Life After Being an Ecstasy “Connoisseur” & MDMA-Fueled Raver, and the K-Hole That Scared Me Straight

Matt Handy (00:00:03):
I'm Matt Handy and you're listening to My Last Relapse. Dan, how do you say your last name?

Dan Vaysburd (00:00:08):
Vaysburd. Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:00:10):
Really?

Dan Vaysburd (00:00:10):
Yeah, it's Russian Jewish and the name is kind of like German. My dad's family, both my parents are from Russia.

Matt Handy (00:00:16):
Okay.

Dan Vaysburd (00:00:16):
But my dad's side is Jewish, and so Vaysburd in German means white beard. And so his ancestors from long ago were at some point in Austria, Germany, and so that's where the last name comes from.

Matt Handy (00:00:28):
That's fucking awesome.

Dan Vaysburd (00:00:29):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:00:30):
So you came, how old were you when you came?

Dan Vaysburd (00:00:33):
Yeah, so I was born in Trieste, Italy, and then I came to the United States. Now I was 11 months old, to be exact. My dad was a visiting professor at Cornell University out in Ithaca. And so that's how we came to America. We lived there for one month, and then when I was a year old, we moved to Central New Jersey, which is where I grew up from the ages of one to 18.

Matt Handy (00:00:54):
Okay. So what was it like growing up in Jersey? How old are you?

Dan Vaysburd (00:00:58):
I'm 30 today.

Matt Handy (00:00:59):
Okay. Yeah. Oh, today.

Dan Vaysburd (00:01:01):
Well, not today, but as of now, 30. Yeah, I turned 30 this past summer.

Matt Handy (00:01:05):
Happy birthday.

Dan Vaysburd (00:01:05):
Thanks. Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:01:06):
Okay. Yeah. So how was Jersey growing up?

Dan Vaysburd (00:01:09):
At the time, growing up in Jersey, I thought it was boring.

Matt Handy (00:01:14):
Yeah.

Dan Vaysburd (00:01:14):
I thought there was nothing to do. I almost felt sorry for myself. I never liked the cold weather, so I didn't like the winters. I didn't like waking up early for school. There's lots of things I didn't like. So I took a lot of the things that I know are good now for granted back then because as a kid, I was kind of spoiled, entitled. And I grew up as an only child. And growing up in central New Jersey, specifically Princeton, where Prince University is. It was a really sheltered, safe environment. And it was a really good environment to actually grow up as a kid.

(00:01:49):
So knowing what I know now was a really good environment. And I got a really good education. From the ages of pretty much five, from kindergarten all the way to 18 through high school, I went to really good public schools for the most part. I spent a couple years in the private school, but my parents realized the public schools were so good, they didn't even have to pay for private school. So I was in public school most of that time. And what characterized my childhood in suburban New Jersey and also my school experience was just super rigorous academics. Central New Jersey, especially where I lived, was mostly immigrant families, kind of like mine. So whereas my family came from Russia via Italy, a lot of my immigrant friends and classmates were from places like China and India and Korea and some European countries as well.

(00:02:37):
And it was a really competitive environment because these immigrant families were pretty much all in America by virtue of special visas like H1B visas, which were really hard to get back then and were essentially only for people with extraordinary ability. So myself and my classmates, we were children of really high performing engineers or scientists or pharmacists or professors. So all that combined, this immigrant work hard mentality and having parents of really extraordinary abilities created this pressure cooker environment. So pretty much what characterized those first 18 years of my life was an obsession with high performance in academics and athletics.

Matt Handy (00:03:30):
What sports did you play?

Dan Vaysburd (00:03:32):
I grew up playing tennis. So I picked up my first racket at age 17. I played a couple of sports before that, but from the age of seven to 18, and even now I'm actually getting back into tennis. Tennis was what dominated my life when I wasn't in the classroom. I was on the tennis court. And so I had this overwhelming drive, both self-fostered and enforced by my parents to do well in school, do well on the tennis court. So really competitive childhood growing up. And yeah.

Matt Handy (00:04:04):
So did your dad continue to be a professor?

Dan Vaysburd (00:04:08):
So my dad switched from being a professor to essentially being a financial service professional right around the time I was two years old. At the time, Wall Street was going through this boom where they were hiring a lot of people with math or physics, PhD backgrounds. My dad was one of those people. He ended up becoming a quantitative analyst or quant for short, and ended up working for a multinational investment bank, which he still does to this day. And I ultimately would kind of end up following in his footsteps later when I was an adult, and I can definitely get into that.

