Addiction Took Everything, Music Helped Me Get it Back | Benjamin Lerner

Join us for an inspiring conversation with special guest Benjamin Lerner, a Vermont-based Rapper, Composer, Writer, Recovery Advocate, Radio Host, and Viral Content Creator.

Benjamin Lerner, the Great-grandson of Irving Berlin (composer of such iconic tunes as “God Bless America” and “White Christmas”), began his musical career as a classical piano prodigy. By his early twenties, he was an IV fentanyl, heroin, and crack cocaine addict. Now sober since June 13, 2016, Benjamin journals his journey in addiction and sobriety through his music to tell powerful stories of healing and recovery.

His latest EPs, KEEP MOVING FORWARD (2024) and RUN TOWARDS THE TRUTH (2025), reflect the mantra from his long-running column, CLEAN:

“Keep moving forward.
Run towards the truth.
Don’t quit before the miracle happens.”

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:12

Welcome, welcome, welcome everyone to Never Alone Live. And uh as usual, we have Krista Sober Barbie and uh me, I'm Johnny. And today we have a special guest that we're super excited to have, Benjamin Lerner. Benjamin Lerner, if you don't know him, he is in recovery and he is a musician that is extremely talented, Ben. You're dude, I'm uh I'm so excited to have this conversation with you. I've been watching your videos and listening to you for a while now. And uh, dude, you just your your your music just just speaks volumes, right? Um, so let's uh let's get into this. Let's get into this. Tell us a little bit about yourself and let's just jump into you know tell us tell us about your addiction.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Well, I always start when I share by saying I was an alcoholic or addict before I took my first drink. And what that means quite simply is that I was always searching for an external solution for an internal problem. And before chemicals, it was I'm a millennial, so it was video games, it was Pokemon, it was Digimon, it was POGs, it was more importantly than any of that approval from other people. You know, I'm not gonna make this a whole dual diagnosis thing, although that's valid, but I was diagnosed several times with what at the time was called Asperger syndrome, and that was autism spectrum disorder. But separate from any diagnosis, sensory input to me, whether it's looking somebody in the eye, whether it's auditory input, visual, tactile, is too much for me to handle. And I remember being three years old, having my hands over my ears screaming right around the same time that I got my first autism spectrum diagnosis at a Toys R Us. Not because my parents had done anything, but because everything around me was screaming at me. And it was so overwhelming that I had to block it out, put my hands over my ears, get under the table, and hide. And alcohol and drugs were essentially the same thing, except instead of a three-year-old screaming and blocking it out literally with my hands, you know, after years of developing and trying to assimilate into life with a neurocognitive and neurological layout where everything was entirely overwhelming, and the only thing that gave me comfort was the endorphin hit and internal dopamine hit I got from repeated obsessive behaviors like video games and Pokemon or getting a hug from a family member, which is which is good. Like, you know, those are healthy things, but I found myself manipulating people before I ever had a substance to get validation and approval. Because when people told me I was good for playing a certain piano piece, or I felt like I was smart in the conversation, I got rewarded from my parents, it was a little hit of endogenous dopamine. But I didn't know that there was a shortcut on the outside that could do that until I took not my first drink, I had little sips before, but my first drink with the intention of getting drunk when I was 13 years old. And it was a disgusting six-pack with mold on the cap, literally, I found in my friend's basement. And he downed half of one, spat it out, and was like, This is gross. And me being the alcoholic I am, I downed the other five and a half in about 20, 30 minutes. And it's like when you go on an airplane and then you go up, but then you come back down and the pressure returns to normal and your ears pop back, and like whatever sinus headache you got, that's how it felt for my spirit. But it came at a price because I finally felt comfortable in my skin, or so I thought, but everything else in my life fell by the wayside. I was in no denial that I was an alcoholic or addict, although I might not have put that term to it, because I had finally found an external solution that made me feel comfortable. And over the years it escalated from the suburban private school reality I was born into with two parents, uh, Ivy League educated journalists. We weren't billionaires. I like to say we didn't own them all, but we sure as hell shopped there. You know, I never went hungry. And my mother struggled with her own alcoholism journey, and she's now sober 14 years, but we went through it together. Um, she hit bottom a couple years before I did, but it went from that first drink to drinking every night in high school, you know, powder pills, all them things. And then before I know it, I'm 22 years old out in the tenderloin and I got a needle in my arm, I'm picking cigarettes out of the gutter, I got abscesses on my arms, I'm smoking crack off of you know, dirty tinfoil, same thing I'm smoking like fake press 30s off of. And I'm thinking, how did this happen? And the reason it happened was the same underlying fear that made me putting my hands over my ears when I was a little kid. Fear I wasn't good enough, fear I was uncomfortable in my skin, fear I wasn't deserving of basic human happiness, fear that I couldn't handle the world. But the funny thing is, and this is what I always like to tell people who are in the grips of the struggle, the same fear that pushed me towards the drink ended up pushing me towards recovery. Because when it got to the point that when you're shooting fentanyl-ased dope and like you're smoking, like, you know, $40 rocks, you you can't like in one goat, you you can't go any further. Like you could try, but but that had exhausted itself. And those voices that initially were tamped out by the drinking of drugs, like the discomfort on a spiritual level that I had ran from for so long. There was a certain point where I got physically high, but I didn't get spiritually high anymore. And I knew I had three choices. I could try to keep using and see if I could get that escape back. I could try to check out, which I had tried before to no avail because my tolerance was so high that it never seemed to work. Or I could call the treatment center. I had been there many times before, inpatient and outpatient, trying to placate my family. Um and on June 13th, 2016, I hopped in that little drugie buggy and I went up to treatment for myself. And I didn't do it because I thought I was capable of getting sober or I had this big white light moment. I did it because the only thing that was scarier than losing my friends and lancing abscesses um with blunt rigs or anything like that was shooting several bags and not feeling a thing because my solution didn't work anymore. And uh one day at a time I've been sober ever since. And uh I owe that to a fact that there's a lot of people who have walked this path before me who were kind enough to show me how to do this darn thing, and that I wasn't alone.

