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A lot of people in AA have a Big Book. Fewer people know how to actually use it. Matt was one of those people for a long time — and he's willing to admit it.

In this episode Matt and Steve dig into what the Big Book actually is and what it isn't. It's not a memoir. It's not a devotional. It's not a loose collection of Bill Wilson's thoughts. It's a textbook — sequential by design, with chapters that build on each other deliberately. Read it out of order, rush through it, or try to go it alone and you'll likely miss most of what it's trying to teach you.

They talk about why the book works best when you go through it with someone who knows it — a sponsor, a Big Book study group, or resources like Joe and Charlie — and why the stories in the back, as valuable as they are for identifying with the problem, are not the instructions. The first 164 pages are the instructions.

Matt also recommends Writing the Big Book by William Schaberg — a deep dive into the original source material and manuscripts that gives you the historical context to understand what you're actually reading.

If the Big Book has felt confusing, inaccessible, or like something you had to get through rather than something you got to learn from — this episode is for you.

Find Sober Friends: Website: https://www.soberfriendspod.com Email: matt@soberfriendspod.com

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Nobody gets sober because they want to stop drinking. They get sober because their life isn't working — and somewhere along the way, someone handed them a set of instructions that actually helped.

Matt and Steve call it the recipe. Not a rulebook, not a religious text, not a list of suggestions. A recipe. Follow the steps enough times and something unexpected happens — it stops being something you do and starts being how you live.

In this episode they dig into what sobriety actually opened up. Not the big obvious wins. The quieter ones. The mental chess game that used to run constantly in the background — calculating how much is there, how much have I had, how do I get more without anyone noticing — just gone. The emotional bandwidth that comes back when you're not spending all of it protecting your access to alcohol. The way treating people better stops being a program principle and starts being muscle memory.

This one is for anyone who is still in the hard part and can't yet see what's on the other side. The recipe works. You just have to make it enough times before you stop needing to think about it.

Find Sober Friends: Website: https://www.soberfriendspod.com Email: matt@soberfriendspod.com

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📫 Get more honest conversations about sobriety delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to The Sober Friends Dispatch, our weekly newsletter where we go beyond the podcast to share real strategies for alcohol-free living. Join our community by clicking here.

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What does recovery actually mean? If you've ever measured your sobriety by days and wondered if there was more to it than that, this episode is for you.

Matt sits down with Dr. Adi Jaffe — psychologist, neuroscientist, UCLA researcher, and author of The Abstinence Myth and Unhooked — for one of the most honest and wide-ranging conversations Sober Friends has ever had. Dr. Jaffe went from meth-addicted drug dealer with nine felonies to earning his PhD and building one of the most forward-thinking recovery programs available today. He knows what it feels like to be on both sides of this.

This episode challenges some assumptions — including a few of Matt's own. They dig into why black-and-white thinking keeps people stuck, why shame is more dangerous than the substance itself, why the label "alcoholic" helps some people and hurts others, and why stopping drinking is not the same thing as getting better. They also find more common ground between Dr. Jaffe's approach and AA than you might expect.

Whether you're in AA, tried AA and it didn't stick, or are just trying to figure out what recovery looks like for you — this one is worth your time.

Find Dr. Adi Jaffe: Website: https://www.adijaffe.com The Abstinence Myth: http://www.theabstinencemyth.com Unhooked: https://www.readunhooked.com IGNTD Recovery Program: https://www.igntd.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dradijaffe Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dradijaffe LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dradijaffe

Find Sober Friends: Website: https://www.soberfriendspod.com Email: matt@soberfriendspod.com

Support the show

📫 Get more honest conversations about sobriety delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to The Sober Friends Dispatch, our weekly newsletter where we go beyond the podcast to share real strategies for alcohol-free living. Join our community by clicking here.