Matt Handy (00:04:39):
Yeah, we definitely will. And so was there any drug ... As a kid, obviously there is later on, but as a kid, was there a lot of exposure to substances or not really?

Dan Vaysburd (00:04:51):
Zero exposure to substances to me. The idea up until I was 17, just the idea of using drugs like weed, let alone hard drugs like cocaine and ecstasy, which I ended up doing as an adult, and those were my drugs of choice, that was unthinkable to me because of the way I was brought up in my environment. I didn't know anyone who did drugs as far as I know. Knowing what I know now, looking back into my past, I realized, okay, there were some people doing drugs.

(00:05:25):
I just wasn't mingling with them, but I can kind of remember in the back of my mind, okay, that person, he or she was probably doing drugs or, oh yeah, I heard that person did cocaine or ecstasy or whatever, but I was so, so sheltered. I was in such a almost overprotective environment that the idea of even doing drugs didn't cross my mind until I was around 16 or 17 years old when I first tried marijuana and then I was off to the races. But no exposure to drugs. And just the idea of drugs was horrifying to me. I'm never going to do drugs. Why would I do that? If you do drugs, you're crazy or you're a failure at life or something. But what I didn't realize also was, I did have a drug of choice and my drug of choice at that time was video games and computer games. So that was my first drug. I remember I got my first personal computer at age 10 back in 2005, and that became my drug of choice.

(00:06:28):
And I think for a couple of different reasons, growing up as an only child, growing up with English not being my first language, growing up honestly kind of a little bit isolated from other kids, maybe because of my background, maybe because of the way I talked, maybe because of the way I was raised, I found solace in online communities and in video games, whether that was on the console or on the Game Boy or later on the PC, that was my drug of choice. So that was kind of what characterized at least my double life as an addict from the ages of say ages 10 to age 18. But I didn't think I was an addict. I had no inkling of that. I just thought like computer games. I knew other guys who were my age who played computer games and video games.

(00:07:14):
I didn't think there was anything wrong with it, but I think my parents could tell something was off. So when they noticed my addictive patterns, they would do everything they could to keep the computer or the Game Boy away from me. They would hide it, they would hide the cable, hide the router, hide the modem, cut cables, take the laptop away from me. And it was so frustrating for me because I would get so much euphoria from playing these video games and computer games and immersing myself in these online communities. And I didn't realize at the time that I was exhibiting addictive addict behavior, but knowing what I know now, having been in recovery, understanding the dopamine mechanism that goes before you get high off of something, whether it's a substance or a thing or a person, the feeling that you get while doing it, I realize now that I was in my addiction But my addiction was just not a substance. It was computers.

Matt Handy (00:08:08):
Yeah, that's a big thing that's going on right now, right? People are going to treatment for devices. People are going to treatment for phones and online gaming and stuff like that. And I tell people all the time, I was exhibiting addict behavior as a child and I couldn't pinpoint it as a child, obviously, but growing up, going through everything that I've gone through and then becoming a professional in the treatment space, when I look back, I'm like, oh, there was for sure problematic behavior, for sure. And it might not have been obsessive, it might not have manifested in obsessive behavior, but there was a lot of pointless dishonesty, a lot of manipulation, a lot of weird lies and just dumb shit that didn't make sense. And I would get in trouble for it. I mean, it wasn't like I was good at it. It was like I would do things to kind of try to get my way. And it was just so blatantly obvious. My parents were like, why do you fucking lie? And in my head, I'm like, I'm not lying.

