Announcer:

This episode of The Matt Feret Show is brought to you by the Brickhouse Agency. Brickhouse is a boutique independent health insurance agency that focuses on finding the right Medicare coverage for folks across the country. Matt's wife, Niki, is the heart behind Brickhouse. She's great at making confusing things clear and is passionate about helping people find a Medicare insurance policy that suits their individual needs. To schedule a free one-on-one appointment with Niki or a member of her team, head on over to brickhouseagency.com or simply call (844-844-6565), and someone will help you schedule a phone call or a Zoom meeting. The consultation is free because the insurance companies pay Brickhouse, not you. There's never any pressure or obligation to enroll. Your clearer, simpler Medicare journey is just a call or click away. brickhouseagency.com. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the government or federal Medicare program. Contacting Brickhouse Agency LLC will direct you to a licensed insurance agent.

Introduction by Matt Feret [1:08]

Matt Feret:

Hello everyone. This is Matt Feret, author of Prepare for Medicare and Prepare for Social Security Insiders, guidebooks, and online course training series. Welcome to another episode of The Matt Feret Show, where I interview insiders and experts to help light a path to successful living in midlife retirement and beyond. Bracha, welcome to the show.

Bracha Goetz:

Thank you. Happy to be here.

Matt Feret:

I'm happy that you're here. So tell everybody what you do, how long you've been doing it, and how you help people.

Bracha Goetz:

Okay. Well, I'm the author of 41 children's books. I say that they are books that help children's souls to shine. That's what they all have in common. And I'm also the author of one memoir for adults about my journey to joy. And how long have I been doing this? Well, I started writing children's books when my children were very little, and now I have grandchildren who are really big. So that's how long I've been doing it and how do I help people? My mission is to help souls shine. That is it. And of course, it helps my soul shine too when I help other souls shine. So it's also selfish. It's like that's what I do.

Matt Feret:

Yeah, but that's such a, I mean, if that's selfish, then be selfish. That's such a beautiful mantra. You talked about your book for adults and that's really what I want to spend a lot of time on today. And you're a former food addict and written a book as well. Talk to me about that. How did that go? Tell me that story.

Bracha Goetz:

I'm holding it up, Nourish the Soul. This book, it's about my journey. It's an unusual book. It's like a documentary. It has the actual diary entries I kept from age 12, and then it turned into a journal when I got older. I called it a journal, and then I put in letters. I wrote letters home, and then I filled in all the missing pieces and it's a thread of how I develop the food addictions and then how I healed. Because actually, when I found these old diaries, I was able to see the thread. So I said, I have to present this out to help other people. So when they're developing these types of addictions and how to heal from them, because what I discovered was something amazing. What I discovered is that really it was my soul that was starving. And that emptiness that you feel inside, you try to fill it with physical things and that just gets the hole even deeper because it's not a physical hole, it's an actual spiritual hole. And what I finally learned how to fill it, what fills the emptiness is gratitude. That is what fills us up. Yeah.

Bracha Goetz’s Story with Food Addiction [4:39]

Matt Feret:

Wow. There's a lot to unpack there. I'm going to try to start, but you mentioned the age 12. Are you saying- so talk to me about that journey. Did you start having an issue with food? I don't even know if that's the right phrase anymore to say. I dunno what the right phrase is, but-

Bracha Goetz:

Who knows?

Matt Feret:

Age 12. Did you have some sort of eating disorder starting at age 12? And how long did that persist until you, I mean you were journaling about it. Yeah, go into depth. When did this start?

Bracha Goetz:

So I didn't really start having food issues till I was an older teen, but what started at age 12 was the search for meaning in life. At that age, it was like a consciousness expansion happened. I wasn't a child anymore. The body starts to change. And as an adolescent, I started wondering about life. Is this all there is? We get up every day to go to work, to make money, to buy food, to live another day, to go to work. What's it all for? Those questions began at age 12. Also, I had just finished reading the diary, Anne Frank, and that affected me tremendously. That's what got me to start my own diary. And in her writing, she writes so much about what life is all about. She was wondering these same questions. So that began the journey of my search, and the search became more and more desperate as the years went on and I didn't find the answers that filled my soul, which that was the thing. I didn't know I was a soul. My parents were not really spiritual. And although I was born Jewish, it wasn't like I understood that it had any spirituality to it. So that was kind of lost for me, and I went searching for what had meaning. That's how I ended up at Harvard, because I was searching for wisdom. I figured, okay, I'm going to study everything, learn about life, and maybe there I'll find the ultimate wisdom. Yeah.

