The Rich Roll Podcast - Joseph Naus’ Straight Pepper Diet: How A Sex Addicted Lawyer Who Lost Everything Found Salvation

Episode Date: February 15, 2016

Addiction is a common theme on this podcast. But this week we sail into previously unchartered waters to tackle a dark and difficult subject: Sex addiction. Few taboos remain in our hyper-extroverted, selfie-fueled modern culture. But I think it's safe to say this remains one of them. And yet 18 million – 24 million people in the U.S. alone suffer from this incredibly destructive affliction — that's 6-8% of the population. But because this particular topic is so taboo, most locked in the grip of this prurient form of addiction are too terrified to reach out for help and thus suffer in isolation, silence and profound shame. Joseph Naus was one of them. Raised in hardscrabble poverty by a young, single mom — a heroin addict turned shut-in depressive — Joseph was desperate to find a way out. On sheer determination he succeeds, graduating Pepperdine Law School to become a respected lawyer. However, at age 32, his American Dream became a nightmare when his secret life as a sex addict collided with his not so secret alcoholism to destroy every aspect of his life with the explosive force of an atomic bomb. Convicted of a felony and disbarred, Joseph has spent the last twelve years learning humility the hard way: making a living doing everything from picking up the trash on film sets to selling outdoor kitchens at home shows for a former client, all while cleaning up the wreckage of his past and building a new life. Joseph's tale is one of darkness, desperation and demons. It's horrifying and it's cautionary. But it's also about redemption. Forgiveness. And the journey to find wholeness. A story laudably chronicled with distressing honesty and harrowing detail in Straight Pepper Diet: A Memoir*. I understand that some may cringe at the prospect of tuning in for this one. I get that. But on a personal level I feel a responsibility to tackle the subject. My aspiration is that this conversation provides a glimmer of hope for those imprisoned by this lonely, soul-eroding compulsion. It took courage for Joseph to sit down with me to openly share his story. I applaud that. So set aside your preconceptions and lend him your ear. Peace + Plants, Rich

Tuesday morning, I was a successful lawyer making $100,000, you know, six figures. And then on Wednesday, I woke up handcuffed to a hospital bed, charged with attempted murder. And the reason for that is because, like you said, I went out. And then things got worse. Oh, right, right. And then things got bad, right? Like, that's the tale on that. Right, right.

Exactly. And then things got worse. Like, how could it get worse than being charged with attempted murder? Well, I'll tell you. That's Joseph Knauss, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. All right, you guys. Greetings. My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to The Rich Roll Podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I appreciate everybody who has shared the love on social media or told their friends about the show. And of course, thank you to everybody who

has made a habit of using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. You can find that banner ad right there on any episode page on my website, and it really does help us out a lot. So thank you so much. If you're new to the show, what do we do here? Well, each week I sit down with a thought leader, the best and the brightest across all categories of health, wellness, diet, nutrition, athleticism, fitness, entrepreneurship, mindfulness, meditation, creativity. And the idea, of course, behind all of this is to help all of us, myself included, unlock and unleash our best, most authentic self. And there is a recurring theme on my podcast, and I think it's a theme that distinguishes what I do a little bit from

some of the other podcasts out there. And this is my commitment to really explore issues related to addiction and recovery, of course, because in part, that's a big part of my story. And that's what today's show is all about, really. But we're going to be sailing into some uncharted waters this week and tackling what I think is a very tricky and really difficult subject. There are very few taboos left in society, but sex addiction is one of them. It's something we don't really talk about. We don't feel comfortable talking about. It's not polite cocktail party conversation. And yet there

are millions and millions of people out there who suffer from this and they do it in silence. And I think in many cases, profound shame. It's an addiction that is incredibly destructive, as we're going to see today. And our guest to venture into this world is a guy called Joseph Knauss. He's an author, and he's somebody who is in recovery for both alcohol and sex addiction. And I think it took a lot of courage, and it required a strong sense of self for him to do that. I want to set a little bit of context. I don't want to go too much into his bio because I want him to tell you the story, but I will say this. I came across Joseph's story by way of my friend Nick Guth, who's a writer and a director who filmed a movie at our house several years ago. And Nick called me up out of the blue and implored me to check out Joseph's story,

which I did, and I was really affected by it. It's the story of a guy who grew up completely impoverished, raised by a young single mom who was a heroin addict with lots of dubious, undesirable boyfriends who turned into a shut-in and a depressive. And this was really kind of a prison for young Joseph. But he found a way out on sheer determination and self-will. He ends up graduating from Pepperdine Law School, and he becomes this respected lawyer. But at age 32, this American dream that he had worked so hard to create and cultivate becomes a complete nightmare. When his own sex and alcohol addictions that he had been quietly coveting and feeding collide in this incredibly brutal way that just explodes every facet of this guy's life like an atomic bomb.

I got a bunch more I want to say about Joseph before we get into the interview, but first... All right, so as far as today's episode is concerned, this one might be difficult for some of you out there to listen to at times, especially as we unpack what it was like for Joseph. And it's something that he describes in an incredibly honest, open, raw, vulnerable, and really harrowing way. But his story is as much redemptive as it is cautionary and horrifying. It's really about what it took over the last 12 years for Joseph to learn humility the hard way, for Joseph to learn humility the hard way, to find a way to pick up the pieces and really just survive as an essentially unemployable felon and how he was able to clean up the wreckage of his past and move forward to build a new life. And I think there's a lot of power in that. And I understand, of course, that some may cringe at the prospect of listening to this one. I get that. I really do. But I implore

you to set it all aside and give it a chance. And you know, it's important to face the reality that sex addiction doesn't just exist, but that it's very, very real. And I feel personally a responsibility to address it, to shine a light on it. And my hope and my intuition tells me that Joseph and his story just might be a lifeline for someone out there who is dealing with this. The loneliness, the compulsion, the incredible destruction and potential havoc that someone afflicted in this way presents and can create. All of this Joseph's story can be found in his uncompromising, quite distressing, haunting, but laudably honest memoir. It's called Straight Pepper Diet. It's quite an incredible read. So I think all of you guys should check it out. And that's it.

So buckle up, you guys. Here we go. Here we go. It's funny. I was introduced to you by Nick Guth, who is a writer, director. And I met Nick, I don't know if you know this, but I met Nick originally because he wrote a movie and directed a movie that took place about like 80% of it was shot at our house. It was a movie called Minnie's First Time. Have you seen it? Have you seen his movie?

Yeah. Yeah. I saw when Heidi, his wife, was telling me about him and how much he liked or they liked the book and was thinking about producing it or something. They sent me a link to it and I started watching it. Right. Which is amazing because I was like, how did I never hear about this movie before? It was pretty... Yeah, it kind of slipped... Contessential 90s.

It kind of slipped under the radar, but it has an amazing cast. It has like Alec Baldwin, Luke Wilson, Carrie Ann Moss, all these people. And it was a trip for us because they rented our house for like five weeks and just took it over. We had to move out and all this sort of stuff.

And then, you know, we would stop by and see what was going on, but we didn't really know what was happening. And then when you watch the movie later and it's like, oh, Alec Baldwin is sitting at my kitchen table, like eating his meal. Like it's kind of a surreal, bizarre thing, you know? So you have like the quintessential

Dwell Magazine house, right? Well, yeah, it's a modern kind of architect yeah you know it's it and we rent it out we have kind of a side business we rent it out for location shoots and ultimately we end up uh we we book jobs quite often because we live out in the country and it looks like a house that would be in the hollywood hills but it's very difficult to shoot in the hollywood hills because you't, there's nowhere to park all the vehicles because there's so many trucks and all that kind of stuff.

And so we actually have like some space where you can put the vehicles. So a lot of times it boils down to parking. Yeah. I've done a lot of production work. Oh, you have? Okay, right. And so I'm familiar with the concept.

Yeah, people don't like to be shooting in Beverly Hills, that's for sure. Right, right, right. But in any event, Nick and I became friends and we've kind of stayed in touch and he reached out to me and was like, hey, are you hip to like Joseph in his book? You should check

this out. It's really compelling. It's right up your alley of the podcast. I looked into it and I was like, oh, this is like, this is. There's so many points of intersection. In certain respects, our stories are very different, but there are a lot of similarities in our stories. So I think there's a lot of cool stuff that we can talk about today. Cool. You know, lawyers, alcoholic lawyers. So you haven't read

my book yet, but like, you know, a lot of the stuff that you're talking about, just really just the feelings, the emotions, that headspace of where you're at, where you were at when you were in the throes of your addiction and kind of the overwhelming, you know, demon compulsions that like really kind of propel your behavior patterns was so familiar to me, you know, that and that deep shame that comes with doing something that you know you shouldn't be doing and then being in the aftermath of it. It's just that horrible kind of residue. I mean, your prose really, really brought that to the surface and made me feel that in a way that I haven't in a long time. So I appreciate your ability to conjure that up in my conscious.

It's uncomfortable, but I'm like, that's what that feels like. I remember. Thanks, man. That's a real compliment. I appreciate that. Yeah. And it's interesting because your addiction kind of is a multi-headed hydra, really. You have the alcohol addiction.

You have the sex addiction. You have this profound nicotine addiction and all of this. Like, you know, this profound nicotine addiction and all of this. These things are kind of, you know, fueling this descent into the dark underbelly of, you know, your worst nightmare, essentially. And I want to play what it was like, what happened and what it's like now. But just to kind of set the stage, I really feel like the biggest issue and please correct me if I'm wrong, but sex addiction really is the core problem. And it's almost like alcohol and nicotine were your way of trying to clamp it down. Yeah. Is that accurate, you think?

I think my drug of choice was definitely the sex addiction, and it was switching rapidly towards alcohol at the time i'd kind of gotten to the point where uh i kind of made the decision that the sex addiction stuff was was really getting dangerous obviously yeah and um you know i was switching to alcohol and cigarettes but that particular night during a blackout you know the night that this all happened, it came down to the sex addiction, which really was my downfall. But also what saved me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's, yeah, it's that weird equation, right? Yeah. It's the terrible thing that ultimately can provide the foundation for your salvation. Yeah, yeah. But let's, well, let's take it back uh i mean your upbringing is you know is tragic in many in in many ways and you know as i'm reading your book and kind of learning about

your childhood my heart's just breaking for this little boy you know who grew up in circumstances that really nobody should have to have to you know suffer through. So, you know, paint the picture for me a little bit if you could. Well, yeah, you know, I grew up in a broken household. My mom was very young when she had me. She was, I think, just turned 17 or maybe she was, I don't know, I think 16, pregnant, 17, had me. My dad left when I was six weeks old. We were extremely poor. We lived in poverty and welfare. And she was a heroin addict and um you know some of my earliest memories were going to the methadone clinic with her actually there were good memories because that was the time when she was actually trying to get clean after she'd been arrested with me in the car um scoring dope and have a

lot of memories of going to casablanca which is an area in riverside Riverside where the heroin used to be sold by a lot of Mexican gangs and stuff. So I remember going there and stuff and seeing all the fascinating stuff that you see in those really dangerous parts of town. But we lived in a very dangerous area and impoverished. And there was a lot of welfare and a lot of difficulty surviving. and impoverished and there was a lot of welfare and a lot of difficulty surviving. And my mom, once she stopped using heroin, she really got, things got really bad because she was basically a shut-in depressive. So she didn't work, you know, and all she did was sleep all day. So she just on the dole, like on welfare and surviving that way?

Yeah. Yeah. It's like the heroin was the medicine and there was no tools there was no tools or program to take the place of that. So ultimately, she ends up just sort of devolving. Yeah, exactly. She just was ill-equipped for life. She was pregnant when she was super young. She had a high school education.

She had no support, and she just kind of hunkered down in her bed. I would go to school in the morning, and I would come home home and she would still be in bed at 3 o'clock sometimes. And so probably the hardest thing about my childhood was probably there was a point in time there where I was really having to find food on my own. by different techniques, you know, that making friends with rich kids and figuring out a way to go to the upper, the nicer schools in the area by using other people's addresses. And, you know, the boys club kind of saved me during the summers where I wouldn't get food at school. I would go to the boys club and they would provide food and stuff. And so, yeah, it was a rough childhood.

