Ken Cox| Sobriety & Success: A New Perspective

All great programs, wonderful programs. They help a lot of people in a lot of ways, and I probably wouldn't be here without them. But none of them talked about being happy or being strong in your sobriety, right? And that's really what I want to do because— and I don't know why, and I can't put my hand on it— it is challenging for a human to be at a happy hour and refuse alcohol in our society. This is The Chris Project, where we discuss mental wellness, self-awareness, and mindset with entrepreneurs experts. Set your perceived ideas and biases aside and let's go on our journey for yourself, for your family, for the world.

Welcome to another episode of The Chris Project. I am your host, Christian Brim. Joining me today is Ken Cox. Ken, welcome.

Thank you, Christian.

So for our listeners, why don't you give us your bona fides, a synopsis of your story to date?

Wow. Okay, so a little about me. Ken Cox. I guess I'm going by the title entrepreneur now. Good, I like that. I prefer business owner or operator.

Entrepreneur sounds too French.

Yeah. So what I do is I, I create projects and I, and I run them, and they either are successful or they're not, right? And they're successful, I keep doing it. When they're not, then I shut them down. I come from what I call a rough and tumble upbringing. And early in life, I was surrounded in a lot of pain, a lot of violence, a lot of drugs, a lot of sex, a lot of alcohol was kind of my upbringing. And that was just normalized in my life and then led to, you know, some, a lot of great times that I've had throughout my life. But then, you know, there's also been some very damaging things that that has done for me. Early in my career, you know, what's childhood, a lot of trouble, all the way until I was 18. Once I turned 18, I had some goals in my life, right? I found for a little while in my high school, we had a speech and debate club that also led you to our TV and radio club. Okay. And I fell in love with that, right? So once I found something that I liked to do, I still drank a lot, I still did drugs, but I was able to stay outta trouble because I had something I could focus on. Focused on that for years. In 1999, I left that world, the world of broadcasting and entertainment, stage management stuff like that. And I moved into IT. Okay. In the entertainment world, drugs and alcohol are prevalent just everywhere, just on the table, right? Went into corporate America, those are gone Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. But boy oh boy, do they pick up on happy hour. Yes. And where I succeeded very dramatically, and I think this is happening today still at a huge rate, and what I'd like to try to help some people with in this world is that a young man or woman— I don't know from the female perspective— is highly rewarded for their ability to do happy hours in a specific way that brings in lots of business, right? And, and the longer you can stay at happy hour, you know, if you could turn that into after hours, then, then you can close more business. And you're rewarded for damaging behavior to yourself, right? Yes. Damage the company brings company money. But if you can take 10 different clients out of 10 different happy hours in a week and close 5 of those deals, then it's a numbers game.

And was that your experience?

I mean, oh, absolutely. Yeah. And then some of my larger deals, right? Like, I've closed more deals at a bar than anywhere else in my life.

Yeah.

So by a significant amount.

What flipped that switch to say that's not working for you anymore?

I'm assuming it still would work fine for me financially, but, uh, originally when I was 39, late 30s, early 40s, I was diagnosed with liver disease, alcohol-related liver disease. We talking with the doctor, and that doctor's passed away now, but basically after a whole series of events where I thought I was going to die, ended up in the hospital thinking I was having a heart attack. It was withdrawal, basically. I was in the midst of withdrawal. I had just had strep throat, so I hadn't drank in a couple days. And I got called into work late at night and I went into work and just getting that just hit me like a ton of bricks. That put me in the hospital. Thought I was having a heart attack. I wasn't. The funny story is I was in the hospital, out of the emergency room, like, nothing wrong with your heart, right? But my blood pressure was 190 over 110, and it would drop down, it would shoot up, it was doing all this crazy stuff. So I'm in the doctor's office for hours and he's literally got me hooked up to the EKG machine for hours, right? Like, right. Track everything, what's going on, what's going on. And he had asked me a few times, do you still drink? Because I'd always been honest with my doctor, right? He asked me, you drink? I said, yeah. I said, how much? Same, 20-pack and a couple fists a day, probably, right? This is where I'm at. And it always kind of, you know, hey, you didn't knock that off. But this time he asked me like 3 times, he goes, you sure you're still drinking? I'm like, yeah, I'm still drinking. And it wasn't until he asked me the specific question, when was the last time you had a drink, right? Oh, well, I've had strep throat, so I've been dry. I'm not drinking 2 days, but I still drink.

