Laban Ditchburn Shares How Asking For Help Allowed Him To Overcome Childhood Challenges And A Life Of Addiction

Listen to the podcast here

 

 

Isn’t it wonderful when we can finally find those unique individuals in our world who have been where we’ve been, who know what we’re going through and have come out the other side better than they ever thought possible? Joining Dan Clark to share his story of overcoming childhood challenges and a life of escapism and addiction is ‘The World’s Best Courage Coach,’ Laban Ditchburn. Laban is the author of Bet On You and podcast host of Become Your Own Superhero. His story and wisdom have inspired so many, and today he retells his journey, hoping to inspire more. Laban also shares a key factor contributing to his recovery—a natural, healthy diet. It’s not about what’s in the food, but on it. Once you’ve nailed down your diet and transformed your health, the rest will come easier. You don’t want to miss what might be one of the most insightful interviews you will have ever heard. Learn how to tap into your personal power by tuning in!

—

Laban Ditchburn Shares How Asking For Help Allowed Him To Overcome Childhood Challenges And A Life Of Addiction

I know I’ve said this many times but in this episode, I really mean it. Strap in. It’s going to be one of the most insightful interviews you have ever read in any of my episodes. A quick and dear friend, Laban Ditchburn, is one of the most intriguing individuals I’ve ever met. As you know, I played football for all those years. I was paralyzed for fourteen months. I had so many people come up to me. I know they loved me. I know they cared, family members, colleagues, teammates, and coaches.

I know they came up to me out of concern and said, “Clark, I know what you are going through.” No. They didn’t. They had no clue. Isn’t it wonderful when we can finally find those unique individuals in our world who have been where we have been, know what we are going through, and have walked through the valley of the shadow of death and feared no evil? They knew they had a support system from every aspect of our lives, physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, social, financial, and family, to inspire us to get back up and go again.

In my experience in understanding the steps of resiliency, I’m always intrigued and immediately drawn to people who have a story of adapting to change, of resiliency, figuring out their why, and making sure their why is bigger than their why not. That’s my guest in this episode. Usually, when it’s a dear friend, I can off the cuff tell you why I have him or her on my show. I want to give you an official paragraph or two about Laban Ditchburn so you get a feel for what we are going to talk about in this episode.

—

This is an interview with the world’s best courage coach Laban Ditchburn. Welcome to the show. ach episode, I bring you an inspiring message from an extraordinary human being who will share their secrets on how you can tap into your personal power and become everything you were born to be. Thank you so much for spending time with me.

In this episode, my friend and colleague Laban Ditchburn, the world’s best courage coach and author of the internationally acclaimed book, Bet On You, shares his life as a child badly affected by divorce and dysfunction. He sought validation and escapism in all the wrong places like alcohol, gambling, sex, drugs, and negative self-talk, giving us an inside glimpse into his recovery through self-discovery.

By not being afraid to ask for help, he conquered the full gamut of addictions. Laban defines the word transformation. After several years free of addiction and now having reshaped his body by swapping 60 pounds of body fat with 30 pounds of powerful muscle and bone hunk a bunk of burning love, he discovered a simple cure for his incurable autoimmune disease in the process. Please welcome to my program, the one and only Australian, my buddy, Laban Ditchburn.

I don’t know who you are talking about but he sounds like someone I want to meet.

We all want to meet you. Let’s cut right to the chase. We will have episode two to dive deeper into what you’ve discovered from a medical, biological, and physiological perspective that turns medicine, health, wellness, and fitness upside down. Let’s cut right to how you grow up. I briefly touched on a childhood of dysfunction. There are so many people out there who have that experience but your recovery and resiliency are different. That’s where I want to take this conversation. Give us a brief snapshot of growing up and how you fell into looking for love in all the wrong places.

Dan, I got to say I’m almost emotional to the point of tears hearing that back. I’ve never heard it in such a wonderful complimentary manner. I want to acknowledge and thank you for being a masterclass. I’m from New Zealand originally. I’m half-and-half. If people are going, “He doesn’t sound like Steve Irwin.” It’s because I’m half-and-half. My mom was a New Zealander, and my dad was an Australian.

My father was a retired radio announcer. He got a job opportunity in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he went as a young man as a 25-year-old. My mother, who already had a child from a previous marriage, rang up the radio station one night and requested You Sexy Thing by Hot Chocolate. They struck up a relationship and moved in together six weeks later. A year or so later, I came into the world.