You know, my mom was assaulted by a stranger, you know, in the house. And so I came home to sirens and that cops and everything. And, you know, she'd been assaulted and somebody broke into the house and assaulted her. And, you know, she didn't tell the family about that. So it was just one of those things. And, yeah, so it was a rough childhood. Yeah, a lot rough childhood yeah a lot of chaos a lot of trauma um and i feel like in your in your reflecting back on it in the book

you almost create this disassociative relationship with that period of your life because the book is all written in the first person you know i i i this is what happened to me and this is what i'm doing except for the one part about growing up with your mom where it's joseph right create this third person narrator all of a sudden and so i'm curious was that what was the logic behind making that that sort of uh literary choice yeah it was a it was something that our this my story editor and I went over a lot, and it just felt right to do that part of it in the third person. Like you said, I'm glad you noticed that. That was the only chapter in the whole book that I did in the third person, you know, that even though there was other flashbacks that were in the first person, I did that one in the third person.

And it just felt like it was flashing back to this childhood that was different from the character in the rest of the book because it was because it was after a i don't know maybe it was just distance i'm not quite sure i know i do know that we wrote it i wrote i rewrote it in the first person and my story editor and i went over it and didn't feel right and we kept it in the third person and i like the choice but i'm not quite sure how it happened or yeah it's's interesting. I think it creates a distance. So it is, for me, that's what I saw into it. I was like, you're disassociating with this person that you're having trouble relating to anymore because it's very much, you're a powerless, it's a victim narrative.

I mean, you're this powerless person who has no control over their circumstances, who just finds themselves in this scenario that no one would want to find themselves, and ultimately, which compels you to become this survivor. You literally are just trying to figure out how you're going to live, and you're on your own, really. Yeah.

Which is so painful to read, and it was very eloquently described. And just like I said, my heart was breaking for you, you know. And I think in looking at that, you know, heroin addicted mother, depressive, you know, alcoholic father who just bolted the minute you were born. I mean, the sort of, you know, the cards were sort of, the stars were aligning for you to have future problems with, you know with substances and errant behavior patterns. Yeah.

It's funny. That's exactly what the judge said at the sentencing hearing. He really said almost identical to what you just said. I think he said the stage was set. Not the stage, but he even used a metaphor like that. It's weird when you're a kid and you're in that situation. You're just in water. You're fishing water. You don't know that it's weird when you're a kid and you're in that situation. You're just in water. You know, you're fishing water.

You don't know that that's really going on. Although I did have some relatives that were what I thought were crazy rich, but they were just middle class probably. And I would go over to their houses and stuff and just be like, oh, my God. It's like being at Disneyland. You know, they have food in their refrigerator. And my aunt had a swimming pool. I thought she must have been, you know, I would think she would be like Bill Gates or something, you know, had a swimming pool i thought she must have been you know i would think she would be like bill gates or something you know having a swimming pool to swim in and and then you would go i would go there for a weekend or something hang out and just like i remember them being like okay stop eating you know you don't have to keep eating and then i

would go home and it would be just like oh and it was weird because it was a time you know those relatives would talk to me now about this, especially after the book come out, and be like, it was a different time. Back then, you left people alone. I kind of had a bit of resentment of like, hey, what the hell? Yeah, because if it was happening now, there would have been a lot of involvement. You would have been plucked out of that house and oh yeah place somewhere else pretty quickly well i mean even after the assault of my mom i don't know why i'm saying the assault the rape of my mother you know i would have been child protective services would have ripped me out of there but it didn't happen that way then um i think i went to live with my

my aunt for a couple weeks and then i was right back in the same situation um in fact it happened again after that. The cops didn't get involved in that time. It was a bit dark childhood, but it also led to who I am today and also gave me a certain amount of strength of survival. It's funny, I was listening to your podcast of the other author that was on. Oh, Khalil.

Khalil. I'm not like him. I was know, I'm not like him. I was interesting. I'm not like him. I didn't develop the hustler thing that he has. He's definitely got some street hustle. Yeah, he's got that street hustle. I didn't have that street hustle.

I was more like, I had more of a different type of hustle. But I'm jealous. Well, it definitely planted the seed of wanting to be sort of upwardly mobile and a respectable member of society. I mean, clearly your dream of becoming a lawyer was born out of not wanting to live in this chaotic, precarious way that you were brought up. Exactly. In fact, I had a friend whose dad was a lawyer, and I was just like, I'm not very good at science, so this is it. It's going to be it. I'm going to do this.

And what's amazing is you make it happen. You really overcome these tremendous odds to get to that place that you dreamed about when you were a kid living in that house with that mom. I mean, that's the street survivor, sort of your version of Khalil's hustle, that you were able to make that work and make that happen. you know, sort of your version of Khalil's hustle, that you were able to make that work and make that happen. And I think it kind of gets to something that's a core thing that I like to talk about on the podcast with my own recovery is this relationship between kind of self-reliance and self-will. And, you know, and I described this in my book, like everything I thought when I was in the throes of my addiction, I thought that everything good that I had accomplished in my book, like everything I thought when I was in the throes of my addiction, I thought that everything good that I had accomplished in my life, because, you know, I'd gotten into law

school and I'd done certain things academically and in sports, was solely attributable to my self-will, my ability to work hard, my ability to focus and not accepting help from other people, just I'm going to buckle down and do it myself until that rubs up against addiction and you start to try to figure that problem out using that same skill set that got you where you were in life and kind of banging your head against the wall and realizing it's not going to solve this problem. Man, that's it right there. I mean, that's it.

When you're self-reliant and you've been pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, sports, everything you do is about, I'm going to do this on my own. I'm going to grind this out. If I work hard enough, I can get through this. And that's how I survived through my life. And then when I came up against this addiction, I'm thinking to myself, damn, I passed the bar. I got myself out of childhood. I used to be a competitive amateur kickboxer did all these things and i can't stop smoking and drinking and going to prostitutes like what is going on and then what's

the answer try harder right and that the idea of therapy especially where i grew up digging your grave and yeah and the shame spiral is exactly its intensity. So that very thing that helped you survive is killing you. Right. And in your case, I mean, you really did. I mean, you are a true example of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. And your history, your upbringing demonstrated to you that other people are not reliable. Like you had been let down essentially by the people that you needed most in your life to support you. So of course you're going to develop this approach and this mindset of self-reliance and I'm just, I'm just going to

have to do it myself because no one else is going to do this for me. Everyone else has let me down. Right? Yeah, exactly. So how did you, so how did you like, let's just, let's do the, you know, what it was like, like, how did you get out. How did you get out of that living situation and into college and create this kind of upwardly mobile trajectory for yourself? Well, I got a job as soon as you were legally able to get a job. I worked at a sporting goods store and basically got that from Hustle. I walked into the store and was like, hey, I need a job. And I said, we don't have any jobs. And I said, just tell me to do something.

I'll do it. And if you like what I do, hire me if you don't. Don't pay me and I'll go on my way. So I went in there and I spent 14 hours in a row organizing their shoe section and stuff. So they hired me and I had that job for a couple years. And that kind of was the basis of me being able to be self-reliant. I still lived in my mom's house during high school but i worked full time and i was able to buy a car and you know support myself and feed myself you know literally feed myself and um you know i think

as i describe in the book i had an incident that was a was a spiritual experience that um was you know my response to the harshness of life, especially when I grew up in Riverside and the hard areas I grew up in, was to back away and was to take the weak stance. When I was bullied by life or people, I backed away. And one time I had an incident where I was bullied, literally bullied in school,

and I kind of snapped internally. I snapped and I just said to myself, you know what? I'm tired of this. I'm never going to be bullied again. I would rather die fighting than to live like this. And I literally left school that day, went and signed up at a kickboxing or actually it was a Kung Fu gym and a weight gym. And I just went crazy. And I just changed my entire life that day and just said, no more of this. No more of being a victim, really, in general. If you're 300 pounds or a black belt and you pick on me, I'm going to hit you until one of us dies. And at that point, I never, of course, the way energy works in our world, I never was picked on again at that point, even though I was not like super badass right away or anything.

But at least you were emitting a different energy. Exactly. Right. And so that also carried through and everything else, you know, it wasn't just that the physical thing, it was the, you know,

that I was girls, I was terrified of them. And I immediately got my fiance. He was my former fiance, who was a cheerleader. And I just, if fear approached, I just ignored it and walk through it. And I just, if fear approached,

I just ignored it and walked through it. And then I got straight A's. I got into college and I did everything. Everything I wanted to do, I just did. I worked hard and I got everything I wanted. I got a bunch of scholarships and I did really well in college. And then kickboxing, did really well in that. And life was going really well.

Yeah, and it's so interesting because, yeah, well, the thing is, like, here you are. You literally, you know, pull yourself out of this situation. You create your own reality. And you're on this better trajectory. And certainly the last thing on your mind is, I mean, of course, I'm never going to be like my mom or the dad that I never met. Like, I'm not going to go into that territory at all, drugs and alcohol, forget it.

I'm going to be a successful lawyer. Right. And then where does it, you know, so where does that aspect of, you know, where does that wrench get thrown into your, you know, divine plan here towards upward mobility? Well, the sex addiction was – the first time I ever realized that I had some sex addiction was I remember I had seen some prostitutes when I was in Riverside growing up. And I always just had this little – I don't know.

There was some effect on my body from it. I just remember seeing the prostitutes and going i don't even know what it is but there's something there that's affecting me um cigarettes you know i i my mom smoked and i hated smoking she used to burn me on accident you know she was a junkie so she would light the couch on fire all the time or she would accidentally burn me with cigarettes i hated cigarettes and then one night i was in new yorkork doing model united nations for the college i went to and you know i was feeling pretty good because i was i felt like i was on my way up i was out of poverty and i was going to be okay and we went to this bar and i got drunk and i smoked a cigarette for the first time and i cheated on my fiance like in one night i cheated on my fiance i got drunk one night, I cheated on my fiance. I got drunk for the first time

and I smoked a cigarette for the first time. And it didn't change my life completely right then and there, but the seed was set like, in my mind, that was the new best thing, best way you could ever feel. And so everything else kind of was like, you still got to make a bunch of money so that you can get to the point

where you get to do that a lot. So that was kind of the thing. Like if you could do anything you wanted to be doing what would you be doing sitting at a dark bar smoking cigarettes drinking a jack and coke and then hopefully get laid at the end of the night but you had kind of that epiphany on some level like not that you rejiggered your entire life overnight but that there was a realization that occurred exactly like i need more of this in my life exactly yeah exactly because prior to that where had you been like a drinker or you know like i i maybe had three or four beers my entire life before i was 21 i think right because i you know i was i was straight edge i grew up uh when i was in high school i took on um straight edge moniker i listened oh you were like minor threat today and i go to the gigs and

gorilla biscuits and all that i used to wear x's on my hand and oh wow do you know the crow mags i didn't know them but i i've been to gigs with crow mags oh you have yeah yeah so john john joseph from the crowd is a good friend he's been on the podcast a bunch of times really wow well we could talk about that i think i saw them with um long beach but they closed it down now but there's a there used to be a place in Long Beach that was where it was like the CBGB's of the West kind of. God, I can't think of the name of it. With Bad Brains? No, it wasn't with Bad Brains. I love Bad Brains.

I still love Bad Brains. But it might have been Corrosion and Conformity. COC. I'll ask John. Excel. How long ago? That would probably have been in 1989 maybe. I'll ask John. Excel. How long ago? That would probably have been in 1989, maybe? I'll find out.

Yeah, yeah. Cool. But, all right, so awesome. So, yeah, so you go from straight edge to dipping your toe into, ooh, that feels good. And, you know, with the amount of trauma that you had suffered and the lack of intimacy in your life and all of that, like, it's no wonder that suddenly this, you know, salve to that wound suddenly appears and you realize, like, wow, that feels like a nice warm blanket that I didn't know that I needed. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Especially the sex stuff.

