember, you know, growing up as a kid, we had like Lincoln logs and you know, like, yeah, go outside and play in the dirt and, and that go ride your bike. Or, you [00:21:00] know, something like that. I mean, yeah, sure. There, there might have been some things that made a, made a little bit of noise or, you know, maybe it had a bell or something like that on it.
But it was, it wasn’t like anything flashy and, and bright and loud and, and some of these things, I mean, you couldn’t shut them up because they were so loud. Right. And. I, I think it’s like, hey, marketing team or you know, product team in whatever toy company we’re getting outsold by, by the competition.
So let’s make our thing louder and flasher than the other guys. And then the kids get drawn to that and then someone else makes it even flasher and louder. And then they get drawn to that. And then eventually you’ve got stuff that’s like, as a parent, it was unbearable to, to like watch them play with some of these toys ’cause they’re awful.
And the same thing with like cartoons, like the, the bright colors, the, the quick scene transitions. We didn’t have any of that crap when we were kids. We had like Bugs [00:22:00] Bunny and, you know, you know that, that type of stuff that, I mean, those, those were. As kinda low tech as they got, as far as cartoons go, I think.
But but that’s, that’s the, the difference is like, like that barge over, over the years just kept getting raised higher and higher and higher and needing to be flashier and color more colorful and louder and more stimulating. And it’s no wonder that kids these days have the attention span of a goldfish.
Like they’re, like, they have no attention span these days and then add social media and all this other crap on top of it. That just makes things even worse, I would imagine. You know? And so, you know, it, I think like, to your point like this is, this is something that happens in many areas of our lives.
It’s not just combat. It’s not just you know, someone with, with drugs or other trauma, things like that. It, it, it can happen. I mean, even to a young kid just like that, right?
Mark Haddad: Yeah. You [00:23:00] know, one thing I I I found in the research that I was doing was that there were basically different types of efficiencies
Scott DeLuzio: Okay,
Mark Haddad: around the BMS. Right. Just like, just like you, you knew when you, when you went down to the, to the sandbox, you went down range. There were people there that you knew that may have signed up after nine 11 that should have never been in the military.
Scott DeLuzio: sure.
Mark Haddad: were, it’s like you, you had a good mission. You, you had good purpose, but your body is not made for
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah,
Mark Haddad: or your mind is not made for
Scott DeLuzio: sure.
Mark Haddad: And so you have a lot of people that went and. You know, didn’t do well because of the,
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: inability of the body to handle
Scott DeLuzio: Mm-hmm.
Mark Haddad: that was going on, you know?
And so this machine, the machine was overwhelmed. And so, like, now, like you’re saying, it’s not just military, you’re right. It’s not, it’s not just trauma. Right? Right. I mean, even if you think about the FBI files from back in the late, [00:24:00] early seventies when they were looking at serial killers, before the word serial killer was invented, all of them were saying, I’m, I was bored.
It was dull. I needed something that’s gonna stimulate. I mean, they’re saying the same exact things, you know? So I’m not saying that we’re all serial killers.
Scott DeLuzio: sure.
Mark Haddad: that, I mean, maybe No, but what I, what I am saying
Scott DeLuzio: No comment.
Mark Haddad: works, it all works on the same mechanisms, right? The body’s, it’s a, it’s a similar mechanism that works on the, you know. state of the chemistry and how the mind that mind’s translating it. Right?
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: then if I, I was starting to look at people, like when we looked at people I was trying to figure out how to, how to break this thing down. And a few key themes came around. Ambition was one and complacency and contentment to be kind of the three main things. And so the first category was like low ambition and complacent. so I was like, well, where, where the hell did we think about those kind of [00:25:00] people? occurred to me that when we graduate high school, we look around at our peers and we make judgment calls and we’re like, oh, they’re gonna go do this.
Highly ambitious, you know, smart. They’re gonna, they’re a go-getter,
Scott DeLuzio: Mm-hmm.
Mark Haddad: And you have that whole ex extreme spectrum. And then you end up with the people that are like, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I’m just gonna. Work at the store
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: do nothing. Right. And, you know, we, everyone judged that too.
Everyone judged. We didn’t know why. When you’re that young, you don’t know why. You’re kind of like, you know, we’re kind of immature. We base it on different criteria of, you know, social status and all that kind of stuff.
Scott DeLuzio: Well, yeah, we, we kind of have an idea of what success looks like and someone with no ambition who’s just gonna float through life. That kind of looks like not a very successful person, but I guess it really depends on what your definition of success is. If that’s what the person wants, then, then that’s good.
They’re good to go and they’re successful. Right. [00:26:00] Okay. Yeah, sure.
Mark Haddad: so let’s, let’s, let’s pin on that. It is, it’s kind of unfair to say you’re talking, of course you’re talking about human stuff. We’re human, we all we know is to be
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. Right.
Mark Haddad: But the, if you think of it this way for a minute, right? You go to the next stage, it’s the ambitious people.
You know,
Scott DeLuzio: Sure.
Mark Haddad: the people that went to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, computer science, you know, whatever. You’re gonna go, you’re gonna go do something. You want the better car, you want the bigger house. You,
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: wanna grow in life and you wanna do cool things. You have this thing, there’s varying degrees of that, right? Then you have the people. That’s where the third category of extreme is a drug.
Scott DeLuzio: Mm.