Like, right, right.

You hadn't quit. So that was— I was doing withdrawal. So, and immediately ordered the liver panel, diagnosed with liver disease, and basically says, you can go home and start drinking right now. Go home and have a beer, and all these symptoms will go away, and you'll be dead in 2 years. You're months away from cirrhosis at this point. Uh, you don't have a cirrhosis now, so you've caught it. Luckily we're there, right? Um, but you're months away from it, and or we can quit, right? If we want to quit, then we'll, then we'll support you in any way that we can. The support was miserable. It was, you know, bricks of Xanax was the support that I got. So a couple years later, I got to go through Xanax withdrawals as well.

Yeah, thank you.

One gift. I guess that's a gift horse that I shouldn't look in the mouth. But what I found, what led to the book through that event, that was not when I be— I did not reclaim sobriety then. Like, I had to quit drinking Yes. Right. So I was on Xanax, a lot of Xanax. I hated life, right? I just did. Nothing was good. I couldn't find joy in anything that I did. And every single thing that I did just reminded me of this thing that I couldn't do, this relationship that I had that I can't have anymore. And it was miserable. But along that path, one of the things that I did is I started boxing.

Okay.

And I started going, not like competition boxing, but I started going and hitting the heavy bag as exercise. For most of my adult life, I'd been helping businesses grow their business, build their websites, do their back office, you know, whatever programming tasks that they need done. And I noticed this gym that I'm at isn't being run very well.

That's what entrepreneurs do. They see problems.

Yeah. So I reach out to the owner. I'm like, hey, what's going on with this? He tells me his story. I'm like, holy shit, that's horrible. I'm sorry that that happened to you. Right? So they had good intentions and things happened in their family that they couldn't execute. On. So we made a deal for me to buy the gym from him. Okay. Still searching, right? Still not happy. I'm going through the motions, right? I'm running the data center every day. I'm trying to grow that business. I've got the gym now and I'm there nightly. I don't really care if the gym grows at this point, right? Right. I, I just know if I don't have this, a boxing gym, that I'm gonna die. That's all I knew. Fast forward several years, I get the notice from my doctor that my liver counts are normal. No signs of liver disease at this moment, right? So I'll go, oh, that means I can drink again, right?

Really?

Really? So then we're negotiating, right? We're in this negotiation time frame, and I get him to say, if you think you can do it. And I'm like, dude, I just want to feel normal at a happy hour. I just want to feel normal at dinner.

Now, you were off the Xanax at that point?

Off the Xanax. I'm on some other mediation drug to help me with the withdrawals of Xanax. Right. So off of those, and he is like, if you can handle 1 or 2 beers every now and then, go, you can do that. That's not possible. Right. Right. Not for me at least. Right. So that led to another series of off and on attempting moderation. Right. Which then got pretty bad again in COVID. So post-COVID, right, right at the end of COVID we shut down that gym and we opened a new one. Down the street. Just business model wasn't going to work the way it was. We get— we found a new location. We got a great deal on the rent because, you know, everything was shut down. Yeah. And we opened it up. So I'm building this new gym, and these kids are knocking on my door every day. They see me building. What are you building? I'm like, building a boxing gym. You teach me to box? Nope, get out of here. This is— I'm building a gym for guys like me, right? This is what I'm thinking. Guys that are struggling, that need a place to go. That's what I'm building now. On my own terms. And they keep knocking, I keep shooing them away. Gym opens, really great, right? We have guys in there, we're doing stuff. Didn't realize that guys like me that have jobs, they get hit, they don't want to do it again, right? So very bad business. The new business model wasn't good, right? Months into that, I bring the kids in, like, come on in, right? Just, we'll figure something out. And these kids start flooding this business and they all want to compete. I did, uh, I won Golden Gloves St. Louis at some point, so I eventually converted from exercise into competition, right, through all that. So I started teaching these kids how to box, and I'm not a great boxer, right? So I got to hire somebody. I'm, I'm okay, right? So I got to hire somebody to come in, teach these kids. But what I do know is mindset, pretty much. And I knew that it's hard to get in the ring, really hard to get in the ring, and it's even harder to get in the ring and lose and then get in the ring again. That's really hard. So One of the things that I did, one of my coaches had a set of core values and that really helped me a lot. These core values that, you know, for my marketing class and stuff like that, maybe we'll implement that. So we took some time and developed a set of core values for these kids and we talked about these core values and we have all these stories and this program that we created over some years. And then our team, like these kids, like change drastically. I see it happen. Like you can see it happening.