You know, that was really a cure. It was really a great cure, you the sex stuff. I, you know, it was, that was really cure. It was really a great cure. You know, I, I, looking back on it, it was kind of amazing. I had this, you know, my fiance was this beautiful cheerleader, gorgeous girl. And all I could do is wait to cheat on her, you know, all the time. And it'd be this huge guilt because you'd just be like, first of all, why am I doing this? I have this beautiful fiance.

And secondly, you know, this is horrible. Like, I'm risking my whole life. I'm trying to – at the time, I kind of had political aspirations. You know, I was on the – there was a time I was on a couple city council things and was getting involved in that whole thing. And I'm like, you know, this gets found out. I'm done, you know. My whole life is going to be done if i get caught you know picking up prostitutes and well and i want to unpack all of this it's super interesting uh but before we do

that i mean really there's the there's the act itself like the this and then there is the verboten aspect of performing the act like that i that sort of thrill that comes with doing something that is illicit and and the kind of potential for getting caught like in the balance of those two things like what do you think was the allure really just the sexual act or do you think it would do you know how much of it was influenced by that oh you know like i'm doing something i'm not supposed to and the kind of risk that comes with that and the stakes being so high for you? Yeah, there's, that was a huge part of it.

There was definitely, I mean, especially when I think back of the early parts of it, when I would actually pick up street prostitutes, I mean, Jesus Christ. I mean, I would read about, you know, read about junkies or see junkie movies or whatever. And that experience they talk about, about about scoring was very much like that like there's that thing where you first see the prostitute and you know that she knows and and there's this feeling you get in your body of it and and that all this anticipation just builds up it's almost more important than the actual act like you're saying with um you know and then there's a the massage parlors was the exact same way. You know, pornography for me was just kind of like a filler to like get over. You know, it's kind of like the way junkies use pills, you know.

That's your entry level drug or something like that. Maintenance, you know, when you can't score, you use that for a while. It's your methadone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I find that your comfort level with talking about it and really owning this aspect of your past and as a fundamental aspect of your addictive condition to be really, really fascinating. Because I think increasingly so, alcoholism is being destigmatized like people are like you know people go to rehab and like i mean especially in la right but it's i think it's becoming more and more kind of like people are like okay with it like this sort of verboten like um you know anonymous aspect and all the shame that goes with that is slowly dissipating

but i think when we get into the sex realm it's still very much like it we're in we're talking about a completely different world here and i think it's very courageous to kind of own these things that you have done and and be able to speak about them so liberally and and openly um because i'm sure in the time and at the time they cause you an unbelievable amount of pain and shame, right? But to be able to kind of be past that and talk about it almost clinically is not only refreshing, but I think it's important for a lot of people because it's so pernicious, and I think it is pervasive in our society. And because it is so stigmatized, I think there's a lot of people that are suffering from what you went through

on some level, but feel that there's no way that they could ever talk about it to anybody. Right? So I appreciate your willingness and your candor in this regard. So let's get into it, right? Like, what do you think,

what is it about this that you found so captivating and how did it start to kind of unravel your life? Well, I think as I describe in the book, one of my first experiences with sex addiction was the 976 numbers. And I remember doing that and just, it was crazy. I mean, I remember calling a 976 number on accident because I used to surf and I used to live 60 miles away from the ocean and I would call the surf report.

And then one time I misdialed and got one of those 976 numbers that was a sex number. And it was like, I you know it was it was the craziest orgasm i ever had in my life and i i literally started calling the numbers like a like a total freak just constantly how old were you uh this is when i was 18 or seven maybe 17 i was in high school and i was calling these numbers and then of course i had immediate shame afterwards and then the immediate realization that this you know I was gonna have a 500 phone bill that I couldn't

pay for and that was in my mom's name and I was gonna have this amazing shame so I worked you know I had a job at the time so I paid it off and called them up and pretended that I was my dad and talked them down like you know to get the number down and i accidentally i actually blocked myself from calling because i couldn't control myself i would call you know and um it was i guess because i guess the distinction that needs to be made is the difference between like sex that is normal quote unquote versus addiction sex they're completely two different things they have no they have very little in common very little in common um you know it's just it's just two different things it's it's really um one's just i mean one of the reasons i can be kind of clinical about it is because when i think of my

sex addiction i think of it the same way i would think of someone who's addicted to alcohol or or nicotine or pills or anything it was just like taking a pill for me you know it was like you needed it you did it and you know it had nothing to do with the sex you had with your girlfriend nothing to do with it right you know but that gets confused in the way you know culture would perceive it because it's not a drug that you're taking into your body and it's a behavior and because that behavior kind of defies logic in so many ways like by your your own sort of description saying, I have this beautiful fiance, like who in their right mind would cheat on her with some kind of street urchin prostitute? participate in these behaviors which could ultimately just unravel and destroy this life that you would work so hard to build to crawl out of the circumstances in which you were raised exactly yeah I mean it just comes down to addiction

going to your earlier point about how pervasive this is and what a big problem this is, is that, you know, looking at pornography, you know. I remember the first time I saw pornography, I saw some of that old school stuff that was stashed in my aunt's closet, like the Debbie Does Dallas and the Green Door and Deep Throat, you know. you know i kind of followed the history of pornography through my life until i stopped using it and it was on the one hand i was addicted to it and on the other hand i was a student of it and i would follow it and you know there was that point in time where basically you know there was obscenity laws that were limiting pornography and then there was the study that came out that was like the – I forget the big congressional report that was done on pornography that listed all the names and stuff. And they had the big obscenity things. And there was all these prosecutions on obscenity. And so it was limiting what was out there.

Because pornography, just like any other drug, the addict increases their tolerance levels. like any other drug the addict increases their tolerance levels but the tolerance was being limited by congress's limitation on obscenity laws these pornographers didn't want to get put in prison but what happened was is when clinton got uh elected to office and basically dismantled the obscenity prosecutions from the attorney general's office, the lid was off. And so during that period of time, the pornography just blew up and became more and more and more hardcore. I had no idea about any of this. Yeah. And so, you know, you just got this really hardcore thing. So if you watch modern pornography, it has a tone that is very different than pornography you saw in the 70s.

And I think it's attributable to the access and to the consumership of it. And so it's an addiction that is out there that is just very harmful to society and is growing. And because of the basic dismantling of the obscenity prosecutions by the attorney general, it created a real problem. And also the technology created a problem because now you have the internet so people don't have to go and do a creepy theater to watch it or even to go rent it from their store. They can get it streaming right to their house.

And you have the technology of, you know, like what we're on here. Someone can just do a podcast with very little equipment. Somebody can just throw on their iPhone and create pornography now. So you have this huge pornography addiction problem out there, which was a part of my addiction. But talking about what sex addiction is like, pornography is very part of the formula

for it because it's so much like a drug. You just turn it on. It's there. You get what you need. One thing I found with my pornography, which was very disturbing, was the tolerance. At first, you want to watch one-on-one this. And then you want to watch two-on-one. And then I remember going to Amsterdam and going into one of those booths and watching pornography in Amsterdam. And seeing the stuff that was, the lid was off. They don't have the same laws that we even have now and going, oh my God, is this where I'm going?

You know, five midgets and a battery cable? You know what I'm saying? Crazy stuff. Yeah, I mean, the kind of arc and the evolution of it is pretty severe. I mean, what are you, 45 or something like that? 44, yeah. 44, okay. See, I'm 49. I mean, when we you, 45 or something like that? 44, yeah. 44, okay.

See, I'm 49. I mean, when we were kids, it was like your friend whose dad had a stack of Playboys in the closet or something like that, and that was it. And now, flip on the computer, young people have unlimited access to an unlimited amount completely for free,

24 hours a day. It's a different culture. It's a different culture. It's a different relationship with it. And I think that that is really pernicious on our culture. And I don't know that we've really seen, we've been able to really properly and objectively gauge and evaluate the fallout from that yet. And I think that there is sort of this acceptable kind of idea like, oh, well, it's just, you know, whatever, it's innocent, and it's no

big deal. And, you know, the AVN awards, and, you know, it's sort of become, there's an aspect of pornography that has begun, that is encroached on mainstream acceptability. And I'm not so sure that's so good because it creates this level of, you know, just sort of acceptance that this is okay, you know, without really exploring, evaluating, and determining the true impact of this on our mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Exactly.

I mean, you know know i try to approach everything with love so i know that saying to the pornography industry no no no this is bad and people who view this as bad are bad bad bad that's not going to do anything it doesn't do good for us but and not but you know there has to be an understanding of what this is doing to our society like you're saying, especially young kids. I would imagine that young kids that are just turning in, having puberty, are probably their first access to any type of sexual experience is from watching pornography. And you can imagine what that's like versus the natural evolution of stumbling around

and doing what most kids did before the internet well it's creating a you know an established it's establishing a bar of of what is normal in a very different place from when we were kids yeah yeah it's yeah yeah it's a it's a problem that's out there you know um and like you said it's not it's totally somebody wrote a review of my book recently that i thought was interesting they said you know thank you for writing about sex addiction it's about 50 years behind where aa is as far as public acceptance and that's exactly right and we're going to see the results it's kind of like what's happening with uh narcotics these days i mean the pill addiction is just unbelievable like if you go to rehab now you'll see that majority

of people in there are not there for heroin and speed. They're there for pills, pills that are legally gotten a lot of the time, or at least legally started. And, you know, I think sex addiction is kind of there too.

Right. But I think the difference with sex addiction, as we kind of touched on earlier, is there is a level of kind of dark shame. There's a curtain that hangs over it like people talk about the pills that they're taking you know it's a different kind of cultural relationship that we have to that to that than we do with sex which is why i think it's still so much in the rearview mirror and it's going to take a little bit more time before we can really

kind of you know address it in an open forum which i think is why you know your your willingness and your courage to talk about it so openly is is really important to this discourse so when you know when does it so so so for you it's it starts with the the nine seven six numbers or whatever the phone the phone calls and then it becomes you know pornography and then it's massage parlors and you know it just it explodes from there right like but when does it become something where you're like this is really derailing my life probably when i was engaged and i was doing you know i was just doing the i i would you know i was cheating where i would do a lot of one night stands i'd I'd pick up girls and risking getting caught doing that and then sneaking pornography and then the occasional street hooker, which was like the – that's the holy grail of the sex addiction, at least in my sex addiction was the street hookers. I mean there's nothing that has more risk associated with it and it has this seediness to it.

It's like the more seedy it is, the bigger the payoff and the worse the guilt like i'd just be terrified of that whole thing like i wouldn't even know how to approach how i learned that i you know i recount this thing in my in the book but there was a point where i was reading the paper and i see this article about a local city council person who had just been picked up by the cops for doing exactly what I was doing on down in University Avenue in Riverside picking up a prostitute and I just looked at him there's a picture of him and his family on the on the front page and my fiance at the time was showing it to me going hey look at this and I looked at it and I just felt like the air just suck out every cell in my body because I was like, oh, my God, that's what I'm doing.

That guy's life is destroyed now. Like he's gone. His political career is over. He's probably going to get a divorce. And obviously he's a sex addict or he wouldn't be, you know, picking up prostitutes on the street. It's the extent to which you can so rapidly destroy your life through this addiction is pretty profound. You know, it's like gambling you could go and like you know bet your whole life and you know one bet and destroy yourself and in one single act as you've kind of experienced in your own life uh you know

your whole entire life can be undone yeah yeah um yeah you know the massage parlors was kind of a response to that. I did have some brain going on. So I was like, okay, I cannot keep doing this. The numbers eventually are going to catch up with me. So then I got into the massage parlors and the massage parlors is fascinating thing that nobody really talks about. And I really wanted, want people to know about this. You know, there's like these legal prostitution places out there everywhere i mean you see them all over the place it's crazy in la you go down you drive down any major boulevard you know pico santa monica boulevard and you see these little low slung like they're in little you know crappy little uh you know drive-through little malls or little houses, and they have neon lights in the window that say massage. And you're like, what's going on in there? Like, it just looks not right, you know? And they are everywhere. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them all over town.

