Behind the Book Cover

If you're thinking about writing an authority building book, and I really hope you are, and you don't want to be counting pennies or checking your book sales all the time, you actually want a book that's going to change your life, I can tell you how. Just go to sevenfigurebooks.com. I'm not trying to capture your email or anything. You can just download this PDF that's going to tell you exactly how to turn an authority building book into revenue, speaking, authority, and no exaggeration, a whole new life. 

Writer and musician John Albert did not have a standard trajectory to literary success—in fact he says he became a writer by accident when he submitted information about his amateur baseball team, which was made up of a slew of misfit former addicts and rebel rousers, to LA Weekly. That information became a story, that story became a cover story and that cover story became Albert's widely praised book Wrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates. This wasn't Albert's first foray into the public eye: he co-founded the cross-dressing band Christian Death and was the drummer in Bad Religion. Now sober over three decades, the husband and father works for a record company when he's not handling the movie offers Wrecking Crew regularly receives (it's been optioned more than four times by various people, including the late Philip Seymour Hoffman). In this episode, he and Anna David discuss having sex with borderline schizophrenics in rehab, the essay on Sober House he wrote for David's reality TV anthology and being on methadone at the college where your dad teaches, among other topics.

Writer and musician John Albert did not have a standard trajectory to literary success—in fact he says he became a writer by accident when he submitted information about his amateur baseball team, which was made up of a slew of misfit former addicts and rebel rousers, to LA Weekly. That information became a story, that story became a cover story and that cover story became Albert's widely praised book Wrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates. This wasn't Albert's first foray into the public eye: he co-founded the cross-dressing band Christian Death and was the drummer in Bad Religion. Now sober over three decades, the husband and father works for a record company when he's not handling the movie offers Wrecking Crew regularly receives (it's been optioned more than four times by various people, including the late Philip Seymour Hoffman). In this episode, he and Anna David discuss having sex with borderline schizophrenics in rehab, the essay on Sober House he wrote for David's reality TV anthology and being on methadone at the college where your dad teaches, among other topics.

If you're thinking about writing an authority building book, and I really hope you are, and you don't want to be counting pennies or checking your book sales all the time, you actually want a book that's going to change your life, I can tell you how. Just go to sevenfigurebooks.com. I'm not trying to capture your email or anything. You can just download this PDF that's going to tell you exactly how to turn an authority building book into revenue, speaking, authority, and no exaggeration, a whole new life. 

TV host, writer and producer Steve Goldbloom has done a lot in his 31 years on the planet: the Canadian (dual citizenship, yo) created the PBS Digital Studio comedy series Everything But the News, where he documented his misadventures exploring the tech scene, and which USA Today named Best Web Series. This was after his stint as a correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. He currently produces a weekly segment on PBS called Brief but Spectacular which is, he says, an interview without the interviewer.

Now he's launching Intimacy with Strangers, where he speaks with various people about intimacy, for Discovery and for this episode, we did something entirely unprecedented: while I interviewed him for the podcast, he simultaneously interviewed me for Intimacy With Strangers. Did this meta double project work? We'll find out when you listen to this podcast while watching the Intimacy with Strangers episode (that's overly ambitious, I get it; also I have no idea when IWS will air). Since he is neither an addict nor a person with serious issues (my diagnosis), we focused the conversation on developing and maintaining healthy relationships. In this episode, we discuss relationships that cause you to stare at the ceiling wondering what's happened to your life, whether or not just a few sessions with a therapist can do the trick and if, when we saw Boyhood and he elbowed me every few minutes, we were on a date or not (TBD).

TV host, writer and producer Steve Goldbloom has done a lot in his 31 years on the planet: the Canadian (dual citizenship, yo) created the PBS Digital Studio comedy series Everything But the News, where he documented his misadventures exploring the tech scene, and which USA Today named Best Web Series. This was after his stint as a correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. He currently produces a weekly segment on PBS called Brief but Spectacular which is, he says, an interview without the interviewer.

Now he's launching Intimacy with Strangers, where he speaks with various people about intimacy, for Discovery and for this episode, we did something entirely unprecedented: while I interviewed him for the podcast, he simultaneously interviewed me for Intimacy With Strangers. Did this meta double project work? We'll find out when you listen to this podcast while watching the Intimacy with Strangers episode (that's overly ambitious, I get it; also I have no idea when IWS will air). Since he is neither an addict nor a person with serious issues (my diagnosis), we focused the conversation on developing and maintaining healthy relationships. In this episode, we discuss relationships that cause you to stare at the ceiling wondering what's happened to your life, whether or not just a few sessions with a therapist can do the trick and if, when we saw Boyhood and he elbowed me every few minutes, we were on a date or not (TBD).

If you're thinking about writing an authority building book, and I really hope you are, and you don't want to be counting pennies or checking your book sales all the time, you actually want a book that's going to change your life, I can tell you how. Just go to sevenfigurebooks.com. I'm not trying to capture your email or anything. You can just download this PDF that's going to tell you exactly how to turn an authority building book into revenue, speaking, authority, and no exaggeration, a whole new life. 

All sober addicts have their stories, some more severe than others. Well, it's safe to say that author and former attorney Joseph Naus checks all the boxes on the "most severe" scale. Born to a heroin addict mother, Naus managed to rise from poverty to become a successful attorney. As this was happening, however, his sex addiction and alcoholism were increasingly controlling his life—causing him to cheat on girlfriends, visit massage parlors and eventually get a DUI. Then came the cataclysmic event that brought him to sobriety: the night when, in a black out, he tried to break into a massage parlor but instead broke into a guy's apartment, stripped naked (thinking he was in the massage parlor) and beat the guy up. He went to rehab and got sober but ended serving time (for attempted murder), was disbarred and has to register every year as a sex offender. Now over a decade sober, Naus chronicled this journey in his memoir, Straight Pepper Diet, and is at work on a second book. In this episode, we talk about the ways people respond when you write about them, how nicotine addiction is as intense as any other and why not to call your ex the minute you get sober to ask if if they want to edit your memoir, among other topics.