When you say kids, how old are you talking about?

8 to 15. Okay. Mostly that 12 to 15. Okay. Bunch, right? And their confidence skyrockets and— Sure. You know, all these things. And then they can take a really tough loss and get back, right back to work like it's nothing. It was just amazing to me. And so that's a lot with the book is these 12 core values that we created for these kids to go from, you know, goofy teenager to I'm gonna compete in a ring in front of an audience half naked, and there's going only one of two outcomes. I'm either gonna win or I'm gonna lose, and it's gonna be embarrassing probably either way. So I found a ton of power in that, still not even realizing what it was doing for myself. Right, right. So I'm reading these core values to these kids every single day. Every day I'm reading them, and I'm like, we're reading them because they're part of— they're going to become a part of who you are. And couple of mishaps after COVID, I got in some trouble leaving. It wasn't even alcohol related the last time. The last drink that I had was not even— I got in trouble because I, I was coming home from Podfest in Orlando, driving home, and because my flight got canceled, there's some— actually, my— the plane that I had caught on fire, so I had to drive home.

You don't want to take that one.

That was to get there, so I drove and drove home. Going through Georgia, I got pulled over for a super speeder ticket in Georgia. And I am an advocate for medical cannabis and I'm a medical cannabis user and I use it specifically for anxiety and sleep. So high anxiety moments and sleep, that's what I use it for. So I had some in my, in my back, in my luggage. Regardless of what happened, I ended up going to jail in Georgia, um, in Taylor County, and they were holding me without bond. For 2 weeks until I got to my— until the judge showed up. So that wasn't good. Uh, I ended up getting out a little— I got out earlier than I was supposed to. We ended up posting a significant bail to get me out to guarantee that I would come back to Georgia for my trial. But that night when I left, I got to the gas station because I had to walk pretty far, about 5 miles, to the— to get my car. And I stopped at the gas station and I bought a beer. I bought two tall boys. Like, if I've ever deserved a beer, I deserve it now. And I took one drink, maybe two drinks of that first beer, and I just dumped them out. Like, this is not even who I am anymore. Like, and that was the moment that I knew that I was sober, and I was happy about it because I just experienced a wildly traumatic event, right? If you've ever been there—

no, you don't want to be in county anywhere.

No. And, uh Taylor County, Georgia was not a good one, but by any stretch of the imagination, um, it's the whole thing, right? And I dumped him out, and that moment I knew that it's not who I was anymore. And then I reflected on all— everything that I'd ever done, right? My, my AA— I did my first AA at 13. I'd been through Smart Recovery. I'm a huge fan of Smart Recovery, uh, Recovery Dharma. I'm a high flow coach, right, through the Cognitive Flow Coaching. I've taken neuro-linguistic programming courses. I've done all this stuff for these kids to figure out how to train them to do this breathing coach exercise. And I realized that some of the things that I was doing in all these programs were preventing me from living a happy life. They were helping me keep sober. But AA, if I'm saying I'm an alcoholic every day, I'm an alcoholic. And in SMART Recovery, if I say moderation's okay, then moderation's okay, right? So I didn't have— there wasn't a program that was built for me. Maybe Recovery Dharma, right? There is suffering in the world. There's an escape from suffering. But that was about it. So all great programs, wonderful programs. They help a lot of people in a lot of ways, and I probably wouldn't be here without them. But none of them talked about being happy or being strong in your sobriety. Right. And that's really what I wanted to do because for some— and I don't know why, and I can't put my hand on it— it is challenging for a human to be at a happy hour and refuse alcohol in our society.

Yes, yes.

And you have to be strong about it.

Yes, alcohol is a very— not just socially acceptable drug, it's, it's an— as to your point, it's encouraged. I never really understood where the whole, like how did they get everybody in the country in agreement enough to pass prohibition as a constitutional amendment? Like I still don't, I need to research it, but—

I have a theory on that. Well, good, let's hear it. It wasn't for consumption. It was because the petrol oil companies didn't want individuals making their own fuel for their cars. Interesting. I have never heard that angle. Okay, so, you know, back then when Prohibition was there, you could run your, your Model T off of, you know, off of stuff that you made out of your corn in your backyard.

