Bob Martin: From Mafia Lawyer to Bestselling Author

In this CJ Moneyway Show episode, 74‑year‑old Bob Martin shares his remarkable life journey. He recounts growing up as the son of an Eastern‑European refugee and a Roma mother, his early work in a carnival business, and his rise to become a Miami‑Dade prosecutor under Janet Reno during the “cocaine‑cowboys” era. After a lucrative transition, he defended organized‑crime figures from Colombian, Haitian, Cuban, and Italian syndicates, describing vivid cases such as the Buzzy pilot who smuggled cocaine to Homestead Air Force Base and inadvertently funded the Contras. Martin explains how a therapist introduced him to the I Ching and Taoist master Hua Ching Ni, leading to eight years of study on “going with the flow” and the 64‑hexagram system. He details his turn to meditation, CBT, and mindfulness, crediting them with weight loss, emotional regulation, and recovery from substance abuse. Martin also discusses his book I Am the Way, a Christian devotional that blends Taoist wisdom with biblical teachings, and promotes his free 45‑page meditation ebook. The conversation ends with three personal maxims—“you’re not your thoughts,” “be happy,” and a quirky dog anecdote—plus a preview of upcoming true‑crime storytelling projects set in the American South. Throughout, the host intersperses sponsor messages and encourages listeners to request the ebook or purchase the book.
Chapters
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Welcome to the CJ Moneyway Show podcast, the podcast show where we unlock potential one dream at a time. Today we have another guest whose journey is truly worth hearing. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the Moneyway experience.
What's up, my good people? Welcome to the CJ Moneyway Show. Today I have on the show criminal trial lawyer, meditation teacher, and I'mma leave the other part when we talk about this, about Miami cocaine cowboys. But hey, I got my man Bob Martin on the line today. How you doing, Bob?
Hey, CJ, thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. I appreciate it. And let me just say the first thing, let me just say thank you for creating a platform like this where people like me can come on and tell their stories and maybe make a difference in other people's lives. So I want to thank you for the work because it's not a little bit of work that you do to make this happen. So I appreciate it.
Thank you for coming on, man, taking the time out today while you're out there in beautiful Costa Rica right now, you know, enjoying the Enjoying the ocean, enjoying the good sun, man. Appreciate you coming on today. So Bob, tell us a little bit about yourself and about your background.
Wow. Well, I'll start off with the fact that I'm 74, and I guess one of the most important things I could say about me is I'm 74 years old and I'm happy, and I don't have a lot of regrets. I got a woman who loves me. I got two kids who I got a good relationship with, and I got a couple of dogs who are my best friends. And so, you know, you can't ask for more than that. But I started out in a family that, well, my dad was an Eastern European refugee. He left Hungary when the Bolshevik communists came in and invaded Hungary back at the time of the First World War. And he immigrated to this country and all his family was Hungarian royalty and they all just got wiped out. My mom's family was Roma gypsy and they all got wiped out. And so they came up and really came up and figured that there couldn't be much of a God that would allow that kind of things to happen. So I grew up in a family that wasn't atheist, but we were just non-theist. We just didn't have a religious conversation going on in our family. We were in the amusement park business and carnival business. We had the popcorn and caramel corn and caramel apples. You know that trailer? That was our trailer. That was our trailer. Okay. And so that's what I grew up in. And so a lot of strange and odd things, maybe we can get into some of them in the podcast, but I wound up being a lawyer. And I got a job with Janet Reno, and some of your listeners might be old enough to remember that name. She was the Attorney General under the Clinton administration. But she was also the DA of Miami-Dade County. If you ever seen that movie Scarface, Al Pacino, those were the days, those were the days of the cocaine cowboys. And those are the days that I, that I was in Miami as a DA. And it was crazy, man. I'll tell you, it really was just like Miami Vice. It was just like that. Oh, yeah. And oh, yeah. So we wound up having a big case with the feds against the mob. And when I say the mob in Miami, the mob was the Colombians and the Haitians and the Cubans and the Italians, and of course the Colombians. So they all kind of at a certain level, they all talk to each other. But anyway, we hit them up for a bunch of money. And then I left that office and they came a couple of weeks later, the guy, I call him Johnny, came to see me. And he goes, You know, you gotta be pretty good to get us for that much. He says, would you mind if I sent you some clients? And so I went from being a DA to a mob lawyer in one fell swoop and spent a few years doing that.