Mark Haddad: Those are the people that all things like, you know, I, I like the race motorcycles. I did that when I got back from the military. You race cars, you do anything that causes adrenaline. You want to, people always go skydiving, scuba diving, whatever it may be. It’s that. you go to combat, you come back, you still need that chemistry.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: You’re chasing, you’re chasing that [00:27:00] situation in your mind, the way your mind handled it. And so we can never find it because we don’t have that same, we don’t have that same stimuli to create that chemistry. That’s why we do crazy dumb shit. Because we’re looking for it and we don’t know why. Now that, you know, why go do something that’s safer, that’s dumb shit, you know?
Scott DeLuzio: Sure.
Mark Haddad: you’ll get the chemistry, right? But also think of it, the bar’s up here. Okay, do I need to throw everything away and start again down here to go to the bar? No. Some people stayed in the military or stayed in, in contracting because that’s all they’re gonna know, man.
Their souls are lost, right? But then you have people that are just missing it and it’s driving ’em crazy. All you gotta do is figure out this delta. that’s what I help ’em do.
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: I help people figure out, you gotta throw away the baby with the bath water, or you just gotta figure out this delta and let’s capture that or lower the bar to make you to, to, to [00:28:00] bring them back, right? the last group is. The people that are gone, right? Long-term abuse. Acute abuse, or maybe just your body’s broken.
Scott DeLuzio: Mm-hmm.
Mark Haddad: born that way. Some people were born with no arms and maybe this person, the person’s born without the chemistry to satisfy their
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. Right,
Mark Haddad: looking for stuff, right?
Scott DeLuzio: right.
Mark Haddad: when we look at that, what I found was that you have these categories, but really the first category that we had judged the most is the most efficient mind body system. With the soul. They don’t need much and they get than enough happiness than meanwhile, US schmucks are sitting there busting our asses to, to do what we need to do to get more, to get more, to get more.
And we may or may not be content.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: what will happen? Who do you think’s the smart person.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah, exactly. I, I [00:29:00] think, yeah. Not busting your ass to get the same results, I think is, is probably a, a good idea, right?
Mark Haddad: Yeah, sure. They’re gonna have problems. I mean, we all have problems,
Scott DeLuzio: does. Yeah,
Mark Haddad: yeah, they have, like, they’re gonna have, they, they can’t go on the vacations. We go on or whatever, whatever that may be. But they’re still living a life. They’re still happy.
Scott DeLuzio: yeah. Yeah.
Mark Haddad: do their job, come home, eat dinner with the family, watch the game, go to the kids, games or whatever, and that’s it.
They don’t care about anything else. Turns out they’re the most efficient. They’ve been dealt the best hand, and we look at it in reverse.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, we, we see the. The Instagram highlight reel of people’s lives, where that’s everyone’s showing their, their flashy cars, their flashy outfits, their flashy whatever, fancy vacations that they’re taking and all that. And that’s, we look at that like, now that’s, that’s my bar that I gotta get to.
’cause now I’m comparing myself to that person instead of [00:30:00] looking at myself and saying, what is it that I really want? Not, not like, how do I compete with that? What, what do I need? You know, what do I,
Mark Haddad: we’re targeting a thing
Scott DeLuzio: yeah,
Mark Haddad: happy.
Scott DeLuzio: yeah.
Mark Haddad: And that’s kind of interesting because in, for instance, in in Buddhism or Shalin, Shalin monks, right? They say, by the way, there’s this, there’s this thing, a vacation you can take. It’s called monk for a month.
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: gotta check it out. I was like, this close.
And I was like, look, I’m already bald. It’s not gonna matter. I’m not gonna, they’re gonna shave me. All right, cool. And you go to Nepal for three weeks and you do monk stuff, which is basically sweeping the floor with the decrepit bro.
Scott DeLuzio: Right?
Mark Haddad: And, you know, didn’t go though, but you know, the monks believe they, they want peace.
They’re striving for peace. Right? And that sounds good, tell you, it’s wrong.
Scott DeLuzio: Hmm.
Mark Haddad: Not what? It’s not why the soul is in your body for your life now, whether you believe in [00:31:00] reincarnation, whether you believe there’s a huge ass line trying to get in heaven, whatever you believe in, okay? But the soul coming into a body has to have a reason.
Like what does a soul have in a body that doesn’t have on its own
Scott DeLuzio: The experiences that, yeah, well, why? Why do we have the experiences? Is that what the question is? Or,
Mark Haddad: Yeah.
Scott DeLuzio: I don’t know why.
Mark Haddad: you know, outside of this space time, like imagine like a tube,
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: the tube there’s material able to be formed.
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: Okay? The thing that creates this tube is the quantum physics programming that creates space and allows, like a scaffold, allows for things to stay on. So material’s allowed,
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: time happens to also be there. The only reason to have time is to have mortality.
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: There’s no other reason to have time. [00:32:00] Mortality, we have this, this thing of mortality is that when we’re in a body now we can have that experience, like you said.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: And as a, you know, as a human in particular we have a whole list of emotions that we understand as humans. So dogs have ’em,
Scott DeLuzio: Mm-hmm. Sure.
Mark Haddad: they get angry, they get anxious, they get happy. Same thing, right? So for us, we have all these emotions that get tra or this chemistry that just translated to emotion the soul on its own, does not, when
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: on near death experiences? I, common thread across everything is that they were saying I was at peace.
I don’t know how to explain it. And the reason they were at peace is because they didn’t have a body at the time.
