Victor Murgatroyd

Victor is a retired American music industry executive who has contributed to the sale of over 30 Million Albums, 9 Billion Streams, with 6 Grammy nominations and 2 wins. Victor has 33 years sober and is a staple in Los Angeles Recovery. Victor is very special to me, he’s one of the few people who kept me close when I couldn’t get 10 days sober. He never judged me, never made me feel less than, he just wanted to see me “get it.” Victor’s story is inspiring as we discuss the true “gift” of Sobriety and what that actually means, including how he prevailed from his life-altering stroke at age 44. To find out more about Victor, go to www.victormurgatroyd.com

Sicker Than Others is bought to you by Pink Cloud Coffee. Pink Cloud Coffee is an award-winning coffee company based in Los Angeles with the primary purpose of helping addicts and alcoholics through scholarships and work programs. Sicker Than Others listeners get 10% off their first order. Go to pinkcloudcoffee.com and use promo code sick10 for 10% off any beans or merchandise.

For more information on Beit T’Shuvah please go to www.beittshuvah.org.

For more information on the program of Alcoholics Anonymous go to www.aa.org.

Host: Seb Webber

Engineered and Produced by: Ted Greenberg

Producers: Laura Bagish, Jesse Solomon, and Chris Hendrickson

Executive Producer: Seb Webber

Intro Theme by Rich Daytona

Recorded live at: Beit T’Shuvah, 8831 Venice Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034.

To reach the production team, please email: seb@magick-arts.com

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Ah, that's the sound of pink cloud coffee and their exceptional Colombian roast. Pink cloud coffee is an award winning Coffee Company based in Los Angeles with the primary purpose of helping addicts and alcoholics through scholarships and work programs. Sicker than others. Listeners get 10% off their first order. Go to pinkcloudcoffee.com and use promo code sick 10 for 10% off any beans or merchandise sicker than others, is a podcast on the ups and downs of recovery brought to you from within a treatment center in Los Angeles. This podcast does not reflect the views or opinions of beta shuber or any of its subsidiary businesses or partners sicker than others. Neither speaks for AA or recovery as a whole, but you'll find some useful links on both if you would like to find out more information sicker than others, touches on subjects and situations that some listeners might find offensive, or, if you're lucky, triggering you have been warned. David, Hi and welcome to sicker than others. The podcast brought to you from within a treatment center in Los Angeles. Very excited about my guest on today. Big part of my sobriety and my and my general life. Overall Victor, welcome to the show. Thank you, Seb, happy to be here. I'm really surprised you're doing this. Me too. I mean, you got a pretty phenomenal story. We were just talking about how you were born in Brooklyn. You couldn't be anymore New York if all, there's a picture I wish I could maybe we'll find it for the Instagram, but there's a picture Victor sent me once of the lobby in your apartment where you were growing up. It was just like every it was it couldn't summed up that burgundy door. It just couldn't be any more like working class new Brooklyn, right? Just couldn't be but, um, yeah, you have 33 years sober, almost 34 which is crazy. And yeah, tell us how you got sober. Well, tell us you know what. Tell us whatever you want you want to start a little early. You can start earlier. No, I think that's actually a good place to start, because it's kind of a miracle, you know, and actually kind of has very little to do with the circumstance and me, let me say this, Forgive me, there was a woman named Liz lapresti, who is a therapist. She's amazing. She I was about seven years sober, and I said to her, I said, Why do I have to be the one to break the chains? Why did my father get sober? Like, why do I have to do this? And she said to me, she goes, Oh, you're so sad. I feel so sorry for you. And she was kind of mocking me, and I laughed, and she did it in a really loving way. She was amazing woman, amazing therapist. She's now moved on old age, and I kind of looked at her funny, like, What do you mean? She goes, let me ask you something. I go, what she goes, Why didn't you get sober a week before you did? And I go, I don't know. She goes, No, think about it. Why didn't you get sober a week before you did? And I thought about it, and I was like, I don't know. I guess I wasn't ready. She goes, Okay, so what did you do between the day you got sober and a week before you got sober to get ready? She pointed at me. She goes, What did you do to get ready? And I go, I don't know. She goes, No, think about it. What did you do? And I go, nothing. And she goes, Okay, so you did nothing. I go, yeah. She goes, fair to say you were given a gift. And I go, yeah. She goes, Well, your father was never given that gift. Stop taking credit for it. And that was the first moment that I was like, wow, something higher really happened to me the