And the one that I, you know, ended my career on, so to speak, was on, you know, was in Santa Monica, and it's super high-end neighborhood, but they were grandfathered in, I presume, because they'd been there since that was a marine town, I think, Santa Monica, or maybe it was Navy or whatever. But they'd been there for years. There's like three on Pico Boulevard on the Santa Monica side of the street, which is houses that are 1,000 square feet that cost a million bucks, and there's a massage parlor there. So what is – how does that all work? I mean, you're a lawyer. What is the legality so what is like how does that all work like what i mean you're a lawyer like what is the legality behind what is actually happening here i mean they are legitimate businesses

as massage parlors but why aren't they getting busted and why aren't there crackdowns on these businesses well one reason it's really difficult to bust them because they are so well run they're they're operated like a mcdonald's franchise i mean they are so well run. They're operated like a McDonald's franchise. I mean, they are tightly controlled. You go to any massage parlor and they're all controlled the exact same way. You never see another patron, right? You never cross paths with another patron, maybe in the parking lot or something. You're in a closed room, locked doors. You go in, there's a security gate between you and them getting in. So if they ever had a raid or something,

they could close it down. And a lot of people probably go there and don't have sexual favors. You know, I got to the point where a lot of people, I'd be like, oh yeah, I've been to a massage parlor too. I just get a hand job. And I'd be like,

well, I advanced to the point where I was having sex with the massage parlor girls. And I kind of knew how to do that the way an alcohol or way an addict knows how to there's gotta be like a whole weird etiquette to that right like there's some unwritten rule book on how all that stuff works yeah yeah and i just kind of learned it as i went like you do this you do that you know where do you place the towel do you take off all your clothes

do what do you say they're going to say this question how do you answer it you know i knew the whole thing i mean i've probably been to a massage parlor i don't know hundreds of times wow it got to the point at some point where i would have two girls at a massage par you know that i would be like i needed another one to come in and you know so it would be and you know exactly how much to pay and everything and it and the thing was is it was uh the risk was so low because like you said you know i would even i remember searching the internet going am i going to get busted doing this eventually and the reality was given the number of massage bars out there versus the number of raids and stuff and busts on them because they're not causing any the police are not you know they're not visible to society.

They are paying their taxes. They are good tenants. They are very quiet. So this is really one of those quote-unquote victimless crimes. There's a lot of victims, actually, but it's victimless crimes. But there's got to be some weird kind of slavery issues going on with this as well, right? I would think that there would be civic outcry. And it's sort of a not in my backyard kind of thing like a lot of i don't know i just don't understand how

these things are allowed to exist well most of them are in county land not city land santa monica was actually exception because it was probably grandfathered in but most of them are in county areas like if you go where in the inland empire where i grew up they would be in san bernardino county out in like highland and stuff they weren't in the major city and i grew up they would be in san bernardino county out in like highland and stuff they weren't in the major city and there were a lot of times they're in commercial areas and i think you're right you know that's one thing i remember talking to a friend of mine being like well i didn't hurt anybody this early in sobriety early in recovery i should say saying i didn't hurt anybody and they're like what do you think those you think those girls are in there

willingly wanting to do this no they're all're all there on that whole visa promise thing. They're probably paying off a visa or whatever they're doing. They can't work legally, so they're in there doing it. Most of them live in there. Well, depending on where it is. And the ones in Santa Monica and stuff, they don't live there. It's gnarly. It's horrible.

And is this – I mean I see them all over L. LA, but do these exist in other cities in the same way? I mean, all the ones I did were in Southern California, but they certainly, there were certain cities that were interesting. Like when I was in Oceanside, that was a marine town and they were, there was a lot of them, but they were all highly regulated. Best you're going to do there is a hand job. And so that didn't work for me. Why is that? I don't know. I think it's probably an agreement with the police

that you know they exist and they're only going to let them go so far and there was so many people doing it um because there were so many marines you know that they just probably could get away with that i'm not quite sure um it's a weird thing it's a weird thing nobody talks about you know occasionally if you do a google search of it you'll probably see a you know a couple articles on some raids or something and you know but i think it's just one of those things where it's not visible you know it's not like there's not streetwalkers walking down the street no one's complaining about them you know it's all under wraps that's weird it's really weird yeah it's crazy all right so you're going to these places and you're you

know you're totally dialed in on these places and you're you know you're totally dialed in on the pornography and you're picking up prostitutes here and there i mean what what is going on for you kind of biochemically or emotionally like what is the what is the like how does it how does it feel like what is the compulsion to do this and what is it allowing you to kind of check out from or um or or what is the rush of that for you like i'm trying to understand what it is that's driving you to sort of you know repeat this behavior pattern i look back on it and i'm sure there's some you know therapy answer to that question.

But when I really look back on it and think about what was I thinking at the time, it was just like, hey, this is the best feeling you can possibly imagine. Why would you not repeat it? So, you know, I would, I remember I worked at this big law firm and I would go out to the desert

to do hearings out in like Palm, was it, I forget the court out there, but the court out by rancho mirage and it covers all palm desert and everything and i would do three or four hearings at once and on the way back you know i'd already build you know i'd build 15 hours in one day doing the trip out there and i went on the way back i would just stop at the massage part and i'd be like hey i i just build 15 hours i can you know i can get this pleasure and the pleasure was you know i've never shot heroin but i know a lot of people who have and know i can get this pleasure and the pleasure was you know i've never shot heroin

but i know a lot of people who have and whenever i describe what this was like i always think of it must be like what heroin was like the orgasm just was like taking what i imagine would be like taking a shot of heroin just un-friggin-believable you know just and the the build-up to it the anticipation to it the driving to the massage parlor, the walking in, the going through the ritual of paying the amount, answering the mama-san the correct way, doing the whole thing, they build it up. They're part of that. They know how you work. Right. It's sort of like all the paraphernalia that's associated with the drug or getting ready to do the drug.

With the drug or getting ready to do the drug. And then, man, it's like the cigarette smoker who throws away their pack and pours water over it. And then the next day goes out and puts the pack of cigarettes in the microwave and digs them out of the trash. You know, it was exactly like that. I swear to God, every single time I did it, I would be on that massage table and the girl would leave. And I would go, oh, my God, that's the last time I'll ever do this. My God, please don't get me arrested. Don't get me caught.

I will never do this again. Right, just the shame and just feeling like you needed to take a silkwood shower afterwards and cleanse yourself of the kind of moral and physical residue of this experience. Yeah, and just the secret of it and the money, not to mention the money. It cost $100 a pop every time I did it. I was a lawyer making good money at the time. But it's the double life thing, too. You're leading this completely separate existence that no one knows about, that you can't possibly talk to anybody about. I mean, were there any friends that you confided in who knew what you were doing?

No, no. Nobody knew that. And you're getting away with it for a while, right? But you must know on some level that at some point something's going to happen. But you're willing to take that risk anyway because you're addicted. Yeah, the massage parlors, you know, you could go a long way not getting caught doing those. You park away. They're in remote locations a lot of times.

You're very careful the way you do it. I mean, maybe someone sees you walking out the back door back door i mean they're very careful about the way they do it you go in the front door you leave in the back the back doorway is usually off to an area that's kind of secluded a lot of times they have parking in the back i mean they're they know where they're buttered their bread is buttered you know so you could get along i mean the way my crash and burn happened was just bizarre by any... Yeah, well, I want to get into this story because it's quite an epic downfall. I mean, this story is insane, like how this kind of blows up in your face, right?

It begins relatively innocently. A few drinks at Liquid Kitty, right? Which is a bar I used to get drunk at quite a bit. You're a hipster. You were a hipster when I hated hipsters. Momentarily. Listen, you went to the bar. Who are you talking about? It was interesting because you kind of describe it

in that you've started this law firm, you have a law partner, and you have a really big kind of appointment early in the morning where you're going to meet your biggest client to play golf at 7 o'clock in the morning. And so you know the right thing to do is to go to bed early and to stay in. And yet you can't help yourself from smoking a bunch of cigarettes, having some drinks at your apartment, and ultimately with a buzz on like heading out to the bar. Yeah. And even at the bar, I'm sure your intention was, I'm just going to have a few drinks and go home because I'm definitely going to wake up in time to go play golf. Well, I intentionally left, only brought cash, thought I'd only brought cash. And then

the last minute I grabbed my jacket and it had my wallet in it, or this, I probably would, you know, this whole thing might not have happened the way it happened. And I ended up spending like, I don't know what the bill was, but I spent, you know, $70 on drinks and I went insane, you know, went into a blackout. Yeah. So let's walk, walk, walk us through like what happened. Well, okay. I'll, you know, straight pepper diet, a memoir. The, the, the pitch I always say is on Tuesday morning, I was a successful lawyer making a hundred thousand you know six figures and then on wednesday i was i woke up handcuffed

to a hospital bed charged with attempted murder and the reason for that is because like you said i went and then things went got worse all right right and then things got bad right like that's the tail on that and then right right exactly and then things got worse like how could it get worse being charged with attempted murder well i'll tell you tell you. So, you know, like I said, at the time, I was actually tamping down the massage parlors and hadn't been going a lot. I had really been transferring over to alcohol and cigarettes as my go-to drug. And did you think, like, I've got a grip on this? on this? I don't know. I was going kind of nuts at that time. You know, I just, I kept on failing up in my legal career. You know, every time I would burn out at one firm, I would get hired at another firm for more money. And then eventually I got to this big firm in Santa Monica that was, you know, really great firm. And I ended up burning out of there. And before they fired me,

I went and started my own firm. And then I was scared that we weren't going to do that well. And we were just doing awesome. I had all these clients. And so I had a free time and a lot of money with bad combination for an addict. So anyways, that night I had this big, like you said, I had this big, big client meeting with my partner. And this client had a golf course at crack of dawn. So I wasn't going to go out but i did go out of course and i got i went to a blackout and i walked down the street back

towards my condo and i went to an atm machine apparently in a blackout because i don't remember going to the atm machine and got a hundred dollars out which is how much you it cost to do the massage bar thing it's 40 to get in and $60 for the quote unquote tip. And I went to this massage parlor that was connected to this, like, it was like a old motel, how they were shaped in a C. And one of the legs was a massage parlor that I'd been to a couple of times.

And it was really close to my house and the condo in Santa Monica. And most of this is from the police report. I was blacked out, so I don't remember. But I was pounding on the massage parlor door and they didn't answer, of course, because it was two in the morning and no one was there. Or three in the morning or two in the morning. I'm not quite sure. And then I went around back and I climbed in the window

and the way it was connected to the other units i actually ended up climbing into someone's window that wasn't the massage part was right next to it and so i climbed in there and this guy was kind of a neat freak so the bathroom was completely clear and it looked like what the massage part bathroom probably identical because they were old motel rooms and i walk in uh and you know so there's this guy asleep and i'm naked i take off all my clothes and i'm naked and he has this industrial fan going so there's no noise

and he wakes up from the smell of nicotine and alcohol and there i am you know six foot four 220 pound white guy with a hard-on standing over his bed oh my god he goes nuts and um we fight and um you have do you have any memory of this or you're just this is how you've pieced it together all that's from the police report but the memory i have is of spinning around in a in like a like i say in the book like a palsy ballerina in the dark spinning around and kind of seeing lights like you do and when your peripheral vision is messed up and screaming you know and so we're in the dark, and he's screaming, and I'm trying to shut him up. And eventually I put him in a carotid artery chokehold

and realized that I'm going to kill him if I don't let him go. So I let him go, and he runs out the front door. I run out the back. Of course, I drop my wallet and my ID and everything and my aclu card and what else crack up on and uh my amnesty international card and uh he chases me down you know the cops must have been cracking up you know they find my wallet with this my state bar card the key snake yeah like almost kills this guy i think he's in it so this guy calls out to one of his neighbor buddies, and they trapped me in the yard across the street in Santa Monica,

and they just beat the living crap out of me. He had a skateboard, and he was... I don't know why he had a skateboard. I just wanted to grab him. The other guy had a bat. And I was trying to get away, and there was all these people gathered around, and there was police and everything.