SPEAKER_02 6:40

That's uh dude, that's amazing. You know, we talk about the the disease on this live a lot, you know, and it's the only disease that's gonna tell you that you're okay, you know, and uh everything we're doing, you know, because you know, you how do you get to the grips and it's like I'm doing fine, sure, I'm uh living on the street, but everything's fine, you know. Yeah, I I do dope all day, every day. Everything's fine, you know? Uh and it's not until we finally get that gift of desperation where we say that everything's not fine, and that gift of desperation that inevitably leads to the willingness to do anything to stop. How many treatment centers did you go to?

SPEAKER_00 7:20

I went to two inpatient in total, but I was in and out of outpatient like 10 times. I used it as kind of like a band-aid. Like every time something bad happens, um, like my mom would find a rig, like in my laundry, or like, you know, I would show up dope sick to Thanksgiving and puke in the car on the way up. I'd be like, okay, well, I'm going to outpatient. Like, you know, I'm not actually going to inpatient because, you know, I was blessed. My family was willing to pay for me to go to treatment. Both my mom and my grandmother who ended up helping, because she had the resources to do that, uh, although she had never struggled with addiction. I'm not unaware that, you know, addiction doesn't discriminate. I know kids who grew up in mansions bigger than me and all it got them was a better coffin. I knew kids who came up in the projects of like really gritty areas in the city and like uh meth lab trailer parks who now own million-dollar businesses as a result of their recovery. But I'm not naive enough to think that like I didn't have a lot of advantages. But my biggest disadvantage, separate from all the help that was offered to me, is that I didn't see it as a pathway to recovery. I saw it as a pathway to getting my family off my back. Yeah. And every single time that I went there and I completed treatment, I should have been stoked. Oh, I'm sober, I'm not dope sick anymore. Like, this is great. But I was just like, okay, now they're off my back. I'm gonna actually do what I want. Um, which is to go back to use because I wasn't ready to stop because I thought that the drugs still worked.

SPEAKER_02 8:46

Absolutely. So we got a lot of people in here today and they're making a lot of comments. Um I guess I just saw one in here that we're all gonna really like Kevin Lopez, 13 months clean today. I'm telling you, if you're celebrating, we're celebrating, please let us know in the comments. If you have any questions for Ben, please throw it in the comments. Uh, and before we keep going, I got a couple more questions for you, but uh, I gotta talk about our friend who introduced us. I'm gonna give a little shout out to her. Her name is Marie, and she's your biggest fan, and she introduced us, and she is so excited for this interview. She's in here now. We love you, Marie. Just want to give you.

SPEAKER_00 9:28

Love you, Marie. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 9:29

Um, so let's let's let's continue on the recovery portion. So how yeah, so you get to you get to now when was this? When did you go to your last treatment?

SPEAKER_00 9:40

I went to treatment uh this last go-around, June 13th, 2016. And um, you know, some people do their sober date is like the last day they used. I actually used the night before, and um, I went to a treatment center that has since closed uh called the Retreat in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and it was the right place at the right time. And um, I had a really transformative experience there, which isn't the typical transformative experience, which is it was a great treatment center, they had great therapy groups, but I had been through all the modalities before. There wasn't anything new. I could recite all the different like old school recovery stuff and all the different psychological, psychiatric elements, all the different tools separate from any fellowship or like anything that they gave me. Like that was never my problem internalizing information intellectually. So that wasn't the learning experience I had. The learning experience I had was that I made a very dumb mistake, which is that I didn't go to treatment looking to do anything but see if I could get sober. But my addiction transferred in a way that I didn't anticipate. Where six days in, this dude comes up to me and in typical rehab fashion, a rehab bro fashion, he's like, yo, you see that girl over there, man? And I was like, Yeah. He's like, That's good money, bro. And I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, he she won't stop talking about you. And it was the only girl in in the treatment center that I actually thought was like cool and attractive. So I took that as a sign that I should transfer my addiction on to somebody else. And I did exactly that. And I I made the very selfish decision of hooking up with her there and transferring not just my like addiction in terms of like interpersonal connection or whatever, but codependent, just like I wasn't okay unless I was like sitting with her listening to music or whatever. And then someone spread a rumor that just to keep it 100% real, that like I had a very serious STD because they were jealous, and then she stopped talking to me. And I didn't know that any of this had happened until the rumor mill got around, and I got so mad two weeks in, a week after I started talking to her, which is like a week into being there, after the detox, I had thrown up, I had gone through all the chemical detox that I thought I couldn't do. But the thing is, I hadn't detoxed emotionally or spiritually. And when she stopped talking to me, it forced me to go through that detox of understanding that it was bigger than any drug. I could get just as addicted to people and back to that original external validation thing. Like I talked about as a young kid, it was full circle because I first was addicted to validation, then the substances came in, then I went to rehab trying to escape the substances, then I went up on a little mini peak of external romantic validation, and then that was stripped away. So I call my family and I'm like, I'm getting out of here. Like I'm sober, but I need to go to another treatment center. But really, what I was doing is all the kids at that treatment center were kids, mostly not all of them, but most of them, were kids who are using on the streets of Kensington and Philadelphia. Jersey and Pennsylvania kids, because it was a Pennsylvania-based treatment center, and they were all talking about the alphabet blocks and Allegheny and like Kensington and all of that, which for people who don't know is the biggest open-air drug market on the East Coast. And so what I was gonna do is I was convincing my family, hey, I'm gonna go to this treatment center, Western Union me some money, get me a cab, get me a train ticket to Philly, and then I'll go to Karen, which was a different treatment center in Pennsylvania. But really, what I was gonna do is go to Kensington, buy a bundle, and check out. Um, because I realized that I could be sober. I had gotten through the detox, not having a seizure. That was what I was afraid of when I stepped in. But then I realized I couldn't deal with heartbreak, or so I thought, in recovery. Two weeks in, I'm ready to leave. I packed my stuff into a trash can, cabs called on the way, and I'm sitting in this discharge office about to AMA from this treatment center, right? And I'm telling this treatment counselor on the other side of the bench in the office, yeah, I'm gonna go to this other treatment center, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. And she's like, uh-huh. Yeah. She's not buying it, and I'm not buying it myself. But then I see this little mirror, right? Might not have been like a full, like, like personal mirror, might have just been a reflective surface, but I see my reflection in a clear as day. And I see these scabs from like picking from like being up all night smoking crack. I see the like sunken eyes that are worse as a 24-year-old than they are now, because I ain't living right. But I look deeper and I see that same scared little kid. And I think I might not be worth saving. I might not think that like this is worth it, but but maybe just maybe it's worth saving that kid underneath all of this grimy fingernails. And like, regardless of what this girl says, I realized it was gonna be harder for me to keep running than it would be to run towards the truth. So I I canceled the cab. I said, I'm staying. If I ever say I want to leave again, don't let me, don't let me call my family anymore. I'm doing this on my own. I walked out, I went to that next group, and that I consider my real emotional sobriety date, although there have been hiccups along the way, but that was the first time I realized recovery was bigger than you know, a rig, a spoon, a pipe, a bottle, a pill, whatever it was. It was me not needing an external element to put my personal growth and healing as the goal. So, so that's that was the real revelation I had in treatment that all of the counselors really was the foundation of my recovery.

