Light Hustler: Making Your Mess Into Your Message

In this episode, I talk to addiction psychiatrist Dr. Josh Lichtman about how depression and anxiety manifest—and overlap.

I've long admired Laura McKowen. The sober mama is a prolific writer (you can see her many posts over at LauraMcKowen.com), podcaster (for years she co-hosted HOME, now she's co-hosting Spiritualish) and all-around honest person living in recovery. What do I mean by honest? Well, follow her on Instagram and you'll see more than just Ghandi quotes and hot photos. The woman spills it out there—and people love her for it. While we met at the Unite to Face Addiction rally in the fall of 2015, this is the first time we were able to chat one-on-one. And what a chat it was! Tune in to hear us get into losing our virginity, the stories we tell ourselves and developing healthy relationships with other women, among many other topics. NOTE: This episode is from a Facebook Live interview that we did, which means that the audio isn’t as sharp as it is on regular episodes. Please bear with that! And please tune into my regular Facebook Live interviews. Make sure you Like my page so stay up on the info! It's better with the

AA is a controversial topic within recovery circles. Some are all for it, some violently opposed. So where does a prominent addiction psychiatrist stand? Does he tell all his patients who are addicts to go there? The answer may surprise you.

Bucky Sinister is a poet, self-help author and comedian, he has published four books of poetry and two self-help books, including Get Up: A 12-Step Guide to Recovery for Misfists, Freaks, and Weirdos. His journalism, film reviews, and short stories have appeared on The Rumpus, The Bold Italic, and a number of other online and print publications. His novel, Black Hole, is flat out the funniest novel I've ever read about addiction. He's been something of a regular in my world—a repeated podcast guest and performer at my live show. This episode is from one of those live shows and in this story, he talks about being terrified of small talk but not remotely scared to score drugs from strangers or get in fights. This episode is from my live storytelling show, which happens on the last Friday of every month at Open Space Cafe (457 N. Fairfax Ave) in LA. Sign up for the newsletter to make sure you’re notified when shows are coming up and/or stay up to date on the schedule here. For more about the workshops I lead whe

Jen Matesa is a recovery powerhouse. Unafraid and unapologetic, she speaks out about two "s"'s that scare some others—namely, Suboxone and sex. She's written extensively about both—Suboxone in blog posts like this one and the sex in two of her four books...especially her most recent one, Sex in Recovery: A Meeting between the Covers (her previous book for Hazelden, The Recovering Body: Physical and Spiritual Fitness for Living Clean and Sober, also got into meditation, exercise, nutrition and more). She has spoken and written widely, teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh, is a psychotherapist in training and is currently working on her second master’s degree. Sober since 2010, she was one of the first sober bloggers and she's been dedicated in that time to giving the public reliable information about addiction and recovery without advertising or paywalls. Her commitment to removing social stigma from addiction and recovery earned her a fellowship at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Adm

If there’s anyone who can make a ridiculous drinking story hilarious, it’s Laura House. A headlining comedian who has performed on HBO, Comedy Central, NBC, she is originally from Texas and moved to LA after starring in MTV’s cult-favorite Austin Stories. She’s written on the Emmy-winning shows Mom and Samantha Who, BAFTA-winning Secret Lives of Boys, as well as Nicole Byer’s Loosely, Exactly, Nicole, The George Lopez Show, Mad Love, Blue Collar TV and more. This story is about how she went from being a girl who knocked on doors trying to talk to strangers about Jesus to vomiting Pina Coladas all over a bus to peeing her name in the hallway outside of a teacher’s hotel room. Did she end up suffering consequences for being a host family’s worst nightmare? Well, no—and yes. It all makes sense if you listen. This episode is from my live storytelling show, which happens on the last Friday of every month at Open Space Cafe (457 N. Fairfax Ave) in LA.

I first met Drew Grant through friends, when we both lived in New York. She was a young, dynamic, cool, talented writer who'd worked at Salon and The New York Observer, among many other publications. While I'd always found her somewhat fascinating, that feeling was only enhanced when, during a causal conversation, she mentioned that she had a brief addiction to Fentanyl. I was working at The Fix website at the time and so I did what I did whenever anyone mentioned drugs...promptly assigned her a story. While she wrote that piece under a pen name, a few years later—in the wake of the Philip Seymour Hoffman overdose—she came out under her own name. Drew and I recently got in touch again, when she spoke to the students in my coaching program. She told me that her story with drugs had only gotten more Byzantine since we'd last spoken and so I did what I do whenever someone tells me that...promptly invited her to come on the podcast. I knew it would be such a different story than the one my guests usually tell. Th