They were two people who did the best they could with the tools that they had available but they were ill-equipped to esteem themselves, let alone their children. This will resonate with a lot of people. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve forgiven them. I’m grateful for all the other great stuff. What we inherit is a legacy of dysfunction. It was the inability to set clear boundaries. It was codependent behaviors, a litany of dysfunction that has been bought forth.

If you look at how mom and dad were raised, my father was the child of a loveless marriage, 1 of 4, and the whole family is incredibly dysfunctional as a result. My mother was the child, 1 of 4, of an alcoholic father who never touched a drop of booze until he came back from World War II, opened up a grocery mart, and started drinking with his clients in his late 30s and was horrendously verbally, emotionally, and possibly more abusive.

 

My father, as a result, grew up a weak man. He attracted a domineering woman. If you can imagine the storm that ensued, if you need to beat that out, feel free. That was what happened. The way to cope as a kid is escapism. For me, when I was young, it was video games and TV. I would immerse myself in the stuff. As I got older, it became alcohol, drugs, gambling, philandering, lying, and telling myself I couldn’t do anything. There we got to the point where I was in so much pain that I couldn’t be in that pain anymore. The pain of the future was less than what I was in. Hence it started the transformation.

You brought up a deep question, pleasure versus pain. I remember I hit what I thought was rock bottom when I was paralyzed because my heart was broken and dreams were shattered. I could no longer pursue that dream of being a professional football and baseball player. When you have suicidal thoughts, you don’t want to die. You want the pain to go away. If your pain is real, what you are saying is that we usually find a way to medicate or create false and counterfeit happiness. That’s something that all of us can relate to some degree.

We’ve heard, therapist after therapist, after psychologist after psychologist, “Be present at the moment.” What if your present sucks? You then medicate or live in the past, which causes depression and regret or live in the future, which causes worry, stress, and anxiety. We know that’s true. It’s making that shift and allowing the pain to make you better, realizing that pain is a signal to grow, not to suffer. Once you learn the lesson the pain is teaching you, the pain goes away. In life, there are no mistakes, only lessons. Those are all mindset shifts.

What you bring to the table is the answer to how you make that shift. The amazing part of your recovery story from all these addictions is that you didn’t go through any official Twelve-Step program. As I read your book, Bet On You, at some point, you said, “I’ve hit the bottom of what I thought was the bottom. Now it’s time to make a shift.” Teach us how you did that as a unique individual. Everybody knows that it’s okay to reach out and seek help. That’s one of your platforms. It’s not a sign of weakness for a real man, especially to seek help. That’s a sign of strength. Teach us what happened that allowed you to allow the sickness to make you well.

Let’s quote our dear friend, Les Brown. He says, “Ask for help, not so that you appear weak but so that you can remain strong, and keep asking for help until you get it.” The benefit of that is that the more help I’ve learned to receive, the more help I can give other people as a side note. My point at rock bottom was that I was sitting at home. It was a Tuesday night. I had about three bottles of appropriately priced Pinot Noir, coursing its way through my vein and pounding in my poor old liver. I was betting on a horse race on the laptop.

I wasn’t even looking at the race on a TV screen. I was refreshing the page to see the results coming. Talk a next-level degeneracy here. In the bottom left corner of the screen, there was a phone number that I had never, ever seen before but I instinctively picked up my cell phone and called this number. This woman picked up the phone. I will never know her last name but I will call it Magdalene because her first name was Mary. I believe she’s one of about a million guardian angels I’ve got looking after me. For the first time in my entire life, it seemed, I was able to share what was truly going on without judgment. That’s important here.

She allowed me to unload. Once she got to the point where she was about to break, I stopped, and then she spoke. She spoke about the link between suicide rates and gamblers being far higher than all the other addictive behaviors because of how quickly you can lose it. That scared the pants off me metaphorically. She put me in touch with The Salvation Army, which was funded by the taxes from gambling losses ironically. For the first time in my life, I got a return on my investments. I had a session with this Lady Lee, who I got access to for a year and a half free once a week for nothing.

I would love an opportunity to reconnect with Lee to show her how far I’ve come. I’m getting a little bit emotional thinking about it but it’s the very first session together. She spoke to me about the link between coping mechanisms and escapism behavior. I shared one thing about my mother and completely exploded into tears. I cried a lot in those sessions. It was a healing, emotional release, and there are hormones in those tears that help calm us down and heal us. That started this journey of discovery for me. I became insatiable at wanting to understand what had happened to me so that I could then reverse engineer it.