Matt Feret:

And what'd you find?

Bracha Goetz:

What I found was, well, a lot of interesting people, for instance, this is really interesting. I mean, I knew Bill Gates. I was in the dance studio and he was in the computer studio. There was one computer room back in those days, just one little computer room. And he and Steve Bauer, they were best friends back at Harvard. He became the second guy at Microsoft. They spent all their time, a lot of their time in this computer room, and everyone just thought of them as such nerds. It was like they were so looked down upon. It was like, anyway, but I knew all these people. I was invited to this really exclusive party, Kennedy's, Rockefeller and Moynihan, and I felt, this is it. I have made it to the top only to realize that they're just regular people like anybody else that you meet. And they too, were searching for something more, searching beyond.

And also it was May and it was this beautiful day in May, and all of a sudden, just like is happening to me right now, the sky filled up with storm clouds, and there was a tremendous thunderstorm. The whole party, the garden party was ruined. And I remember thinking, well, this is not it. I mean, these people don't even have the power to stop the rain from coming down. So I reached it, and what I thought was fame and power. Well, this is not it. There's something more. That's what I got to see at a pretty young age.

Matt Feret:

Yeah. Well, you started searching for meeting at a pretty young age too. That's not normal. At least I wasn't 12 thinking about that. I was trying to watch Saturday morning cartoons at age 12 and thinking, am I too old for this? I was not thinking about my lot in life, which is also probably why I didn't go to Harvard. But that notwithstanding. So the search for oneself and meaning in the world in all that you've just mentioned, how did that turn into a food addiction?

Bracha Goetz:

Well, food brings pleasure. And when you are searching for lasting pleasure in life, trying to figure out how do you bring lasting pleasure into your life, food is very, it's the easiest way to do it. It gives you immediate pleasure, and if you don't want the pleasure to end, you just keep stuffing your face and then the pleasure just keeps lasting until you're even more miserable than you were to begin with. When you started doing that, feeling emptier than before, just with all addictions, it's really, food is like, it's the easiest analogy to see this with, but it's really for all addictions is that way we try to fill it and it doesn't do it. In bringing that desperate, trying to fill it with externalities just makes us feel emptier and feeling more of a lack of pleasure than ever before.

Matt Feret:

How long would you say you were a food addict?

Bracha Goetz:

Well, I began at age 17 to try dieting like crazy and I got a lot thinner, but, and then there'd be these horrible binges when I couldn't keep dieting like that. And those were horrible experiences. So from looking at me, you couldn't tell how I was suffering. At a certain point, I knew how to diet, so I'd be yo-yo dieting, and then bingeing one or the other. And it was an absolutely horrific way to live. It was like being in a prison and the walls get smaller and smaller around you. And the amazing thing is that the walls are composed of your thoughts and you actually have the key to get out, but you're trapped. So that's what it's like to be in an addiction. That's exactly how it feels. It's when you have a compulsive behavior that is causing you harm and you're still doing the behavior. You're still involved in this addiction even though you know that you're causing yourself harm.

Matt Feret:

Did someone ever diagnose you with something with either food addiction or related? I'm thinking of what anorexia is one or what are some other names? Did it ever go through all that or all or none or some

Bracha Goetz:

Yes, and I was the expert on anorexia in college at Harvard. I was giving talks on it. I was writing a paper that still used in a textbook that's used in women's studies courses around the country. I was doing groundbreaking research in the field and getting sicker and sicker at the time. And then I went on to medical school where things got even worse and the behaviors got even more bizarre. That's the other thing with an addiction, doing it in secret. So other people have no idea what you're doing until things get completely out of hand. So that's what's going on. And so let's say this went on from, I'd say about age 17 through age 21, and then I went to a therapist in medical school and I told this therapist everything I was doing, I let it all out. And he said to me, he was Japanese man.

It was really interesting. And he understood something just from this conversation I had with him. He said, I know you think like you're extremely messed up right now, but I feel like when you go to Israel this summer, I was planning to go for six weeks between a break between my first and second year of medical school. He goes, I think you're going to find what you're looking for. I think it's really a spiritual need that you have that is not being filled right now, which is amazing. A very different culture, this therapist. But he was able to see that in me.