day that I got sober. Because so the night before I got sober, somebody hit me on the head with a hammer in an after hours bar, which is pretty brutal, but it wasn't the first time something that extreme had happened to me. I'd been beaten up before by a biker gang, like a real one, pretty badly. I had been stabbed. I had been a. Um, I've been hospitalized countless times in New York, just growing up like, you know, like when you grow up the way that I grew up, like I didn't come from a bad family at all, like my mother was a good woman, my father was a good guy, but I grew up like a street kid, like a real street kid, and my dad drove a cement truck. And I don't want to say we had no money, but we had no money like there was food on the table, but we were lower income, working class. My dad was a blue collar guy who got up every morning and went to work. We weren't poor than anybody else in our neighborhood. We certainly weren't richer. My dad, he did what he could. You know, there's two stories I can tell. I could tell the story of how he was a raging tough guy who was really brutal in the house, and I could tell the story about how he was a hard working guy who did what he could. And it really the story would vary depending upon how long I'm sober. If I was a year sober, I'd tell you how awful he was, and how abusive he was. If I'm who I am today, I'll tell you how hard working he was, because when I really look at it, he was 28 when he had me, and I'm the youngest of five. I mean me at 28 when I was drinking, forget it. I couldn't have taken care of a dog. This guy had five kids and was drinking and using and got up at five in the morning every day and drove a cement truck. It's pretty crazy. So back to your question of the day that I got sober, I had a really bad night, and I was hit on the head with a hammer and a bar fight. And the miracle of that story, there's two miracles in that story. One is it was, first of all, was at a club in New York, a famous rock club called La Moors, that every notable rock band played at. I guess this was like 1990 and 90, no 91 it was 1991 and the miracle of that story is that the ambulance took me to the hospital, and he took me to the hospital that my mother worked at. She wasn't there at the time. It was just a coincidence. So they took me to that hospital, and I had since left queens, where I was living. I'm now living in Manhattan, bouncing around from place to place, and now I'm in the hospital. My mother works at recovering from being hit on the head with a hammer, and I was pretty homeless at the time, just like couch surfing. And so I get released from the hospital. It's now six, seven in the morning. I got nowhere to go. I have nothing in my pocket, not a quarter, no money, no job. I'm kind of detoxing. I want to drink. I need food. I got nowhere to go, and I'm eight blocks from my parents house, because they took me to that hospital. So I walked to my parents house, and I rang the doorbell. My father answers the door, takes one look at me. I got blood in my hair, and he looks at me, and he goes, hadn't seen him for years. He goes, Why don't you go to bed? First thing he said to me, I just walked past them and I went to bed. I stayed in that bed for pretty for the most part of a month. By the way, I took an antihistamine this morning. That's why I'm like so. Anyhow, we could UA you, if you want. You might need a de Esser, though, anyhow, though, so. So when I woke up that day, I was like, I have to stop drinking. I have to stop drinking because it was a bad night, and it was obvious to me, like I was 23 my life was going nowhere. And I was like, What am I going to do? I mean, my heart was broken in half. I had nowhere to go. I couldn't be a part of anything that was around me, my friends, my family. I had nothing, nowhere to go. I was what am I going to do? But I did have the self awareness or self reflection to think I need to do something here, even at 23 and completely uneducated, I dropped out in the sixth grade. Like no education whatsoever. I didn't complete what? No, I completed the sixth grade. I did, like three months of the seventh grade, that's the highest I ever went in school. I was like, I can't keep knocking around. Gotta do something. So I called a friend of mine who's actually doing well these days. Jesse Malin is an artist in New York. Yeah, the Springsteen guy, right? Yeah, we're still friends. Amazing guy. Love him anyway. So I called Jesse. He was doing, like a man with a van type thing, and I asked him he was living in Brooklyn, and I asked him if I could help him in the van, like, move stuff around, furniture, things like that. Bands make some money. And I did. He helped me. And I made a little bit of money, like a little bit of money, like $100 maybe $125 or something like that. Do you know Jesse? You know that is and I bought a one way ticket to LA. It was LA or Florida, and I had been in bands. I had had a record deal or two. Actually had had two record deals at that point. I was in a band called The Four Horsemen that was on Def Jam. Oh, Deaf American at that time, and oh, it was band