It’s to your point regarding not using Twelve-Step. You’ve got to use whatever weapon tool armory that you need to use to get over this. It’s because I was able to understand why I was doing it, it allowed me to heal in a way that I don’t meet many people that have experienced because I don’t have any desire to escape from the way anymore. It’s easy for me. I got married this 2022 in Las Vegas. We stayed at the Virgin Active Hotel there. The downstairs has gambling and complimentary drinks. It’s not an issue for me. I’m in a state of willpower, which makes me very dangerous in terms of my recovery in a good way. It has been several years since I have been sober.

That is what life is all about. It's not about the money and the title; it's fulfillment. Click To Tweet

Congratulations. To bring your beloved Anna into this conversation, she taught me in the brief time that we first met that pain is a signal to grow, not to suffer. Gambling became your teacher. The Virgin Hotel, which I’ve stayed at, became your teacher. You went to Vegas as a couple in love, enamored with your spiritual and physical connection, and allowed that ceremony to be your teacher.

In my conversation with Anna, anything that anyone has said to me that was negative or aroused some chemical reaction that the guy is an idiot or a jerk, she immediately said, “Dan, it is now your teacher.” I’m reiterating that pain is our teacher that anyone reading this, continue reading for the rest of this conversation with Laban and let him be our teacher in what you did, not mind over matter but in a sense, a deeper mind over matter where you allowed your mindset to shift and the behavior change followed.

There are two points I want to make.

You don’t run from pain. You don’t run from the storm, the rain. You figure out a way to dance in the rain.

To quote Sterling Hawkins, who’s a mutual friend of Waldo Waldman, “You’ve got to hunt discomfort or discomfort is going to hunt you.” The two things I would say are, “On the surface of it, I had it all together.” I held down a job. I was always on time. I appeased my boss. I got on with my colleagues. I paid my taxes. I was part of sporting clubs. I was involved in mentoring roles. I posted happy birthdays on people’s Facebook pages.

I was a high-function member of society but beneath it all, I was fallen a bit. I see this a lot now. I put everything on services. It’s built on a house of sand. The second point I would make is that once you can learn about this stuff and understand that this can become your own superpower, your gift, because how inspiring can I now be to people that are 6 years and 3 weeks behind where I was and not be ashamed that they are about to lose their family or whatever. Whatever state, there’s no judgment for me. We are all on our own path.

When you know that you can become an inspiring person that now receives messages like you would from all around the world from people who read the book and you never even met and never will meet, saying, “What you wrote changed my life. You saved my marriage. You saved my life. You stop me from taking my own life,” that is what life is all about. That is the fulfillment. That’s the thing that people are looking for when they are striving up the corporate ladder. It’s all wrong. It’s not about the money and the title. It’s fulfillment, in my humble opinion.

What’s the name of your podcast?

Become Your Own Superhero.

 

You have over 150 episodes with some very illustrious guests. I believe in the Law of Attraction that we don’t attract who we want. We attract who we are. As I look through your list of guests and you look through my list of guests, that’s why we talk about the things we talk about because we feel called to serve, heal, and do whatever we possibly can to lift up humanity and those who are having trouble now in helping themselves. Continue with your story. This is amazing.

I said there are two things. I said the first one, and there was another one. There’s a third thing that underpins this. You touched on it at the beginning. Physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, I was in a place of hyperstress cortisol. Everything was completely out of alignment. You talked about this incurable autoimmune disease. I had a condition called GERD, which is short for Gastrointestinal Reflux Disorder. What it is, it’s chronic heartburn. I got it when I was nineteen.

For seventeen years, I had this incurable disease where the doctors would say, “There’s nothing you can do about it. Take this medication, which is perfectly safe and healthy.” In 2016, I watched one podcast on The Joe Rogan Experience with the guy Dr. Chris Kresser, who is a functional medicine guy who spoke about the link between good reflux, heartburn, and gluten intolerance. I was like, “I wonder if that’s me.” Four days later, I’m off seventeen years of medication by cutting bread, pasta, and pastries out of my diet. I was pissed. I was like, “What else are these mother flippers wrong about?” I went down this rabbit hole. I was like, “I want to find out the truth. It’s my whole point of being on this planet.”