But before the police were fully there, they just started beating the hell out of me. And he beat me pretty bad. I actually split open my head. I had to have like staples to close it down. And I said a bunch of crazy things to him. I don't remember it. I just remember what was in the police report.

He said all kinds of crazy shit about Hawaii and Volkswagen and all kinds of nonsensical stuff. And I think at some point he realized he was going to kill me if he kept hitting me because even though he's hitting me, I wasn't still moving because I was so anesthetized that I wasn't feeling it. But at some point I do recall thinking to myself, if he keeps hitting me, I'll die. So eventually he lets me go and I go down the street and I'm stumbling down the street, bleeding everywhere and the cops pick me up.

Wow. the street and i'm stumbling down the street you know bleeding everywhere and the cops pick me up wow and the cop well i in the book like you're the you start running right and the cops are you kind of like hiding somebody's bush like yeah the cops are like come out and you're like all right you know i'm running away from this i'm not gonna get shot right right right yeah so you know um and they you know i i must have blacked out because I don't remember being in, I don't remember being in the ambulance, but I was, I must have re-blacked out or whatever you call it. I do recall that part of it where the cops were there, but then I don't recall after that. But I do, I recall waking up in the hospital room, handcuffed. This is the second time I've been handcuffed to a hospital hospital bed first time was when i had my dui that i had where i rolled a car over yeah you had a felony dui that and that didn't prevent you from it was pending drinking yeah yeah and um so did you you were you probably didn't even have you probably weren't even did you have your license suspended at that time anyway but no no but dui doesn't get you suspended from the bar no no your driver's license suspended oh no no we'd worked out a deal um i was gonna have to wear an ankle bracelet the ironic thing was i was supposed to report to a to the a meetings like the next day

after this happened which would have been you know interesting But, yeah. And then you kind of wake up from your blackout coming to thinking, oh, man, am I late for my golf game? And then realizing, like, oh, I'm not in my bed. Right. Oh, I'm handcuffed to this bed and somebody's, you know, somebody's attending to my bleeding forehead. Right. There's a cop, you know, there's a cop standing over me and there's a doctor that staples my head shut which i don't feel at all because i'm still anesthetized and uh you know i don't know what i'm being charged with i call my ex-girlfriend who's a criminal defense attorney who was the same one who handled actually she was in the firm that handled the

first one that must have been a really fun call to make yeah yeah well she asked me what i was being charged with and i said i don't know probably solicitation of prostitution and uh that must have been a really fun call to make yeah yeah well she asked me what i was being charged with and i said i don't know probably solicitation of prostitution and uh because i didn't remember what happened and she gets there and hours hours later i get there and that's when the big reveal happens of oh you're not being charged with you know a misdemeanor you're being charged with attempted murder and the attempted murder charge emanates from this chokehold right right because you put that move on that dude that was the determinative thing in coming up with that charge yeah well that move is a corroded artery hold it has a very derogatory name amongst the

lapd but it's a not no longer allowed to be used by them because it kills certain ethnicities because they have a different rate or something to do with the blood to the brain. And so they would always use it in the sheriff's academy. They used to teach it, you know, how to do it. So you would put somebody out, you'd do it for a certain amount of time, it knocks somebody out, you'd do it a little longer to kill them. So for my martial arts training, I kind of instinctively did that. So, yeah, that's how it all starts

this is this is chapter one right and and the amazing thing is leading up to this this moment you're in your office and and the way that you describe like that kind of tug that like pull like you're you're what really brought me back to my own experiences with alcoholism was that feeling of sitting in your desk, being unproductive, knowing you should be working, not being able to work, and knowing, like, you should just be a good boy, but having that tug. And you know that, like, it's going to take you to a dark place, even if your intention is only like, well, I'm just going to have a couple drinks. Fast forward to you being charged with attempted murder and now facing serious jail time. Yeah. And that arc that literally transpires in a matter of hours is really that encapsulates alcoholism and addiction to a tea you know just how incredibly um damaging it can be and how it sneaks up on you right and suddenly

like you would have never chosen to do any of these things and And now you go to jail, you're disbarred, you can't pursue the thing that you always wanted to pursue as a career. I mean, the fallout is, to say it's extensive, is to understate it, to say the least. Yeah, it was quite the bottom. I mean, you know, addiction always has the same, every addiction story is exactly the same. You know, You know, addiction always has the same – every addiction story is exactly the same. You started out just doing it and you liked it and then it became a problem. And then if you're in the recovery, you stop through some type of methodology. Mine just happens to have this really crunchy top to it. And that is lawyer goes into a blackout, charged with um attempted murder and ultimately sex crimes

gets disbarred ends up you know having to go to prison and all this terrible stuff but that's just the crunchy top to the whole story the reality is the thing that people relate to is the is what they can feel in their hearts is the feelings that go with it and those are all the same for all addicts right and all it's all about that tug that you're describing and that inability to stop something that you think intellectually you should be able to stop that's why you know it's a disease yeah and so you end up in jail how you're in jail for 18 months how long did you go to jail for i only went to jail i actually went to prison prison for uh three months for what's called a 90-day evaluation actually four months supposed to be three months but it ended up being four uh for a not what's called 90-day evaluation which is what

they do um for privileged people that get busted uh you know um and uh they're supposed to evaluate you and then they the judge decides whether to send you back or not i had what's called a two-year lid so i could have done two years you, they were looking at putting me in prison for, you know, it could have been 20 years if I was convicted. Well, attempted murder, you know, is no joke, right? So the fact that you really didn't spend that much time compared to what it could have been. Well, the attempted murder charge was dropped at that point. I was charged with all these sex crimes.

I was charged with assault with intent to commit rape. I was charged with burglary. I was charged with straight assault with five or commit rape i was charged with burglary i was charged with um straight assault uh with um um like five or six different right i mean we could get lost in the weeds on the legal aspects of this too like how could this you know possibly be an attempted rape charge when it was a dude and you know it's like i had to go back to my law school days i had to go back to my law school days and uh and look at at factual impossibility to an attempt crime. You know, there's factual impossibility is not a defense to an attempt crime. Right.

We learned that in, you know, Crim 101, right? Right. So, but, yeah, I mean, there's that angle of the book. It's not big part of the book, but there is that angle of the book of like, you know, what's the duty of a prosecutor? book of like you know uh what's the duty of a prosecutor the duty of every other attorney in the world besides for a prosecutor is to defend or is to represent their client at all cost except for breaking the law right except for violating the law the duty of the prosecutor is to seek justice so is that what they're doing? Hell no. They're doing everything everybody else does.

Everybody knew that, you know. I'll let the reader decide what they think about it based on the facts. It's one of the reasons in the book I put a lot of transcripts right from the court, you know, so they could really see what happened and what the judge said and everything. But that's a different angle of the book, you know. It's really an addiction memoir.

Yeah. It's very palpable in that regard. I so you you know what is what was your experience in in prison like how did it measure up to you know my my experience of prison is informed entirely by television and movies right so what is the reality of that experience versus what one might imagine who just you know sees it on a screen well there's three chapters in the book that are um dedicated to my experience at at twin towers county jail and then to chino state prison oh man i just i told kelly my my criminal defense attorney, I told her, you know, make sure that I think you have an option of a vegetarian menu or not when you go to jail. Make sure they know I'm a vegetarian and make sure I get close to a gym, you know, and that type of thing.

I just could not. I have a degree in criminal justice, by the way. the way and uh i could not i could not wrap my head around the idea that they would send someone like me to one of those prisons that i saw in prison documentaries and in movies unfortunately right before i went i did do a little research on chino state prison and it turns out it's the deadliest prison in in the country and the reason is is because it's a transfer prison where they put everybody before they go out to the other prisons. And so it makes it very chaotic and dangerous. And it's also a failing prison structurally. So there's just a lot of bad technology. And horrifying doesn't start

to tell how gnarly our prison system is. It's just devastating. The idea that we're one of the most privileged countries in the world and we consider ourselves the top of democracy and the leaders of the free world and yet we treat our prisoners the way we do is it's just shocking it's just mind-blowing i mean the the the way prisoners are the danger of being in there is, it's unbelievable. It's just, I, I mean, I recount it in the book, but I want people to get that from this book, reading this book of like, you know, there's over, I think there's over a hundred thousand people incarcerated in California alone.

If you think this doesn't affect you, you're wrong. It affects everybody. Almost most of us know somebody who's been incarcerated at one time or another and to treat our criminals that way is just it's it's barbaric um it's horrible and the the kind of prison yard you know uh shank and you know ganging up and the alliances and all that stuff is very real right like you had some pretty close up close and personal experiences with that i mean one of the first days i was at chino prison the guy sitting right next to me got shanked within five feet of me you know and um i'm not sure if he died he never returned but looked like he died you know he was in a pool of blood when they pulled him away i saw other um shankings um yeah it's it's it's a it's a horrible thing um it's uh i was very lucky

to be safe thank god i was uh had 12-step training um in how to pray and meditate and um and basically be a geek i mean that was my my original technique and going to prison was i was gonna i was gonna be as much of a badass physically as I possibly could, but in every other way, I was going to be a complete geek. So I like – Just work out and read. Exactly. Well, yeah, and read Alcoholics Anonymous. I read Alcoholics Anonymous probably 40 times.

So where does sobriety come in at this equation between waking up out of the blackout and being in Chino? It was a two-year period from the time that I committed the crime between the time I got out of Chino. So I was sober from that night. So I had to go to jail immediately, and they they um let me out to a rehab um as part of my bail and i never had a drink after that and um pornography and prostitutes and all that followed soon as far as um clean cleanliness from that and smoking took a lot longer yeah did you did you go right to 12 step and? I went to Pasadena Recovery Center. Oh, you did.

I'm very fortunate to immediately be befriended by a guy named Bob Forrest. Yes. Who I'm sure you know. And he turned me on to that. Bob saved Khalil's life. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Yeah, Bob's a force in the 12-step world.

And at the time, he was just a van driver for Pasadena Recovery Center. world and uh at the time he was just a van driver for pasadena recovery center you know and he was he he was the guy that drove me around to all my court hearings and and my interesting all these expert witnesses that i had to see and psychiatrists that had to say that i wasn't a sexual deviant sexual predator i think that's what they call it they needed to make sure i wasn't you know and so i saw psychiat a psychiatrist and stuff for that. And so Bob turned me on to the, you know, he took me to a lot of his meetings he went to. And I kind of, he's an atheist, I don't know, atheist agnostic. So I could really relate to him.

And he really, you know, it's a rehab that's based on the 12 steps. So, you know, it's not, you don't have to be in 12 steps to do it. But I kind of bought in. I mean, I thought I was going to die. I thought I was going to kill myself. You know, as soon as I was sentenced to prison, I just figured I would just go jump off the Grand Canyon or something. But meanwhile, I was kind of doing the 12-step thing. And, you know, in your rehab, you just eat donuts and flirt with the girls and play ping pong and smoke a bunch of cigarettes. So, you know for the listeners you know you might know bob forrest because he's

dr drew's partner in those television shows i think that they have a podcast together now and stuff like that so you know he's sort of out there in the public eye a little bit yeah at the time he was very helpful to you yeah no bob was great he kind of turned me on you know i still had a lot of ego i was like you know i'm i'm not a i'm not just a normal alcoholic i'm a badass lawyer who you know came from nothing and created this thing and so i still need a little ego so he took me to some meetings there was a lot of celebrities and stuff in them and that was kind of um good for me at the time you know i'm probably not now because i deserve to be in the room with yeah yeah the fancy people yeah so i was you know i had a lot of friends who were i call them it's funny because khalil brought that up in his thing i used to call them

friends of chili you know a lot of a lot of friends of chili yeah uh there's a lot of that that goes on in in uh in la 12 stuff you know i got the reverse. My lawyer, when I was facing jail time as a result of two DUIs in a row, literally back to back and not good ones, I was in the same boat as you thinking, I'm a lawyer. I have this big job. I can't be somebody who goes to jail.