called Soul Kitchen that was on giant Irving Seb. Oh, wow. I had messed both of those up with my drinking. So I decided on La because I just wanted to make music. So I bought a one way ticket to LA with the money. I think it was $80 or something like that. I think I use this place called supersonic travel. It's amazing. I remember that I came out here, I cut off the plane, and I had nowhere to go. I didn't know anybody. I had $30 and a base, and I had a laundry bag for all my clothes. Literally, I traveled with a laundry bag. That's how I transported my clothes. And nothing like nothing. I took a bus to downtown LA and I went to a pay phone. And I don't even know where I got this idea, but I asked him where there was an AA meeting. I have no idea where I got that idea. I just did. Oh, but you know what I did? Forget one thing, very important thing, about a month before I got sober for no good reason that I could think of, I went to St Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, and I got on my knees and I begged God to help me get sober. About a month before I got sober, I mean, I was baptized and confirmed, but that didn't mean anything to me. Didn't mean anything to my parents either. I think they just did it because you were supposed to, like, Italian Catholic. My mother's Italian, my dad's English. They were like, yeah, have him do that thing, you know? So I went to St Patrick's Cathedral. For me, I probably thought it was a cinematic moment. I don't know what I thought it was, but I did it. Yeah, and it worked. It's still working, which is crazy. I have not had a desire on any level to drink or do drugs for almost 34 years. It'll be 34 next month. It was completely removed from me. You really had a white light moment, like they talk about in the book. Well, maybe it didn't feel like that at the time. Yeah, I wouldn't say that, because it doesn't feel like that to me. No, the way that I would characterize it is it was removed. The desire was completely removed, whereas before it was a compulsion, like, I could not not drink for three days. Like, if I went three days, I would boast about a week. I'd be like, I haven't drank in like 10 days, and it would be like two and a half. Yeah, I did that for a while. Yeah, I was drinking every day by one in the afternoon, or I would shake anybody who knows me from back then would be like, I remember, JB, from Bucha. You know him, one of the man in Bucha? Yeah, yeah. So. JB, I know him since I'm 14. JB, gave me my first cake, my first AA meeting. And I remember we were walking up to the meeting, and he goes, he calls me, VM. He goes, VM, they're giving you a cake. I said, Yeah. He goes, they should give you a Cadillac. So when you landed in LA though, I mean, it's a pretty bold thing to do in your first year of getting sober. What do you mean move? Yeah, well, I had nowhere to go. I mean, I couldn't stay at my parents house, right? You went to the log cabin, right? A lot that I did, but that was like, later, you know, my first meeting, something really kind of special happened for me. Um, well, first of all, I hated it. I really hated it, like, because I was just so New York. I was like, right off the boat, you're still pretty new york, buddy. You think, oh yeah, 100% okay. So I was very New York, then internally, as well as externally. And I was just like, What is this? This is just not like, you know, I hated it. I hated El. I hated the people, was it? Get me out of here? So halfway through the meeting, I got up and I walked out and, oh, you know what? I can't say this, because I can't it's an anonymous program. I was just going to name two people, one of which is a rock star, but two people walked out of the meeting. And I'll tell you after two people walked out of the meeting and said to me, where are you going? And I was like, I'm leaving. And they were like, why? And I was like, What do you care? And they were like, Well, come back in. And I was like, No, this place is stupid. And they were like, come back. He wasn't a rock star at the time, by the way, come back in. And I was like, No. And they talked me back into the meeting, and had they not done that, I probably would be somewhere pretty pathetic. Right now, I don't want to say I'd be dead, because that's a little glamorous. I probably would just be pathetic. Probably just be living on somebody's couch, like, 80 pounds heavier, you know, I don't think I'd be dead. I think or in jail, probably not. I think I'd just be losing in a big way. How much, obviously, we don't want to touch too much on career stuff. But do you you had a very prolific career in the music industry. How do you think that? How do you think sobriety affect that? Oh, my God. Well, because you really went from them, you know, you went from the mailroom, you were a mailroom intern to probably one of the biggest ANR guys in the world, yeah. And how did sobriety play a role in that? Because you're in an industry where it's not, you know, it's a lot easier to not be the sober guy in that industry, speaking from experience, you know, what's interesting? I didn't realize this until a