Overcoming Addiction: My Journey to 23 Days Clean and a New Podcast Direction

What if one decision could change your entire life? In this heartfelt episode, I share my raw and personal journey of battling depression and overcoming addiction. After months of being MIA, I'm thrilled to celebrate a milestone—23 days clean from my porn addiction. Join me as I candidly discuss the ups and downs of my recovery, the strategies that helped me stay on track, and the invaluable lessons I've learned along the way. From mental health struggles to the importance of a positive mindset, this conversation promises to be both honest and inspiring.

Additionally, I'm excited to announce a shift in the podcast format. Moving towards a solo setup for now, I'll be sharing my insights on business strategies and mindset development, incorporating lessons from past guests and my own experiences. I'll also introduce you to Speech2TO, an incredible tool that has significantly aided my recovery and writing process. Whether you're looking for business tips, personal growth insights, or just to catch up, this episode offers a genuine and motivating experience that you won't want to miss.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello, hello everybody. It has been a while. I did a whole sad story flash in the pan, I'm back, everybody and then once the smoke settled, he was gone. He was depressed. That's why but I'm better now Part of me going MIA for a couple months there was well the first part in the previous episode and just going through the withdrawal breakups and just reeling from that and my porn addiction and what I've recently been doing which is why I want to talk is I have officially made it to the point when I hit publication on will be 23 days clean.

Speaker 1: 0:43

Um, I haven't used, I haven't relapsed and um, so I'll. I'll glance over that, but if it is interesting to you all, um, uh, my website is down, by the way. I have to figure out how to build a new one, um, so I would say, message me on the website, but you can hit me up on joshbolton show at gmailcom. I think I put a link in the description that has my Google voice number too. So, yes, if you actually wanted to text me no one's ever taken me up on that, but if you ever want to do that, you can also tell me there. But the surefire way is through email joshboltonshow at gmailcom.

Speaker 1: 1:27

Other than that, I've decided with the show I'm going to go more of a solo podcast for now, kind of like what I did when I first started. It's important for me to just get back behind the mic. I am not recording this time. I am a hot mess. My room is just a disaster, so it would not be YouTube visually appealing. But the next episode I will record and post it to YouTube. Wow, that was a long slip. Yeah, I will post it to YouTube and have everything there. What I'm thinking of doing is retooling it. When it's the solo podcast is my personal recovery and some experiences in and insights, but also because I'm mostly business talk about the business, businesses, strategies and methods. I have learned from all my guests and eventually, if I'm able to get some guests on. But currently, with my schedule being so unpredictable of work, I don't want to commit to a time and then be like whoopsie, something came up, can't do the recording and this busy person actually gave me like an hour of their time. Hard to ask for that back. So I'd rather just do solo until I can figure things out. But also I want to get into mindset. That's a big one, especially with business. You have to have a good mindset anyways. You just need to have a good mindset for life. I think that's what I want to kind of transition to and have fun with.

Speaker 1: 3:01

Recently, one of the biggest tools I've been using is this application called Speech2TO. Note I honestly I'm using it right now to outline the whole um podcast. It's you pretty much especially with my ADHD the way the developers have made this app. You talk into it and it transcribes it. Then it also summarizes your notes and it'll take all your run on sentences and just cut them off. It's amazing, like this morning I was working with it on creating an outline for my nonfiction like porn recovery book line. For my non-fiction like porn recovery book. I can write about all the psychological stuff because I've studied that, but I haven't done the like 90 days plus. So I figured by the time I'm done with it I can credibly say this is what I'm doing. Um, and it honestly is like the prompts I've figured out for this app. It's amazing. It's like having a really cheap ghostwriter for everything and it's only getting better with every update. So I recommend right now he's still having a lifetime deal at AppSumo. I'll try to link the AppSumo and just pick up I think it's like $49 per code and you need two codes for the unlimited unlimited everything. Um, he is planning on phasing this out. Uh, so this grandfather deal will disappear. But from what he's told us though, um, in the future I'll also link my affiliate link. Uh, you get the grandfather pricing. So it would be a hundred bucks a year for unlimited chat. Gbt 4.0, by the way, not just the four turbo 4.0. It is slick, and, by the way, not just the 4 Turbo 4.0. It is slick, and yeah. So a little rant on that, but that's what's helping me write my stories and helping me embellish.

Speaker 1: 5:04

When I was mentioning earlier with the outline for the recovery nonfiction, I woke up at like 2.30 in the morning today and I don't know why. So around three o'clock I was fully awake and I sat in front of my laptop and I'm trying to type because I didn't want to talk and wake up my parents and I couldn't type for my life. My dyslexia was kicking in so hard and I'm like oh, so I eventually came back back, cleaned up everything and then we put it in the speech to note and had to outline everything for me, and that made more sense and, my goodness, it saved me. It would have saved me so much time to just do it that way. But, um, the other reason I'm going to bring up the YouTube channel rebuild is I accidentally deleted my old channel when I had some fraud last year. My card got compromised and I forgot to update my YouTube music subscription and so I went in and tried to do it. It was rejecting it and it was saying it was the wrong channels. One of my sub channels I made and I was like, okay, delete that one. And it's like, all right, cool, delete. It says you still have too many channels. I'm like, all right, delete the other sub channel. Well, apparently that one was too tied to the main channel and it's deleted both of them. So all those years of work are kind of gone, like my website too, just gone, um. But so I'm going to rebuild it.