People like me don't go to jail. My lawyer could tell I was wrestling with that kind of entitlement and ego issue. And he's like, what are you talking about? You're a criminal. Of course you're going to go to jail. And I was like, what? You're my lawyer.

You're not supposed to say that to me. But that was like the reality check that I needed to make me realize like the true gravity of the situation that I was in. Yeah. Yeah. gravity of the situation that i was in yeah yeah no i mean that addiction has no it's addiction is perfect and in so far as it does not discriminate right i mean it's like of course you're gonna go to chino yeah look what you did you attempted like yeah the story is insane you're going to prison, dude. Right. I mean, basic. You know, Robert Downey Jr. basically did the exact same thing I did. He broke into somebody's house.

He wasn't naked and there was nobody home, so he got lucky in that regard. Yeah, when I was reading everything, I was like, this is quite similar. He was in a blackout. He didn't think that he was going. He thought he was going into his own house or something like that. Yeah, and I thought I was going into the massage parlor. Mine was probably a little worse, but he did the same thing i did he went to he did 90 days at chino um church a little different when you're a celebrity you're you're experiencing there

but uh yeah no what i did was horrible i don't think i the intent part of there's crime probably doesn't hold water but i wasn't willing to risk 20 years in prison to see whether a jury would convict a tall white bright, bright, polite white guy. Right. So you just took a deal. I mean, basically, the alternative would have been to fight it, go to a jury trial. And even if you could prevail on the legal grounds, I mean, a jury is going to look at you and go, we can't just let this guy go. Exactly. We got to hurt him somehow. Well, this gets into a little bit of the legal technicalities of it, but there was a charge of criminal threats, and I had no defense to it because I had no memory of what was said.

And the victim does have a memory of it. So it basically would have been a directed verdict, and I had a minimum sentence for that alone. So even a complete victory for me at trial would have meant at least some, probably two years, maybe more. So that was a lot of part of the reason I did it. The other thing is I was, you know, I'd spent $50,000 on my attorney at that time. I had a big shot attorney, Mark Worksman. And, you know, I couldn't afford to go to trial on top of that. It would have been another 50 grand, you know? you know i couldn't afford to go to trial on top of that it would have been another 50 grand you know right and the other aspect of this is that you come out the other side uh with this label of being a sex offender and that's something that that is just going i don't know how that works but

as far as i can tell that's going to haunt you forever right does that ever get undone or can that ever be sort of vanquished? Well, in California, uh, registered sex offenders are lifetimes or is it a lifetime sentence for most convictions? Almost all of them. Um, so there's a lot of politics involved in that, but, uh, yeah, no, it's a lifetime thing. And there's some laws that they've tried to change recently. And, uh, mine, I'm at a level where you don't see my address. But, you know, you type me into the old Google search, I'll come up as a registered sex offender. You know, and I don't address – obviously, I don't address that in my book because my book ends on the day I get out of prison.

But the – wow, you know, the label. In criminology, we have this thing called labeling theory, which is basically like they talk about, you don't want to put adolescents in jail because you don't want to label them a criminal because once they're labeled a criminal, it really affects them. And, um, you know, the effects of being a registered sex offender mentally, not what society has done to me because of it. I've had nobody, neighbors don't come up to me and go, Hey, you sex offender get out of here like i've never had that happen never nobody has affected me but the mental effect of it on me fuck it's intense man yeah um but i'm proud to be who i am and you know the reason i took a long time to write this book and get it out is because i'm finally okay with who i

am and i can just say this out loud to a, you've got a pretty big audience. Yeah. Well, that comes across loud and clear. Like you really do own it. Like you're, you know, it's, it's that adage from recovery. We shall not regret the past or, you know, wish to shut the door on it. You really are in a place where you can own it and you can talk about it in a, you know, implacable, you know, objective way. And I think that that's really powerful for people out there that might be struggling with this to be able to hear that you can not only overcome it but to even survive the circumstances that you had to survive and still be you know breathing air in and out of your lungs and and you know try to put the pieces back together yeah yeah i mean that's you know it's an intense thing it's a really it a really intense thing, the whole registered sex offender thing on society and the effects of it and how far it's gone politically.

You know, it started out as this idea that we wanted to protect society. And it's kind of got to the point where it's a political token, where every politician that wants to get elected wants to be tough on crime. So no one will change the laws. And all they'll do is increase them. So it's more and more and more you know we all want to be protected from the child molester who is you know has three conviction for child molestation and is a danger to society which is kind of unrealistic because those type of people don't even make it out anymore they're they're civilly confined even after they serve right but i can understand that

intention like yeah yeah of course that's valid for. But I think it's been extended now that even some guy who's out drunk and takes a leak on a tree in a park could get that label and be in that same situation. Yeah, and the scary thing about it is we've taken the discretion away from judges. The judge that heard my case was actually a member of 12 Stepper. a member of, you know, a 12-stepper. And, you know, he did everything he possibly could to get the DA to not have me be a registered sex offender. Even after the conviction, after I got out of jail, I actually pulled the DA in and said, hey, you know, this is ridiculous.

This guy doesn't belong here. And they didn't do anything about it. They, you know, they refused to do anything about it. There's no political. If they take me off and I do something wrong, then they're screwed. They leave me on and no harm can come to them. So it's a crazy thing in our society.

It's very damaging to society, but that's kind of a meta thing. As far as my personally experience with it, it was like obviously God put me where my bottom was what my bottom needed to be. And I was challenged with this. And I feel like I've been, in some ways, I'm honored to have such a burden to carry and to be having to take on the spiritual journey that's required to go through this and live life with this label and to reach a point where I'm okay with it and embrace it, actually. label and to reach a point where I'm okay with it and embrace it actually. That's the courageous aspect of how you have to approach life, right? I mean, you are convicted felon and registered sex offender. You've been disbarred.

You can't pursue the career that you would like to pursue, that you spent years getting yourself in a to to do to take yourself out of the circumstances under which you were raised how do you how do you move forward how do you move forward how do you wake up in the morning and face life and you mentioned earlier like when you first met bob forest you you were attracted to his kind of agnostic um atheist perspective but i'm not so sure that that's going to serve you in approaching this new phase of your life yeah no that was just a start you know the doorknob the using the doorknob or the a group as your god is it doesn't work for too long it might get you sober for a little while but um and clean um uh you know the one thing i did was i immediately got a girlfriend who had a lot of time i'll solve the problem yeah and uh you know in a ways it kind of did i got this girlfriend who

was this amazing person who i was more of a fan of than I was necessarily attracted romantically now that I look back on it. But she had some time. She was this incredible story, kind of like mine. And she was living it and walking it. I live on the east side, Silver Lake, Los Angeles east side, which is this. Who's calling who a hipster? Oh, no. I'm totally. Hey, I buy in.

I'm in now. Back in the day, I did. You're out in the suburbs right now. This is like the Orange County of LA. This couldn't be less hipster-ish. But I was introduced to this, you know, where a lot of artists live and this whole program out there. It's huge. You know, 12 Steps are huge out there.

And, I mean, they're huge all over LA, but there was just a certain group out there it's huge you know 12 steps are huge out there and um i mean they're huge all over la but there was just a certain group out there and she was very into spirituality and you know i grew up in the inland empire which is basically the midwest of of uh southern california and you know therapy please you know i remember she took me to ama you know ama the the hugging same i've been on the twice me too i've been on the twice explain to people who are listening who ama is because most people probably don't ama's an indian woman indian from india and she she her practice is hugging people and you would think that's crazy especially if you're me back then and but she hugs you and it blows your mind because she transmits love through her hugs and she and you can't help the force of it

the power of it even if it's just the people around there's thousands of people to go to lax when she comes into la you wait in line all day and my experience with that inching forward to yeah have the opportunity to hug her we named one of our dogs after her oh yeah we have a dog named ama and so she's so huggable i was introduced to these spiritual concepts in these um you know i also you know i'm still a member of agape international spiritual center okay cool and reverend michael michael beckwith yeah and ricky you got to get him on your show i would love to have him on the show he he him and his they are amazing people and what they've done with agape is truly remarkable yeah i went on a silent meditation just

recently with them and it was like it was awesome agape is is that's where i found my god was i was an agape um and and explain what agape is because agape international is a kind of an offshoot of science of mind not to be not to be uh um confused with scientology please don't it's the ernest holmes uh exactly science of mind approach right ernst holmes science of mind and basically it's it's a non it's not really a church it's a non-religious organization that believes in spirituality basically and then uses a lot of the teachings of jesus and mahabhagandhi and martin luther king and and the mahabharata and all kinds of different Hindu, Buddha, everything you can imagine. And it has a lot to do with science of mind.

And, you know, it's just really it's about, you know, we're all one. We're all one. And that, you know, the way I interpret it is I always, you know, start with love. You know, every single situation I go into, I start with love, you know. And so I was introduced to agape, ama, this spiritual way of living kind of. All through this girlfriend? Yeah, all through this girlfriend. And she was a very interesting person.

She was, I remember the first time we went out, I went into her room or her apartment, and she started playing songs, and she was singing. And I was just like, oh, my God, why aren't you a star? Why aren't you a star? What's going on here and she kind of was and and we went out for like five years and she was amazing and um she ended up now she's a super well-known author and and has written a bunch of books and it's wild not wildly famous but pretty damn famous and can you are you comfortable saying or yeah tracy tracy mcmillan and she's written a bunch of books and is wild not wildly famous but pretty damn famous and can you are you comfortable saying or yeah tracy tracy mcmillan and she's written a bunch of books and she wrote on a lot of big shows and stuff and she'd been on oprah and stuff you know and um you know we had a

very tumultuous relationship she just got through a divorce and was had was transferring her career and she basically was living in an apartment and doing this thing but i swear to god she believed that she was going to make it she really did and i was kind of blown away i'm like what are you talking about you're in your 40s you've got a kid you live in this small apartment you think you're going to be this big shot writer and sure enough she was you know and so i kind of followed her lead and um and uh she just introduced me to, to not just what the 12 steps were, but what it was like actually living them, not just being in the rooms and being like, you know, talking to people the way you talk in 12 steps, but actually taking it out into

the world and believing in things and believing in love, even when your circumstances do not look like they support that. I mean, I was a two strike registered. I was two strike felon, registered sex offender, disbarred lawyer. I didn't have a job. I remember talking to her and being like, what the hell am I going to do? Where are you going to live? And she goes, you know, there's only really one industry where they don't give a damn what you do.

And that's the entertainment industry. As long as you do the work. That's so true. So I got involved in entertainment. And I started as a PA. And, you know, I was a hard worker. So I would go on these little shoots, and I would start out as a PA. And by the end of the job, I'd be the assistant director. And I did that.

And then I ended up getting a job several years later. I was a contract manager. This is crazy. I could write a book about this. But I became the contract manager for one of the largest steel companies in the world, CMC. And they're the ones that do the rebar for pretty much all the buildings downtown, one of the biggest rebar companies in the world. Having disclosed that I was a two-strike felon, disbarred lawyer, registered sex offender, I actually got into this Fortune 500 company. How did you squeak through that? Well, when I interviewed with them, they were very happy because I was massively overqualified to be doing this.

And they liked me a lot. I mean, basically, just to set the stage, because I know how this stuff works. They look at it like, we're going to get this lawyer, but we're going to pay him what we would pay a paralegal. And he's going to do lawyer work, even though he's not going to say he's going to do lawyer work. And we're going to save a ton of money on our outside council fees. Yeah.

Or alleviate the burden from our general counsel. Right. Basically, you know, I mean, you know, I did the contract. I did the rebar contract on the four Oh five freeway bridge overpass, which is the largest construction job in Southern California in the last 20 years.

It seems like it's just finished, right? Like it seems like it's been – ever since I've been living in L.A., they've been working on it. Yeah. I mean, I remember I signed that. I negotiated that contract, the legal part of it, not the rebar part of it. But I negotiated the legal contract and signed this contract. I think our part of it was, you know, over a quarter million, quarter, $250 million or something crazy. The total contract was almost a billion.