friend said this to me recently. She said, you know, a lot of people are afraid to get sober because they think they're going to lose their creativity, but all of your creativity happened in sobriety. And I was like, That's really true, actually. I mean, I was in bands and I made music, but I mean, just to be real, like I was kind of terrible as a musician. I mean, it would for me, it was more like I wanted to be in a band, so I kind of self willed it, like I was clever as a person, so I figured out how to be in a band and how to play, but it wasn't my gifting. I'm not a gifted musician, so I wasn't particularly creative. I don't think on an instrument. But then the way that I kind of worked my way up in the industry was eventually from getting sober. So when I first went to AA, I didn't have a place to live, so I literally slept in a park at night and went to AA meetings in the morning for a while, until I eventually got a job and then got a place to live and a car and then from the mail room. Well, actually, I guess I just started talking about bands and telling everybody about bands. And then eventually I started liking bands that started getting signed to other labels. This back in the day when you have to go see the bands there wasn't like, MySpace or like, this was like, you found out about shit by hanging out at the mint or fucking Yeah, Sunset Boulevard, 1993 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So how did sobriety play a role? I mean, I was, I was all in with both feet, but also I was inspired to I was terrified of ending up back in Queens or Brooklyn. You know, Queens and Brooklyn weren't then what they are now, Queens and Brooklyn, for me, it was like being sent to the Eastern European block. Like it wasn't like, no offense to the Eastern European block the wall, or my perception of what that might have been like. I'm talking bread lines and soup kitchens, and it was rough. Yeah, it was like, I just didn't want to go back there. So I worked like I was terrified of being having to go back there and be like, I don't want to become my father, because he just looked so miserable. And I just, I would do anything to avoid that. So I would drive around listening to Anthony Robbins. And also, fortunately for me, I was very sensitive, and I fell into a community of people in AA that were young, and they became my family, and we attended weddings and funerals, and we had Christmases and we had birthdays, and we all loved each other, and we were all orphans, so to speak. I mean, I had a living family, but they weren't really in my life, but these people in AA that were my age, we became a community, and I became a part. Of that fabric. So it's almost not even fair to say how much did sobriety play a role. I was sobriety through and through. Yeah. I mean, I lived this. I lived in the steps and worked the steps, and so did my friends, and that's all we did was go to meetings. Went from meetings to coffee to lunch to dinner, to meetings, to coffee, to lunch to dinner. We worked on the steps at home. I went to work. I worked my way up in the record company. And then eventually I left that company. I went to another company. I went to wind up, because it was a better opportunity for me, because I did so well at that company had hit, a hit, a hit. And then when I went to wind up, there was an amazing opportunity for me there, because wind up was wasn't really a label. It was they had creed, finger 11 and 30 bands nobody ever heard of. And at that time, finger 11 wasn't successful. They had, well, they had, I think they had one record that had sold 100,000 copies, and the second one sold like 90,000 and that was it. It was very fragmented. They had R B albums, they had comedy albums. They had no other rock bands. Yeah, it was run by an entrepreneur, right? It was a very successful independent, probably one of the biggest Indie labels of the 90s, for sure. Well, yeah, for sure. So. Alan Meltzer, yeah. He had a thing called CD one stop. And he was an entrepreneur. He was a marketing guy. He was very, very brilliant man. He was a marketing guy, and I believe it was Bill mcgathy had who was a radio guy, had discovered creed, and creed had a finished album, and McAfee brought this finished album with this band, creed, who was a Christian band, to Alan Meltzer, who was a brilliant marketing guy with a lot of money, and Alan just marketed the hell out of it, and Bill promoted the hell out of it on the radio. I believe that's the story. Pretty accurate. That's the story. And it blew up. So now they have all the money from Creed, Creed success and the money they had before creed, and they've never made a record, because the album was made when they got it right. So what a good opportunity. So here I come. I have a lifetime of being in bands, making records. At this point, I had been in maybe 1015, bands, two that were signed, been at Sony for four years, made three or four albums for Sony. I'm 30, and I've been playing in band since I'm 14, so I've got a lot of experience. And I know everybody in LA because everybody in my AA community is either a musician or