Sean Paul Mahoney isn’t your average bear. He isn’t your average human, either. That’s because he’s much funnier than your average human. As a blogger, playwright and podcaster, Sean shares his many witticisms with the world?—?including me, back when I used to edit his essays at AfterParty. Just over nine years sober, he’s now working in the mental health and recovery field…and as he says, it keeps life very “real.” In this episode, we discuss hitting (and coming out of) an emotional bottom at seven years of sobriety, discovering that he was HIV positive, sitting with someone who’s overdosing and how his family sent him to church basements instead of a cushy Malibu rehab, among many other things. The interview got cut off at the end but he’s so great that it’s well worth the abrupt finish. This one’s a can’t miss, guys! NOTE: This episode is from a Facebook Live interview that we did, which means that the audio isn’t as sharp as it is on regular episodes. Please bear with that! And please tune into my regular

Gabe Zichermann is an unlikely hero in the addiction recovery world as he literally spent the first half of his career making sure we got hooked on tech. The world’s foremost expert and public speaker on the subject of gamification, user engagement and behavioral design, Zichermann is also the author of The Gamification Revolution (McGraw Hill, 2013), Gamification by Design (2011) and Game-Based Marketing (2010). But, as he observed addictive tendencies in both himself and the people around him, Zichermann realized he was potentially part of the problem. Consider his new project, Onward, penance. Onward is an app he co-founded that brings together the latest data science and artificial intelligence to help people change their potentially addictive relationships with technology, pornography, gambling or shopping. In this interview, we talked about his epiphany about his own addictive relationship with gaming (spoiler alert: don’t invite him to your party if he’s in the middle of a game), why cognitive behavior

Prolific TV and movie producer Scott Steindorff has convinced authors like Philip Roth and Gabriel Garcia Marquez to give up the film rights for their books. He's won Golden Globes and been nominated for Emmys. He's worked with Matthew McConaughey, Paul Newman and Nicole Kidman, among many others. But his greatest passion in life doesn't have anything to do with the entertainment business. His greatest passion is related to the fact that, at over 30 years of sobriety, he's watching more and more people die as a result of addiction. He believes our current treatment methods—in particular AA—need to be modernized and he's devoting his time and passion to doing just that by putting together his own recovery program, Life Renewal. In this episode, he and I get into a very heated debate about whether or not AA works. When this aired as a Facebook Live, the comments and questions were never-ending and I couldn't even begin to address all of them. A tame episode this is not. A lively one it is. NOTE: This episode is

Austin Cooper didn’t want to live anymore. Like many people suffering from addiction, he was at the too-scared-to-live, too-scared-to-die crossroads. He’d forgotten that he had people who loved him. When those loved ones did an intervention, he knew he had a choice: to live or die. He chose to live…and in less than five years, he’s become an outspoken recovery advocate. It all started when he discovered some inspiring quotes that changed his life. He thought maybe those quotes could help other people and so he started an Instagram account filled with them. The account grew so rapidly that he soon found himself on 20/20 and working as a coach. Now he and I have partnered on The Light Hustler Evolution, an accountability group that includes weekly assignments, webinars, coaching sheets, a book club and more. We talk all about it in this interview and explain that if you join before January 1st, you can get locked in at a 20% off discount. While this group will eventually be invitation and nomination only, for n

Austin Eubanks shouldn't be alive. And he certainly shouldn't be thriving. An injured survivor of the Columbine High School shooting, Eubanks was shot twice as he watched his best friend get murdered in front of his eyes. Afterwards, a phalanx of doctors prescribed him everything he wanted and more, until he found himself on a drug cocktail that included not only stimulants but also benzos and opiates. Marijuana and harder drugs followed soon after. A few trips to rehab didn't do much to slow his roll but, after coming to in jail in April of 2011 and learning that no one he knew was willing to take his call let alone bail him out, he made the choice that saved his life and entered treatment at the Stout Street Foundation for over a year. He has been sober ever since and is now a world-renowned speaker on the topic of recovery, COO of Foundry Treatment Center, on the board of directors for Stout Street Foundation and a member of the founding board of directors for 5280 High School. In this episode, Eubanks sha

Jodi Miller is what they call bust-a-gut funny (do they call it that or did I make that up?). She's also, as they say, blue. So if you're prone to blushing, you may want to skip this one. If, on the other hand, you don't shock easily and also enjoy laughing, you'll love this one. Jodi has performed on The Tonight Show and America's Got Talent. She's also written on a Cinemax series and been a recurring guest commentator on Showbiz Tonight. In this episode, she tells a night of drunken abandon...and a wardrobe malfunction. She performed it at my storytelling show, Hammer(ed) Time, which takes place every other month in LA, has been an LA Weekly pick of the week and is being developed into a video series. For more about the workshops I lead where I teach people to take their most disturbing or interesting experiences and make them into stories, click here. For more information about my online writing classes and coaching programs, click here.