I want to know the truth, so I can make an informed decision. I didn’t care that I needed to pivot and change. If I figure out what I’m doing is the wrong thing, I want to be doing the right thing. I came to learn a few things, and it turns out that what the mainstream narrative tells us about how to be healthy is almost the opposite. For three years of this healing journey, I eliminated all plants from my diet and operated on a purely animal protein-only diet known as a carnivore. Some people might call it keto but don’t be too caught up in whatever.

People don’t think it was just your discovery that taught you the significance of changing your diet. We are not supposed to seek opinions. We seek counsel. We need to seek the true sources of truth, not somebody’s opinion or fake news. Take us to that spot before you continue.

That was the second interview that Joe Rogan had. He interviewed a guy named Dr. Shawn Baker, who’s an orthopedic surgeon and a war hero. He operated on Iraqis and US soldiers that had been blown apart. He was one of the guys in charge of the trigger for the nuclear bombs and stuff. He was a reputable guy and used it to heal his autoimmune disease. He had diverticulitis or one of these other ones. He’s a World Concept2 indoor rowing and a natural athlete. He’s also a world champion powerlifter. He’s eating beef, salt, eggs, chicken, and some shellfish. I remember watching this. You are probably listening to this guy and thought, “That is bollocks.”

I thought the same thing. I then started learning about it because it was very interesting. At one point, I started to try it. Let me share this with you, Dan. When I was 38 in May of 2018, I went from running 3 miles, which is my longest-ever distance, to 26 miles a week later. I completed my first 60-miler trail run on 27 kilometers of sand 12 weeks after that. I have since completed 360-mile ultra-marathons in July 2021. I ran a 30 miler on 0 sugar and carbs. I had a ribeye, half a gallon of homemade bone broth with liver and spleen in it, 9 slices of Jarlsberg cheese, that beautiful Irish cheese, and about 10 teaspoons of salt. You might be listening to that thinking, “That’s impossible.” I’m sitting here to tell you now.

What happened? Teach us about this carnivore diet. Let’s get down some salt. That’s against everything that everyone says. We go eat Chinese, “It’s too salty. I can taste the sodium. It’s going to make my body inflamed.”

The show would never be long enough to explain all the nuances of it. The fundamental is that autoimmune diseases start in the gut. Fiber is a non-essential nutrient in the human body. That is proven. You can prove me otherwise. These are not my thoughts. These are the thoughts of people far smarter than I in the space with PhD, who had Nobel Prizes and are laureates on the show.

All autoimmune diseases start in the gut. Click To Tweet

I’m talking to some reputable people here. When you remove the fiber out of your gut and the things that are causing all the aggravation and the inflammatory response, which is the key, you bring your body to a state where it’s not inflamed. Guess what? You sleep better. What happens when you sleep better? You heal faster.

I have not been able to find anything anywhere on the internet about anyone progressing that quickly. What they talk about is a year and a half to plan for these ultra runs. This is 2,000 meters, so it’s 5,000 feet of elevation we are running. This isn’t a jog around the track. It’s miraculous. When you understand the science of the nine key amino acids that exist in animals like in ribeye steak, the body needs that to produce everything. When you burn your body fat, you are burning ketones as fuel. Ketones have these amazing properties that create human growth hormones, stem cells, and all the stuff that allows the body to be in a place of homeostasis. It’s not the food that’s the problem. It’s what’s on the food.

As our friend, Gary Brecka, teaches, “We have to look and discover what we are eating is eating,” even when it comes to beef. When you are on a carnivore diet, is it grass-fed beef? Are they injected with hormones or steroids from someplace else? Let’s talk a little teeny bit about the quality of the carnivore diet. Not just going down to a grocery store and buying some hunk of meat but you go to whole foods or sprouts or take pride in the quality of the ingredients you are also eating.

This is an important point because a lot of people will be screaming out. They do, “How I can’t afford that?” That’s a negative self-talk issue that we can talk about in another episode. Here’s the thing. A cheap cut of beef at the supermarket nutritionally and bioavailability, which is important, is infinitely better than the most nutritious organic vegetable that ever exists. Ninety-nine percent of all the plants that grow on planet Earth cannot be eaten.

Ninety-nine percent of all the animal protein grown on Earth can be eaten. There’s a lesson in that. Don’t get caught up. Eat the best you can afford. If you were to ask me for one, if I had to give one nugget, it’s to remove all refined seed oils from your diet. I’m talking about soya bean, rice bran, safflower, canola, all, and it’s in everything. In this country, it’s mainly GMO crops. If you don’t know about this stuff, it’s all doused in pesticides that are known carcinogens and are banned in most countries in Europe. How do I do it? I eliminate most of that.