SPEAKER_02 15:05

Wow. Okay, so that was the that's awesome. That's awesome. What was what was the next phase? Like the just figuring it out, making the decision. Now you've made the decision. Now that's that's that's that's key. You know, what was next? What was the what was what was what changed you from you know being the scared guy to to okay, this is how we're gonna evolve.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

Well, it's very simple. And I want to preface this by saying I support all paths of recovery, and I also support all paths of faith. And I know this isn't like a faith-based thing, but you know, I am a man of God. Um, and when I say God, that can mean the universe, that can mean whatever higher power you got or lack thereof. You could be an atheist, but I just gotta speak like my stuff. So I just want to clarify that. Absolutely. MAT works for some people, Cali Sover works for some people. I'm in the traditional old school thing, but and I got, you know, Christ is my thing. But when I say God spoke through what happened after that, what I mean is that regardless of your faith path, recovery opens doors for us that when we finally open our mind to the fact that being present, facing our underlying issues, demons, whatever you want to call them, um, and being a service is the primary goal. It's not that the world changes, it's that our world changes. So before I had that revelatory experience where I decided, regardless of what happened with like that girl, that stuff that I was gonna stay, I didn't realize that every morning there were people that stood outside of the treatment center cafeteria and said, Who wants to serve dinner? I was like, Oh, that's corny, I don't want to do that. The moment that I woke up after that day, a treatment tech walked up to me out of the crowd, and they're like, Hey, Ben, we don't have anybody to serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We need someone to do all three. And and they thought I wasn't gonna do it because I was the kid that had just left. They had like, nobody's gonna do it. And I was like, sign me up. And so every day I woke up earlier than everybody else, and then people said, Hey, we need people to stack chairs for the groups and like clean up and sweep up. I was like, sign me up. And I found freedom through that service. And then when I left, it was the same thing. It was like every other time that I went to morning outpatient therapy, I was dragging my feet, I wasn't getting up early. If it was bad weather and I had to walk to the train, I would use it as an excuse not to go. Um but every single thing that I did, whether it was chores at the recovery house going above and beyond, I didn't do it because it was like, pull your pants up and be a responsible citizen. I did it because I got high from it. And that's when the game really hit me. I was like, nah, nah. People aren't doing this because they want to be good people. People are doing this because it's getting them out of themselves. The same way that a bag of dope or a drink allowed me chemically the illusion of getting out of myself and getting out of that discomfort within my own skin. When I did service for other people and I prioritized them, I'm gonna keep it a brick. It wasn't because I'm the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa or like whatever, or I'm the best person of all time. It was like, nah, I want a way to get out of my head and feel good about what I'm doing. That was so I'll keep it 100%. It wasn't altruistic, it was I needed a distraction, I needed something to take myself out of myself. So I don't ever get fellowship specific. Everybody's different about that. I catch too much black forgetting 100%. But let's just say I ain't afraid to take the stairs when the elevator's broken, and I ain't got no problem going into some rooms where some chairs are stacked outside of a treatment center. And that whole deal helped me a great deal too. But again, being a service, showing up, you know, leading certain events, um, you know, calling people when they were going through hard times, going to people when they relapsed, like, you know, taking myself out of myself. And after a couple months of doing that, you know, I was very afraid of applying for a job because there was a big employment gap. I didn't have a good resume, I didn't have any references, but the confidence that I built through my chosen path to recovery and the accountability and the service that I did enabled me to the point where I got my first job in the service industry that carried me through my first couple years of recovery. The lessons I'd learned about being in service, not just for the sake of doing it, but from for the actual feeling it gave me of having purpose and something bigger than myself taking me out of my anxiety, that translated to the point where I wasn't thinking, oh, this is corny, I'm picking up plates, I got this stupid apron, like I look like a goon, like why am I doing this? It was like I took so much pride in every little dish, every little plate, every little spoon and fork I put on that table, because I was like, this is literally service and it's not about me. So for the first couple of years of my recovery, I got high on getting out of myself by waking up early, going above and beyond, not because I wanted to be Superman or whatever, but because I wanted a distraction from what was going on within. But the beautiful thing is, even though I thought I wasn't strong enough to deal with what was going on underneath, every single time that I showed up at work and powered through something, it gave way to me having a cathartic breakdown with the people in my chosen path of recovery, where they would give me the game and build me up to the point I could go back to the real world and learn something else, and vice versa. When I was struggling in my job, I would go to the people in my recovery circle and they would help me through that and share their experience. So it was kind of a one-two punch of immersing myself in a community of recovery and taking chances with the lessons that I had learned there through being a service to kind of integrate a life where my job and my calling and my path and my purpose integrated with my recovery work and they kind of coalesced and formed this singular vision of me being of service to the best of my ability in my life and flipping the whole script where it wasn't about changing the way I felt internally to cope with the world around me, but being immersed and jumping into the stream of life so that I would feel better within as a result of the confidence and self-love that I had gained.

