S6 E10 Into Action with Sam Shumakers Golf BuddyS6 E10 Into Action with Sam Shumakers Golf Buddy
That's NOT in the book!
Agent X and Sam Shoemaker’s Golf Buddy share candid stories of alcoholic chaos, Big Book sponsorship and Step 10, mixing humour with honesty about ego, family, illness and faith. Their conversation focuses on practical spiritual action, love and service as the ongoing foundation of recovery.
1:02:41•17 Aug 2026
From Angry Drunk to Tree Number Three: Big Book Action with Sam Shoemaker’s Golf Buddy
Episode Overview
- Denial and comparison keep people from accepting alcoholism, even when consequences are obvious.
- Simply attending meetings without working the Big Book and steps leaves a person stuck in the "lobby of the gym".
- Daily Step 10 practice – watching for dishonesty, fear, resentment and selfishness – helps separate ego from a truer spiritual self.
- Helping others in AA and beyond can turn serious illnesses and hardships into opportunities for grace and connection.
- Gratitude is expressed through love and service to family, work and AA, rather than through words alone.
“If all I get out of life is I help these four guys, you know, and maybe make some people's day brighter at the St. Luke's cancer ward. Yeah. It's pretty good.”
Curious about how others manage their sobriety journey? This conversation between Agent X and "Sam Shoemaker's Golf Buddy" offers a raw, funny and unfiltered look at life before and after the Big Book solution. Aimed squarely at alcoholics and fellow 12‑Step travellers, the episode mixes classic "drunkalogues" with line‑by‑line Big Book application.
Sam talks about arriving in AA via another fellowship, convinced he was "way smarter than everybody here" and definitely not "one of those" alcoholics because he had an education, all his teeth, and no civilian arrest record. What follows is a painfully familiar slide: craft beers, pub crawls, relationships turned into "hostages", and the realisation that he’d become the angry, sad drunk no one wanted to be around. The tone stays light even as they tackle heavy themes.
Agent X chips in with her own horror stories – baseball beers, 20‑drink binges and using workouts as a supposed solution – while both of them laugh at the insanity they once called normal. They keep circling back to the Big Book and the 12 Steps, especially Step 10, as their daily grounding. As Sam puts it, his ego is "just chattering all the time", and the ongoing practice is to watch thoughts for dishonesty, fear, resentment and selfishness.
Later, Sam shares openly about prostate cancer and how it’s pushed him into a deeper relationship with a Higher Power. He jokes about being "tree number three" rather than the star of the show and sums up his new purpose: "If all I get out of life is I help these four guys, you know, and maybe make some people's day brighter at the St. Luke's cancer ward...
it's pretty good." If you like your recovery talk honest, Big Book‑centric and laced with dark humour, this one might give you both a wince and a warm chuckle. Where might you see your own story in theirs?
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