Matt Feret:

So you suspected it all along, but most people I would say, well, I don't know. Maybe I won't speak for most people. Do most people understand this as a spiritual issue or problem as you do and you did at that relatively early age? Or is it just being masked as you should diet and you should South Beach and you should low carb or no carb or whatever? I mean, is diet even a word that we should be using around food?

Bracha Goetz:

Yes. You're asking it a brilliant question. I don't think it's understood at all. And that's why I'm really devoting my life at this stage of my life now that I'm retired, to really spreading this message because I don't think most people understand this. Why don't diets work? I mean, it's been an unbelievable industry of trying this diet or trying that diet. People feel like such failures because the recidivism rate is so high, everybody just gets right back on it. It's not the way to live. And now it's been over 40 years that I've been living this wonderful life of gratitude. And what I tried to understand is why when I finally was able to nourish my hungry soul, what happened to these addictions? So that's why I put the book together. What did one thing have to do with the other? I really didn't see it, that therapist saw it that day.

But at that point I was like, what is he talking about? I don't really get this, but that is exactly what happened to me. And it was kind of gradual, but not so gradual because as I incorporated these ideas into my life, filling up and feeling like my life was full and learning what brings pleasure in life, what brings lasting pleasure, and that there isn't really a scarcity of pleasure beginning to trust life, beginning to trust myself because there's a lot of control issues involved too. When I didn't feel that need to be in such control of life anymore and I could trust that there's an ultimate good design to our life here, then I could enjoy more and feel gratitude and experience pleasure on a deeper level.

Bracha Goetz’s Perspective on Addiction [16:31]

Matt Feret:

So take me across that chasm, which may be too dramatic of a word of you're having these issues, you're recognizing them, and you went to a therapist in med school and he recognized something and gave, I think what we would say maybe is an Eastern approach perhaps rather than a Western approach of throwing drugs and additional therapy at you. And he said, maybe you'll find some spirituality or some answers on this trip you had planned, and I almost want to, well then what? So you're in a great place. How much long after that and what transformation did your brain go through and how did you do this? I mean, I know there are a million steps, but take me in some really important steps to connect a food addiction to a lack of spirituality or a lack of meaning in life or some type of hole in your soul.

I did not mean for that to rhyme that connects the two because I don't know, I'm just selfishly speaking, I think I'm a reasonably complete person on the inside. I mean, none of us are a hundred percent. I certainly have a ways to go, and I've never really made the connection, my eating habits, which are not awesome to what I'm lacking and that spirituality or that hole or something I'm trying to fill, and maybe it is and I just don't even know about it. So when that doctor or that counselor said something to you and you went on your quest to I no longer have a food addiction, what were some steps in there that you had to take and that you recommend others taking?

Bracha Goetz:

Excellent. First, I want to say people that don't have addictions, they have a hard time relating to this. When you have an addiction, I think you have a more exposed soul that is really feeling the need for this nourishment very intensely. Other people don't feel it as intensely. They don't develop addictions as readily. I kind of feel it's a certain sensitivity that people have who develop these addictions. So what I learned from this rabbi who's no longer alive when I visited Israel that summer, is something called the pleasure ladder. I'm going to hold this up. There's five levels, five levels on the pleasure ladder that correspond to the five levels of the human soul. So this is universal, and I think they correspond to our five fingers because we have the power to bring pleasure into our lives at any moment, not dependent on anybody else.

It's totally empowering, which is awesome. So the lowest level of pleasure corresponds to the lowest level of the soul, which is the level of the soul that's connected to the body. So it's all the natural physical pleasures. So let's say we eat an orange and orange. First of all, it's green. When it's camouflaged in with the leaves, it's being protected. Then it gets bright and beautiful. The fruit become bright, the most vibrant colors. When they're ready, first they're calling, we're ready. Then we experience the joy of seeing them, smelling them, tasting like an orange. The sweet juiciness is kept in for months in that peel. And then when we finish the orange are the seeds of eternity. These seeds can become infinite amount of trees, infinite amount of oranges, and you compare that to an orange flavored tangy taffy where even the wrapper pollutes the environment and the pleasure lasts this long just while it's inside your mouth and that's it.