Even most of the highest brand vitamins available like B-12, have cyanide in them if you look at the ingredients. The FDA approves this stuff for us to consume. We immediately threw away every single bottle of B-12 vitamins, and now we are looking for the D3 quality Gary Brecka recommendation of Thorne, the product manufacturer for the highest quality, at least vitamin D3 and vitamin B-12.

This is an interesting segue. What’s high in B-12 is red meat.

If you get the right B-12, that’s the point, the good B-12. Not the manufactured B-12.

You are talking about the real beef. The beautiful thing about beef, sheep, ruminant animals, and a lot of the animals that are shot in the wild like deer, is that beef and sheep have four-chamber stomachs. It’s because of that process that they will epilate. Another word is to detoxify a lot of toxins they take in. Even if they are eating a lot of glyphosate corn meal, most of it doesn’t come through, if any. I know some people that get McDonald’s burger patties. That’s the healthiest thing at McDonald’s apart from the bottled water as a comparison to eating tofu or some other garbage.

 

Eat what you want but know the truth. You don’t have to take my advice or my word for this stuff. Go and do your own digging. This is six years. I’ve read nearly 600 books. I can’t tell you how many thousand hours of podcasts and other articles I’ve read. I became insatiable. I never finished school. I never went to college. I got no qualifications in any of these subjects, which means I can’t be struck off by any registrar as well, which is handy incidentally.

You epitomize Jim Rohn’s famous quote, “Formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune.” We owe it to ourselves to do our own investigation. Don’t take anybody’s word for it. Check out the quality of the credibility of these doctors and physicians from Johns Hopkins and these research scientists who go against the fake news and the status quo and get educated on your own.

Find out what is truth and follow the truth. That’s why I’m so impressed and attracted to you and your integrity. You’ve done it. You are the one who’s doing it. You are not just teaching us what you know. You are teaching us how you live, what you’ve done, and who you really are. That’s the credibility source and the reason why we seek podcasts and check out the source of truth. Keep going.

There’s one other thing that’s important. My mental health went through the roof. When you understand how ketone bodies work, which I spoke about before, when you burn body fat, there’s a ketone body. There’s one part of that called alpha hydroxybutyrate. You don’t need to know this stuff, but AHB is an enzyme, molecule or something. There’s a subset of that that develops into gamma hydroxybutyrate, GHB. You might have heard GHB is the date-rape drug. It’s fantasy. I was experiencing euphoria on these runs.

I haven’t touched this. I am several years sober from alcohol, drugs, and gambling longer. I get high off these runs. I would burst into tears of joy at a time. I believe my body was burning through the stored trauma that was in my fat cells. Fat cells store toxins. This is only a hypothesis. A theory needs to be fact-checked, I’m sure but I believe that as I was burning and losing all that weight, my body was chelating all of those fat cells, and the trauma was being released. I would guttural weeping as I ran along. People must have been looking at me, going, “Who’s this guy?” You are 30 kilometers in, and it doesn’t happen anymore.

When you go through the adversity I’ve endured over the last few years, my wife and I have gone through 16 consecutive miscarriages, including a 2-week ectopic. I nearly went bankrupt four times in 2019. We fled our home country of Australia because we were treated as second-class citizens last 2021. I got out via Germany and Russia. We left with the shirts on our backs in a suitcase. Do I look or sound like someone who’s grappling with life in a way that he can’t handle now?

It’s mental health. Did your recovery begin in the head or the gut?

It’s the head when you think about the knowledge that I acquired. I quickly realized that if I was to have success, the head, the gut, and the body had to be in the best place to heal. I’m very intuitive. I don’t need a scientist to fact-check or verify this stuff. I can show you my medical records, which are incidentally that of Tony Stark and Iron Man.

My GP last 2021 high-fived me and said, “You are the healthiest patient I’ve ever had, cholesterol, C-reactive protein, DEXA scans, the whole kit, and caboodle.” Given what I did to my body, it’s miraculous. If you put your body in a position where it’s healing, all the other stuff is going to get way better because of its lifestyle, stress, and environment. If you can manage the body first, your ability to handle the other two is infinitely easier.