Anyways, and so I told them, I said, I told them my story, but I always say, I was convicted of a violent assault that I committed during a blackout. You kind of buy that. You're kind of like, okay, with that, you go, some salient details, though. You're like, okay, so you got in a fight when you're kind of like, okay, with that. You go, you're drunk. Some salient details, though. You're like, okay, so you got in a fight when you're drunk.

Okay, okay. I mean, they didn't say that, but that's probably the assumption. Right. So then I got the job. You're allowing them to, like, foster that. Right. So they offered me the job, and I said, hey, I've got a bunch of entertainment jobs on the loop. I need you to write me a letter of, you know, locking me in.

So they wrote me an offer letter that I accepted. then the criminal the background check came back and they called me up and they were like oh my god what in the hell have we done like wow you can't work for us and so i sent him a letter from the judge and the transcripts and all these letters from all these different people you know i had well i submitted probably 50 letters to the judge of recommendation from lawyers and all kinds of people and stuff and they you know they they bought the story i mean they understood the story like what had happened to me and there was this weird kind of thing where they were a small they were a big rebar player in southern california but they've been bought out by this giant company so they were making a lot of money this before the recession so the big company kind of just let them they were in dallas the big company just kind of let them do their thing as long as they were making money.

So they could really hire without really going through their big corporate people. So I was kind of a secret. They didn't let me know because they'd already hired me. They were locked in. So they couldn't. So that's kind of what happened with that. That was crafty to make them sign that thing before you quit your other job. Otherwise, that wouldn't have happened.

I had to. I had a wouldn't have happened. I had to. I had a couple $200 a day production jobs. So you still work for that company now? No, no, no. The recession hit. And then what happened when the recession hit, Dallas came in and said, okay, now we're going to take over. You guys aren't making money in a clean house. And when they found out who I was, you know.

That was it. I was, it was the perfect thing to happen at the time. I was, it was not a great place to be. And, you know, it was, it was hard. I was qualified. I would always say in my mind, you know, I'm qualified to be my boss's boss's boss. And here I am, you know, negotiating these contracts and, you know, maybe a little arrogant, but it was kind of true. So eventually I got laid off with about, I mean, they laid off 60% of their workforce.

They had 10,000 people working for them. By the end of the recession, they had 4,000 people working for them. And so how do you make it work now? I do a bunch of different things. I do legal work that I'm allowed to do for lawyers. They hire me for very inexpensive, and I write motions and things. I do – I'm a bit of a fixer um you know like like uh uh what's this like i'm like uh michael clayton like uh ray what's a ray donovan like on a very very small scale of that very small scale like

that i'm kind of the guy you know who knows a lot of real estate agents and knows a lot of lawyers and and does a little odd work here and there I have a few different financial type businesses

that I that I dabble in and the book you know the book makes a little revenue and stuff and

and yeah my fiance and I make it work so you're engaged to be married now yeah yeah congratulations recently thank you thank you yeah she's wonderful how long have you been with her Yeah, my fiance and I make it work. So you're engaged to be married now. Yeah, yeah. Congratulations. Just recently. Thank you, thank you.

How long have you been with her? What's her name? Her name's Teresa. She's amazing. And God, about a year. I mean, it was like one of those things where you just meet the person and you realize, oh, all that time, all those other girls where I thought I had to work to make this work. It's not like that.

Not that you don't have to work to make relationships work, but like you just know that she's the one. I knew she's the one. We got engaged. And that's fantastic. Yeah, I'm stoked. She's amazing. So here you are, not just breathing, but actually thriving.

You've got this book out here, and I want to get into what inspired you to write the book. Is it something you always wanted to do, or did you feel an obligation to address this issue, or what was it inside of you that felt like you needed to express this i publicly well okay so i love having this book so that i can say you know here it is you want to know what's up here it is you know because when you tell your story it's hard to tell my story in a short amount of time there's so much to it you know party yeah what's your story oh i mean I've had that too. Where to begin.

You know, like, what do you do? Oh, I just wrote a memoir. What is it about? Like, I always say to friends, like, all roads lead to bad things at cocktail parties for me. Oh, you used to be a lawyer? Da-da-da. Registered sex offender.

Oh, you wrote a memoir? Da-da-da. Registered sex offender. You know, every single thing leads to that. So it's like, fuck, either i have to make up something or whatever but i don't anymore i'm just like oh i wrote a memoir i had this crash and burn blah blah and that you know it helps how did you get to the point how did you get to the point where you could just own it like that and and not be sheepish or triggered by the prospect of having

to talk about it well the registered sex offender thing i'm still like i don't go to cocktail parties and announce that i'm a registered sex offender but i do go to cocktail parties you're telling a lot of people right now oh yeah you're doing it in a way that it's not you're not like recoiling from yeah yeah no no um uh i you know i this happened after i wrote it but i remember hearing monica lewinsky talk about how she wanted to own her story. And I was like, oh, I love that. I love the idea of like I own my story. The government doesn't get to own my story.

The state bar doesn't get to own my story. The district attorney's office doesn't get to own my story. I own my story. It's mine. This is what happened. I put it in here. It's all true. You can check the records.

This is it. It's like bernie brown if you read bernie brown oh she's got a book on this same issue that i think you should check out oh okay all about shame and owning your story and all that kind of stuff yeah right there but you know and i just was like i can't live in fear because it just it'll eat you up man you i mean you know i'm not allowed to go on us i'm not allowed to go into a school. So, for instance, I had a girlfriend who had a kid, the girlfriend I mentioned earlier, and he'd have a school event. And I'd have to think to myself, oh, damn, am I going to really go to that school and register at that school as a sex offender and risk the idea that all the parents find out? Yeah, it's all these things like you don't even think about how it impacts you.

And the stigma is so gnarly because when you sell somebody a registered sex offender, they don't think, oh, in a blackout you broke into some guy's house. They think you molested somebody or you raped somebody in a violent way. And wouldn't you? I mean, you have kids. You could do anything to protect your kids, right? You're not going to take a risk on somebody. If somebody moves in across the street from you, it's a registered sex offender, you're going to be pretty damn concerned about it.

So, you know, it's a tricky thing. But my story is what my story is. I don't think I should be a registered sex offender anyway from what happened. But I am, you know. And everything happens for a reason. And I own my story. a registered sex offender anyway from what happened, but I am, you know, and everything happens for a reason. And I, I own my story and, um, I didn't want to live in fear anymore, you know, take me or leave me. And the interesting thing is, I guess, cause I've been in my community so long, you know, I've been in, I've, I've stayed on the East side and I've been going to meetings

and different programs, particularly the main one for, uh, you know, the entire time. And so people know me, you know, you can time. And so people know me, you know, you can't hide from who you are. You can hide from who you are when you meet somebody a couple of times, but you can't hide who you are. People can see they're like, you know, we're like dogs. We, we know who's who there's people that are squeaky clean on the outside, but you know, they're, they're creepy. And there's people who have the, like me, who have a pretty creepy story who I just don't think I come across that way. I think, you know, when I move into a neighborhood,

I think, you know, you're safer now that I'm here. You know, your property value might went down a little bit, but you're safer. Not that, you can't find even my address when you look me up online. I'm not of that ilk of the registration, but you know what I'm saying. Oh, there's like different tiers,

like tell you exactly where they live, if you've done X or Y. Yeah, but you know what I'm saying? Oh, there's like different tiers. Like I tell you exactly where they live. If you're a child on X or Y. Yeah. If you've done certain crimes that are of a certain, you know, rate. So for you, it's just like a zone.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got you. I'm in a zone. I just, you know, my,

my, I want my calling card to be, I want to be your mama's favorite sex offender. You know, there you go. Well, you can print those cards up today if you want. I'm going to put that. I mean, what do you want people to get out of your story and your book?

Like what is the takeaway? Perhaps if you're somebody who maybe is suffering from some form of the affliction that was your downfall. of the affliction that was your downfall? Well, I want people to, you know, my primary purpose consistent with the program that saved my life is to be of service to other people, right? So I am more qualified to be of service to people who have the same addiction that I have than anyone else because I have those addictions.

I mean, that's what Bill Wilson taught us, right? So I want people to read this story and be moved by it and see like, you know, the feelings. I mean, to me, a memoir, the quality of a memoir isn't the quality, isn't the crunchy top. It's whether you expose your feelings or not. I've been a memoir fan for a long time and I've read a lot of memoirs and the memoirs I like are the ones that expose your feelings and those are the ones that affect people. Well, that's what allows the reader to emotionally connect. Yeah.

You know, it's like the story, like you can tell crazy stories, but if you're not tapping that emotional vein that you can relate to, the power of that is going to be lost on you. And I think that's very clear in your book. Like I could tell you put a lot of, you know, considered thought into making sure that you were honestly and and openly conveying what it's like to be in that emotional state in a very vulnerable way like i i got that immediately and as a fellow addict alcoholic like i'm like oh

yeah like i'm i'm right there like i know exactly what you're talking about. And I think that is going to help a lot of people. I mean, there's two purposes. One was that I want to own my story. And the second one is I want to be of service to people. I'm not making any money off this book. It sells for basically its cost. How did the book come together? How did it all happen for you?

I was considering writing this book right after the financial crisis. And I had a lot of friends who were, you know, published authors and stuff. So I thought I would get a deal with no problem with my story. And I called around. I talked to agents and stuff. And they'd be like, no, no, no, no, no. And so I ended up forming my own publishing company. Oh, you did?

And doing it myself. Oh, wow. And we're actually taking on other authors and considering, you know, we have another author that we're going to be putting a book out soon. Oh, you did? and she's really good at it and she did a lot of the stuff. So my, I guess technically it's self-published but if you were to look at it, you would never think that. Yeah, I didn't think so. I just thought it was an imprint that I wasn't familiar with.

Yeah, it's like you created your own imprint. That's cool. Yeah, yeah. So I want to take that because there's other authors out there that don't get, that are kind of in between. Like they don't – they're not going to sell that much because they're not marketable for whatever reason.

I mean it's a lot like the music industry I think nowadays. Yeah, it's a lot like that. It's basically if you don't have a platform, they don't want you. They don't really care how good your writing is unless you're established. It's really a business. Yeah, they're buying your audience. Yeah, and I don't have one. They want you to come with an audience.

And that has nothing to do with your talent as a writer. Yeah, and I don't have one. They want you to come with an audience, and that has nothing to do with your talent as a writer. Yeah, and I didn't have an audience, and so they weren't really interested in me, especially when it was the recession. I think now if I had the same thing, I could probably sell. I don't know whether I will sell my next book, but we'll see. Interesting. And what does recovery look like for you now? So you're 12 years, a little over 12 years sober at this point? Yeah, yeah.

I'll be 13 in July, which is the date of the crime. It's my whole life, you know. I meditate every day. I have a prayer practice. I go to meetings in two different programs, two, three, anywhere from one to five times a week. I have a sponsor and I have sponsees. Some have a lot of time and some have very little time. Some call me, some don't.

And it's the basis of my life. It was the last house on the block for me. It was what saved my life. And it's a program that works in hard times, you know, like they say, I don't do it because I owe it. I do it because the only way I know how to live, you know, is through the 12 steps.

And it's blossomed out into other things. You know, like I said, I'm a member of Agape and I practice science of mind and I meditate and those things. But really it's the mothership is the 12 steps. Right. And you've never lost sight mothership is the 12 steps. Right. And you've never lost sight of that being the number one priority? No.

No. I mean, you know. That's great. Look what happened to me. I mean, you know, I'm very graced by having a certain bottom. I mean, when people say, oh, I could go out and drink again. I'm like, oh, man. You know.

Well, yeah, but you could. I mean, listen, you know, alcoholics yeah but you could i mean listen you know alcoholics addicts they're crafty you could come up with some argument well it was only because like i grabbed my jacket you know on the wall it was a jacket if that didn't happen none of this would have happened and you could play the victim and you know get into some crazy narrative and then talk yourself right back into you know a drink and whatever behavior comes packed with that. Well, and the other thing, too, is I love my life. I love it.