So the money was too good to pass up.
No, the money was good. I had my house paid off. I graduated law school in 1977. And by 19— '84, I had my house paid off.
Wow.
So yeah, the money was good.
So let me ask you one more question on that. So I've watched the movie Cocaine Cowboys. I watched that documentary many times. It was just another movie that came out on Netflix not too long ago about the Queen. And so I guess my question is, was it really like what the movies and the documentaries portray?
Even more so.
Hmm.
I'll tell you about one quick little story. Okay.
Okay.
So I had a client, his name was Buzzy as his nickname. Buzzy was an old pioneer Miami family. His family came down with the original pioneers on the Flagler Railroad. And they lived out on the same island where Al Capone had his house. Not that they had anything to do with Al Capone. But anyway, Buzzy was a real strange fella, and he had a boat. And what he used to do for a hobby, see, because when the boats would leave Colombia, they would come through the Florida Straits, and if the Coast Guard pulled them over, they dump all the cocaine overboard. And it was packed up in these waterproof fiberglass kilo bricks. And these bricks would float in, they would get caught up in the mangroves down in South Florida. So for a hobby, just as a hobby, but he didn't even use it as a hobby. He used to put on his snake boots and go trucking down for what he called was square grouper. And he picked up a couple of these kilos, he'd come up and he'd just sell them to some street person, you know, for a few thousand bucks. Right then at that point, a kilo was going for $56,000. Wow. And he would sell it for like $5,000. And It wasn't bad. He was just like, yeah, that's how we went hunting. He gets popped on the way back for 2 kilos, which is a mandatory 15-year federal sentence for trafficking. And so I'm representing him on this, right? So normally what you do when you get a case like that, and he's looking at 15 years, the only way to get out of that case is to see if he can turn in somebody that was above him. Now, I asked him, he said, I don't know anybody. I don't have any dealers. I don't deal with anybody. This is what I do. But one day he said, I kept asking him, in there, anything in there, anything you got? Finally, one day he says, well, I tell you what, I do have this. Now, the guy was a pilot. He says, every month I go down and I fly into Peru. And they had the rainforest was cut like this. So you, the satellites couldn't see the labs underneath. And he would have to take off and bank his plane out and then bank it back underneath and then fly out from underneath.
Wow.
And he would fly a plane full of cocaine into Miami. I mean, a full pack solid. And he would land it at Homestead Air Force Base. Homestead Air Force Base. He would be met there by a bunch of olive green trucks run by Ollie North, who was Reagan's— Yeah, something or other.
Yeah, I remember that case.
You remember all that and remember that it was ransom for money and that the government had made it illegal to support the Contras who were fighting in Nicaragua against the communist government. But Ollie North and his folks, they wanted to supply them with arms. So what they made a deal with is they made a deal with the Colombians that they would be paid $5,000 for every kilo that was brought in safely.
Mm-hmm.
And they would use that money to buy small arms and then fly them back down to the Nicaraguan Contras. So my guy Buzzy was a pilot, and he was actually flying cocaine into the United States, landing it at an Air Force base, turning it over to the federal government so that they could turn it over to the Colombians and get paid for it so that they could finance these guns, which were illegal to ship down to Nicaragua. So I said to him, yeah, Buzzy, that's, that's something. Yeah, that's something we can use. So I went and I told the US Attorney about it. And he set me up with a congressional hearing testimony, flew us up to Washington, we waited all day. They said, go home, we'll bring you back in a month. Came up a second month, they said, go home, we'll bring you back in a month. The third time we went up there, we went down, there was nothing going on in this secret room in the bowels of the Capitol. There's nothing going on. We're asking, where's this hearing? Everybody's going, what hearing? What hearing? We get back to Miami and I go see the U.S. attorney and I said, what's going on with Buzzy's case? And he goes, Buzzy who?
Mm. Yeah.
And nobody had ever heard of Buzzy before that. The case was dropped. It was gone. Anything else. So if you are in a time when the government is taking money from the Colombians for safe passage through for cocaine, while Nancy Reagan is up there saying, just say no, no, just say no.
Yeah.
So if you don't call that crazy, I don't think what— and they made a movie out of it. They made a movie out of it. So yeah, it was nuts.