(00:09:11):
I'm just trying to get what I want. But now looking back on it, it was like, yeah, for sure. I had serious issues. But I also got molested as a kid. I'm the oldest of 10 kids. And so by the time I was 13, all of them were born. So we were all little, little kids together. And so there wasn't heavy super parental supervision, but I was raised in a militantly religious situation. We were raised Mormon, we didn't miss any church. We went multiple times a week, and it was very structured, a lot of obligations. And I found out really early, if I satisfy my obligations to the church and to my family, I can kind of do whatever I want. And so I did whatever I wanted, and it didn't start off super nefarious or anything, but it really led down to girls were my downfall. My desire to have female companionship took me down some ... As a child, down some crazy roads, and ultimately my drug abuse and all this stuff is still connected to that because a lot of it upfront was I needed an in

(00:10:27):
Because I was insecure, I was different, all the typical addict mentality. And so I was like, well, how am I going to do ... I can't skate as good as everybody else. I'm not as good looking. I'm kind of dumber than everybody. In my head, I'm like, oh, I'm dumber than people and all this shit. Oh, everybody loves drugs. I love drugs. So if I have drugs on me all the time, girls will come. And it was like a moth to the flame. And so I found that kind of cheat code in my life where it was like, okay, I found something. I found a way to get what I want with very little effort and also satisfy all of the inadequacies that I had inside myself as well.

Dan Vaysburd (00:11:07):
Wow.

Matt Handy (00:11:08):
Yeah.

Dan Vaysburd (00:11:09):
Yeah. I can relate a lot to that. You mentioned skateboarding. For me, and you felt like you weren't as good at skateboarding as other kids. For me, it was being good at math and in science, but mainly math because that was my dad's focus for me from a young age was to make me as good as math as him, as he was as a kid, or maybe even better, because that's what every dad wants for their kid, their son especially, is to be better than he was. And so he kind of molded me into having that obsession as well. But because for better or for worse, I hadcalend so many high achieving friends who are so many levels above me probably just due to natural talent because kind of like with skateboarding, with math, there's this natural talent that you either have it or you don't.

Matt Handy (00:11:55):
I think that there's three real superpowers that humans can actually have. One of them's childbirth, so automatically can't do that. But high level math is a superpower and recovery is a superpower. So I really am relegated to one of them because I suck in math really bad.

Dan Vaysburd (00:12:14):
When you say recovery, you mean recovery from addiction?

Matt Handy (00:12:18):
Yeah, yeah. I think that overcoming substance abuse addictions could possibly be one of the hardest things that a human will ever have to do.

Dan Vaysburd (00:12:28):
Absolutely. I mean, it's so hard. I will say, and I don't mean to disagree with you, whereas you can only ... Very few people who skate are ever going to be top level skateboarders or top level mathematicians. And this is my experience, my limited experience. I feel like anyone who really wants it can recover.

Matt Handy (00:12:49):
With recovery? Absolutely.

Dan Vaysburd (00:12:50):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:12:50):
What I'm saying is it is very easy to get clean. It is really hard to stay clean.

Dan Vaysburd (00:12:57):
For sure.

Matt Handy (00:12:57):
And in order to live a recovery lifestyle, sobriety and recovery are two different things. You can have a ton of sobriety. I'm sure you've seen them, the people in the back of the room, they've got 30 years clean and they're fucking miserable, but I'm talking about real recovery is a superpower. And it's like, not only is it a superpower because of how difficult it is, but because of what it does transformationally to other people. The domino effect of one person, the ripple effect of me getting clean, the ripple effect of you getting clean, there is magnitudes of change that happens after that to the families, to the friends, and we have no control over that. And that's why I say it's a superpower.

Dan Vaysburd (00:13:42):
Yeah. You know you're right, because sometimes I kind of have a logical math brain. I think about how many people do recover or how many people even, if we're going to talk about 12 step, which is what I followed, of the people who opened the big book with their sponsor, what percent will ever finish the steps within the next couple years say? And then of those people, what percent will stay clean one year, two years, beyond. And just for the first one, from my experience having been in the program for almost two years now, of the guys I've taken through the work or tried to take through the work from the people who start out that cover page with me, one out of 10, if that will ever get through their 12 step, and of those people who get through and actually start sponsoring guys, probably less than half of those.

Matt Handy (00:14:39):
There's real statistics around outcomes for this. And one of my favorite ones that I tell everybody is, because I'm in the treatment world, so I'm looking at outcomes not just of recovery, but I'm looking at efficacy and efficiency of treatment centers. And so it says one out of 10 people will stay clean for one year, of that 10%, one out of 10 will stay clean for 10 years, but they got to go to treatment seven times in order to get that first year clean. So what it comes down to is 98.5% of people will relapse. 98.5% of people will relapse. And then there's even more statistical data out there around efficacies and treatment centers, the payers set the pace for what treatment is. And so most people access care through insurance. And so the insurance, the payer is going to set the pace for what they are willing to pay for.