All sober addicts have their stories, some more severe than others. Well, it's safe to say that author and former attorney Joseph Naus checks all the boxes on the "most severe" scale. Born to a heroin addict mother, Naus managed to rise from poverty to become a successful attorney. As this was happening, however, his sex addiction and alcoholism were increasingly controlling his life—causing him to cheat on girlfriends, visit massage parlors and eventually get a DUI. Then came the cataclysmic event that brought him to sobriety: the night when, in a black out, he tried to break into a massage parlor but instead broke into a guy's apartment, stripped naked (thinking he was in the massage parlor) and beat the guy up. He went to rehab and got sober but ended serving time (for attempted murder), was disbarred and has to register every year as a sex offender. Now over a decade sober, Naus chronicled this journey in his memoir, Straight Pepper Diet, and is at work on a second book. In this episode, we talk about the ways people respond when you write about them, how nicotine addiction is as intense as any other and why not to call your ex the minute you get sober to ask if if they want to edit your memoir, among other topics.

If you're thinking about writing an authority building book, and I really hope you are, and you don't want to be counting pennies or checking your book sales all the time, you actually want a book that's going to change your life, I can tell you how. Just go to sevenfigurebooks.com. I'm not trying to capture your email or anything. You can just download this PDF that's going to tell you exactly how to turn an authority building book into revenue, speaking, authority, and no exaggeration, a whole new life. 

Author Jason Smith is not a writer who languished in obscurity for years as he tried to make sense of his journey through addiction to recovery. The Northern California based former teacher only started writing a mere year ago because he was on an ankle bracelet due to some legal trouble (more about that in a sec) and was trapped at home. He loaded some of his stories onto Medium (a fabulous site but one where most posts get lost and ignored) and the rest is history. People started reading them. Lots of people. A book deal followed and that book, The Bitter Taste of Dying, is now being hailed as one that leaves the reader "gasping for breath." While Smith's writing is undeniably gripping, he also had a lot of rich history to pull from: he went from trying pills in high school to losing his virginity to the hottest girl in his class that very day. And you could say he spent the next chunk of his life chasing that high, from continent to continent, job to job, high to high. In this episode (where we're joined by Danielle Stewart!), we discuss attractive sponsors, sex inventories and doing fentanyl in space, among many other topics.

Author Jason Smith is not a writer who languished in obscurity for years as he tried to make sense of his journey through addiction to recovery. The Northern California based former teacher only started writing a mere year ago because he was on an ankle bracelet due to some legal trouble (more about that in a sec) and was trapped at home. He loaded some of his stories onto Medium (a fabulous site but one where most posts get lost and ignored) and the rest is history. People started reading them. Lots of people. A book deal followed and that book, The Bitter Taste of Dying, is now being hailed as one that leaves the reader "gasping for breath." While Smith's writing is undeniably gripping, he also had a lot of rich history to pull from: he went from trying pills in high school to losing his virginity to the hottest girl in his class that very day. And you could say he spent the next chunk of his life chasing that high, from continent to continent, job to job, high to high. In this episode (where we're joined by Danielle Stewart!), we discuss attractive sponsors, sex inventories and doing fentanyl in space, among many other topics.

If you're thinking about writing an authority building book, and I really hope you are, and you don't want to be counting pennies or checking your book sales all the time, you actually want a book that's going to change your life, I can tell you how. Just go to sevenfigurebooks.com. I'm not trying to capture your email or anything. You can just download this PDF that's going to tell you exactly how to turn an authority building book into revenue, speaking, authority, and no exaggeration, a whole new life. 

Best-selling author and therapist Dr. Allen Berger is a wonder to behold. Not only is he nearly 45 years sober (though he looks no older than 45) and one of the more articulate dudes out there but he's written many of the classic books about recovery, including 12 Stupid Things That Mess Up Recovery, 12 Smart Things to Do When Booze and Drugs Are Gone and 12 Hidden Rewards of Making Amends. He also has made a series of audio recordings that analyze Bill Wilson's 1956 letter on emotional sobriety and videos while maintaining a very full private practice. But a million times more impressive than any of this is the guy's manner and way of articulating the nuances of addiction and recovery while opening up about the 60+ truances he had in school, shooting barbituates while in the navy and how losing his dad at an early age still causes him to choke up today. In this episode, we discuss the way he practices therapy (in particular his use of the shuttle technique), why procrastination is always about perfectionism and the ways he still doesn't support himself during his fourth decade of sobriety, among many other topics.

Best-selling author and therapist Dr. Allen Berger is a wonder to behold. Not only is he nearly 45 years sober (though he looks no older than 45) and one of the more articulate dudes out there but he's written many of the classic books about recovery, including 12 Stupid Things That Mess Up Recovery, 12 Smart Things to Do When Booze and Drugs Are Gone and 12 Hidden Rewards of Making Amends. He also has made a series of audio recordings that analyze Bill Wilson's 1956 letter on emotional sobriety and videos while maintaining a very full private practice. But a million times more impressive than any of this is the guy's manner and way of articulating the nuances of addiction and recovery while opening up about the 60+ truances he had in school, shooting barbituates while in the navy and how losing his dad at an early age still causes him to choke up today. In this episode, we discuss the way he practices therapy (in particular his use of the shuttle technique), why procrastination is always about perfectionism and the ways he still doesn't support himself during his fourth decade of sobriety, among many other topics.