in a band or whatever. So now I'm kind of networked into Los Angeles. I'm think I'm getting the years right. So we go into it becomes kind of a think tank the signing process. It's Alan Meltzer, his wife, Diana Meltzer, and the President, Steve Lerner and I. That's it. And there was a CFO named Ed Vetri who just did the money. And that was it. And there we signed as a team, Drowning Pool, Evanescence, finger 11. See there? That's it, basically the sound of 96 to 2004 Exactly. It's crazy. Yeah. You know, one of the things I really admire about you is you have a really great connection with God, and you've also studied a lot of different religions, which I was pretty, pretty impressed with. You want to talk about that? Sure, so things that I've read is I've read a lot of the Torah. I've read The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I've read a lot of the Quran. I've read the Bible multiple times, Old Testament and New Testament, a lot of new age books, Buddhism. Um, yeah, I practiced Nisha in Buddhism for a while. I like, a long while, I'm gonna say 16 years. They call it SGI. You see, what else I read up? Well, I guess the Tibetan Book of the Dead is Tibetan Buddhism. Is that just out of curiosity, or was that out of like a sober thing, or was it just, you know? Was it you didn't have a god? Were you not sure on your God? Were you exploring everything? I'm interested to know. Not many people do that. Really. I don't know many people that have decided to dedicate reading certain points of their life to six religions. I think that's interesting. Well, I mean, this morning I read the Bible. I read Bible in 365, days. And there's this other book I have. I think it's called, maybe it's called Jesus speaks. Was reading that this morning. Why? I guess. I started out in the 90s. I used to go to this place called the body tree on Melrose. And I was that was by the LA Pat as an old bookstore by the lepan, exactly, of cafe I remember, yeah. So I started reading things like Marianne Williamson and Deepak the fourth seven spiritual laws of success and the Four Agreements. And then there were chant books of channeled writing, like Conversations with God, books one and two. I read those, and I just started eating books, like I said, because I was so uneducated, I just, you know, I've always, or I guess later in life, I started to feel like I'm kind of a nerdy, quiet guy who's like an academic who never went to school, right? And I'm just interested, I'm interested in what we are. Because I don't think, obviously, I'm not this body. I don't think I'm this mind. And if you think about just, let's say what we suffer from, an addiction. Big Book would say it's an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind. My opinion, I believe that's one thing. You know, it's like, if I ingest alcohol I have it starts a compulsion of my obsessive mind because of the allergy of the body. It's kind of like one thing, right? And that's all mind stuff, mind and body stuff. But who am I really like? What's going on underneath that? What? What's going on underneath all that mind stuff? Even if you look at trauma therapy, that's all me centered stuff, which is all mind stuff. And if we really have a spiritual solution, then what does that really mean? Like, if the big book was released or written in 1938 39 what has come along since then that is trumped, forgive the word that is trumped or made that much of a cultural impact. Nothing called AA, the fourth most important thing of the 20th century, sure. So what has come along since then? Nothing. Nothing has come along that I'm aware of that's made, as you put it, so Well, such cultural impact. No, I mean, after, Oh, yeah. But I mean what? I mean, what's the top what's, yeah, right. So it really is a God based solution. So if we're dealing, if my whole life is about a God based solution, then what's really going on here? That is fascinating to me. Yeah, that is what my whole life must be dedicated to. Forget about the first what let's call it, 44 years of my life. And let's talk about the next 44 years of my life, about giving and serving. And the reason why I put it that way, with 44 years is because that's when I had the stroke, which we should probably talk about, yeah, that's, that was, right, yeah. Okay, so you have this big career. Things are going well. You're doing, you know, you're not just made an impact in the music business, you did other stuff, and, I mean, you're ahead of the game on blogs and all that kind of stuff, right? Really, probably one of the top cultural engineers probably ever. And you're living this big life. You're living in Woodland Hills, 1000 Oaks. Yeah, 1000 Oaks. It's all the same shit to me, of that far up, but you're in 1000 Oaks. So you want to tell the story of, sure, it's great story. It's crazy. It's beyond crazy. So, yeah, so I was living in this big house, millions of dollars in the bank, right from like, where I came from, to like, millions of dollars in the bank in this beautiful house that I completely designed like every bolt, every screw. It was like a dream place. It was like a