Scott DeLuzio: Interesting. Yeah.
Mark Haddad: Now, I don’t know what that feels like particularly, but the peace concept means that there is no up or down or side left to right. It’s your center, right? Which is what the shall and monks are trying to do.
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: to just be at peace. No [00:33:00] happy, no sad they say that. So while that seems interesting, you’re cheating your soul why it’s here.
Scott DeLuzio: And.
Mark Haddad: have enough time when you die to be at peace.
Scott DeLuzio: And, and that actually sounds kind of, in a way, kind of awful to just be kind of neutral, not, not super happy, not angry or, you know, any frustrated, any, any of those negative kind of emotions and No, just you’re just kind of baseline neutral. I don’t know, like what does that, what does that even that, that’s, to me, that just seems like a, a miserable way to go about life.
Like, you don’t get to experience any joy or happiness. You also don’t get to experience any sadness. So something happens to a loved one. What are you just gonna like, oh, well, I [00:34:00] guess, I guess that sucks. Oh, well, well, you know, not a big, and it’s not having any emotion about it. Like that doesn’t seem like the right way to go either.
And I, I think, again, because. You know, to what you were just saying, there’s, there’s a soul somewhere inside of me. You know, it may be very dark and, you know, hard to find at times, but but it’s in there and it’s, it’s craving some sort of experiences out there in the world. And some of those experiences are gonna be good, some of ’em not so good, and, but it wants all of them and it want, it wants to take in all those things, right?
Yeah.
Mark Haddad: yep. It was that, that the feeling, the feeling of emotion is really what it wants. That’s what satisfies the soul. You hear that all the time, you know, soup for the soul or what satisfies the soul. Or, you know, people say like, I’m gonna leave my job because I’m just not, I don’t feel satisfied
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: quit their tech job and they open up a flower shop. It’s like, is that really what
Scott DeLuzio: Mm-hmm.
Mark Haddad: Or are you just missing the bar? how far away from that bar are [00:35:00] you? So, you know, it’s really about awareness of what’s happening in that BMS system, that body, mind, soul system, and how efficiency gain, you know, how that actually determines how you’re gonna feel about things. Like, you can feel something about something, but it might not be the same feeling. Like if we do the same thing, you may have a different feeling about it. Either
Scott DeLuzio: Sure.
Mark Haddad: nurture, you know, a lot of different things that go into it.
Scott DeLuzio: Yep.
Mark Haddad: But at the end of the day. We’re our human pat, like our human existence, is to, you know, some people say have experience in learn lessons. I believe in that myself, although everyone can have their own thing. But your human purpose is different than your soul’s purpose. The soul’s purpose here is to have emotion.
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: Now, what you do for the human life to get that is up to you, right? But here’s the next question. Does it even matter? Like,
Scott DeLuzio: I don’t know.
Mark Haddad: we [00:36:00] expendable to the soul?
Like I’m, I’m gone in like 80 years. What’s it mean to the soul?
Scott DeLuzio: And, and Will will that I guess the, the question then is, will that soul, if it still is needing something, will it go inhabit some other flesh taxi, you know?
Mark Haddad: I mean, well, that’s a whole, in my book, I talk about that a little bit facetiously, where I’m like, okay, look, depending on what you believe, there’s a lot of serious questions around here. Because if you believe in like reincarnation, okay, then you’re saying that your soul distinct to you, you’re mutually exclusive soul, which also means that back in the beginning of time when there were like a hundred people, there were only a hundred souls.
How did we get from a hundred to 8
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. Right.
Mark Haddad: Is there like a soul making machine? You know, someone’s cranking out like a meek grinder, getting souls out
Scott DeLuzio: we just taking a piece of a soul, you know? Or, or, you know, is, are we splitting it?
Mark Haddad: like the world has gone to
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. Right. We need, yeah, we, we need to thin the herd a little [00:37:00] maybe. And
Mark Haddad: Yeah, I know, right? We need the, we need to thin the herd so our souls are more full in the grand scheme of things, so
Scott DeLuzio: yeah,
Mark Haddad: more, you know, we have better people. That, that would be an interesting,
Scott DeLuzio: that’s, yeah,
Mark Haddad: a, a movie right there, man.
Scott DeLuzio: I, I, that didn’t come from me. I don’t want any royalties. I don’t want anything to do with that because I don’t want anyone actually thinking the herd thinking that that’s gonna actually make any changes in this world. Don’t do that. Please. Let’s not, let’s not advertise that as, as a viable option here.
Mark Haddad: Does it matter, like, does the soul care ultimately when we die, what we’ve done?
Scott DeLuzio: well, I don’t know, like if this is kind of interesting discussion and when you have a soul, like you said, the soul wants experiences. That’s why it’s inhabited inside of our, our bodies and, and we are able to move it around and take it and experience different things and, and do different things. And some of ’em good, some of ’em bad.
Well, I guess the question then is like, why [00:38:00] does that soul want that? Like, is is it like kinda like a, like in a, in a video game where, where you have like a, a power up and, and the more experience you have, like the, the higher up that level gets and, and you know, at the end of your days you want that, you want that experience level to be as high as it possibly can be.
So that way it’s. At peace when you go, maybe I don’t, maybe that’s part of that piece is balancing out. I want a lot of goods and I want a lot of negatives and, and we can balance that out in, in the end, you know, and you, you do a final tally of, of all the experiences that you’ve had. I don’t know, like there’s, that’s beyond my pay grade, I think.