SPEAKER_02 21:05

This is amazing. And I mean, we all have our own epiphenal thought of I need to be different. And you know, Krista and I, we both woke up in a jail cell, and that was the the last day for us. You know, yours was yours, and but it's all you know, and that's why I kind of led to, you know, after we get that gift of desperation that says, I will do whatever I have to do to get sober. And you talked about God, and we all have to find a some sort of spirituality because me on my own, left to my own devices, I drink, I use. And but when I take me out of it, and because that's one thing that that we're all, you know, with addiction, selfish, self centered, dishonest, right? And selfish, self centered, and having that that gift of of of desperation where I am gonna do whatever I gotta do, dude. See, I've been Over a long time and ashtrays, the amount of ashtrays that I cleaned in the beginning of recovery, you know, and uh you know, but we do what we gotta do to get out, and what that is is God's work, right? When I'm doing service work, I'm doing God's work, and when I'm doing God's work, I'm having little itty bitty spiritual experiences, and I'm a 12-stepper too. And each step is a spiritual experience that inevitably leads to a spiritual awakening, and then we get to go and help others and and be present and do for people's lives and be a part of people's lives. Uh, Krista, Krista's a great example, dude. She is a social media icon, icon, I say. And I'm you know, and and she just gets out there and tells it honest, right? Krista, I'm gonna let you talk about that.

SPEAKER_01 22:54

I think it's really important to show the raw and the real. And that's what I love about you, Ben, what you do. And um it's not all butterflies and rainbows, and you can make on social media, you can make it look like that, but it's not real. And people aren't gonna, I mean, being in recovery is not easy, but it's so worth it. And it's it's proof we are part of God's plan. Like, I went through all this to help the next man. And I don't do it for the likes or the views or whatever. I feel in my heart to share what's on like my story or what I'm going through. And um I have a small young family, like, and it's hard, it's balancing that and and trying to keep my recovery number one. And what you said about um it, it really has nothing to do with the drugs and the alcohol. Like it's something deep down that we need to get to the root of. And um, that was just a symptom. And recovery is for everyone. We all have habits, hurts, hangups. We could be like, I don't go to recovery meetings to get sober. I've been sober 10 years. I suffer from grief, anger, overthinking. And I'm just trying to push through it and heal. It's constantly healing. Recovery is healing, and we all, every everyone on this planet, we're in a fallen world right now, and we all need it. And that's I just want to keep pushing that. That recovery is for everyone. There's no one way, and we're all connected through that healing, you know.

SPEAKER_02 24:25

Amen. Absolutely. I got all the good feels right now, Krista. That was good.

SPEAKER_01 24:30

He's a lot like us.

SPEAKER_00 24:32

That was a big drop right there for sure.

SPEAKER_02 24:33

I'm telling you, she threw she threw down. I think we might have to we might have to walk away altogether. Let everybody welcome welcome to the Christa show. Uh all right, Ben. I my next question, dude. And we're gonna, I mean, we've talked about recovery for 30 minutes now or something like that. I want to talk about music, bro. Yeah, I mean, I want to talk about the music and what so let's back up. And what where are you? You've been musically inclined. You uh you being on the spectrum, did that help? And and let's talk about your early musical endeavors.

SPEAKER_00 25:09

Yeah, so I started writing poetry when I was eight, and I started playing piano when I was nine. Uh, there's a bit of a musical history in my family. Uh, my great-grandfather was a fairly famous American composer, and his daughter and my mom uh were both musically inclined and were both writers. Uh, my grandmother and grandfather were journalists, my mom and dad are journalists, and my mom is also a jazz singer. So growing up, music and words were a big part of my family in the same way. I like to say that if there's a family of lawyers and doctors, if there's a family of auto mechanics, you might have like the starting daughter asks, Daddy, like, what's up with the suit and like the loafers? What are you doing carrying that briefcase? And they talked to him about it. My dad was a writer, and so like I remember him like going down to his study and just being over his computer, and my mom would sing, and I remember getting dressed up for like her jazz gigs and just being enraptured by that. But in terms of my autism spectrum disorder, the cool thing about it was that music and words seem like different things because music is a mathematical language that involves intervals, and the way that there are 13 keys on a piano, it's different in like Eastern music where there are like quarter steps and things, but let's just stick to like Western classical music. You got 13 intervals, A, B, C, D, E F G, and then the sharps and flats. But then with words, they also have a sense of rhythm and an innate sense of structure and like how languages operate to the point that after years of writing poetry and years of playing piano, I wanted to combine those two things. And the closest thing that I got was hip-hop. I remember uh an act of addiction. The one thing that got me higher spiritually, not physically, uh, was walking into the middle of a party. And I wasn't sober when I was doing this. But the crazy thing about it is I could be like drunk or like high or whatever, and the beat would come on and it would be like this blinding light of clarity because I would be improvising poetry, combining my love for words and music, and it would honestly sober me up, but in a way that was uplifting and like a high in and of itself, because instead of trying to run away from connecting with people, it put me at the center, but not in like an attention-seeking way, although there was certainly validation, but there was a high and a euphoria that came from chasing a passion. But as my addiction continued to escalate, it didn't just get away from that, it got to the point that I was chasing clout in every form, just as much of a drug as I was the substances. And you know, if I didn't get like a famous rapper on one of my songs, um, if I didn't get a certain amount of YouTube or Dat Piff views, which was a platform back in the day I'm showing my millennial age right now. But before Spotify, there was Dat Piff for the hip hop mixtapes. There was YouTube, and there were like different hot new hip hop and all that. And I remember at one point I had like a couple hundred thousand views on this SoundCloud platform that me and my buds made for this like hip hop blog and performance series, and they got a copyright violation because they posted a DJ set and the music didn't go away, but all my views went away in like one day. This thing I had built for like two years in active addiction, and that made me double down on my using because I thought my artistic identity is gone. Because just like my personal identity was tied up in the substance, and I felt like I was nothing without the needle and like the pipe and all that at the end, I thought it doesn't matter like who I am and what my music is. If I don't have these views, then like it's nothing. And that's then I don't want to blame that, but but that's just the the way that that converged in my thinking there. It wasn't about the actual living or the crap. It was just like a stepping stone that I could use to prove my validation and my work. So when I got sober, the cool thing is that I immediately started making music after. And it was hip-hop music that instead of glorifying addiction, glorified recovery. And the one promise I made to myself is that in active addiction of music I made, it wasn't false, but it was exaggerated in terms of like I would only talk about the cool things. Like I wouldn't talk about throwing up in an alleyway, I would talk about like the bottle of Johnny Walker Blue or like Viv Clique Co that I drank before I was throwing up in the alleyway. I wouldn't talk about how the fact that like a plug held me at gunpoint or like tried to stab me. I would talk about the fact that I brought that plug $5,000. So, like, all of those different things aside, I would curate this kind of false vision of what addiction was. But in recovery, I was like, no, I need to talk about all of those embarrassing the things I don't want to tell people because I want people to connect with this in a way who have actually been through it. And then a couple years in, I was playing the piano, and I was like, there's no way that I can rap and play piano at the same time. Because again, it's like those are my two loves classical piano and then hip hop. But then my addiction took me away from that. I dropped out of conservatory, I kind of left that out, but I I was playing concert piano pieces, but I threw that all away to like get high, and that came with its own things about disappointing my family and all this. But I was two years sober and I just sat down and started playing, and I was like, there's gotta be a way that I can do this while rapping at the same time. And I just got out of my way and I devised a plan to start doing it. And the beautiful thing about it was about seven months after I did that first piece where I was playing piano and rapping at the same time, I got introduced by a friend of a friend to this dude who owns a studio here in Vermont where I now live. And not only was he a producer who owned a studio, he was also a doctor, a man who was in both worlds, who had been at several summits in regards to treating the addiction crisis from a medical standpoint here in Vermont. So I got to the point I was telling my story of recovery through my music, I got to the point that the classical piano was integrated, and then just like I'm talking about in that treatment center earlier, when I got over myself and I was ready to be of service, that door opened, that God moment, right? When he asked me to be a service. When I was ready to really make music that told the truth, when I was ready to do it in the way that I had been supposed to do it all along, that opportunity opened and I started putting out music about my recovery, but that only happened when I got out of my own way and stopped trying to glorify addiction, when I allowed myself to make the music that I really wanted to make and combine all my passions, and when I was really grounded in my authentic truth and my music the same way I was in my recovery.