A cheap cut of beef at the supermarket, nutritionally and bioavailability, is infinitely better than the most nutritious organic vegetable that ever exists. Click To Tweet

When you were in my family room in my basement, you asked me a question that I had been asked 1,000 times, and we asked everybody, “Where do you want to be ten years from now?” I pontificated on, “I’m not going ever to retire. I’m refired. I’m called to be this speaker, and I love going on stage. That’s my calling.” I reversed the question to you, and you said, “I’m going to live until I’m 150.” I thought, “This is a nice Australian joke.” You didn’t smile at all. You said, “You believe you can live to be 150 years old.” A dear friend of mine and colleague, Leigh Steinberg, made the movie Jerry Maguire about this guy, the most famous and successful sports agent in the world.

He’s investing big money going into Mexico, Panama, wherever they can legally give us stem cells. He’s investing in a compound in Florida, where they are helping with the strength of his mind. I can’t even eloquently talk about what that process is but he spends six days. He’s very old now. He believes he’s going to add at least another 30 years to his life, feeling so in shape, fully alive, and healthy mentally, emotionally, and physically. There’s something to this that the FDA and that the physicians in the US poo-poo, “Explain to us what you mean you believe you can live to be 150 and why.”

If you were to talk to my wife, Anna, she would say 450. I’m just throwing a number out there that’s not so ridiculous that it doesn’t polarize too many people. There’s no reason why that couldn’t go longer.

From a spiritual perspective, it doesn’t matter if you believe the Bible to be the word of God. If you look at the years lived by the ancient prophets that started with Adam all the way to Methuselah, it’s 700, 750, and 500 years old. Some people want to discount the validity of that Bible story because they are like, “There’s no way.” If you think about what they ate with no pesticides and what they did with mental health was spirituality, what you are teaching us is that if we can recover what they knew centuries ago and understand the power of natural health, the natural medicine, there’s a real possibility for us to extend our life expectancy.

It is funny you talk about this. I’ve got a book arriving via Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Prime called The Phoenix Protocol. It is an American guy. He’s got a channel on YouTube. I presume it’s called The Phoenix Protocol as well. For those who don’t know what dry fasting is, you heard of intermittent fasting. It’s periods of time where you are not eating, which might be eight hours. This guy had no food or water. He does this for 7 to 8 days. You talk about stem cells. There’s a wonderful episode on Joe Rogan’s podcast where he interviewed Mel Gibson. Mel Gibson’s father received golden stem cells in Panama. It was only Panama and New Zealand or Panama and Canada, which are the only two countries in the world.

My son-in-law’s daughter did with a famous, reputable, honest, and full of integrity attorney by the name of Leo Beus. Look him up. He swears by the stem cell. They flew down on his jet to Panama days after he had a heart attack and had a full recovery. Those are unbelievable stories and eyewitness accounts of the significance of this Panama operation with stem cells.

Golden stem cells are expensive. Do you want to know what else creates stem cells? Fasting. The longest I have been is a 96-hour wet fast. That was just water and electrolytes. Those are potassium, sodium, and magnesium.

How do you take those into your body? Is it just as a supplement? Do you eat something?

It was diluted in water.

Is it powder magnesium?

There’s a great brand called LMNT that makes high-quality products. I use them for my distance running because when you are a low-carb athlete, you require more salt because the body dumps the metabolic water a lot faster. If you drink a lot of coffee, as I do, having excessive caffeine can mix up the balance a little bit. Dry fasting is interesting. I’ve done one day of dry fasting, Nil by Mouth.

There’s hard dry fasting, where you don’t touch any water, and soft dry fasting, where you immerse yourself in the ocean and whatever. This guy does seven days, and he’s documented it. He’s done it half a dozen times. He looks great. When you get to that level of autophagy where you are burning your body fat as fuel, you create human growth hormone through the roof. You are creating brand new stem cells.

You are creating a new gut lining. You are creating all this new body internally. I will report back. I’m going to set aside the time. It’s one of those things where you sleep quite a lot. Sleep is the recovery, the healing. You don’t want to be doing this while trying to record podcasts. I will keep you posted on my progress. I would like to do a seven-day. I need to build up to that because with some of the stuff, there might be some scar tissue causing these miscarriages. I’ve done damage to my body through all the partying and all the other stuff that I would like to knock on the head and see how good I look after the seven-day dry fast.

I won’t have you on my show for a second episode because I don’t want you to lower my self-esteem when you show up even better-looking than you are now. As we wind down our time, let’s talk about your book Bet On You, a foreword written by our mutual friend and colleague, Les Brown. I want you to share that story, which is the ultimate entrepreneurial story because we both know that relationship is real commerce. It’s the real coinage in our society that nothing occurs until a relationship exists, transference of trust.