Mark Haddad: You know, you, you talked to an older person. I remember I talked to my 90-year-old grandmother when she was dying, and she was like, I, I’m ready to go.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah,
Mark Haddad: too many things over and over again. I was like, huh. That stuck with me
Scott DeLuzio: sure.
Mark Haddad: like [00:39:00] over and over again. That was kind of key. It’s like you seeded enough times, you kind of like, I’m done with this, you
Scott DeLuzio: It’s almost like watching the same movie over and over again. It’s like, you know what? It, it was good the first time, but you know. Yeah, sure. Yeah. But yeah, talk about movies.
Mark Haddad: on Groundhog Day, every day in the middle of the movie, every, he was just feeling more and more and more depressed because he knew what was gonna happen.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: there was no chemistry to excite him.
Scott DeLuzio: Right, right.
Mark Haddad: tried to kill himself how many times? Right? Until a point where he decided, I’m gonna try to create the chemistry. Really? He was trying to change what was happening and he was going after something that created the chemistry, the
Scott DeLuzio: Hmm.
Mark Haddad: with
Scott DeLuzio: I’m not gonna remember her name either. It’s been a while since I’ve seen that, but I know what you’re talking about. Yeah.
Mark Haddad: yeah. So the chemistry he was actually creating, the chemistry that was changing his memory, that was changing the scenario that
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: him happy. [00:40:00] That’s almost like a great example. I am glad you brought that up.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah, well I, that was an accident, so I’m glad I brought it up too. ’cause it just ac accidentally came out and, you know, triggered something in you. What? But again, that’s an experience, right? And that’s how, how did we react? I had no intention of bringing up Groundhog Bay, but I just was talking about a generic movie that, you know, we’ve all seen a movie probably more than once and maybe several times.
And, you know, maybe the, you really liked the movie the first time, but then, you know, the more you watch it, maybe, maybe you start to, it starts to wear on you and, and then maybe it’s not quite as good anymore, the, the fifth or sixth time. Or at least the experience isn’t as good because you know what’s gonna happen already.
So it’s not like. That, that moment in the movie that’s gonna shock you or surprise you or scare you, that you know, the, the murderers coming out around the corner and, and he, you know, stabs a person or whatever, like, you know what’s gonna happen. So it doesn’t, it has, doesn’t have the same effect that it did the first time around.[00:41:00]
That’s really all I was, I was talking about. But that triggered something in you that made you think Groundhog Day and you went down that, down that road and, which is fine, but again, it’s an experience that we shared here. Now we’re sharing it with the listeners too. But you know, and, and people who are listening to this, they’re probably thinking of movies that maybe they have seen that, you know, over and over again, and, and now they have that in their mind.
And so, it’s kind of interesting how we can paint a picture in somebody’s mind without even realizing it. You know, even when you read a book you’re, you’re looking at you. Black and white letters on, on a page. Right. And somehow you can visualize the red barn that’s off in the, the grassy meadow with the blue sky and the trees in the background and, and the tire swing off the tree on the side.
Right now you have all those, those colors, those vivid you know, you know pictures, right? Right. Because my tree might be on the right side of the barn, yours [00:42:00] might be on the left. Your tree might be a little closer and your barn might have, you know, some shingles falling off the roof or something and, you know, whatever it is, like you’ve created something different in your mind.
And as an author of a book, I couldn’t possibly know what everybody who’s gonna read the book is going to create in their mind. They, they’ve all created a different version of that story. None of them necessarily wrong. They’re, but they’re all different just because it all came from their imagination, their own perspectives.
Right.
Mark Haddad: Yeah. And what you just explained around the going over and over again, looking for that surprise.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: That’s a, that’s a way of saying that a, a real reversal of emotion from chemistry. Surprises, like, you’re going to have a, a great surprise. You’re gonna go down low and then spike up, or you’re going from a. You know, a horrible surprise. You, you’re, you’re up there and you’re spiking down. So it’s like that
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: That’s one of the main reasons when [00:43:00] we come back from, you know, the military, we have problems because we’re looking for
Scott DeLuzio: Mm-hmm.
Mark Haddad: The chaos is that that’s what, it’s just constant one after another, after another, simultaneously just going like crazy. so you, your, your mind needs that to operate, feel at home because your bar’s high.
Scott DeLuzio: Right now, you were talking earlier about. Helping people figure out that, that little delta between the, the bar and, you know, and how to get them back down to bring that bar down, I guess, what, what does that entail? What, what kind of process is that to do that? Is this, is this like a in depth process or is this something rather I don’t wanna say simple ’cause that’s, that’s not the right word, but you know, is this something that, that people can figure out you know, and, and manage this, or, or is this a pretty complex process to bring this bar [00:44:00] down?
Mark Haddad: I once you understand that you are in a machine and just like a car. You got oil, you got gas, you got water antifreeze, windshield wiper, you know, transmission fluid. You know you got a whole bunch of brake fluid. You got a whole bunch of fluids in your body doing different things. You got a lot of the mechanics, right?
When something breaks, you look at the machine to fix the machine.
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: You know, we don’t just start pushing the gas pedal harder. If you’ve got low oil and you’re gonna blow, you know you’re gonna blow a cylinder, right? You can blow a head gasket, right? That, and a lot of people do that. Why? Because they’re not aware of what’s happening.