SPEAKER_02 31:30

All right, when I when I'm on mute, I say the smartest things when I'm on mute, then um the uh so that kind of first off, I want to be able to tell everybody where they can find you. Where is where do they find Benjamin Lerner and his music? What's the best place for you for them to go?

SPEAKER_00 31:48

Yeah, the primary platform is Facebook. I'm also on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, all that. All the music videos that I've done are on YouTube. Um, all the like official music that I've dropped is on Spotify. There's some that my team hasn't released on Spotify yet that are on just on YouTube, but most of my songs are on Spotify. Um, and it's under Benjamin Learner. I also have some like collab tracks with some people I greatly respect in the recovery sphere, and those are on there too. Some are like originally on their pages with me as a listed collaborator. But if you type Benjamin Learner um onto Facebook or Spotify or any of them places, you'll you'll see me and all of my rippity rap recovery reels pop up.

SPEAKER_02 32:32

Okay, so uh Megan is in the background right now. Megan works with us. She's gonna put uh all of your links into the chat right now so people can uh can find you immediately. And I wanna I want to keep going into this music because I want to know about how you know first off, you have a song that I am I I'm crazy about, and Turk Street is is is so good, it's so good, it just hits so hard, dude. I've sent I sent it to I've sent the the the TikTok reel of it to probably 20 people just like dude, this is so good, and uh so I want to know how now how how is this music influence your recovery? How how does sharing these the this information about yourself, sharing this personal information? I want how does this you know how is this a part of your recovery life?

SPEAKER_00 33:28

Well, it's one thing to listen to something, it's one thing to write something down, it's another thing to say it out loud and put it out there. And um, you know, before I started my platform, I had put out a CD of songs, I'd done a couple performances, I'd done speaking engagements at different prevention and like substance use disorder summits, uh, both from a prevention standpoint and for a national advocacy thing, like Aspen Institute, local prevention summits in like Albany, New York, and like Southern Vermont that I'm very grateful for. But social media was kind of like the last frontier. And I was six years sober before I ever posted my first reel. Although I had been active as an advocate in the musical and um the writing, I wrote a weekly column. I still I still host a weekly recovery rap radio show here in Vermont, which I'm very proud of because I don't think there are any other recovery rap radio shows on FM radio. Um, so shout out to WEQX 102.7 here in Vermont for letting me do that. They were like a jam rock and alternative rock station, but they they let me do like a weekly show where I essentially talk about my recovery in the same way and get to play music that I really love. But when I made my first reel um in November of 2022, like the week after Thanksgiving, it happened because after my first son was born, Jude, I had a lot of time at home. And my girl would be, who's who's a Gen Zier. I was born in '91, she's born in 2000. So she's eight and a half years younger than me. She's 25, and I'm about to be 34 this Friday. And but that generation gap means everything because she would always be listening to these like mom lifestyle reels. And I'd be like, what is that? Like, what are those like short form videos you're watching? And she's like, you should make them. And I'm like, nah, I'm not gonna make them. Like, I'm that that's that's that that that that's for you, Gen Zers, TikTok. That's not no. She's like, no, like I've seen some recovery stuff. Like, you should definitely make this. And the crazy thing is that after that, again, the doors open when we're ready. Then I came across reels by Rachel Elizabeth, Jimmy McGill, Quinn LePier, like a lot of different people from different um Michael Jeffrey Brown, Hunter Michael Shepherd, like um Brad from Sober Motivation. Like they all started coming across my feed, and I was like, man, I should start doing this. So in the beginning, it was just talk reels. And then I built a platform uh before I had my team's approval to see if I could do it. Because before that, my team had to approve it. If I posted a music video, it's like we gotta approve it. Do they they do old school stuff? But I did it on my own and I got 10,000 TikTok followers within a month just from talk reels and old music stuff. And I was like, you guys gotta let me start posting original music, and he's like, Okay, but it can't be full songs. Record like live piano takes in the studio and post those, and you can do one a week. And I was like, okay. So then, in addition to the talk reels, I started doing one verse every week on original on the platform, and that was premiered on my weekly radio show that I referenced every Thursday night, and then I put it on my platform every Friday. And then people started saying, Yeah, this is cool. Your original album is cool. We want to hear these verses over beats. So what ended up happening is that I took the verses that resonated most with people and I started making them into songs and then putting those out. And Turk Street was the first one that I did that was a completely original song that was separate from all those reels that my team let me put out. And around the same time that that was happening, I was making inroads and I was beginning to talk to rappers that I deeply respect, like Matt Keegan, like Caliche, uh, like the people who I had been listening to and playing on my radio show for years. So, right around the same time my team became open to me, like doing tracks from these verses that I put on social media, Matt and Calici and I started working on songs together. And so over the course of 2024, it went from me just posting these little like 60-second clips of me rapping over piano like I always had, to getting feedback from the recovery community that brought me to the point where the same people who had inspired me with their music, like Matt and Caliche, became my collaborators. And I don't think that speaks specifically to the strength of my music, I think it speaks to the strength of the recovery community, which is whether you're making talk content or music, if you're spreading a message that's true, the algorithm is gonna put you in contact with people who share the same values. And I think that speaks to the strength of the online recovery community more than my music. I'm humbled that you like Turk Street, man, but the most incredible comments I get on that are not, whoa, sick flow, sick lyrics. Like that feeds my ego as a rapper. My favorite comments that I get from the songs are when people are like, dude, I was out on Turk Street in the tenderloin, I was homeless, like, you know, I was I was in and out of prison, and you just spoke my life. And whether it's a talk reel or whether it's a music reel, it's all the same to me. I want to make the stuff that if I was in active addiction or early recovery, because I got sober in 2016, y'all are both, you know, long-term recovery too. So y'all both got sober before the algorithm, before the reels. And so you know what it's like when you don't have a digital space for these things. So it's just been really humbling to see not just how the music has somewhat taken off, although that's a relative term, but how people in the recovery community have used it as a tool in their own recovery, which is deeply humbling and just really cool to see that it's helping people. That that's more than I could ever ask for.