I didn't want to be a player when I was younger. I was so scared of poverty. I mean, my key word to life was and to this day is wholesome. I wanted to be wholesome. I never had the idea of being this player who went to bars and slept with a lot of women and stuff and did one night stands. I was trying to be cool with not me. I wanted to be a geek. That's a very important point. That's a very, because it's, because I think, I think that that gets lost because there's this idea, well, you just want to be with all these women. You're

not that guy. You're not like the guy who wants to be at the party. No, no. And that's what makes it all the more like ironic and bizarre. Yeah, I look back at myself then and I'm like, what a tool, you know, and why? Who I am now is who I love to be. I look at myself in the mirror and I'm okay with it. I get up every day and I'm stoked to be alive, you know. Like, you know, like you talk in your podcast about your training and stuff. Like I get up and I, you know, my passion now is golf. And it's kind of saved my life in the way that ultra has saved your life. But, but I get up and I'm just stoked that I get to do it.

I'm so stoked. I get to go to meetings. I get to be of service to people. I'm good at being of service to people because I've been through this thing and I've been doing it for 12 years and I, I'm lucky enough to have this woman that I love and I live in a nice house and I have a good living. I'm not rich or anything but I'm certainly fine. I live in a community I love with a lot of artists and I have a bunch of friends, most of whom are in

the program and just a beautiful friggin' life. I mean, why would I ever risk that over getting high? No way. Fuck that. That's an amazing perspective from where you've come from yeah thanks and so i want to i kind of want to wrap it up with a final like inquiry or you know line of thought if somebody's listening to this and this is kind of how i kind of always you know

wrap up conversations with people like yourself like if somebody's listening to this and they're they're caught in that cycle of addiction perhaps perhaps they're harboring some secret second life where they're doing some of the things that you were doing or find themselves compelled by that world but don't know how to find their way out or can't grab onto the solution. Their elevator is going down and maybe they're not ready to get off it yet, but they know maybe even unconsciously that they're going to have to soon.

How do you speak to that guy? Well, I would say to them, first of all, reach out for help and reach out for help on multiple levels. Go to therapy and be honest. If you don't have money for therapy, go to a 12-step program that addresses whatever your issue is, whether it's alcohol, nicotine, Al-Anon, whatever it is, go there, be honest, and there's help for you if you want it.

Your bottom is when you stop digging. And if you want your bottom to be really low, like I did apparently, then it can be that low. And if you don't, then... What's your like I did apparently, then it can be that low. And if you don't, if you don't, then what's your pain threshold? Yeah. What's your pain threshold? So join us.

And even there's a lot of people who stop in at these meetings and decide that they're not, it's not for them. But why not do the research and check it out before your life gets completely unmanageable? Yeah, it's interesting. I noticed in the upfront in your book, you have kind of an author's note where you talk about the tradition of anonymity in 12-step. And this is something that came up in the conversation with Khalil. Like, I never know where that line is of what we can or should talk about and what we should avoid. And certainly, we're speaking into microphones right now yeah we're both members of 12 step and we're both advocates of that uh lifestyle as a means of recovery but then i always feel guarded or cagey about what i can or cannot share and don't you know shouldn't share because i don't want to traverse that tradition but i'm not crystal clear on where that line sits like where is that line for you obviously you're you're not anonymous in your own sobriety and you've written an entire book about your journey but anonymity still vests with

obviously with other people and certain aspects of the 12-step program itself yeah well for me i you know the the tradition is that we are anonymous at the level of press radio and film and this is obviously you know falls within radio and And this obviously falls within radio. And my book obviously falls within the public press domain too. So my thing is in the book and in this podcast, to the extent I was successful at it, I try to identify myself as a 12-stepper, not affiliated with any particular program. And maybe you can read between the lines,

or maybe I even accidentally identified which program. But the bottom line is that um uh I think you can identify yourself as a 12-stepper or someone in recovery and not necessarily violate the anonymity um part of it because I do respect the program and I'm not sure whether that tradition is the same as it used to be uh but the bottom line is it's there I respect it as best I as best I can and still own my story. So, you know, and if I can help somebody, if I can help somebody, then that's awesome. And I have, you know, people that have contacted me, you know, after a lot of people have reviewed the book and have contacted me and said, oh, my God, I sent this to somebody and they're going to 12-step program now or something like that.

So, you know, that's the beauty of it, right? We get to save ourselves and then we get to help save some others through this program. It's pretty bitchin'. Well, it's quite a journey that you've been on, man. And it's been an honor and a privilege to have you sit here and share openly your story. It's a painful story to hear. I can't imagine what it's been like for you to live through it. But to come out the other side and to be able, like you said, to own it and to be this kind of lighthouse of hope for other people out there that are suffering from something that I think is truly pernicious and lives in the dark corners and the underbelly of our culture, but at a

profound level that I think we don't speak to adequately. And I would imagine there's a lot of people that are suffering out there. So, I think that you are of tremendous service in carrying this frequency for other people to latch on to. So, thanks for that. And the book is great. I think we need to close it down with you explaining the title because it is a little bit of an inside joke oh right oh yeah straight pepper diet straight you explain it up in front but like for most people straight pepper diet what does that mean it's a diet book well straight pepper diet is a diet book of sorts it's straight pepper diet is a reference to page 69 of the of this fourth edition of big right so ironic reference to page 69 of this fourth edition of Big Book. It's so ironic that it's page 69. Yeah, right.

Ha-ha, sixth grade joke. Alcoholic synonyms. And basically it's a reference to the idea that some would have no flair for their fare, I mean, no seasoning for their food, and other would have a straight pepper diet, and it's a metaphor for sex. And A actually has no opinion on that, but it's just a lifting of that phrase, straight pepper diet, and it's a metaphor for sex, you know. And AA naturally has no opinion on that, but it's just a lifting of that phrase, straight pepper diet, which basically means, you know, a very overactive sexual appetite.

It's a very clever title. Thanks. Hopefully AA doesn't sue me. That's right. Is that a violation of the traditions? No, it's not a violation of the traditions. It might be a violation of the copyright laws. But from what I understand, AA is not litigious, uh, no, at least violations of traditions. It might be a violation of copyright laws, but, uh, from what I understand,

a is not litigious. And, uh, there might've been some other, he might've lifted it from somebody else. And the book is probably nearing it's a, what? 85 year.

Right. Uh, copyright. Well, neither of us are practicing lawyers anymore, so we can't speak to that, right? Oh,

definitely not. I haven't practiced law in a long time. If I could give you my bar membership, I would. Oh, man, that would be cool. Yeah. Is it from like Cornell or something? In a parallel universe, I would grant you that, my friend. Thanks, brother.

All right. Well, thanks for dropping by. The book is called Straight Pepper Diet. Check it out. Use the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com to explore it on Amazon. And if you want to learn more about Joseph, what's the best place to find you? Your website? Yeah, straightpepperdietmemoir.com.

Okay, cool. And you're on Twitter and all those places, right? Yeah, Twitter and – Just your name? Yeah, Twitter's just my name. N-A-U-S, Joseph Nauss, right? Yep, yep. Cool.

And what's going on with and the the option and the project or can you speak to that or is that all like off no no nick is out there rolling with it he wants to turn it into a like a you know like a hbo series type of thing not a movie right and i'm all down with that that's cool it's kind of like uh like it has a little bit of a californication vibe to it yeah yeah no No, he's amazing. He's how I hooked up with you. And his wife, too. Actually, his wife is how I hooked up.

Right. She's a blogger. Yeah. And she chased you down, right? Yeah, yeah. She's a super fan. And so I was really honored by that. I've been real honored.

The book is kind of a bit of a Bernie Sanders. It's like the populace loves it, but I have had almost no media attention at all from it. And I'm not quite sure why other than it's not by a major publisher, but, but that's fine with me. It's hard, man. It's hard to, it's hard to get the media attention. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, that's fine. I'm just, you know, it is what it is and it's, it's doing what it's supposed to do. Cause that's what it is. Well, it's, uh, it, it's not expiring. You know what I mean? No. Yeah.

That's great. In fact, it it just and the great thing about amazon is the more you sell the more you sell right that's right you know that's that's cool so well uh best of luck to you man thanks all right go vegan everybody oh that we didn't even talk about vegan stuff i know you have to come back yeah like you saw cowspiracy totally man yeah you're on that tip we didn't touch on veganism or golf. I know. No, here's what happened. I know. We've got to wrap it up.

But I'm just going to say, Nick, Nick turned me on to you, so I'm reading your Twitter. And I'm like, oh, this guy's watching Cowspiracy and doing all that. So you were already on the whole veg trip. Well, let me make this point real quick. You can cut it out if you don't like it. No, it's all right. Go for it. But this kind of really is an encapsulation of what what addiction is like is i read diet for a new

america in probably 1989 i think and uh i went vegetarian for two years because of that and then you know once i got into my addiction that all went out the door and i started eating in and out burgers again and um you know i was an athlete and everything so now 13 years later that my life is back in semblance and i i don't have to have demoralization because i think eating meat is kind of demoralizing myself because i knew about this i can't claim ignorance like so many people do i read diet for new america was completely sold on the idea of a at least a meat-free diet in 1989. And it took me this long to get back to veganism. So when you talk about the way you approach people about veganism and not doing it in a way that's very aggressive, but being from a more compassionate place, I like that because that's who I was. I

mean, I was a guy who knew about this stuff and still didn't do it. But now that I've gone, I'm almost completely vegan, which, you know, it's changed my life. I mean, I don't have the pains that I used to have. I've lost some weight and, you know, and it wasn't like I was in bad shape before. It's just that now I'm in much better shape. So I'm down. How's it impacting the golf game? Well, you know, I thought that for, I've've been i'm a golf fanatic and for the last seven years i've decided that i want to be a great golfer so i've been down that road and i train very hard and and i always have hip and lower back pain and i thought it was just the way it is even though i work out and i thought i ate well and everything well i went on this no dairy no meat

or no dairy i'd already been eating no meat no no sugar, and no meat, no dairy, no sugar. And I swear to God, the very next day I woke up and I was like, what the hell is going on with me? And I had no hip pain, no lower back pain at all. And it's just disappeared after years of having this. It was just amazing. And I start talking to people about it and they're like, yeah, it's anti-inflammatory diet. It's like, fucking A. Jesus, that's crazy. I've been having pain for six years that I thought was just the way life was, and then all I had to do was do that, and I'm pain-free?

Can't be that easy, can it? Damn. I know. That's great. That's great to hear, man. That's very cool. Yeah. And your next book is going to be about the spirituality of golf, right?

Yeah, Golf is Magic is kind of like going to be my, you know, memoir number two and basically kind of how golf affected my, as a metaphor for a lot of spiritual different concepts in my path. If you want to confront your character defects, start playing golf or get into a relationship. Exactly. It's very similar in that regard right yeah well uh well good for you man

very cool well come back we'll talk more about vegan stuff and all that kind of good have you been to Little Pine yet it's in your neighborhood

isn't it that's Moby's new restaurant no I've heard about it I haven't tried it yet it's out like near the neck of the woods oh cool

I'll try it out cool alright man peace peace bye peace peace

peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace Cool. I'll try it out. Cool. All right, man. Peace. Peace. Bye. All right, you guys, that's it. That's today's show. How'd it go for you? How do you feel about that? It was intense, right? But I really think that it is worthwhile to have that conversation. I'm really glad that I did.

And I hope that you guys got some good stuff out of that conversation. I'm really glad that I did. And I hope that you guys got some good stuff out of that. Please check out this week's show notes for much, much more. I've got tons of links and resources on the episode page for this episode. And for all your plant power and RRP swag and merch, visit richroll.com. And of course, keep sending in your questions for future Q&A podcasts to info at richroll. So thanks so much you guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode and it gave you a couple things to really think about and grapple with this week and I'll see you soon.

Peace. Plants. Thank you.