Scott DeLuzio: Okay. Yeah.
Mark Haddad: what I first do is. Get them to be aware of what actually are we doing here? Like what, who are you the sense of, hey, this is a body, I got a mind Inside? The brain is the brain, but the mind is like the software that makes sense of it all.
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: All the experiences that we have [00:45:00] scientifically, you know, like, all right, there’s the, there’s the hippie moon bat thing of like, oh, everything’s energy, man.
Yeah, there’s that, and then there’s the real science part of it, which is everything is actually, I mean, it’s literally in a, in a pool of energy that we’re walking around. For me to see you, that means there’s has to be photons in the area for you to hear me. That means there has to be air in the area. Even space, you know, voided space has quantum material coming in and out of existence constantly. Nothing is empty. We just think it is because our bodies are limited. We have a limitation in our senses. That limitation is the beauty. Is the blessing how we can have the experience that we do. Imagine if you were to be able to pick up like every single signal of everything, it would be, it’d be
Scott DeLuzio: It would be chaos. Yeah.
Mark Haddad: Yeah. So the limitation that we have is the blessing that we have. So we can have this experience, all right, that put aside, then I talk about, okay, here’s the machinery. Here’s your understanding of your [00:46:00] biochemistry. Here’s why. When you were at Snap go by your head. At first you were like, what the hell was that? And then you were ducking and then at one point you just stood there. ’cause you’re like, that’s not gonna hit me.
Scott DeLuzio: Right.
Mark Haddad: Right?
Scott DeLuzio: Yep.
Mark Haddad: When you had enough rounds go by you and nothing hit you at one point you’re like, eh, these guys suck. I’m not gonna hit you. They’re shooting with AK standing up like this.
I mean, no.
Scott DeLuzio: Good luck. Yeah.
Mark Haddad: yeah. So, when I. When you go through that, that process of getting them to understand it, I go through all the, the stories and break it down in a very simple, you know, understandable way to correlate what’s happening at that level to everyday things that we’ve been
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: and why those things that we do happen the way they are, and what does that really mean?
So once I go through those sections, then we get into the part of saying, okay, especially with veterans, it’s very hard to tell ’em to do to, to, you know, breathe out for eight seconds. They’re [00:47:00] like, what are we doing? know, nobody wants to hear, you know, mindfulness or anything. But all I’m trying to show them is that you can control your inner chemistry. You can, and there’s different ways, you know, there’s different systems. The parasympathetic system, you’ve got the autonomous, there’s all these different systems in your body. There’s one in particular that manages the adrenaline and cortisol, that’s the parasympathetic, right? I, we go through things that help them understand that if you do this thing, it’s gonna lower these, these metrics down.
Heart rate, blood pressure, it allows your chemistry to flood, go through, disseminate, and then go away and you’re right back at homeostasis, So if people understand how the body, how their particular body works, then they can start learning techniques on how to manage the chemistry.
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: you can manage the chemistry, you can lower your [00:48:00] bar.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And I like the analogy that you used with a car, with all the different fluids that, that are in a car. And you know, if you don’t replace the oil then you know you’re gonna have problems. So you don’t put gas in the car, you’re gonna have problems. You can, you can have no gas in the car and you can have your pedal all the way down to the floor and it’s not going anywhere.
’cause there’s no gas, the car’s not good luck that you can’t even turn the car on at that point. Right. And so you’re, you’re gonna have all sorts of problems. And you have to keep all of those things in check and you have to make sure, that’s why there’s a fuel gauge on your dash, right? So you, you can tell like, okay, when, when the fuel’s getting low, we gotta go fill back up and we gotta do something to make sure that we have enough fuel in the car.
You know, you get a little warning light that when the, the oil needs to be changed or, or something. You know, tho those types of things help help. As for a driver help you know that there’s something wrong, something needs to change. [00:49:00] You got, you got to do some sort of action. Unfortunately, humans don’t come with a dashboard with fancy flashy lights and gauges and all that, so you gotta have to know your own body.
Right. And, and you know, we all produce these chemicals in different quantities. We may require them in different quantities. You know, just like a car, one car may need more gas to drive 10 miles than another car may need. And Yeah, exactly. So, so some people, you know, inside their bodies may, may be less efficient, they may need to create more or or less.
Mark Haddad: I wanna, I wanna take that example, ’cause that’s a great example. You have a Ferrari with a V 12 engine.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: Exciting. Fucking loud. that gas pedal. Ooh. But you’re gonna use a gallon to get the McDonald’s.
Scott DeLuzio: Right.
Mark Haddad: Versus, you know, [00:50:00] your grandmom with a four cylinder can go 60 miles a gallon on that thing.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah,
Mark Haddad: More efficient. The, the peop the, the people that we may think are boring or not as ambitious or any of those, those metrics that we had had more efficient cars in the relationship of the car being the body.
Scott DeLuzio: yeah. Right.
Mark Haddad: Same thing.
Scott DeLuzio: It is. And yeah, I like, I like that analogy. That makes a lot of sense. And so when, when you’ve been operating at real high levels you know, use your grandma’s car example that you’re just saying, if you were driving that thing, I. You know, 90, a hundred miles an hour you know that that engine’s getting hot, right?