Yeah, I just seen a documentary not too long ago about that era, you know, uh, the Reagan era. I think it had— it was really about Sugar Ray Leonard, but that was intertwining it with the crack era and how the people was going to jail. And like you say, Nancy Reagan got up there and say, just say no to drugs. Yeah, I remember that, uh, Oliver North trial back in the '80s. Yeah, that was a big thing, man. It's amazing that, you know, here I am today talking to somebody that was actually a part of that, man. That's pretty cool.
And they made a movie with, I think it's Tom Cruise, American something. He was one of the other pilots that was flying this stuff in. Yeah. So nobody believed me for all these years till that movie came out.
Yeah.
Then I said, see, I told you I wasn't kidding. I was really—
That's cool, man. Yeah, that's cool. I mean, because the documentaries and everything is just so real. You know, I watched Cocaine Cowboys. Probably like 50 times, and I would watch it again if it come on. But yeah, man, that was cool. So tell us, Bob, sticking to being a lawyer, what entails being a trial lawyer? The things that we may not know that you may do to try to get your client off.
Well, let me start off by saying Kamala, who we've all come to know much better, she was a district attorney. She was a prosecutor. And the people have said a lot of things about her, but what they said that as a lawyer that I heard that tells me that she's sharp is because the people that worked with her said her strength is cross-examination. Now, that might not mean much to other folks, but to a lawyer to hear that is— almost any lawyer can get up there and put on a case. They can, you know, call the next witness and put on their evidence and figure that out. But to be able to cross-examine somebody and to do it effectively, you got to be strategic, and you got to be thinking, and you got to hear, and you got to think on your feet. And you got to be good. Now, most attorneys can, you know, they can cross-examine. But for people to say that that's your strength, that means you're good. You're really good. No, to answer your question, though, a lot of people, the biggest question they have, especially about criminal defense attorneys, is how can you represent those people?
Yeah.
Especially when you're talking about a child abuser, or somebody's guilty of incestuous rape of a 7-year-old. You know, I mean, there's some pretty disgusting stuff that goes out there. And people say, how can you represent them? And the answer is this. That the police and the— and I've been on both sides, so I can say that the police and the prosecution, they enforce the law. If you break the law, they will come after you and arrest you and they will prosecute you. The defense attorneys, we enforce the Constitution. Okay, we prosecute the prosecutors. We prosecute the police. Not that we say they're bad people. But if you want to go and get my guy and put him in jail for 12 years, I'm going to make sure that you dot the i's and you cross your t's and you do it by the book. Because the moment you start taking shortcuts, then all of a sudden, people start getting profiled, people start getting arrested, innocent people start getting— you put anybody in a police station for 24 36 hours questioning them, and they're gonna confess. And then that confession takes them to jail. I ain't happening when I'm here. Yeah, I'm gonna cross-examine you. I'm gonna make sure I'm gonna look at the records, I'm gonna see what happened. So the defense attorneys are the only group of people that stand in between the government and the police power of the government and you and me and everybody else that's walking the streets. So we're the only thing that stands in between. So I guess the answer to the question is, I don't always do it for the dirtbag. I do it for freedom, justice. I make sure that the justice system stays just. That's my job. That's my job. And so you can overlook a lot of disgusting activity when you know that your eye is on keeping the Constitution in front of the judge.
Yeah, that's a pretty good way. Like you said, you don't do it for— because I'm pretty sure you had some major cases. Like you say, I know when you was defending mobsters that you probably caught a lot of backlash too. Like, how can you defend these people that's doing this and that? But hearing how you say why you do it, it makes a lot of sense. So let's turn the page a little bit.
Okay, sure.
Tell us about your studying under a 72nd generation master, man. What's that about?
So you can imagine in those days, you know, it was the discotheque days. Those were the days of John Travolta. Yeah, yeah, you know, that stuff. So there were a lot of chrome and glass discotheques, and my clients, they always wanted to take me out and I'll confess that, you know, there might have been a couple of little white squiggly lines on the glass-top tables that weren't there after I got there. And I was doing some stuff that I shouldn't have been. And I'm going to tell you, when you do that stuff, I'll just be straight up with it. When you do cocaine, it affects the way that you think. Not just when you're using it, but generally overall, you start to become real arrogant. And you think you're invulnerable and everything you do is going to turn to gold. And you just get into that frame of mind. And I did. And I thought I was going to start a business that was going to make me a billion dollars and my— I wouldn't take any guff from anybody in my family. And I wasn't the best dad and I wasn't the best husband. Somehow, I was always able to keep my legal going and my law practice and My deal with my clients was always, there's nothing illegal and there's nothing unethical, because your best interest is served by me being respected by the courts. If I'm respected by the courts, that's going to serve you better. So, but anyway, things were going down. So I was seeing a therapist. And, you know, I was talking about a lot of stuff. And one day, that business that was going to make me the money, all the billions of dollars, It was going down the tubes because I was going down the tubes.