Filmmaker and Facing Addiction co-founder Greg Williams puts most recovery advocates to shame. And he’s one of the most humble people you’ll ever meet. Here’s how the story goes: Williams got sober and was doing just a basic sober job when he started meeting people in the recovery advocacy movement. He was earning a grad degree at NYU that involved studying both advocacy and filmmaking and so he did the next logical thing: make a movie about these impressive folks he was meeting. After taking out a loan and then doing the Indie Go Go thing, Williams was able to present to the world The Anonymous People—the definitive film about recovering out loud. Because there’s no rest for the weary, he then co-founded Facing Addiction, the non-profit responsible for the 2015 march in Washington where Steven Tyler, Sheryl Crow and Joe Walsh performed. Since then, he’s completed another film (Generation Found) and embarked on a handful of other equally impressive projects. In this episode, Williams talks about where he got

Travis Jones is a video editor by day and a storyteller by night.  He has performed at The Moth and various other shows around LA. In this episode, he tells arguably the funniest story I've ever heard about getting arrested (and I've heard a lot). Suffice it to say that there are some fraternity brothers who surely regretted every setting eyes on him. He told the story at my live storytelling show, Hammer(ed) Time, which takes place every other month in LA, has been an LA Weekly pick of the week and is being developed into a video series.  

Wes Geer may have once looked like an unlikely recovery hero. The founding member of the band Hed PE, Geer went down the path familiar to many young, wild and crazy dudes in bands...all of which culminated in a trip to rehab in 2004. After finding sobriety in 2007, Geer was asked to join the legendary band Korn and he played with them for years. But just being a rock star wasn't enough for Geer and so, in 2013, he formed Rock to Recovery. Rock to Recovery's mission sounds almost impossible: a bunch of musicians go into treatment centers and teach the (non-musical) residents there to play. Together, they write a song. Yes, non-musicians write and play a song. Does it work? Well, Rock to Recovery currently does about 400 sessions a month—at both non-profit organizations and high-end treatment centers. They also put on shows, where people like Billy Idol, Fred Durst and Mark McGrath play. In this episode, Wes and I talk about the manifestation meditation that led to his greatest epiphany, whether or not he's alw

Brian Cuban is the ideal recovery advocate. Sober since 2007, the attorney and best-selling author of two books about his recovery is willing to talk about something very few men are: struggling with bulimia and anorexia. And not only is he willing to talk about it—he's willing to delve into how he developed his eating disorder (he writes touchingly about being teased as a kid in this compelling easy for CNN). The brother of Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank star Mark Cuban, Brian was a practicing attorney whose addiction had caused him to lose all his clients before his brothers intervened on him. Yet it was years before he was actually ready to seek help—when his now-wife discovered his secrets and was ready to leave. In this interview, we talk about the role family plays in addiction, lying to your psychiatrist and moving full-time into recovery advocacy, among other things. NOTE: This episode is from a Facebook Live interview that we did, which means that the audio isn’t as sharp as it is on regular e

Today's episode features a very special guest: me. Since I'm releasing episodes that contain stories from my live storytelling show, Hammer(ed) Time, and I perform in this show, sometimes these episodes are going to feature—well, me. (By the by, the show, which takes place every other month in LA, has been an LA Weekly pick of the week and is being developed into a video series.) The story I tell here is about how, the first time I got drunk, I confessed my love to the big man on campus. What happened next shocked even unshockable me.

It’s one thing to be open about your addiction when you’re a writer in LA—aka a person most people assume WOULD be an addict. It’s quite another when you’re a high-powered attorney. But Lisa F. Smith is a trail blazer. The author of the hit book Girl Walks Out of a Bar is also probably my favorite person I’ve never met. (Side note: I’ve slept in her bed despite not having met her; it’s not as sexy as it sounds but that’s something we get into in the interview.) What’s fascinating about Lisa’s story is that she was so high functioning that the day she got sober was just like any other day where she was headed to work—although instead of going to work, she went to detox. In this episode, we discuss her fear around coming out, the way addiction can start with food and how she feels when men in AA are called sexual harassers, among many other topics. (BTW, Lisa is featured in my Guide to Becoming a Light Hustler, where I profiled the people I know who have taken their darkest experiences to share their light and

Today's episode features an absolute doll of a human being: Greg Behrendt. In it, Greg tells a story from my live storytelling show, Hammer(ed) Time, which takes place every other month in LA, has been an LA Weekly pick of the week and is being developed into a video series. His story captures, perhaps better than anyone ever has before, exactly why being sober is so uncomfortable. When he's not making Hammer(ed) Time audiences nearly pee their pants with laughter, Greg is performing (both as a comedian and musician) or writing (oh yeah; he's the guy who co-wrote the seminal book He's Just Not That Into You, among other bestselling books).