And, and it’s gonna need some time to slow down and, and bring it back down to a level that it, it, it can drive, right? And that, that’s not gonna be you know, real good for the car to keep doing that. So, you know, just, just like grandma’s car, we’re gonna need to [00:51:00] take some time off and maybe take a step back and reset ourselves so that we can be okay with not going a thousand miles an hour with our hair on fire and, you know, jumping outta planes and doing all the, the craziness.
If, if we want that more peaceful, we’re gonna have to allow that bar to come down, right.
Mark Haddad: Well, imagine everyone here in, in the US that didn’t go, that didn’t go in the military, didn’t go to combat, has like a car with all the instrument panels and all the lights.
Scott DeLuzio: yeah,
Mark Haddad: tell you, you know, anything’s wrong. We had our car, we went to combat, we came back. Cars blowing the shit. No instrument panel. I’ve got a 69 Bronco, no warning lights. Actually, my fuel gauge isn’t even hooked up. so I, I have to knock on the fuel tank to hit. I’m like, do I have gas in it? I like, I fill it up whenever I go out just to make sure, because this is a big V [00:52:00] eight engine and a truck with no fuel gauge that, you know, goes fast. But I don’t know anything what’s going on.
Scott DeLuzio: yeah.
Mark Haddad: imagine you’re driving this car. You have to use a whole nother set of instruments see if something’s wrong.
Scott DeLuzio: Right.
Mark Haddad: Right before you’d have you, you wouldn’t smell the car, you’d, but you know, if it smells like pancake, it feels like hotcakes here. It’s probably your your antifreeze that’s leaking somewhere.
Your radiator’s leaking somewhere. you notice, you know, you gotta, is it getting really hot or you hear like a, you hear like a vacuum sound is, you got a leak in the vacuum somewhere. You know, you’re looking under the ground in your garage. You see some leaks going on. You didn’t know you were running out of oil, but you probably, you know, you should probably get something fixed.
Scott DeLuzio: Sure.
Mark Haddad: You have to change. I had to change all the ways that I look at a car to identify problems. ’cause the car has no instrument panel anymore. It only has a, like a speedometer. That’s it. [00:53:00] That’s the problem that we have when we come back. Our instrument panel is blown out of control. We didn’t. We’re the way we look at our bodies.
We don’t even look at our bodies as a body anymore. We’re just us in a shitty situation and everything sucks. And no one knows what I’m doing. No one understands who I am. Everything’s dull. I need to find something wrong. I’m gonna go crazy. That’s driving without looking at your dashboard, not even knowing what to look for.
Scott DeLuzio: Right. And, and to your point with, you know, a vehicle like the one that you were just describing where you, you don’t have any dashboard lights or fuel gauge or any of that kind of stuff, and you need to use other cues to let you know when, when something’s wrong. You know, tapping on the gas tank to see, you know, is there there fuel in here?
You know, if there’s a, you know, a leak of oil on, on, on the ground. Okay, well, something needs to be fixed. And not to say that you can’t do those [00:54:00] things if you did have the dash, but those things make the dash makes it a little bit more obvious for you. Right. But, you know, our bodies are more like. Closely aligned to the vehicle that you were just talking about where we don’t have the dash and we have to pay attention to other things.
And that’s easier said than done, I think. You know?
Mark Haddad: it is. Yeah. That, that’s like kind of the main reason in terms of what I do with the coaching and the helping is around, understanding how to, you know, to peer into your body.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: you can reduce your heart rate and your blood pressure just by thinking about your heart and doing a scan. You can, you know, I, I put, I put military, you know, I put vets to task about how tough they
Scott DeLuzio: Mm-hmm.
Mark Haddad: and. I kind of do a little bit of psychological little playing with that just to kind of get them to say, you know what? You can do this. Don’t, you know, [00:55:00] you don’t have to
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. Right.
Mark Haddad: this, you know, unless you can’t, it’s okay.
It’s not meant for everyone, you know, but they, you know, you get to a point where we, we have to get a better grit around how our body and our, our BMS functions. Once you know that, once you understand that trio, that efficiency, you can control it or you could do things to not let it control you is probably a better way of saying it.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah, I, yeah, that’s a, a good way to put it because when you’re, you’re so focused on the external things. You aren’t focused on internal. Like maybe there could be something that I’m doing instead of everything’s, everything happened to me that’s external, right? Those are external things that have happened to me, and that’s what’s controlling me at this point.
Versus the the, the opportunity to fix it and control it yourself. That, you know, talk about you know, [00:56:00] like Jocko podcast, he, he’s talking about extreme ownership. I mean, that’s pretty extreme right? There is, you know, figuring out how to control the way your body creates chemicals that make you either happy or sad or, you know, any, any of the various emotions that you may be happy ha having figuring out how to control those.
And then you can control your own levels of happiness and
Mark Haddad: I mean, think of it, go give your daughter a hug for 30 seconds. You got oxytocin. You can control chemistry in your body if you know how.
Scott DeLuzio: right. You, you’re not, you’re not gonna be pissed off at, at the situation after doing that, right? You’re not gonna be, you know, oh man, I’ve just wasted 30 seconds of my life. God, I hate this. You know, you, you’re not, you’re not gonna be angry about it, you know? So at a minimum, you’re, you’re gonna be like.
Neutral, but I gotta imagine you’d be kind of happy, you know, that you had that opportunity, right?
Mark Haddad: You know? Yeah. There’s a couple, there’s a couple things that I, about what you were just saying. It’s pretty [00:57:00] interesting. One is this billboard sign somewhere and back home, and it stuck with me ever since. it said, life doesn’t happen to you. It happens because of you
Scott DeLuzio: yeah. Sure.