fantasy I still can't believe it. So one day I wake up normal day workout. Ride my motorcycle from 1000 Oaks to West Hollywood. I work out with a friend. It's about a 35 mile ride workout with a friend. Ride my motorcycle home. So it's 70 miles round trip on a motorcycle. Normal day worked out. I go to bed. I was married at the time, and about five o'clock in the morning, my ex wife says to me, wake up. I'm dreaming, right? I'm dead asleep. It's five o'clock in the morning. She nudges me, wake up. Groggy. I'm like what she said, wake up. At the moment, I was having a dream that I had fallen down in Grand Central Station, and I was trying to grab people by the leg to tell them that I couldn't speak. And I. Couldn't move, but I was paralyzed, and I couldn't move, and I couldn't speak, and people were walking all around me in Grand Central Station, and I was trying to reach them, and I hear my ex wife in the back, way in the background, going, wake up, wake up, Victor, wake up, wake up. And finally I say, what? She goes, wake up. And she's getting louder and louder and louder. I'm like when I kind of come back into the moment, out of the dream, and I'm like, what? She goes, you're talking in your sleep. And I said, okay, so And she goes, something's wrong. And I go, I'm fine. She goes, you're having a stroke. What are you talking about? She goes, you're having a stroke. Something's wrong. I said, No, I'm fine. She goes, something's wrong. Stand up. So I got out of bed, and my knees buckled and I hit the ground. She called 911 ambulance came. They said he's having a stroke. They took me the ER, and they gave me this clot buster drug, and it didn't take. And they made an incision in my lower abdomen, and then went up my artery to my brain, and they pulled the clot out, saved my life. I was in ICU for a month, but the surgeon was a miracle, wasn't it? And it wasn't there a story about the availability of the surgeon there is, yeah. So the crazy thing about that story is, well, there's many crazy things about it. The first thing is that she knew I was having a stroke. I mean, there's no reason in the world she should have known I was having a stroke. First of all, second of all, there's no reason in the world she should have woken me up. If the situation were reversed and she would talk me in her sleep, I would have rolled right over and went to sleep. I would have been like, Ah, she's talking in her sleep, whatever. Who cares, right? So the hospital, los Robles Hospital, in 1000 Oaks. It was 512 in the morning. There was no traffic, and the hospital was three miles from me, so it was just down Jan's Road, absolutely no traffic. They got there quickly took me right in, and the hospital had just instituted a Stroke Program three months before I got there, and because they had done that, there was a surgeon in the hospital waiting for my arrival. Had he not been there, they would have had to airlift me to UCLA or something, and they said I would have died totally crazy. I mean, I came within like, a minute or two of dying completely saved my life. And they just, like, he just went up through, just, yeah, basically, like, went in my What is it, carotid artery, whatever it's called, right up in the artery, into the brain, and pull the clot right out. I mean, yeah. I mean, it was a major stroke. Like, I was messed up for a while, for, like, yeah, five years, I just shut my whole career down when that happened, when I got home from the hospital, like, if you would have said to me, What color is your car, it would have taken me, like, three minutes to answer you. I'd have been like, uh, like, my face was like this, hmm. I was messed up for a while. I just told my ex wife said, call these four people, tell them what happened and not to call me. How did did aa show up for you? Yeah, yeah. A has always shown up for me. A has always shown up for me. A is always there. A is always there. Yeah, that's amazing. Did, since we've talked a lot about God today, after the after the stroke, did it change your views on God? It's interesting. You know, I went through a lot of different phases of it. You know, when you see movies where somebody gets into like, kind of like a plane crash, or, you know, an experience where they almost die, they kind of have this white light experience where they they love life again. It didn't do that to me. It kind of, it kind of did the opposite, because what definitely made me softer. I mean, see how big my ego is now. I mean, before that, I was insufferable. It took a lot of the edge off of me, which is a good thing. Mortality will do that, yeah, for sure. But what it did was it, there was a period there for about, think it was about two or three weeks where it looked like I might die, like I might have another stroke, or it was pretty like, I was pretty cognizant of the fact, like I might not walk. We didn't know what was going to happen. And I felt like I faced death, like, pretty squarely in the eye, like, what we're all going to go through, if we're lucky enough at the end of our life, to actually be looking at death rather than just go in a hospital