Then it just starts harming the body. And actually those things are designed to be addictive as opposed to the natural foods are designed to be delicious and nutritious and addictive. Junk is designed to be delicious and addictive. So a person doesn't need to feel guilty when they overeat addictive food because it's designed to have that effect on one's body. We're just reacting the way their labs have made it. So the natural foods and being in nature, movement, exercise, swimming, yoga, gardening, dancing, music, all these natural pleasures are designed to nourish both our bodies and our souls when we experience them with gratitude. So when you experience an orange can imagine with that kind of mindful gratitude, I mean it's a spiritual experience when you really do that. So that's what all the natural physical pleasures are designed to do. The next level up is love and love.

A person could say, how could that be empowering? It's dependent on someone else, but this is love is focusing on the virtues of another. So even in prison, a person can experience love by focusing, let's say on a grandmother that once did a kindness for them, and they're uplifted emotionally, and that's how you can bring love into your life at any moment. By focusing on the virtues of another, what's a more lasting pleasure than that is doing something good and meaningful in the world. I was on another show where the guy said he ate two slices of pizza and then he was about to plow through the whole rest of the box by himself. He was feeling lonely. His neighbor knocks on his door, he helps his neighbor for two minutes. He comes back, he doesn't want the pizza anymore. He puts the rest in the fridge. He filled up. He filled up feeling grateful that he could help somebody else. It immediately him up doing something good and meaningful. It's that simple. Higher than that is creativity.

When we're being creative, we don't feel like sleeping or eating. We're in a zone of such pleasure. That time just passes. We don't even know. So that's the next to the highest pleasure. Each level upbringings more connection because like when you're in an addiction, you're totally self-centered. You're just focused on yourself and this, you're feeling gratitude to another thing, to another being, to a wider, helping others, to bringing a unique part of yourself into the world through creativity. That's why it's an even greater pleasure than simply doing something good and meaningful. And the highest level is transcendence. That's when we transcend our own limitations. We make the first crack in a bad habit and an addiction. We transcend into a greater self that we could be. It's also like what we experience under a starry, starry night when we know we're a part of a greater universe, it stays with us forever. This pleasure, each is a more lasting pleasure, and when we recognize this, we realize that there's an abundance of pleasures we all can bring into our lives at any moment. This releases us from where we're stuck on just finishing the whole tub of ice cream, finishing the whole box of chocolate chip cookies, the whole big bag of potato chips. It stops calling our name in the same way when we don't feel that scarcity of pleasure in our life and we are aware of the abundance of pleasures, there's a show my 600-pound life; the people say they all say the same thing. Food was the only thing bringing me pleasure anymore. So that's how we end this by filling our lives with gratitude, pouring in the joy

Matt Feret:

That is so much different than fasting and the right carbohydrate and protein intake for your body type, your blood type and all these other things. Is your experience more like, I haven't had any experience with it, but I have seen, I guess commercials on TV and on the internet, this whole concept of Noom. Have you heard of that?

Bracha Goetz:

What is Noom?

Matt Feret:

Noom is a behavioral based approach to food. Oh, okay. And it's I think more in line. Again, I haven't tried it, so I'm probably going to trip all over this, but it seems to be more attacking not just the type of diet or what you're eating or when you're eating or when you're not eating, and all these different rules that are thrown at you a million miles an hour, but it's the mental connection between pleasure and food, and that's really kind of what you're saying, which is you're not full. I guess that is a food reference. You're not full, and so you keep trying to fill the void with food or whatever substance I guess you could apply it to. Yes, because you're not full as a human.

Bracha Goetz:

Yes, and I want to say that it's many people talk about minds over matter and having the right thoughts. I want to add that we are spiritual beings that need spiritual nourishment and gratitude is the nourishment we need. I forgot to say that in order to climb any rung on the pleasure ladder, there's only one price to pay, and that's gratitude. That is what gets us to each rung on the ladder. That is what fills us up.

Matt Feret:

What does gratitude, I think that can be hard for people. I mean, thinking about, about going through up to transcendence, Ooh, that can be intimidating for a lot of people with eight to five jobs or kids or parents, they're taken care for. I mean, that's a thing that's like saying, why are you here? Why are we here? And those are questions. Most people go, I can't even put my brain today. I've got a report due in a half an hour, or I've got to take the kids to school, or I got to check in on my mom. How do people get themselves in the brain space? And you've used the word gratitude a lot. I'm going to get to it, but how do people put in the brain space to think about this in terms of a food addiction or really any addiction?