SPEAKER_02 38:45

I'm telling you, not I mean, not only are you speaking volumes to people that had the same thing that you that you had, you know, because you speak you're you're very specific about the things that you did, and people can relate, and it's beautiful. Um, but you know, the you you're taking a stand. You're taking a stand up against fentanyl, against you know, and I want to talk about that for a second. And I know that it wasn't on the dock, but it is now, and you know, uh, you know, and I and more people need to be standing up and and and trying the fentanyl awareness, overdose awareness, everything. We this is this people are dying all day, every day from this disease. And it's it's people like you were out there loud, yelling, this is this is what we we need more of.

SPEAKER_00 39:42

Well, thank you, man. I mean, I want to preface this by saying that just be just like I'm I got the path of recovery that works for me, but even though like my path of recovery is kind of old school recovery, I'm not old school in the perspective that I bring to it. Like when I tell people, even though I'm absent, and I told Quinn this, I was like, dude, I've learned so much from your platform. And he's like, Well, are you Cali Sober? And I say, No, but like it's not about that our path of recovery is different, and I'm absent and you're Cali Sober. The mental health stuff, the self-work, the shadow work stuff you talk about, the spiritual principles, it doesn't matter because that's opened my vision. So I apply that same perspective towards mitigating this crisis on a policy and direct intervention basis. There's a big divide in the recovery community, not just between the abstinence or nothing, or if you're abstinent, you are pushing a harmful stigma. And and I think both of those extremes are crazy. I think that if you're an abstinence-based recovery, that's great. But I think that there should be room for MH and Cali sober. And if you're harm reduction, MHC or Cali sober, you should be okay with people in chemically absent recovery too. We're not opposed to each other. Even it's okay that we have different stuff that works for us. So I started seeing that same thing, not just in the recovery community, but people saying you can't be both pro overdose prevention and harm reduction and pro fentanyl enforcement. And I'm like, the hell I can't. I want to see a world where people pass out Narcan and people go to homeless camps with like mental health outreach and enforcement officers getting metric tons of fentanyl off the streets, man. People are getting too divided on this. Whether you save a life by putting someone in a treatment center, reviving them with Narcan, or getting them in a state where this happens to an overdose prevention center, people have different opinions on that. And you're welcome to your opinion on that. But recently I was down in DC with a very political, it's uh right-wing leading enforcement-based organization, and people were saying, Oh, you're a boot licking fascist because you're allied with this organization. I'm like, you know what? When I was going passing out Narcan and advocating for the overdose prevention thing, same people saying that were saying that I was a hippie dippy, woke mobber, left-wing lunatic. And the truth is you gotta be willing to step, put your boots on the ground, whether it's for harm reduction, enforcement, or anything like that, I don't care as long as it's a life getting saved. And the truth is that, and I hope, I hope I don't compromise your platform by saying this, but I gotta speak my piece. Ever since the OxyContin epidemic, like you know, the pharmaceutical epidemic all the way today, with the Chinese Communist Party directly subsidizing the manufacture of precursor chemicals, the deck has been stacked against us from the start, regardless of what side it is. This is bigger than any single political party. This is bigger than any specific policy decision. Half a million people died from the addiction epidemic over the past 10 years, and there is no one size fits all solution to it, just like there is no one size fits all solution to recovery. So whether it's harm reduction, overdose prevention, enforcement, treatment, abstinence recovery, MAT recovery, my platform and I and I put this down through my music in the most recent song Fall in Line when I went down with the lost voice of fentanyl people. If you're trying to save people's lives and get them towards recovery, I'm with you, bruh. I don't care who you voted for, I don't care where you live, I don't care what path of faith you are, I don't care what path of recovery you are. I want to support you, and more than that, I want to platform you and give you a voice because it's not just about the people in recovery, it's about the people who are mourning their lost loved ones who don't get a chance to speak. And I and I hope I didn't go on too much of a tangent.

SPEAKER_02 43:30

No, free tech, free tech. I mean uh let so last week we had our friend Kindle on here who is walking across America with the with with T with t shirts, with a t shirt, and he's got 18 t shirts of people who have died from overdose on there. And so, and then a few weeks ago we had Chief Rosier from Charleston, South Carolina, on here talking about how he's seeing a 40%. decrease in in opioid related overdoses in his community because he's they so a lot of people don't know about the opioid settlement fund that the the pharmacies that put out all these harmful drugs they ought to pay a big fine and billion billion and and and each city each each state each city everybody's getting money for some sort of harm harm reduction and he told us exactly what they're doing and it's working it's working and so when we're we're we have you on here we want you on here because you're vocal about this we want to talk about this we want the world to know that this is a an epidemic this is this is out here it's killing people and we need to talk about it more and we need to sing about it more brother and we need to do it I mean I no go ahead it's simple we we we want to save lives we want to help people and everyone wants to make it a little more complicated or have something controversial to say about one thing like what you are saying is I've I've dealt with a lot of these these people too and it's just there's no one way and and everyone's suffering from something different and but there is a solution.