bed. I kind of got so okay with dying that it made the discomfort of life, it gave me like a little bit of suicidal ideation, like feelings of like, I don't want to be here. I. I'm good with dying. Like I just felt so okay with leaving here and so so, like, I know that God is good, and I have a God in my life and looking forward to the afterlife. That I was ready to go. I was like, where's the rocket ship? I'm ready to go. Get me out of here. I don't want to deal with the traffic and the people and this and the that I want to go. So how does one get over that? And the way that I did for me, life had to take a natural shift. Actually, I'll say that sino helped me a lot with that because and he did it knowingly and intuitively. I would say, the way he did it was after about five or six years, when I got my faculty back, I went to the back to the music business for one year. And it was, I hate I was like, it was like drinking a glass of vomit. I was like, get me out of here. I can't do this. I hate this. It had changed so dramatically. I went from kind of the top of the game working for Clive Davis and having, you know, this wouldn't be a good podcast for me if I didn't say what I have to say about Clive, which is, having worked for that guy as long as I did, he was just unbelievably elegant and incredibly good to me. Yeah, it was a great time working for him, being around him, and what a mentoring him, yeah, I mean, like observing that man work, and the way he treated me, it serious amounts of compassion, right? I'm sorry, Pat compassion. He was very compassionate to me and everybody. He's just a mensch, yeah, it's a beautiful man. So anyway, so having worked for him, and then going back and seeing how the industry had changed in those six years, actually, at that point, it had been like eight or nine years, because I had kind of moved out. I moved out into 1000 Oaks, and I had had, at that point my own label, my own publishing company. I'm just kind of being more entrepreneurial. My own label through Sony that he gave me, I was just like, I don't want to do this. So I did it for a year, and then COVID hit, and then when COVID hit, I was just like, really, are you kidding me now, like, fucking kidding me. Like, this is gonna take me out now. Like, could you imagine going through that, yeah, and then a divorce, yeah? And then COVID hits, yeah? It was just like, not to mention writing the divorce check, yeah, which was painful, yeah, as painful as the stroke or different? Yeah, different kind of scary. Um, stings differently. I harbor no resentment toward my ex. We parted as friends. You know, here's how I think about that. And since you mentioned it, I thought I have two choices here. I can make sure she's set up, yeah, or I can get the phone calls where her life's falling apart and be in that position. It's the better position to be in. Well, yeah, 100% Yeah. Hey, we'll be right back. But before we do please consider helping us grow this podcast. You could do that a number of different ways. You can hit follow on Spotify. You can rate us, review us. But what would be really awesome would be if you could share this with one other addict or alcoholic that you think could get something out this podcast. If everyone did that, we would grow this thing tremendously. But as always, thank you for listening, and thank you for your support. So we we ask every guest this as we come to an end, and I feel like we could be talking for hours, dude, I love you so much. You've made such a fucking big difference in my life. Dude, you're one of my best friends, and you've seen my journey up and down. And just just, I relate to you on so many levels. And I want to tell one story before I get into the final question. But I think it's amazing how, when I was a kid in my bedroom, I distinctively remember listening to science by Incubus and on my CD and and being like and see the and probably Evanescence and being like, I want to work in the music business. Now, I wasn't living in London, but I lived in a little village outside of London. So imagine this kid in a village of 60 people listening to the CD, looking at the jewel case, reading all the line of notes, and being like, this is what I want to do. And then now one of my best friends is the guy responsible for that. That's pretty fucking amazing, isn't that? Like, I get it, I mean, I mean, what? Well, I get that. I'm nobody from nowhere, yeah, and Ian Asprey is my friend. Yeah, you know? Like, I. I'm nobody from nowhere, like literally, I'm as uneducated as it gets, and I'm not a fancy person, and I don't want to be. I'm I mean, you know, I once said to Clive, he said to me, he kind of was taking the piss out of me. He goes, Oh, so I see you're an expert. And I said, Well, I mean, I did wait online for Aussie tickets all night in the snow. And he looked at me like my it's a good point. So, so our final question, if you could say one thing to little Victor today, that kid him, that kid in Brooklyn, behind the burgundy door with the dad that drives a cement truck. What would you say to him? Pay the IRS thanks for coming in. You.