Well, that makes sense. That actually makes sense, because from a morality standpoint or, or a health standpoint, I can't see getting that much consensus.

Yes.

But any case, I think you're right. It is, it is socially acceptable, socially encouraged. And for some people, which I, I think that entrepreneurs have a tendency to have addictive personalities, you're playing with fire because at some point you're going to lose control. And for me, I have— let's see of my parents and my siblings, I think I may be the only one that still consumes alcohol. Everybody else is sober. My next youngest brother just got sober about 5 months ago, and he was in a situation more like you, like had declining liver health, and it was really for health reasons that he made that choice, but to your point, nothing fundamentally changed about him. And, and not that I would say that someone goes through that and has to change, but I'd always heard that phrase, you know, a dry drunk. You know, I understood it as someone that didn't drink alcohol but was still an asshole, like someone that was still angry, still mad, you know. And I think it's very hard in life to forego something, anything, it could be ice cream, it doesn't matter, without having something to replace it with, right? Something that gives you similar feelings. You can't just take it away because then there's just a hole. And that's how you perceive it. But what I was going to say about my alcohol use is I feel like I am playing with fire because I've seen, I've seen everybody around me. I have done some real stupid shit when I was drinking. I don't drink as much as I used to because I don't like the feeling as much anymore, and I really don't like the recovery from the feeling. So that's what's tempered my drinking. But I, I also know that every amount of alcohol that I put in my body lowers my cognitive ability to control the compulsion.

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You only get a high off of alcohol if your blood alcohol content is increasing. So it's not like you can have a couple of drinks and just stay there and get the same feeling. You, you got to keep drinking to keep feeling that way. Does scare me a little, like, am I going to cross that line again? I've not done anything criminal. Well, maybe misdemeanor. I haven't done anything criminal or something that I'd really regret, like, you know, cheating on my spouse or something like that. You know, I've set a standard for myself that I don't want to behave like that. I don't want to be the the idiot. And that's something that I'm struggling with.

Yeah, it's challenging, right? And I guess some— a way to say it is we've all been to wedding receptions and had a blast. Well, it's kind of hard to dance sober.

I can't. My wife sure can't, right?

You can't do it. I don't think any of us can do it good because it's not our career, but you at least think you can when you're drunk, right?

And you don't—

you don't care. You don't— yeah, right. So I think learning how to do that sober is a challenge for a lot of people, right? And that's really what you want. You want that amazing night that you've had, that you've experienced, and alcohol can give it to you, you know, at noon on a Tuesday if you want it to, right?

Right. So how did alcohol affect your business?

It's an odd one, and I think a lot of business owners might be in this world, right? Or entrepreneurs, even sales reps at companies, right? So nobody knew, like it was, nobody knew I had a problem, or at least they didn't vocalize that I had a problem because taking a client out for lunch at noon and having a couple beers is no big deal, right? That's expected. So for a long, nobody knew who I was without alcohol, right? The only time if somebody would say, I think I might, you know, ask me if I was feeling okay that day, So if I hadn't had a drink that day, right, right. So that's just the world that I lived in. And I was a highly functioning alcoholic. Like, I'm not exaggerating. To, you know, 20-pack and 1 or 2 fifths a day was—

that just blows my mind.

Pretty regular.

You're not exaggerating?

No, I'm not exaggerating. You know, because you go to lunch and you have, you know, 2 or 3 tall boys with, with the guys there, and that— I mean, that's That's 9 beers, 9 12-ounce beers, right? So, and then sit at home, and I, you know, I like to program, I like to write, I like to create, I like to do those kinds of things. Sitting there with a fifth of Crown, I mean, every day it was 10 beers and a fifth. That was, that was about the minimum of a day. And then, you know, the, the better, the bigger days would be, uh, would be more. So if we're going out to a party or something like that after work, then yeah, that would be definitely definitely significant amount more.

Well, then I can understand why your liver was screaming at you.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I lost my medical insurance over this, right? In the, in the midst of Obamacare, my medical coverage said, nope, we're pulling you, you're not gonna— we're not gonna cover this.

So did you have any other physical symptoms besides the withdrawal? I mean, like, you didn't know that you had liver problems?