(00:15:34):
And the metrics that they use for success is the terminology that they use, has been manipulated and it's dishonest. There is a research institute, it's called the Recovery Research Institute. Have you heard of this?

Dan Vaysburd (00:15:48):
The Recovery Research Institute? No, not off top of mind.

Matt Handy (00:15:50):
Okay. So there's a guy his name's Ron, I mean, William White, you may have heard of this guy. He does a lot of the metadata analysis, and then he crunches a bunch of studies and does it. And he's actually really, really getting up there in age and he's kind of passing the baton on to a guy named to another guy. And well, anyway, they run all these studies and they're looking at outcomes and they're looking at what actually qualifies as recovery, what actually ... Have you ever heard the addictionary?

Dan Vaysburd (00:16:26):
No.

Matt Handy (00:16:27):
Okay. So they developed the addictionary. And so they're defining all this stuff. Do you know what SAMHSHA is?

Dan Vaysburd (00:16:34):
Yeah. Substance and addiction mental health.

Matt Handy (00:16:36):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's the federal government organization that really heads and oversees funding for federal programming around recovery programs and stuff like that. And they collect a lot of information. And so the Recovery Research Institute is who they're looking to for information. And so these guys, I mean, they're all older now, but they were kind of like ... So when you look back 30 years ago, treatment wasn't accessible for hardly anybody. There was either the Salvation Army or there was resort style, only rich people could access this kind of care. And then 2008, Parody came around and they said-

Dan Vaysburd (00:17:28):
You said what came around 2008?

Matt Handy (00:17:29):
The parody laws. So parody laws say this. Parody laws say if you are an insurance company and you cover medical expenses, you have to cover mental health and behavioral health services at the same rate as any other diagnosis. And so this is where it became accessible to the mainstream.

Dan Vaysburd (00:17:51):
Yeah, that's huge.

Matt Handy (00:17:52):
Massive, right? It's actually the Kennedy family. Do you know the Kennedy families?

Dan Vaysburd (00:17:58):
For sure.

Matt Handy (00:17:58):
For sure. Okay. So Patrick Kennedy, one of the younger brothers, the Kennedy family historically has struggled with mental health and addiction for generations. They got their start bootlegging, but they're this political dynasty in the United States. And so downstream, you're talking about JFK, RFK, all these other people, but Patrick Kennedy, he's still a politician in Massachusetts. He wrote a series of bills and laws that turned into parody laws and it kind of piggybacked off the ACA, but it wasn't accessible before that. Well, anyway, all of these dudes are part of this research institute and they have dude so much information around outcomes and statistical data around treatment. And so the question that you asked was how many people that crack open the book finish it? I don't know if they have that specifically, but they have a ton of information about how many people get cleaned because they're looking at 1929 and going, AA was created and they had 100% success rates for years. Why are we completely opposite where we have almost 100% failure rate? What's going on? And they're looking at all this stuff going, the privatization of treatment and then the court system forcing people into recovery as a preventative measure versus a less stop on the block thing. A lot of that's kind of muddied the waters around who gets clean and why they get clean. And so it's really interesting to see, yeah, we've ended up in a place today in the recovery world and in the treatment world where, I mean, they're unicorns, right? They're called one chip wonders where that person goes to treatment, gets clean and then never relapses, but they're a statistical anomaly. They're rare, so rare that we call them a unicorn.

Dan Vaysburd (00:19:52):
Yeah. Yeah, that is so rare. And I can see why you say it's a superpower, almost like equating it to the likelihood of someone becoming a genius mathematician or top level skateboarder. And then the water is even more muddied because someone who's say addicted to meth comes in and then he never touches meth, but he kind of just keeps drinking alcohol and smoking weed for the next 10 years. And we don't know what happens to him after that. But he's clean off meth and he considers himself 10 years clean, but he drinks and smokes on occasion. And then there's also someone you don't even know because it's self-reported, you don't know if they're drinking or using, so it's honestly so both fascinating and complicated.

Matt Handy (00:20:38):
Yeah. So that is why I equate it to that superpower. And for me, realistically, obviously I can't have babies, but when I look at childbirth, I just had a baby last week.

Dan Vaysburd (00:20:51):
Yeah, congrats. Amazing.

Matt Handy (00:20:51):
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. She's a beautiful little girl.