Start with the Les Brown deal. Don’t reveal our secrets that we’ve talked about as far as phone calls but take us all the way to the lake in Austin, Texas, where you saw Joe Rogan out in his backyard, and you said, “Hey,” and you threw him a book. Start with Les Brown as we wind down our time together. I want everyone who’s an entrepreneur of any kind to read this story because the worst someone can say is, “No.” Zig Ziglar reminds us that sale does not begin until the customer says, “No.” Take us on your journey, brother.

I know that you hung out with Muhammad Ali because you went to his house and said, “Muhammad, what’s up? Do you want to watch some throwback movies of you kicking someone’s butt?” I love that about you. There are so many similarities. I know you’ve written that we feel like we’ve known each other forever. There has been a previous life experience.

2020 happened. I started my entrepreneurial journey. I was forced into it by the lockdowns. The only way to get my voice out was through a podcast. I created the podcast Become Your Own Superhero. I had about 9 or 10 guests on. I reached out and got Les Brown to agree to come on my podcast. He didn’t know that I had ten subscribers. Had he asked, I would have told him, Dan, but he didn’t, so I didn’t.

He comes on via Zoom, and I recorded this moment. I said, “Les, what do you think of the name of the show Become Your Own Superhero?” He was so brilliant. For those who don’t know Les Brown, get on YouTube after this and go to Les Brown. You will know what I’m talking about. He encapsulated everything I hoped everyone would ever think when they heard the name Become Your Own Superhero. His voice is like chocolate. I was so enamored by this response that I verbally diarrhea my story of transformation to him unrequited.

Eat what you want, but know the truth. Click To Tweet

He sat there with the patience of a saint and listened to me as I told him about how I had conquered all this stuff. In August 2022, I would be celebrating at that time my four years of sobriety. I finished, and he goes, “Congratulations, Laban.” I said, “Thank you, Les.” He goes, “Do you have a book?” I go, “No.” He goes, “If you are going to be a speaker, you need a book for credibility.” He goes, “Who was the most influential person in your life when you were five?” It was some unresolved anger at that point. I was like, “My mother. Despite how many flaws, it had been my mom.” He’s like, “What attributes did you get from your mother?”

I was like, “She was tenacious, unconditionally loving, and fearless,” and all this he’s writing the stuff down. He looks up at me, Dan. He goes, “Laban, this is a God moment.” He says, “I’m going to show you how to monetize your passion.” For the next ten minutes, he reads back to me the blueprint for this book called Bet On You. He said, “Laban, you are going to write the book. You are going to turn the book into a keynote. You are going to turn the keynote into a three-day retreat. Even if you muck this up, you are going to make $200,000 in the next twelve months. I’m going to interview you on my show with four million followings.”

I have never written anything in my life apart from a shopping list. I said, “Les, if you are going to write the foreword to my book, I will have it to you by June 30, 2020.” In six weeks in a deep carnivore diet, incidentally, I wrote 30,000 words of the first draft of Bet On You and completely changed my life in the process. With the story of Joe Rogan, I was staying in Lost Lake, Austin, earlier this 2022 with a friend of ours, John Mitchell, and his wife, Ginger.

That’s not just a shabby neighborhood. Sprinkle the conversation with 3 or 4 big names because we have been there. That’s a pretty amazing place.

Sandra Bullock lives down there. Elon Musk bought a place and Matthew McConaughey. Joe Rogan lived there. They knew where he lived. The way that the river system works, they are like, “Let’s go and throw a copy of your book on Joe Rogan’s back lawn.” You heard me talk about him earlier. His podcast saved my life and/or expedited the healing process in a way that I can’t even quantify.

I wrote a lovely note inside the front cover, put my phone number in there, and put it in a Ziploc thing. We are cruising up the river, and I’m going to throw this on the back lawn and be done. We are getting closer to this dock. As we are getting closer and closer, a figure of a large, stocky man comes into existence, standing there with a dog, Marshall, and his daughter. It’s Joe Rogan. We haven’t prepared for this. I’m good on my feet. I’m like, “Joe.” Everyone can open carry in Austin, Texas. Who knows? He could have shot at us.