Mark Haddad: situational environments you put yourself in or you don’t take yourself out of.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: And I have a posting about that, like I’m gonna, I’m gonna do a little bit of a reel or another, or a show about that what is a situational environment is and how do you get yourself out of that. And usually, especially vets who, who look at drugs or, or alcohol,
Scott DeLuzio: Yep.
Mark Haddad: You know, and it’s, it’s, you know, it’s kind of like, well, my friends were drinking.
Well, why are you still hanging out with those friends?
Scott DeLuzio: Right. Yeah.
Mark Haddad: So
Scott DeLuzio: I’m. Yeah, you, you, you can take that to an extreme too, because let’s I, I saw a study that, that took place with Vietnam soldiers who were over in Vietnam. And they were doing all sorts of drugs over in Vietnam when they were home before they went to Vietnam, they never did any drugs.[00:58:00]
But when they got to Vietnam, they started doing all sorts of stuff. And when they came back, they, they stopped doing drugs. They, they were taken out of the environment where there, there were those people who were doing those things that influenced ’em to do it more. ’cause hey, everybody’s doing it. I might as well just join in kind of thing.
And when you’re in that environment back home, yeah, you might, you might have friends who are drinking or, or doing drugs or, you know, whatever. It doesn’t mean that you have to you know, you can find other friends. And if everybody that you know in your area, ’cause you live in a shitty area is doing that kind of stuff, well move, you know, like, there are things that you can do.
You’re, it’s not like the world is out to get you. You can move, you can get away from these types of environments if you choose to help change your phone number and, and move, and these people aren’t gonna follow you [00:59:00] and they’re not gonna bother you. And, and you can find a better place to live. You can, you can find other people to hang out with.
You know, and if, but that’s if you want to, you know, I think you have to have that desire, right?
Mark Haddad: It, the desire, the need. And the thing is, people don’t change. They usually
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: there is extreme
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: Right? And so, unless there’s physical, mental, or emotional, and when you, if you wanna look at how there’s a science behind that, just look at bootcamp,
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: at the timing, the cycle, timing of how they talk to you, how they communicate with you over bootcamp.
I mean, think about it. There’s a, there’s a push down and there’s a gradual curve and then all of a sudden outta nowhere, instead of yelling at you, they’re starting to, you know, kind of commend you for some of the things that you’re doing, right?
Scott DeLuzio: Right,
Mark Haddad: by accident. That’s. Purpose built. So pain, physical, mental, or emotional.
Even with that, [01:00:00] people that hit rock bottom don’t always change because their chemistry’s off bodies, they’re not gonna, they’re not gonna be able to change on that. But usually people don’t change altruistically. It’s usually because of the, of a purpose that’s painful enough for them.
Scott DeLuzio: right.
Mark Haddad: your, you know, loved ones, you lose something, it doesn’t matter what it is. it hurts, you are gonna
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: So if they want to make that change, you gotta first look deep inside and say, is the pain strong enough for me to wanna make that change? Gotta be honest with yourself on that.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. And if it’s not, what, what is it you’re trying to get out of it? You know, do, do you actually want to change? And if you do you, you might need to dig down deep and figure out what that reason is. Why do you want to change? What, what’s, what will be better if you do make that change? And what’s not going as well [01:01:00] as you want it to right now before that change?
And, and how do you make that work? So, yeah, you can do, you can do a lot of things with that. It’s, it’s interesting. All this stuff really just boils down to. What do we want do, do we want, do we want this change to happen? Do we want do we wanna bring that bar down? Do we want to constantly be living where we’re, we’re going a hundred miles an hour you know, going crazy, you know, or Yeah.
And, and they, they might, right? And so some people might listen to this, might be like, well, yeah, I do. So, you know, I guess I’m good. Yeah,
Mark Haddad: But the, the message there is like, that it’s not one is better than the
Scott DeLuzio: sure.
Mark Haddad: It’s knowing where you are.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. Right?
Mark Haddad: when you know where you are, you can put yourself in an environment that’s gonna help you.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah,
Mark Haddad: can pick the right kind of mate. If you’re super ambitious or true as a drug and you’re picking someone who doesn’t want to do anything [01:02:00] pro, you’re, you’re probably gonna have some
Scott DeLuzio: sure.
Mark Haddad: So, you know, it has a lot of impact. One of my friends who read the book, she, she told me when she was in it, she goes, you lost me in the science part. But then after the science part, I understood why you had to say the science part.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah.
Mark Haddad: And then she said, when you talked, she goes, she said, I chuckled when you talked about the skydiving thing, because she did it. She goes, and then I started wondering, where am I in life?
Scott DeLuzio: Hmm.
Mark Haddad: Thank you. Right. So it was pretty cool that that, that she, she had that insight in there. But you know, at the, at the end of the day, do you, do people want to change? And you know, there is a, it is you doing it, it’s you putting the control in your hands.
Scott DeLuzio: Right.
Mark Haddad: for entrepreneurs, it’s great for people that are having problems. It’s great for people have friends or people that they hang out with that cause problems because they’re still in those situations.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah, sure.
Mark Haddad: a lot of kind of tertiary and secondary impacts there.