Dan Vaysburd (00:20:54):
Is she your first?

Matt Handy (00:20:55):
No, second. We have a four-year-old and her.

Dan Vaysburd (00:20:58):
Wow. A boy and a girl? Girls. Girls. Okay. Girls. I'm done.

Matt Handy (00:21:02):
Amazing. Yeah. I'm not going to get stuck having a bunch of girls.

Dan Vaysburd (00:21:05):
Maybe try one more time for a boy.

Matt Handy (00:21:06):
Done.

Dan Vaysburd (00:21:07):
Done. No shot.

Matt Handy (00:21:09):
I know math well enough to say my chances of having a boy are pretty much zero right now.

Dan Vaysburd (00:21:14):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:21:15):
Yeah.

Dan Vaysburd (00:21:15):
Why do you think that is?

Matt Handy (00:21:17):
So I read a study a long time ago that they looked at people whose jobs are high stress and then they ended up bunching a ... So what they found was this, Navy SEALs, high level military operators end up always having girls, right?

Dan Vaysburd (00:21:32):
That's crazy.

Matt Handy (00:21:34):
Yeah. And then they bunched of other stuff into it too. And one of the things that they found is people who spend a lot of time in prison end up in that group as well. So this is actually my third girl, and I've done about nine years in prison. And so in my head, I'm like, there's probably no chance I'm having a boy.

Dan Vaysburd (00:21:52):
Oh, so you have three daughters?

Matt Handy (00:21:53):
Yeah. So me and my wife have two, but I have a 15-year-old daughter that my parents adopted.

Dan Vaysburd (00:21:59):
Oh, okay. Got it. Got it.

Matt Handy (00:22:01):
Yeah. So I'm like, yeah, I could keep trying to play this game or end up with another girl.

Dan Vaysburd (00:22:06):
It's been kind of three for three in terms of girls. No, I get it. Okay, fair enough. Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:22:12):
So yeah. Well, okay, so New Jersey-

Dan Vaysburd (00:22:14):
Maybe it's player's curse.

Matt Handy (00:22:16):
So I think there's ... Okay, so you either believe in God or you believe in luck, right? Yeah. Because they can't exist in the same place.

Dan Vaysburd (00:22:25):
For sure.

Matt Handy (00:22:26):
So I tell people all the time that it's God punishing me, and then I think about it. I'm like, that's kind of fucked up to say about my daughters. But yeah, I don't know. I'm really excited for them though. For

Dan Vaysburd (00:22:37):
Sure.

Matt Handy (00:22:39):
She's an angel.

Dan Vaysburd (00:22:40):
Yeah, that's amazing. Congrats again, man.

Matt Handy (00:22:41):
Thank you. Thank you.

(00:22:44):
So you're an only child?

Dan Vaysburd (00:22:45):
Yeah, only child.

Matt Handy (00:22:46):
New Jersey, fucking cold during the winter, and it's wet cold, right?

Dan Vaysburd (00:22:50):
Yeah, kind of wet cold. Honestly, I mean, compared to San Diego or LA, yeah, it's cold. But then growing up as a child with an infantile brain, I didn't think about those things. I'm like, it's cold so it's cold. I don't think about the fact my dad, who's from Siberia, literally Siberia, Russia. He grew up in a place Tomsk, Russia, where it literally gets negative 40 degrees Celsius in the winter. Negative 40 degrees Celsius is so cold. At that point, the Celsius and Fahrenheit gradients converge. So negative 40 C is roughly negative 40 Fahrenheit. So when my dad was growing up, there were times that he would later tell me where it was so cold. And this happens in Chicago too, so I didn't even have it that bad. I could have been growing up in Chicago, which a lot of people in America have.

(00:23:33):
The pipes would freeze up where you would grow up and they would cancel school just because of how cold it was, not even because of the snow. And for me, growing up in Jersey, if there's more than three inches or four inches of snow on the ground, which happens once or twice every year at most, some years we wouldn't even have a snow day, which I'd be sad about, but they would cancel school for anything. In Russia or the Soviet Union in the time where my dad grew up and also my mom, wh she grew up in kind of a warmer part, it would have to be a wall of snow, like two feet plus for them to cancel school. The pipes would freeze over. It was bone chilling cold. People die from the cold out there. And of course, me growing up in Pleasant Suburban, New Jersey, for me, if it's below zero Celsius, it's cold.