Yeah.
And you don't take care of what's inside, what's outside falls apart. And I went to my therapist and I said, should I do this? Or should I do that? Should I continue trying to push this thing and make this thing happen? Or should I back up? And he pulled out some coins. I'm paying the guy now for those days, $65 an hour was a lot of money. I'm throwing these coins on the table and he's figuring out some numerical stuff and drawing some lines on paper and comes up with the number. I think it was 62. He gets this big old book and he turns to chapter 62 and he shows it to me. Steam is coming out of my ears at this point, you know?
Yeah.
And it says Retreat, the name of the chapter, Retreat. So I cursed him out. And I stomped out of there because I was paid him $65 an hour to throw coins with my life. He's telling me what to do with my life, and he's throwing coins. And but I thought about it. And it was really the only answer. So I went to the business and I walked in the door and I told the staff, I'm sorry, this is your last day. I'm out of money. I'm sorry, it's over. I closed it down. And I didn't have to refinance my house. And I put myself back together.. And I had a lot of debt to pay off, but I was able to do it. I hadn't lost my reputation. I was that close. I was that close. One more step and it would have all been gone. Mm-hmm. One more step, you know, because you can spend your whole life building your reputation up.
Yeah.
And lose it all in one second.
Mm-hmm.
And I was that close. And so I went back to him after a while with my tail between my legs. I said, whoa, what was that? And he says, well, that was the I Ching, the I Ching. I said, what's the I Ching? He says, it's the book of changes. What changes? Well, you know, everything changes. Days turn to night and night turns to day and the universe goes round and everything. I said, where do you get all that from? He goes, it's called Taoism. What's that? Finally, it turns out that my therapist was the English language editor for this Master Hua Ching Ni, who was a 72nd generation. I mean, think about this. His teaching was handed down from father to son for 72 generations.
Wow.
At the Shaolin Temple, you know, that's the kung fu, tai chi, that temple. Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee. That, all that stuff. And the philosophy behind it is pull back when the force is greater until that force diminishes and your force builds up and then move forward. And that's why you see that tai chi is always that back and forward. And it teaches you how to go with the flow in a way that makes a lot of sense. Like, CJ, I'm sure that you've been in moments when Nobody's listening to you. Oh, you got a great idea and nobody wants to listen to you, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
So most of us would push harder then, try to make them listen. We would say, wait, wait, you gotta listen. But the I Ching would tell you, no, you're in a time, you're not going with the flow. The flow is going against you then. So fall back, shut up, be quiet. Nobody's listening. To you and think about what you're going to say when they turn to you and ask you what you have to say, because they will. There will come a time when they'll say, well, Bob, what do you have to say about it? And when they ask you, you should be ready.
Okay.
And so the I Ching teaches you how to go with the flow, recognize when things are going against you, conserve your energy, build up. And when things turn around, they go with you. Swim like heck. And if you can live life that way, kind of feeling that way, what's going— you know, this is a time for waiting. This is a time.
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Time for retreat. This was a time for retreat. And so for 8 years, Master Ni and George taught me how to go with the flow. And what Master Ni says is learning how to go with the flow means gaining mastery over life.
Man, that deep right there, Bob.
That deep.
See, Because like you said, you know, one of the things that you said, when things are against you, you know, when people are against you and not trying to listen to what you're trying to say, as if what you're saying is irrelevant, then you just have to just go with the flow. Just let it be, retreat. I like that. That's something that you think about it, and I guess sometimes you may do that, but the way that you just put it, it makes more sense now. You know what I'm saying? It could be in your subconscious, but now that you done put it out there, Now it's like, okay, that's what this is. Just go with it. You know what I'm saying? Like, leave it alone and do what you have to do. And like you said, when they come to you, because they will come and ask you questions about, you know, your podcast, ask you questions about your book, and when they do come, be ready and just go with the flow. I like that. I like that a whole lot, man.