It did not. Well, uh, I knew that I had Unfortunately for me, when I was 20, I got hit by an 18-wheeler. So I've had some pretty significant medical issues through that. In that accident, I've got some fused vertebrae in my lower back. So any back pain that I had, I contributed to that. I didn't contribute it to my liver. Got it. So now knowing what a toxic liver feels like, absolutely was the liver pain. Like, it was, it was significant whenever the flare-up would happen or something like that. Um, it's, you know, almost where you can't walk, you know. My nose was turning colors, right? You know, I had that kind of thing starting to happen in my life. You know, I had, I had alcohol poisoning a couple of times, so, you know, I've had, uh, you know, wake up and have to go get an IV to kind of get the pinkish and the purplish out of my skin, right, kind of deal. But yeah, I guess if I say it that way, yeah, I did have some medical issues before. Okay. I didn't recognize them as associated to the alcohol. I could associate it to something else so easily that, that I just blew it off to, that's life.

Do you attribute any of your, your success to somebody else? Because I, I feel like that this would be almost impossible to do without help.

You know, I use the joke occasionally, and it's not probably not a very well-formed joke by any stretch of the imagination. People ask me, what do you think about getting a coach or getting a mentor? And I say, oh yeah, everybody needs coaches and mentors. But the trick that I use is you don't have to tell them that they're your mentor, right? You don't have to have an agreement with anybody, right? So I can't say I had a person. I know that the kids in my gym and the people in my gym and my wife and kids are a reason They gave me energy to keep going and stay there. I would say the biggest thing that helped me would be the neurolinguistic programming, talk, my self-talk, how I talk to myself and how I feel about myself. It was huge, coupled with EMDR, were the two things that are external. And I talk a little bit about them in the book. I don't know that everybody needs something like EMDR. I think everybody's gonna need therapy.

What EMDR is, is an acronym for what?

It's, uh, Eye Desensitization Trauma Reprogramming, or reprogramming your mind. So reprogramming or reprocessing. So you, you go through this process of eye movement. You, you take a narrative or a thing that's happened in your life and you want to reframe that. You go through this and then you You talk about reframing it with, with alcohol and other drugs, um, or even what I found is even risky behavior, right, can be triggers from past trauma and things like that. So we just haven't processed the things that have happened to us. We— things happen and we blow them off, or we stand strong for our loved ones, or we take a drink or do our drug, and then we don't have to actually sit through the emotions of that happening. So we don't process it properly, and EMDR lets us reprocess all of those things.

Did you use a professional therapist or a psychiatrist?

I did. Okay. I've been in therapy since the age of 7. I had a pretty violent outbreak at the age of 7.

Meaning you suffered abuse or someone else in the, in the home?

So I started, um, I guess I had an existential crisis. I, at 7 years old, I made the decision that I'll never be a victim again. And anything that tried to victimize me— I just remained a victim to alcohol and drugs for a very long time, but I developed a very aggressive attack towards anything that I felt might try to victimize me. Okay. And, and if something— and I felt like, you know, name-calling and stuff like that, I was quick to, quick to be violent because I learned that violence stops almost all situations.

Yeah. When you were going through this final process of getting sober, and since you've, you know, been in therapy since '07, I find so much of my experience and my loved ones' experience is just like you said, the avoidance of feelings, you know, negative feelings, and It sounds simple, but, you know, we create all kinds of mechanisms and coping measures to avoid it. Was there something different that last time?

For the first time, I went through a different kind of therapy. For the first time in my life, I was experiencing self-love. The first time in my life, I had a set of core— now, I've always had a set of core values. And I'll be happy to tell you what my original core values were prior to developing.

You probably didn't write those down and put them up on the wall.

And, you know, I would joke, and I always use them as a joke, right? Like, don't get dead and don't go to prison, right? Which meant that I could do anything up to getting dead, and I could do anything that meant all the way up to get it going to prison. So a night in jail to me wasn't a big deal.

How did you get married?

I mean, she was a party girl when we met. Okay, right. So I can't believe her father didn't try to kill me. I was working at a bar and she was working at the bar down, down the hall, the next, the neighboring bar. Yeah, I was bartending at night. I got in some financial trouble, so I picked up a bartending job for a couple of years. And because that's always an easy way to make some extra cash. And she worked at the bar down the hall from me. And, you know, we met and we, we drank quite a bit. When she got pregnant, about 2 years after we met. Then she stopped and I didn't.

How did that work out?