(00:24:19):
It's too cold. So part of a large theme of me just being ungrateful and unappreciative growing up. But at the time, I thought it was cold.

Matt Handy (00:24:28):
Yeah, for sure. It was cold.

Dan Vaysburd (00:24:29):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:24:29):
It was cold. Trust me, that isn't something to thumb your nose at. But it's funny because you're saying all this, right? And you always hear these stories about people's parents going, "I used to have to walk to school uphill both ways, barefoot in the snow." And ultimately what they're trying to say is, "You've got it easier than we do. " And for the most part, it's pretty much the same, but your parents really had it fucking crazy.

Dan Vaysburd (00:24:59):
Yeah, especially my dad growing up in Siberia. My mom grew up in the South, near Ukraine. Literally the part of Russia where she grew up on the Black Sea, they have palm trees. So she grew up in a more tropical part of Russia. But even that, just growing up in the Soviet Union back then in the 60s, 70s, very much Iron Curtain, just growing up in that kind of despotism and this kind of environment where free speech is essentially non-existent, freedom of movements, almost non-existent, freedom of expression, no, no nothing, no LGBT, no racial inclusion. There was only one race essentially in a way. None of that. None of the liberties that we have here. And even just things like the way a child is raised, both my parents got the crap beat out of them growing up by their parents. My dad, and my dad would never even told me this, my mom had to tell me. My mom told me that my dad would get beat so bad, his mom would have to go into the other room while his dad, who's my grandpa, would beat him. That's how bad he got beat. And whereas me, my parents never laid a hand on me or they would, but maybe I can count the times on one hand. Maybe three or four times I got slapped for something idiotic and that's it.

Matt Handy (00:26:19):
Okay.

Dan Vaysburd (00:26:19):
So again, I had it so easy.

Matt Handy (00:26:21):
So I don't know if you want to talk about it or not, but there is a common trope almost that Americans have about Russians, about them drinking. And what I have heard is that it's really up in those cold areas where everybody's drinking constantly. Is that a contributing factor to what was going on, do you think?

Dan Vaysburd (00:26:44):
You know what's crazy, man, is so I'm an alcoholic and an addict. I'm rushed in by background. My parents and everyone in my immediate family who I know of, I don't know of anyone who ever had a drinking or substance problem, but both my parents never drank. The most my dad would ever drink is maybe a couple beers at dinner and he stopped doing that by the time he was in his fifties. I've seen him drunk twice in my life and he was never belligerent. My mom didn't like to drink. My dad's parents I know weren't drinkers. My mom's parents, who I never met because they had passed by the time I was born. I don't think either of them was an alcoholic. My mom told me that her dad was a big smoker. He liked cigarettes, and he would show her how yellow his fingers were to prevent her from wanting to ever touch cigarettes.

Matt Handy (00:27:38):
Wow.

Dan Vaysburd (00:27:40):
I have one cousin alive on my mom's side-

Matt Handy (00:27:41):
That's a lot of cigarettes.

Dan Vaysburd (00:27:43):
Yeah. He was a big nicotine smoker, so maybe he was not it. I don't know. I have this feeling in the back of my mind that on my mom's side, there must have been somatics or alcoholics, but I never met any of them. I don't even know of any of them. And then of all the family I have alive right now, so my one cousin on my mom's side and then my cousin's on my dad's side. I don't know of anyone with any kind of substance or addiction problem. So I'm kind of a black sheep in a way because of my addiction.

Matt Handy (00:28:12):
So a lot of people talk about the genetic predisposition of addiction, and there may be some kind of genetic predisposition with you, right? But that is a really good point to make is that it doesn't give a fuck. It doesn't care who you are, where you come from, what you look like, who you smell like, none of that shit, right?

Dan Vaysburd (00:28:32):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:28:33):
If it's got you, it's got you.

Dan Vaysburd (00:28:35):
Yeah, it does not discriminate. And growing up up until honestly my mid-twenties, because actually I went to an AA meeting when I was 17 for the first time because I was caught underage drinking.