Don't miss out on CJ Moneyway's book, Both Eyes Open and Both Eyes Shut, and get ready to pre-order his upcoming release, The Issues of Life, coming soon. Moneyway, aiming to inspire. And the trap that's in there, of course, is when you say go with the flow, a lot of people think of getting on an inner tube and floating down a nice creek, you know, in a sweet summer day with the wind breeze and every It's not always like that. There are rocks, you know, and you don't want to become disinflated. You don't want to run aground. And then sometimes, you know, you could be fooled by thinking, well, this is a time to retreat, but maybe it's really a time to punch through. Maybe it's a time when you got to say, no, listen to me. Maybe you got to raise your voice and get their attention. There's those times too. So what the I Ching teaches you is it actually cuts life up into 64 different pie slices.
Wow.
And teaches you that there are 64 different flows. And in those flows, there are 6 subflows. So it's not something that you learn overnight. But if you practice it every day, and it's only 10 minutes a day, to do the practice. But if you practice it over a few months, all of a sudden you start to own it and you immediately can recognize, is this a time of calculated waiting? Is this a time of punching through? Is this a time of retreat? But you get to feel the details of what that actually feels like. And then the only trick is to align yourself with it so that you're appropriate. For the time. And you know, you've met those folks who just always seem to be appropriate for the time. People say things, it would piss you off. They always seem to come back with just the right thing.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like they're almost born with it. Those are the people that I look up at and say, masters. Those are masters.
Man, that's cool. No wonder it took you 8 years there. Now that you said '64, different flows. And then you have, as I would say, like 6 bulletin points under the 64. So, you know, so I can't figure the math out right now, but that's a whole lot, you know, of different ways and different things that you have to maneuver. So yeah, that was pretty cool. So Bob, tell me, so with that, is that the book that was written over 2,500 years ago, or is that something totally different?
Yeah, no, that's the book that was written 2,500 years ago. Well, there's a couple of them. I mean, there are a couple of them. The wisdom of Taoism is kept in a book that was written about 2,500 years ago. It's called the Tao Te Ching, which means the classical book of the way of virtue. Tao means here Taoism. It means the way. And te means virtue, and ching is a classical book. So the Tao Te Ching is the classical book of the way of virtue. And my wife, she is a Bible literalist Southern Baptist, right? So she believes in the Bible literally. And I'm coming from being a Taoist Buddhist. So, you know, how did we ever have a conversation? Yeah, right. But if you look at what Jesus taught, Okay. And, you know, it's funny, you look at a lot of people that have bad feelings about Christianity. And they don't like to even say Jesus Christ or talk about that and the like. But Jesus came and basically what he did was, he basically said, you guys have all been living with a PC, you've been working on a PC and your whole culture is a PC. And I'm going to introduce you to a Mac.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I'm going to show you a new operating system. Okay. And basically, you know, if you get away from the institution of the religion and the dogma of religion, you get away from all that exclusivity, my highway or the highway, you get away from all that. You just look at what the man taught. It's really weird stuff. Like love your enemy.
Yeah.
Like forgive 7 times 70.
Yeah. Or in the Book of James, what complex me one time when I read, he said, consider it all joy when you go through many trials and tribulations. I'm like, wait a minute, consider it all joy? But then as you say, as you read it, you know, you go on. And I mean to cut you off, but as we go into that, tell us about your book, I Am the Way.
Right, right. So what happened was I took this 2,500-year-old book. Well, Connie, my wife, like, it was funny because she would go off to church on Sundays and she'd have these really sad eyes. One time I said to her, honey, why are you sad? And she said, well, you know, I love you so much. I just hate it. You're not going to go to heaven with me. Because in her belief system, I had to be saved. And I would say to her, well, I hate it that you're not going to be reincarnated with me. She'd slap me. But when she would tell me what the sermons were about, I would say, well, that's just like Chapter 32 of the Tao Te Ching. So I started taking little pieces of that 2,500-year-old book, and I started asking, what does the Bible say about this? And it would always take me to a teaching of Jesus. And so I started saying, okay, well, honey, when you say, let me just put it to you in these terms. For example, Lao Tzu, he writes about leadership. He says, you should never strive for leadership. It should be something that you are called to. And if you remember, Jesus says, I go where I am called. And Lao Tzu says, when your work is done, you should step down, because it's the work that's important, not you. And when Jesus was done with his work, what did he do? He ascended, and he allowed the others to carry on the work, and thus his work became eternal. So the way that Lao Tzu saw the world and the workings of how this wonderful creature called human works. Jesus was teaching the same thing. So I just started taking little pieces of the old book, the Tao Te Ching, and translating it into Christian language and Christian terminology.