Bracha Goetz:

This is the way to enjoy a pleasurable life. Why miss out? We can go take care of our mother. We can go do the job. We can do all of this with gratitude in our hearts. It doesn't take any extra time. I mean, it's the same. We're doing the same actions, but they're transformed when we live a life of gratitude and it's recognizing that really we are invisible spiritual beings just clothed in these bodies. Why do we all as we age, feel a disconnect when we look in the mirror because our bodies are aging, but our souls are as vibrant as ever. We feel completely young and vibrant. What is that part of us? That's our soul. It never ages. It never does. It's eternal also. So it just goes on and on. It's only the clothing that we're wearing that ages. So once we recognize that, we can realize we are going to stay as vibrant as ever, and because keep nourishing our souls throughout the aging process, it transforms a whole way of looking at life.

Bracha Goetz on the Power of Gratitude [29:24]

Matt Feret:

Let's get to gratitude. We left off in your mid-twenties where you started to work on this and you said some of it happened pretty quickly and some of it didn't. Who turned you on to the word gratitude and how to practice it? I remember, here's my story. I remember being at an insurance industry conference way back in the early two thousands, and an author named Keith Harrell was, it was, what was his book name? Oh, somebody's going to catch me on this one. Was it an attitude of gratitude or something along those lines? Anyway, he gave a really rousing keynote address, and it was basically like, yeah, wake up with an attitude of gratitude every single morning because that's completely up to you, completely. You're in control and it will rub off and good things will happen to you. Attitude is everything. That was his book. Attitude is everything, but he talked about gratitude a lot. One of his famous lines that I remember was, you can't get up on the wrong side of the bed every morning. You got up some people, and I remember hearing that. I'm like, that is really good way to start the day. Just to remember, some people didn't wake up this morning.

So, that was my first introduction to gratitude. It's at times hard to practice. It's hard when, whatever. Right? Kids, marriage, job, school, church, there's a lot of negativity or potential negativity in the world that can take or steal from your gratitude. How do you personally approach gratitude with all the external forces coming at you trying to get you off your game?

Bracha Goetz:

It definitely is a habit that is exactly right. Let's say we feel like overeating this part of the brain, it's the lower, well, it's the top of the brainstem, but the lower brain, the amygdala starts saying, you got to eat. You're miserable. How disappointing. This didn't go right today. At least get this pleasure in. Come on, you deserve it, and you start going. So if you start the neurons, they get in the habit of firing. Instead, they go up to the prefrontal cortex all the way to the top of your head, and you get in the habit of saying, isn't your body that's hungry or your soul? Or another question, if I have 95 more spoonfuls of this chocolate ice cream, will I then feel full? You won't, it's not going to help. It's an understanding that there's so many other ways to bring pleasure into your life. So you start recognizing that, oh, right, I just want pleasure. It's not like I need the ice cream, the potato chips, the what? The gambling, the shopping, whatever the addiction is. It's that I want pleasure, lasting pleasure in my life. This is how to bring lasting pleasure in your life, filling your life with gratitude. It's the only thing that actually works so amazing, and when you start to practice it, if you're not used to it, you feel really weird. You feel like, oh, this feels so silly.

Matt Feret:

Maybe it does. But yeah, tell me how to start practicing this. Tell everybody listening and watching. How do we start doing this?

Bracha Goetz:

Yeah. Imagine with a raisin. Imagine with an orange. You take these little things and you look at them with gratitude for the first time, different eyes. You start feeling grateful for the most basic things in your life. Many people do it before they go to sleep at night. They think of three things that they were grateful for that day. They have found research discovered, like let's say a person wins the lottery, or let's say God forbid a person becomes paralyzed six months later, they're at the same happiness set point they were at before that ever happened to them before they won the lottery or before, God forbid they became paralyzed. They were at the same level of happiness they were before those things happened. It didn't change them. What does change them? Six months later, a person keeping a gratitude diary, like writing down three things they were grateful for every day. Six months later, they're at a different happiness set point. It actually changes them. The habit of gratitude changes people's level of happiness in life. We are the people that have control over our own happiness. It's not what happens to you. You think, oh, my happiness depends on what happens to you. No, it's what you do that matters. You are the one that determines with your mind how to fill your day with happiness, and that's through gratitude. That is the secret to happiness.