(00:28:50):
I was drinking at my best friend's house and the cops got called on us. They came with breathalyzers. I blew into a 0.06 and as part of my punishment as an underage person was I had to go to an AA meeting. Just one? Yeah, just one. Just one AA meeting, some community service. And then I think that's it. They assigned me a probation officer who I never even met. I sent in my community to service and I told them I went to that AA meeting. I think it wasn't a court card. It was some sort of thing I got signed, but I remember going to this AA meeting in suburban New Jersey and it was a men's stag meeting because it was only men. And I just remember a bunch of guys going to the front of the room and sharing war stories and talking about drugs as well.

(00:29:35):
And I think some of the stories were kind of funny/interesting, but I didn't really relate to them. I was like, "Oh, this is cool. Thanks, whatever." Obviously I didn't share. I was probably half listening and I left that meeting, I got the punishment done for that underage drinking, and that's it. The thought of AA left my mind until I was 28 years old and decided to get clean. And obviously we'll get into that.

Matt Handy (00:30:00):
Yeah, let's get into it. So 18, you graduated high school when?

Dan Vaysburd (00:30:06):
Yeah, I graduated high school in summer of 2013, turned 18 years old, and three days after turning 18, I shipped off from Princeton, New Jersey to Los Angeles to matriculate at UCLA where I attended college.

Matt Handy (00:30:21):
Okay.

Dan Vaysburd (00:30:21):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:30:23):
Did you graduate from UCLA?

Dan Vaysburd (00:30:25):
I did. Yeah, I graduated with a bachelor's and a master's degree.

Matt Handy (00:30:27):
You're the second UCLA alumni on this podcast now.

Dan Vaysburd (00:30:32):
Oh, sick.

Matt Handy (00:30:33):
Yeah.

Dan Vaysburd (00:30:33):
Yeah. Who was the first?

Matt Handy (00:30:35):
Dan Dalton.

Dan Vaysburd (00:30:36):
No way. Another Dan.

Matt Handy (00:30:37):
Yeah. Oh, Anna was ... Yeah.

Dan Vaysburd (00:30:38):
Yeah. Same name. Same.

Matt Handy (00:30:40):
That's way crazy.

Dan Vaysburd (00:30:41):
That's crazy.

Matt Handy (00:30:42):
Yeah. Yeah. He golfed, a very high level golfer, but ended up getting a really good education at UCLA.

Dan Vaysburd (00:30:48):
I'll have to connect with them. That's sick.

Matt Handy (00:30:50):
Yeah. He actually lives in California too.

Dan Vaysburd (00:30:52):
No way. Yeah. In

Matt Handy (00:30:53):
Orange County, I think.

Dan Vaysburd (00:30:54):
Okay. Awesome. Yeah, I'll definitely connect with him.

Matt Handy (00:30:56):
Yeah, for sure. I'll hook you guys up after this.

Dan Vaysburd (00:30:58):
Totally. Yeah, no. So I come into UCLA as a freshly turned 18-year-old and I kind of came there early in July of 2013 because I wanted to get a headstart on college. I was 18 to get out of New Jersey. So I did the summer program. And honestly, I was most excited about the prospect of just partying, drinking, and doing drugs. At this point, the switch had flipped.

Matt Handy (00:31:25):
Okay. So the introduction to alcohol obviously happened. So the relative terms that we use, because I'm going to say a little later, because now you've got kids that are fucking drinking at 10, 11, 12. I mean, that's always kind of been a thing, right? So later on in your high school experience, you started drinking. Where did that happen?

Dan Vaysburd (00:31:47):
Yeah, no, super important. I'm glad you asked. So I'm just playing video games up until roughly age 16, 17. In summer of 2012, a year before shipping off to college, something started to shift in me because I was kind of ... Aside from being known as a tennis player in my school, I was kind of known as an introvert, weirdo, nerd. And that's the identity that people put on me. And ultimately that identity, I accepted for myself. And that's kind of what characterized my identity from the ages of 10 to 17 or 10 to 16, 17. And something started to switch in my mind because I think it's because I was watching YouTube videos online. I'd watch this YouTube channel called I'm Smacked. And I'm Schmacked was this group of guys who would go to different college campuses and showcase the partying on those campuses.