Scott DeLuzio: Right. And you know, any positive change that [01:03:00] is made in your own individual life can ripple out into other folks’ lives as well as they start to see, hey, he’s, he’s making these changes and he seems to be, you know. Doing better. You know, he is, I want that, you know, and, and you know, that that could have that ripple effect to affect other people in a, in a positive way.
So the book again, the, a Soul Spoke to me, souls Guide to Navigate Purpose is, is the book. For the listeners, is there any place that, that you would like to direct them to you know, websites or social media, anything like that, that they can check you out, find out more out more information about you and what you do the kind of coaching to help them bring that bar down.
Or, you know, o other stuff that might be of of interest.
Mark Haddad: Yeah. Thanks Scott. So yeah, you can follow me on, I’m on Instagram. It’s Market at Author. You can just look that up and you’ll find it. And I’m, I’m dropping notes. I’ll be starting to put some some [01:04:00] talks on there where I talk about parts of chapters. It’s a short book. It’s about 90 pages,
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: but it’s pretty deep, so people have to read it over and over again because they’re trying to wonder, Hey, how am I supposed, you know, I get people to get out of their own heads and sit over here looking at themselves.
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: so to think about that and the things that we talked about is a little challenging. but I’ve gotten some pretty good feedback on that. Good stuff. So, you can, I’ll be launching some videos and, you know, live sessions there. Also markhaddadauthor.com so you can go there and see some, you know, some other information and figure out how to, how to get the book. You know, I’ll be doing some additional podcasts talking about, you know, the applications of that. And I am launching a a website called Land Nav for the Soul. Obviously it’s a military based navigation. I thought I’d have a nice little ring to
Scott DeLuzio: Sure.
Mark Haddad: that, but I was like, ah, we’re probably gonna knack out all the Navy guys ’cause you know, they’re not gonna.
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. Right. They’re not gonna know [01:05:00] Land N.
Mark Haddad: So maybe just, maybe just n for the soul,
Scott DeLuzio: right.
Mark Haddad: But in this site, it it, it basically takes you through a little deeper sense of the book in terms of how you can apply things. has a, a, a very quick assessment around how you feel in situations. then it has an ability, helps you, I identify where you fit in those categories and it helps you to journal
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: write about things that are going on so you can actually, you know, create an account. You’re putting your information in there. It’s totally secure. No one’s seeing anything. Not even myself. I’m not reading any depth in there. But what it does is it’ll, it comes back with things you can do. Actual, whether it’s breathing control, whether it’s getting out of a situation, whether it’s doing other things, it comes back with real scientific activities that you could do to lower your chemistry reaction to things.
Scott DeLuzio: Okay.
Mark Haddad: And so that’s usually what [01:06:00] happens after you talk to me, because before you’re kind of like, how, what, what am I doing here? This even make
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. Right.
Mark Haddad: believe in that. You know, it’s like, oh, so your way is working,
Scott DeLuzio: Yeah, yeah. Right, right.
Mark Haddad: Yeah.
Scott DeLuzio: And you know, you’re, you’re talking about how people kind of have to, or, or will with the, the book, they’ll kind of step outside of. Themselves and kind of have that outside look in. It almost sounded like one of those out-of-body experiences you know, near death experience kind of thing, where Yeah.
Don’t do that. Yeah, I, yeah, I, I man, this book killed you know, but no, like, yeah, definitely, definitely don’t do that. But but it, it’s, you know, helpful to, you know, kind of look at it from in somebody else’s shoes or look at it from an outside point of view. Maybe not necessarily someone else’s shoes, but from a different point of view than, than what, ’cause sometimes you just get stuck and you, you just, you’re, you [01:07:00] got tunnel vision and, and you can’t see it from any other way and, you know, couldn’t be further from the truth.
There’s, there’s a lot of different perspectives out there, and, you know.
Mark Haddad: each other. I hope I can help some people.
Scott DeLuzio: Well, these, these links your Instagram and your website, I’m gonna put both of those in the show notes for the listeners and so they can reach out and check out your book. Definitely again A Soul Spoke to me, soul’s Guide to Navigate Purpose is the name of the book.
Go get, go get a copy of the book and reach out to Mark and get his insights and wisdom and, and hopefully he can help get you back on the right track, lower that bar a little bit so you’re not constantly going at 110 miles an hour and hair on fire and all that kind of crap. So you can, you can go back and you can have a, a normal life, you know, if, if that’s what you’re looking for.
You know, again, not everyone’s looking for that. Some people want, want to be, you know, overly ambitious or, you know, going crazy, so you know if that
Mark Haddad: you [01:08:00] enjoy life at that
Scott DeLuzio: Exactly, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If you’re, I guess the, the call to action is if you’re feeling out of control and you wanna bring that bar back down, then, then yeah, definitely reach out, get a copy of the book.
Even get a copy of the book anyways because there may be some people in your life who might be seeming like they’re getting outta control a little bit too, and maybe they need some help and you know, you might be able to help guide them in the right direction. So, so get a copy of the book and check out the, check out the website, get in touch with Mark if you want to kind of go down that path.
But Mark man, thank you so much for this conversation. It really has been eye-opening. You know, eye-opening view into the soul, I guess, is a, a good way to put it. Maybe that’ll be the title of the episode, but but but definitely a great conversation. I really do appreciate all the work that you’re doing.
Appreciate you for your service and thank you for coming on and sharing everything with us today.
Mark Haddad: Thanks, Scott. Appreciate
Scott DeLuzio: You bet.
Mark Haddad: Thank you.