SPEAKER_00 45:22

Yeah and when you let people speak their truth see here's the thing and then people think I'm crazy for this I always tell people if your experience contradicts mine that doesn't make it wrong. Like the things that didn't work for me if they work for you contradict me. Speak it on your platform but don't make your platform being in diametric opposition to me and my lived experience. You ain't gotta invalidate my lived experience as a person in abstinence based recovery to speak your truth on MAT or Cali sober. I will honor and validate that truth for you. But there has to be mutual respect and understanding that if we're truly going to address every aspect of this crisis that whether it's abstinence or MAT slash Cali um harm reduction moderation recovery or whether it's enforcement versus uh treatment and harm reduction and overdose prevention, all of those realities can be true. Some people get help by going into the justice system like y'all said you bottomed out after you got arrested. Some people get arrested and the system does them dirty and they and they go out and they never make it back. Some people go to treatment and they get body brokered and it's horrible and it's the worst experience of their life. Some people go to treatment and it saves their life. Some people practice harm reduction and it keeps them in a cycle and they're not able to get clean some people have harm reduction people reach out to them and get them into like a a better living situation that allows them to get sober. Nobody has a one size fits all solution to this I think the one size fits all solution is let's talk with respect let's overcome our differences let's share our hope and our strength and our resilience and let's build together and not knock each other down. Yes amen amen to that dude that that was that was powerful that was powerful that's a great response do my best I'm using it I'm definitely not I'm definitely not up in the comments sections on all three apps like like doing little like uh back and forth nah I yeah no I I'm so the same exact way we face a lot of the same stuff and I love your response just now and I'm using it go for it I I love what you're doing too and thank you for letting me speak on the music and how it relates because you know a lot of people they just want to be musicians or they just want to be talk content people they don't see the intersection but I think it's all part of the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 47:41

It's all part of the same conversation absolutely let's give away something let's give away some hat like I want to give away a hat have you uh have you seen these have you met our buddy Mike yet he uh he isn't in here but he uh uh he's got a company called soberhats.com and it can have sober on it has clean on it he has people for allies of people and uh let's give away a couple hats um the first person to email my buddy Mike at uh sober hats at gmail dot com first person to email uh Benjamin Lerner is the best music wins a free hat that's all you gotta say Benjamin Lerner is is the best music wins a free hat and you guys are too much i i'm gonna need to cop that pink hat though though we got is hidden we got a heart yeah i'm i i'm finna that's that's finna pop i'm gonna i'm gonna get like the the the hello kitty like k-pop background for the real switch it up on them with the pink they're gonna be like what i didn't see that coming hello so i i got mike here mike is mike is prepared to receive an email benjamin mute benjamin learner is the best music all you gotta do is type uh soberhats at gmail.com i believe that's his email address right chris i'm not giving the wrong email address um look at this old man memory you better watch out when it uh put it in the comments meg and put it in the comments first person to email mike he's gonna i got him over here he'll text me and let me know who won but uh but dude okay i got i've got a couple more questions and we've already kind of you've kind of um you've kind of answered them but just i want to be what what is your inspiration what's the what inspires you when you write a new song when you get when you get is it is it just something a a moment that pops in your head and you just start flowing or what inspires you to write a new song in terms of writing like rap verses it just hits me from time to time and I'll just crank like I don't really take that much time with rap verses.

SPEAKER_00 49:52

If a rap verse doesn't come out like there's some like really structured conceptual stuff where I'll take my time and like go back but usually it's just like five 10 minutes just like it's basically freestyling through keyboard. But there's certain songs it's funny you mentioned Turk Street the the song tracks the ones with melodies and that's not all of them I'll be listening to a song that no one would ever think was like a recovery rap song. But I listen to all kinds of music I listen to folk like I listen to you know like Noah Khan and like Zach Bryan and I listen to country I listen to like Jelly Roll I listen to Tyler Chowders I listen I don't just listen to hip hop I love hip hop but I listen to everything and like I listen to like Rod Wave and like you know different like melodic hip-hop stuff Roddy Rich like Polo G. And I listened to the Amazon session the acoustic session where Rod Wave did like a melodic trap song called the Great Gatsby and he did it over very spare piano and it was just this level of pain and vulnerability that like literally sent shivers down my spine because even though I hadn't lived his life I could feel his pain. And I was there was just something about that chord progression that BPM and I did it differently from him but that inspired me hearing him in a completely different way he's not sober. He lived the street life in a different way than I did but hearing him cathartically vent his pain over that very minimalist production I was just it got me to a place where I was willing to tell my own story using that as the inspiration and it didn't inspire the content it didn't inspire the flow pattern it didn't even inspire the melody that I did over that same chord progression or how I laid out like my piano part but just like I had to keep my ears open to people in recovery who were sharing experience, strength and hope in a real way to get to the point I could share my own I keep my ears open to the music that's doing the same thing in different ways. And there's an amazing thing going on in the music industry now where people like Cam Whitcomb is one of the most incredible recovery artists I've seen in my life. And he's not a hip hop artist but if you ask him on the opposite side he's like a folk and like pop and like country artist who inspired you he's like Mercules and Mad Child. And you would never think that because those are like Canadian like lyrical rappers but it all goes to show that music is bigger than a genre it's bigger than a singular like school of thought and people who keep their ears open are the real ones because if I had been listening to that rod wave track being like man this isn't in line with my recovery principles this isn't I listen to the music and what that carried and I let that light a fire within me to take that inspiration interpret it within my own thing and create something that was uniquely my own so I guess that's how I encapsulate how I find my inspiration. I keep my ears open man it's good like your mind yeah open mind. Yeah okay so now you are live on Facebook frequently folding laundry that's kind of it's kind of your thing let me let me see if I can make it like my laundry live real quick I have so much to fold maybe I should be doing that too it's the only time I can do it because I used to go live and you know I was a dad of two under two and after Max my second son was born in December 2023 Alex my fiance the mom of my kids was like yeah you can't go to the studio to do lives anymore I was like well what am I gonna do she's like do it while you're folding the laundry how about that yeah and I was like you know what that's the best idea of all time that is that so I combined my dad chores you're a good man you're a good man uh mate she's a real dad so that brings us that brings me right to my last question is balance is how do you balance your recovery your music your social media presence your everything you know that's uh and your family you know I know you've got you've got children that jump into your lives every now and then or at least you talk about them uh that sweet pea is that uh that's Alex that's uh that's her nickname we actually have a tattoo that we share for her it's on your shoulder for me it's on my leg um our mutual friend uh said when I met her he's like oh yeah he's got a big Philly oh yeah she's a sweet pea and then he when he with her he's a car salesman he's you was he's better friends with me but he also knows her so he was selling he was selling her a car he's like so what's it like dating a redwood tree so she's sweet pea and she calls redwood because she's 4'11 I'm 6'3 so we have this little cartoon tattoo of a little sweet pea pod in like a big tall tree and so that's why I call her sweet pea that's the origin of it is she in recovery um she's not in recovery but she is sober um she tried the whole completely sober thing and she she didn't have a problem doing it but for her it's more about mental health challenges childhood trauma I I would let her speak on her own thing yeah but she is in therapy she is doing all that stuff but her main thing is in substances it's like different divergent like mental health stuff but she's very supportive of my recovery and she can have like one drink every like four months but honestly she she spits it out like halfway through and she's like yeah this isn't my thing.

