Sometimes, it's amazing to me that with all my privileges and advantages I've still struggled to make it through this life. And yet my next guest is a guy who really had none of that - absentee parents running from their own mess inflicting their trauma on their poorskids. And somehow he found a way through - a way that was aided and abetted by drug and alcohol abuse - but a way nonetheless. He has two books out now The Wisdom of the Rooms and The Twelve Steps: A Modern Hero's journey which the kirkus review called unexpectedly gripping. Won't you please welcome, Michael Z.

Buy his book here: https://a.co/d/itIECxR

When I was an assistant at William Morris my boss would sometimes hire this masseuse - Steve - to come into the office and give everyone neck and shoulder massages. And he would laugh that my session was always a kind of wrestling match. "Nick, relax," he'd say. "This is meant to be enjoyable!" This next interview feels a little bit like that. We wrestle for a rhythm that works, but somehow get there in the end. My next guest was a drug dealer for decades, ran a recovery film film festival, founded the experience strength and hope awards and has a new book out, now: High From Cannabis to Clarity. Won't you please welcome Leonard Lee Buschel.

Kaila Yu used to tell people that she was born in Tai Pei, she was actually born in Lawence Kansas and moved to Southern California at a young age where she was reared by her tiger mom parents until she discovered ecstasy and cocaine in Socal's rollicking rave scene of the early aughts. She dropped out of UCSD and became an import model making money as a pinup girl in the underground world of street racing. She eventually got sober and worked every twelve-step program under the sun before finding her footing as a writer. She's just written a new memoire published by Penguin Randomhouse called- "Fetishized - A reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism and Beauty" which explores how media, pop culture, and colonialism as well as her own behavior have contributed to the oversexualization of Asian women.