Horribly. Like, on the surface it was fine. You know, there's the whole time where you're like, oh, you slow down in life, right? And you're at home instead of leaving work and going to the bar. I'd leave work and get a 20-pack and go home. I'd still have my lunch with people and I'd still go to happy hours. And in the early days, you know, it was, oh, I'd be home by 10, but then it was always stretching to 11 and I was blessed at, uh, turning happy hours into after hours and then just going straight back, you know, hitting the— either running home and taking a shower, hitting the Y, taking a shower, and hitting the— getting back to the office, right? That was something that I was capable of doing. And evidently, for some people, alcohol energizes you, and I, I guess I'm one of those people, right? Because I could just run unbelievable amount of hours just back to back without even thinking about it. So it wasn't good. I would say she was in way over her head and didn't know it, but we had two wonderful kids together, and there was always the ability to keep the bills paid, food on the table. And I mean, basically she was single for a long time, right? Because, yeah, I just wouldn't come home. I'd get home at 2 or 3 in the morning, right? But I would always muster it up, and family events were always drinking anyway. Right? So it just fell into the norm.

How old are your kids?

13 and 17. And my son is— to add to the challenge, my son's 13, he's nonverbal. So that, that adds to all the challenge that we have in our life. And quite frankly, she was focused on raising him, right, for a lot of that.

I want to circle back to your answer. So, because I don't, I don't know that I heard the complete answer, what was the difference this last time?

Self-love, self-respect, and a set of core values that I had instilled into myself that when those core values were conflicted, that it felt— it was uncomfortable, right? So knowing that I have respect for myself, how could you poison yourself? It just doesn't work.

The difference then is that you replaced the old values before when you quit drinking. You didn't replace the old values.

And I was, and I was doing it in protest, right? And when I quit drinking, it was— anytime that I quit drinking prior to the last time, it was court-ordered, doctor-ordered, or wife-ordered, right? Right. And I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to quit drinking. I didn't want to have to do it. In my mind, and I've said this a bunch of times, alcohol for me, from the age of 5, 6, 7 years old was the thing that I could do that made me a man in my head, right? Um, and gave me comfort. It took whatever thing that was going on bad in my life and made it go away. So that was my best friend. Yeah.

And I think that example that you, you say, you, you had something you cared enough about to stop drinking but you didn't really want to do it for yourself. I think, I think that's a key, because if you, you hear all the time, well, if an addict doesn't want to help, you can't help them. Sometimes you can manipulate, cajole, force a change in behavior, but it doesn't stick because the, the desire isn't here that you want it. And that's a, that's a difficult thing that I have found in, in my journey, that when something's not right, you don't like the situation, as an entrepreneur you want to change it, you want to fix it, right? But if, if the person that you're trying to help doesn't want help, doesn't see that there is a problem, then there's nothing really you can do but love and support them. But that's a sad place to be because, you know, you, you love somebody, you know, your kids, your, your spouse, your sibling, whatever, that's a dark place to be because, you know, what do you do?

And it's weird, you say dark place to be, and it's literally— it's so bizarre that your life, literally your vision seems brighter when you're on the other side of that. Like, yeah, my memories are literally physically darker than they were. Yeah, than they are now.

Well, Ken, how do we find a copy of your book when it does release?

So right now, between now and November 19th— and I'm not sure when this episode is going to release— if you go to reclaimsoberety.com, you can download a free copy. The only thing that I ask is if you read it and you like it, give me a review when it comes out publicly. November 19th, that offer goes away, and it will be available on Amazon and anywhere else that I can get it on the shelves. Love it. So again, you'll be able to get it still at Reclaim Sobriety. It just won't be free any longer at that point. But there's Uh, we have all the versions. We've got a hard copy, soft copy, and we got the ebook coming out. I am currently working on trying to figure out how to get the Audible version done.

Hire somebody, don't do it yourself. I can tell you that I didn't try, but after looking at what, what was involved, I'm like, I'm glad I didn't try this myself.

Yeah, so that's where I'm at with the process. Super excited. The, the reviews that I have, um, are phenomenal. I could not be happier. And, you know, it took, um, I've been writing for a long time. That therapist at the age of 7, one of the first things she had me do was start writing every day. So this is my first— I've got a book with Kevin Harrington from Shark Tank that came out last month called Mini Paths to Profit. This is my first, like, totally my project that I'm releasing to the world that's personal in any kind of way. And, and this is, this is wildly personal.

Well, congratulations. Very interesting. Thank you for sharing it with us and the world. It needs to be there. So thank you again for your time and your candor. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Christian. I appreciate you having me.

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