He’s like, “Yeah.” I go, “I’ve got a present for you.” He’s like, “How have you got a present for me?” I said, “Don’t worry. It’s a book. It’s not anthrax.” Anna goes, “You saved his life.” He’s like, “I didn’t save his life. How did I save his life?” We had this wonderful 90-second exchange. It was a little bit awkward. I threw my book, landed at the bottom of the boat where he and his friend were, and completely broke the glass ceiling in my mind of what I thought was possible. I don’t know what’s going to happen with that. I don’t care. I’m not tied to any outcome. When you go around calling yourself the world’s best courage coach, Dan, how would the world’s best courage coach conduct himself?

That’s a good way to start winding down our time. Let me put you on the hot seat. We talked about this in my basement. What would you say to somebody? What would you drive 5 hours, 1 way to say to somebody for free? If you had one hour to live, what would be your message? What would you say to the world?

No one is coming to save you.

 

There’s no calvary.

It’s you. It’s on you. The greatest suffering is now your greatest superpower. You just need to see it as there.

Let every experience in life be your teacher. It’s very cool. How do we find a copy of your book Bet On You? I’ve read it. It is incredible. The eloquence of language baffles me that you sat down and wrote it, and that was the true you that came out. The sophisticated elegance and the polished professionalism are who you are, even though you didn’t know that your entire life.

That was another page that you turned in your life, saying, “Not only have I recovered and faced my fears, not only have I become a serial entrepreneur,” but now you know you are a writer, a philosopher, and a closet psychologist. I am so proud to know you. How do we find your book and keep in touch with you?

For those who enjoy my dulcet tones, I recorded the Audible in a studio in Berlin last 2021, which was exciting with a guy, Eric Wittenberg, who’s one of the top vocal talents in Germany. He recorded Elton John’s book in German. I don’t know how that goes. It’s all over every country that has Amazon. For a US audience, if you text the word COURAGE to 33777, you can register for some upcoming virtual events in which we talk about a course in courageousness.

If you are reading this for the first time, and you haven’t, go out, subscribe, and leave a review for this show because when you do that, you give people that don’t know about this an opportunity to know this unbelievable work that Dan is doing. The fact that Donny Osmond was a former guest, and then I’ve come on, tickled me pink.

It’s yin and yang. When you have Osmond and Ditchburn, you don’t need anybody else. Look for Laban’s amazing opportunities to join his tribe and enroll in some personal coaching and high-end, high-performance mindset shifts that will change your life physically, mentally, spiritually, and financially.

We are brainstorming on some programs we could put together and co-venture with some of the bigger names on the planet to change your life and make you everything or invite you to become everything you were born to be. Thank you, Laban. I love you, good brother. This has been such an honor. This is episode whatever number but it should be number one on your list. Laban Ditchburn, my Australian mate, and two brothers from a different mother. Thanks, brother. God bless.

I love you. Thank you so much.

 

Important Links

• Laban Ditchburn
• Bet On You
• The Salvation Army
• Become Your Own Superhero
• Dr. Shawn Baker – The Joe Rogan Experience Previous Episode
• Thorne
• The Phoenix Protocol
• The Phoenix Protocol – YouTube
• Mel Gibson – The Joe Rogan Experience Previous Episode
• Leo Beus
• LMNT
• Les Brown – YouTube
• Audible – Bet On You
• Amazon – Bet On You
• Donny Osmond – Previous Episode

 

About Laban Ditchburn

A child badly affected by divorce and dysfunction, Laban sought validation and escapism in all the wrong places. But through self-discovery, not being afraid to ask for help and a ton of hard work, he conquered the full gamut of addictions—alcohol, gambling, sex, drugs and negative self-talk. Today, he defines the word transformation.

Six years free of addiction and now having reshaped his body by swapping sixty pounds of body fat with thirty pounds of powerful muscle and bone, he discovered a simple cure for his “incurable” auto-immune disease in the process. By learning and then reverse-engineering the root cause of why he needed to escape, giving up his addictions has been almost effortless.

These days he gets his high from ultra-marathons, not taking no for an answer and scouring the planet for the world’s best steak! Now physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally in charge of his own destiny, Laban’s journey continues to inspire those ready to change their life.

An exemplar and a revolutionary, he revels in unabashedly sharing what he’s learned: how to conquer the demons you don’t know you have, and how to be unstoppable in getting to where you want to be. Laban’s internationally acclaimed book “Bet on You” is a “can’t put down” must-read with its raw, real, hilarious, and inspiring message of hope. Known affectionately as The World’s Best Courage Coach, Laban shares his life with his smoking hot wife, the bravest person he knows, and the future mother of their children, Anna!