Okay.
So it wound up as a Christian devotional. And my wife read it and she said, you know, A lot of preachers have told me what's right and what's wrong, and what I should do and what I shouldn't do. And they told me that I gotta tithe, and they told me a lot of stuff. But there's no preacher has ever taught me who Jesus was as well as this book does.
Mm. Yeah.
And coming from a Southern Baptist, that was high praise.
Not only that, coming from your spouse, somebody who you love, and somebody who, you know, because we all want our spouses to admire us, you know what I'm saying, for things that we do. And, you know, because a lot of times I speak in church and I will ask my wife, how did I do? And when she tell me that, you know, you did good, you know, whatever, that makes me feel better than if anybody else told me, like, oh, you did a great job, Corwin CJ Moneyway Johnson, this and that. But her telling me that, it just makes a totally difference, you know, because a lot of times, as we know, one of the hardest people to satisfy or impress are our spouses. And so for that, man, that was cool, you know, to get that. But so before we move on, where can we find this book at?
Okay, so yeah, you can go to Amazon and look for— by the way, the name of the book, I Am the Way, I mean, Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and life. And the Tao means the way. So that made it a little cute. Like when Jesus said, I am the way, is he saying, I am the Tao? Is he saying, I am the Tao?
No.
So this is a little cute. It's a little cute there. So yeah, you can go and get it on Amazon, but you can also go to my website, which is I Am the Way Book. Iamthewaybook.com, and it's got links there to Amazon and Barnes Noble and the like.
Oh, okay, man. It's been a good conversation, man. So I'm gonna have to skip a couple of them. So let me ask you this last question, Bob.
Okay. Okay.
You did a stint as an addiction counselor. How can mindfulness and meditation benefit individuals navigating addictions, obsessive thinking, and unhelpful habits?
Well, it helped me lose 100 pounds. So that's one answer. So this is what I'll say. There's this kind of therapy called CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy. And the way it works is you work with the therapist and you try to recognize that something will happen to you. Somebody will come up or you reach your hand out to shake somebody's hand and they don't offer their hand. So something happens, right? So you get a thought in your head and that thought, it lasts maybe 2.5 seconds. And it's gone. But it leaves you with a feeling, an emotion, like, I don't like this guy. You know, like, why did you know? Well, that's rude. You might have been the thought, and it's gone. And you're just left with the feeling, I don't like this guy. And based on the fact of your emotion, you know, you're going to go then do something else, which is going to make him do something else. And then out of the whole thing, you develop a story. And then that story becomes your reality, whether or not it's accurate or not. And so CBT is the process of recognizing the thought, seeing the emotion that it led to, and then kind of pulling apart the story that you have now accepted as your truth, which may or may not be true. Okay? So that's how CBT works. Now, if there was a side piece to that, which actually was all about teaching you the skill of watching your thoughts without judgment. Because most of us have a thought, and then the first thing we have to— we start doing is beating ourselves up. And we call it this committee in our head. And our mind's always running. And when you go to ask somebody to meditate, they sit down and they sit, last for 20 seconds, and they go, I could never do this because I get all these thoughts. I can't stop the thoughts. That's not what meditation is. Meditation is not even trying to stop the thoughts.
Mm-hmm.
Meditation is coming to the recognition that I'm not my thoughts, right?
Okay.
Okay.
Now, a lot of people, you know, just from a cultural point of view, a lot of people see somebody walking with their pants halfway down their butts and their underwear showing.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And a lot of people have an emotional reaction to that.
Yeah.
Right. Okay. So you see it and you have a thought, I don't like that, or that's rude, or that's this or that's that. But you have a judgment and you have that thought, and there's no difference between you and that thought. I am that thought. You are that thought. You say, I feel, I, that person. And that's your truth, right? What if I could help you to step back from your thoughts and be the person who is the I in the sentence I had a thought. CJ, I would ask you this question. If you say I had a thought, who is the I that had the thought?
It would be me.
But it's not your thought. Because you had the thought, right? Okay. Had the thought. So it's not your thought. So who is the I? And since you're a religious man, and I'm a spiritual man, we're both religious folks. I'm not scared to say I believe that the I that had the thought is your soul.