Bracha Goetz on Gratitude vs. Intentional Dieting [34:45]

Matt Feret:

Talk to a skeptic, talk to somebody who's going to go, nah, it really should be 15 to 1800 calories a day and a third, a third, third, protein, carbs, and you can have that piece of chocolate cake, but just don't have five pieces.

Bracha Goetz:

Yeah.

Matt Feret:

Tell me if it's the whole mental versus practical piece, as somebody who's skeptical of this, and I'm imagining those same very people are going to be yo-yoing their weight for the last 40 years like I have. Not saying I'm a skeptic. I just want to hear you give it to me. What would you say to somebody who doesn't agree with that approach?

Bracha Goetz:

First of all, I totally agree that if you eat healthfully, you're going to be filled with more gratitude. It's just you can have gratitude toward these natural physical things that were made to nourish you and were made for you to experience gratitude to nourish both your body and your soul. We were meant to feel gratitude eating these wholesome foods. The other foods were designed out of greed just to make money, and they make us sicker so those actually don't help our bodies to feel gratitude. After we eat the whole bag of potato chips, we feel guilt and miserable and it doesn't help us at all. So there's a real difference. We are meant to enjoy wholesome, healthy eating with gratitude and all of that helps us eating in a healthy way. But I don't fuss about calories, the things like chocolate, sure, it would be great if you could just eat one piece of it.

That's not what it was designed to do to you. It's designed to make you eat it and eat it, and eating it. Eating junk is not the problem. It's eating it and eating it and eating it and eating it. It's not being able to stop eating it. That's really where the problem comes up. So yeah, the more we can fill our lives with healthy things, the better. But we don't have to be just, that comes naturally. Actually with living a life of gratitude, we tend to veer in that direction because we want to experience more gratitude every day, and it's this simple, any moment that we are being grateful is a moment. We're not being miserable. We can have both those emotions at the same time.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion by Matt Feret [37:20]

Matt Feret:

Baraka, this has been a lot of fun. What questions did I not ask that I should have?

Bracha Goetz:

Oh gosh.

Matt Feret:

Food addiction and recovery.

Bracha Goetz:

You ask fantastic questions. I want to say that one of the reasons, okay, the question is why do I write children's books? Because I want to get children learning these things as early as possible. Learn happiness skills as early and life as you can, and you don't have to play catch up like the rest of us. We can learn it at any time, but why waste all those years not being grateful? I teach this to children early on. I have a book about Let's stay healthy books about appreciating our fruits and vegetables, books about swimming safely, prevention of abuse, all kinds of things that as an undergraduate at Harvard, I was even then taking courses at Harvard Medical School and the Graduate School of Public Health. Having a healthy body is a big part of helping your soul to shine fully. So we're a whole package, and I love to address that in people as young as possible, two as old as possible. Let your soul shine as fully as possible by nourishing it. Yeah,

Matt Feret:

Beautifully said. And Baka, thanks so much for joining me.

Bracha Goetz:

Thank you.

Matt Feret:

The Matt Feret Show related content, publications and MF Media LLC is in no way associated, endorsed, or authorized by any governmental agency, including the Social Security Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, or the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The Matt Feret Show is in no way associated with authorized, approved, endorsed, nor in any way affiliated with any company, trademark names or other marks mentioned or referenced in or on The Matt Feret Show. Any such mention is for purpose of reference only. Any advice generalized statistics or opinions expressed are strictly those of the host and guests of The Matt Feret show. Although every effort has been made to ensure the contents of The Matt Feret show and related content are correct and complete, laws and regulations change quickly and often. The ideas and opinions expressed on The Matt Feret Show aren't meant to replace the sage advice of healthcare, insurance, financial planning, accounting, or legal professionals.

You are responsible for your financial decisions. It is your sole responsibility to independently evaluate the accuracy, correctness, or completeness of the content, services, and products of and associated with The Matt Feret Show, MF Media, LLC, and any related content or publications. The thoughts and opinions expressed on The Matt Feret Show are those of the host and The Matt Feret show guests only and are not the thoughts and opinions of any current or former employer of the host or guests of The Matt Feret Show. Nor is The Matt Feret show made by on behalf of or endorsed or approved by any current or former employer of the host or guests of The Matt Feret Show.