Speaker 1: 6:30

I'm going to use speech to note I'm actually working with the developer. He's also a prompt engineer. He's going to help me with a podcast app, a podcast prompt, and so this is where I'm going to use that prompt and the titles I recommend. And then I found a AR generator. I pay him like five bucks a month. Um, it's like a california coffee. I don't even drink coffee anymore, uh. So I use that and I can. It's a really interesting app. Um, it's one of those. If you're not careful on specifying what the subject's supposed to do or look like a high probability. If you're not careful on specifying what the subject's supposed to do or look like a high probability, if you do not put a filter in, it'll probably be a naked subject kind of thing and it's like oh, that is not what I wanted. So, um, it's very versatile, so I'm going to use that to generate um images. Probably eventually I'll get the OpenAI subscription and work with DALL E3, like take that photo and be like alright, here's the photo, now, make it better, kind of thing. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to the rebuild.

Speaker 1: 7:45

Now, doubling back to the guest scheduling problem I mentioned quickly and just kind of slid over was for me, right now I do a clean pools, by the way, um, we're hitting summer season, so it's long, hot and hard and I usually am just wiped out from getting home, from just my work, and so I've really my only free time is on Saturdays. But to be real and frank, entrepreneurs or whatever like wanting to promote their stuff on a Saturday morning or evening. I don't blame them. They probably would rather be with their kids or their family or their significant other doing events instead of talking to this jerk over here. Um, so that's where I'm going to. Also, I'm also working on going to the gym in the morning around 5am. Part of the reason why I wasn't totally upset at waking up at like three in the morning gave me an hour to work on um, my stories, and then I went to for an hour total at the gym. Um, I think I did only like a 40 minute workout. It was legs, though oh boy are they toasty. And so that's where I'm trying to get back in shape. I realized at a certain point I'm underfeeding myself, I'm not exercising, I'm literally just vegging and depressed.

Speaker 1: 9:09

Personal side note part of the reason why I'm doing this podcast is, in the last seven days, good old Josh here had almost three just meltdowns break. I just I was literally screaming at an imaginary person. I was so angry and crying at the same person and it just was like all the emotions. And I sat there and I was like, first of all, I realized, with my ADHD and depression but manic depression. Uh, I have cycle and I can't fight the cycle. It is, it's there, I get. I've learned to delay it and make it longer, and that's something we could probably go into in another episode of how I figured that out. But the cycle is inevitable. I can't. I can't get rid of it, kind of thing. So, yeah, I just I realized I'm like I need to do something.

Speaker 1: 10:00

I love I love creating stories, hence the speech, to know. I love podcasting, hence why I'm back and I'm going to aim for twice a week, so there's usually at least two days that are not too busy and I actually get home on time, like today. Um, and if worse comes to worse, if Wednesday doesn't work out, I can record something on Saturday, edit it up and post it, kind of thing, or bulk it, bulk record, I don't know, um, but that's where I'm excited, especially with AI and the ranking ability and all that. It's, it's exciting time. I feel I feel better, I feel optimistic and for a long time I did not feel that optimism and it really bugged me. But, um, since I mentioned it, I'll I'll double back, probably the third time. Now.

Speaker 1: 10:52

My, my first book is, um, well, my porn recovery journey and outlooks on my strategies and knowledge, um. But the second one is more the business and morale and productivity uh, how treating your employees well and having a lower turnover rate actually increases your business profits and stuff like that. Contrary to Fortune 500, big companies who practically look forward to turnover for write-off reasons, a lot of companies medium and small can't afford that turnover, so it would be doing that. But then also a lot of the marketing strategies I've learned from the show of putting it into work, words and just also the customer acquisition without over leveraging yourself as a young company, how to get customers and get them in your door. So it's going to be cool, it's going to be a fun journey and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you guys.

Speaker 1: 11:59

I am doing a separate YouTube channel, call it Mindful Evolve. It's essentially just going to be a really raw, unedited, no retention, editing or and stuff like that of just me talking about what I'm going through, so I don't have to flood the josh bolton show with it, um, but it's also it's me, but it's not kind of thing. It's separate from the podcast and that's. That's another one where I'm also going to test different strategies to see, oh, if I do this? What does it do? What if I do this split testing? I love it. For some reason, I'm really into split testing, um, so yeah, that's that's about it.

Speaker 1: 12:43

I just want to thank you all for being loyal. I looked at my stats before I hopped on um and I saw, since I last posted the previous one, saying oh oh, I'm back, but I'm not I got at least on Buzzsprout, 40 downloads. That's huge, like I know there's more, I'll put it that way, but the fact that I can see 40 on it is huge. So, thank you, thank you everyone. You mean the world to me and I look forward to delivering high value and high content to you on a more frequent and consistent basis. Other than that, love y'all, have a good one Until next time.