Okay.
And it is a soul that has been written on by this conditioning of society. It's like an old blackboard that's been erased on 1,000 times, and now it's a grayboard. When you can step back and realize I'm not the blackboard, but I'm the person that writes on the blackboard, and I start to get back in touch with my soul, I can start letting go of all that gray dust, and I can get back to the soul that I was created with. So the process of meditation is really— see, CJ, I have this wonderful, glorious benefit blessing in my life where I can get pissed. I don't want to use a bad word, but I can get pissed. Something like that. I can get pissed. Stuffless, right? I can get pissed and at the same time that I'm pissed, I can be watching myself be pissed.
Yeah.
I can be sad and I can watch myself be sad. Now all of a sudden I'm not afraid of being sad because there's a place where I'm okay with it.
Yeah.
Yeah. I can be angry and I can be saying, is this anger helping me right now? Is it hurting me? Is this a good thing for me or a bad thing for me? And if I decide from that other place, from my soul, if I decide that this anger is not helpful, you know, I can deconstruct it.
Yeah.
So I much more have a say in the matter of my life when I can step out of my thoughts and be the creator of my thoughts and be my own database and feed my database the data that I want. Instead of the data that this world has given me.
It's given me.
And that's what meditation's really all about.
Mm.
If your listeners want to know more about it, I've written a free ebook that's free. It's 45 pages. It's full of inspirational stuff and it's fun. So they could just send me an email or they can go to wiseandhappylife.com.
wiseandhappylife.com. What's your email address?
The email address is— I'll give you the easiest one. It's iambobmartin@gmail.com.
iambobmartin@gmail.com.
And just ask me for the free ebook and I'll send it right out to you and you'll read more about meditation.
I'm going to send you a request for the free ebook because that was powerful. I also want to grab the book, I Am the Way, man. Every author that I have on my show, I tell them that I'm going to get their book and I got a bookshelf and so I'm trying to fill my bookshelf up, man, with inspirational people like yourself. I really appreciate you coming on today, man, and sharing your story, man. It was very, very intriguing and very, very insightful, man. And I enjoyed it, to be honest with you.
So, uh, appreciate it.
Bob, before we get out of here, man, is there anything else that you would like to share? Is there anything, any other projects that you have on the horizon that we can look forward to?
Well, I've got some great projects. I got a real true story of in Alamance County, which is deep south, which used to be the headquarters for the KKK. I have a story of an old Alamance County family guy who grew up and never got married, took care of his mom, and then needed somebody to take care of him. And he wound up hiring a young Black man who just got out of jail, and they hated each other until he discovered that he was gay at 67. And then they fell in love with each other.
Wow.
And it's a real, literally, really black and white, day and night, summer, winter, southern, rich-poor marriage romance in the Deep South.
Wow.
Wow.
Hey, man, when you get that out, I hope you, you know, enjoy yourself enough that you can come back on the Moneyway Show, man, and share these stories with us, man. I appreciate it.
But there are 3 things I'd like to leave you with, if I can.
Okay.
One, you're not your thoughts. You're not your thoughts. Always remember, you're not your thoughts. And two, be happy. And three, there ain't nothing like a dog. I mean, you take your best friend and dog and put them in the trunk of your car and drive around for 5 miles. And when you open the trunk, see which one kisses you.
Oh, man. Hold up, Bob. I'm gonna take the two. Hey, so we gonna end it up, we gonna end it on that, man. Always be happy. You heard it from my man Bob Martin. Hey, he was in them days of the Cocaine Cowboys. He survived it. He strived. Now he's doing great things. 74-year-old man looking good. Hey, thank you for coming on the show, Bob. Hey, you have been listening to the CJ Moneyway Show, and this is your boy CJ Moneyway. Until the next time, we out of here. Peace.
Thank you for listening to the CJ Moneyway Show. Don't forget to share this episode with your friends. Leave a comment, and drop a review. Be sure to tune in every Tuesday and Friday for more inspiring journeys. Who knows, your story might be next. Mm-hmm. Whether you're making the same breakfast that you have every day or baking a cake for an extra special day, eggs are a staple in our diets. Egland's Best eggs are nutritionally superior to ordinary eggs, containing more vitamins and 25% less saturated fat. Not only are they better for you, but Egland's Best eggs taste better too. There's a reason that they're America's number one eggs.
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