SPEAKER_02 54:55

Yeah so do you go on tour or anything like that?

SPEAKER_00 55:01

I recently did um a show at a theater down in Massachusetts uh which is really humbling because it's like normally reserved for um kind of Broadway like theatrical productions and we got to raise some money for like artistic and recovery organizations in a real beautiful way and the mayor came out and it was a real humble and cool thing. I'm gonna be doing a show in Maine. I've been doing it for the past several years um for Black Balloon Day in Maine and supposedly I'm gonna be joined by Caliche maybe Matt Keegan I don't know he's a busy man. KC makes music Jordan Meyer and the real young swag a lot of incredible musicians supposedly are going to be coming I did it with Calici and Real Young Swag last year. My management's real selective about the stuff I do um I have a different they have a different approach than most people in the recovery scene do which makes it hard for me to do some events because they're like well we're doing this we're doing that we're doing stuff at the studio but they're working towards doing more theatrical tour dates and I'm pressing them to let me do more recovery events because I want to go out and do stuff but again like I got a day job I got kids and I think this kind of factors into that question you were asking before I beered off into the little uh sweet pea origin story which is the way that I balance it whether it's shows whether it's you know journalistic assignments for my day job whether it's filming my reels is I'll break it down like this. The whole laundry live thing is a perfect encapsulation of how I've managed my platform from the very beginning. When I started filming reels I used to think oh it needs the perfect lighting oh I need to take like 20 minutes to get a perfect take and then out of necessity I started filming reels when I was walking my dog that was the only time when I was when my first son was a newborn and I was like in and out of the house trying to manage work and all that made it work. And the thing is the fact I only had 10 minutes when I was walking my dog to film, edit and post those reels became the backbone for my entire platform. So the way that I do it is I would love to get like a little like podcast studio and and and it's awesome when people can like that's a beautiful thing. But at this point in my life I have to do my lives when I'm folding the laundry I have to record my music when my kids are asleep and like that's time that I can do it. I have to write my music when my kids are asleep after I fold the laundry and I have to only do reels when I have the time and most of the time that's when I'm walking my dog around the block. So the way that I balance it is I don't see the time constraints as a negative I see them as a positive because in the same way in early recovery when we have all these pressures beaten down on us, being unemployed having to figure out recovery housing getting right with our family paying off debts literal and metaphoric it seems like there's a 10 ton weight on our shoulders but that's actually kind of the crucible and the pressure in which it's like you have to get out of your own way and just speak the truth. So the way I balance it is by taking advantage of whatever time I have and not getting hung up on what I can't do. If a I used to I used to put and no hate to anybody who uses filters I used to be like I'm gonna choose the perfect AR filter the perfect lighting this real isn't right because the lighting doesn't do this. I drop the filters I drop making the placement of my face perfect in like the thing and I just post stuff. Doesn't matter if I do perfect eye contact doesn't matter if my skin or the angle or whatever is hitting that's where I'm at. And if it ain't good enough and someone's in that whole superficial headspace then it is what it is. I'm gonna put out where I'm at in the realest sense because honestly when I was on the other side in active addiction and there was a dude 34 years old nine years in recovery he was talking about his family and all this stuff if I saw him in a studio every day like trying to be all glissy and glamorous I'd be like nah bro this man's this man isn't really being with his kids he's not really working the recovery program he's trying to be all Hollywood so that's how I balance it I keep it real I keep it simple and I try my best to keep it authentic.

SPEAKER_02 58:51

I love it this has been so awesome brother I thank you so much uh you got a birthday coming up on Friday this Friday four let's get it this Friday's a huge day Chris has got to keep huge your birthday my baby girl's four my husband celebrates one year sober and I'll be married for six years on that day 117 we should be playing that number somewhere I'm telling you this is congratulations 117 I'm expecting every everybody in this live to be to be sending uh all these uh congratulations and happy birthdays and everything over to Krista and to Ben uh Ben dude from the bottom of my heart thank you for being here with us today for answering our questions and uh you know it's uh I can't wait for more people to learn about you we've put your uh your contact information in the in the chat here so everybody who watches this video now everybody who's going to watch this video later will be able to find you and uh dude I just I just can't express enough how how great this has been today. And some powerful new music you just dropped too thank you I'm I appreciate y'all checking out Fall Online from the bottom of my heart man God bless y'all I mean from the platform how y'all link people in with resources how you create a vibrant community where thousands hundreds whatever it is people like tuning in every morning y'all are doing God's work and I'm humbled to be here love y'all thank you Ben thank you everyone for for tuning in this week uh we'll see you again next week and uh until then you know make sure you're going and following Ben and because it's he's it's awesome stuff. Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you