(00:32:47):
So I was watching these videos. I would hear talk of people drinking and smoking. And the idea, mind you, just that idea of smoking marijuana seemed interesting to me. I'm like, okay, this is a cool drug. It seems you go out with your buddies late at night and you get high. It's something you inhale through smoking. The idea sounded very enticing. It seemed like an opportunity for me to break away from this old identity that I wanted to shed, which is the computer nerd, like the loner, the geek. And so I tried weed for the first time in summer of 2012 with a friend from one of my classes. I didn't feel it. Shortly thereafter, I tried it again. I got high. And from that very first time getting high with weed, I didn't like it. It made me paranoid. It made me even more in my head because I was already super shy and awkward and self-conscious for a million different reasons.

(00:33:42):
And the weed just amplified that. I would get weird, dark thoughts. Every weird weed trip was a dark trip for me. And so I didn't like it, but I would keep smoking. It helped me feel like I was connecting with others because that's what I really wanted. Because being connected with people online through video games and computer games was no longer enough. I wanted to connect with people in person.

(00:34:03):
And to me, the most obvious route was through substances and partying. So even though I didn't like the actual psychedelic effect of weed, honestly, it would make me paranoid as hell sometimes to the point of having almost like a panic attack.

(00:34:19):
That's the only way I knew how to connect with people that wasn't related to computer games or tennis, which honestly probably saved my life. If I didn't have tennis, I probably could have gone down a really dark path. And so I needed a new drug of choice because clearly the weed wasn't doing it. Obviously I didn't want to go back to just playing computer games twenty four seven. So shortly thereafter in October of 2012, so fall of my senior year, I go to my first party, which is something I'd been waiting for kind of a long time. It'd been like a year because along with learning about substances and the college party scene, I knew there were high school parties too. I just wasn't getting invited. So finally, I started hanging out with a new group of friends in senior year of high school. I get invited to my first high school party, and I remember taking my first drink.

(00:35:07):
And I was a blackout drinker from the very first sip. I remember they were serving Smirnoff vodka, and I had never gotten drunk in my life. I'd taken sips of alcohol from my parents throughout my life. I never liked it because alcohol tasted awful

(00:35:23):
And never got that drunk inebriated feeling the most I'd had in my life up until senior year. It was probably a couple of sips of beer, which was enough to just make me feel nauseated and that's it. But on this night, it was a Halloween party in October of 2012. I remember mixing a drink of Smirnoff vodka and Coca-Cola. And I could not pour enough Coke in there because the vodka tasted so awful.

(00:35:47):
So I made the drink with a little bit of Smirnoff with Coke. Drank, it was probably a 10 to one ratio, still too- Gross. ... too harsh for me, but kind of forced it down, kept pouring in more Coke, forced it down, finished a drink and kind of looked around. People were socializing, talking to one another. I didn't really know what to do with my hands because I'm one drink deep now, but I'm still kind of awkward and I've never been to a high school party in my life or any kind of drinking function with people my age. So I make another drink and I slowly started adding more and more vodka. I have four or five drinks. I noticed myself getting more social. I ended up making out with a girl or something and then everything was black. I remember just falling on my face and blacking out and waking up the next morning in the pool of my own vomit.

(00:36:37):
So that was my very first drinking experience, blacked out from that first day. And from that moment on, every time I drank, pretty much every time I would black out. And if I didn't black out because there was just no more alcohol left or I'd have to be physically restrained. So I was a blackout drinker from day one and it was clear that I had the allergy looking back now. It's very clear.

Matt Handy (00:37:02):
The next morning after you woke up from the first time drinking, what was your thought?

Dan Vaysburd (00:37:07):
My thought was like, "What the hell?" And I obviously woke up drunk. I was like, "I need to get out of here." I remember getting up out of my pool of vomit and the guy, there was just a bunch of passed out high schoolers in this living room. It was like someone's apartment and there was no parents around for whatever reason. And one guy laying on the ground was like, "You're not going anywhere." I'm like, "What the fuck?" And my paranoia kicked in. I'm like, "What is this guy talking about? " Because I think he thought I was driving, but I biked over. I didn't have my license yet. So I kind of make my way out of there, get on my bike, bike home, get home and pass out in my own bed. And then I wake up in my bed at home and my dad walks into the room and he's like, "Where the hell have you been?" I'm like, "I was drinking." And he was like, "How much did you drink?" I'm like, "I had five cups." And he's like, "Five cups, mixed drinks?" And I'm like, "Yeah." And he's like, "How much alcohol?" I'm like, "I don't know, probably a cup of pure vodka, which probably was about how much I drank." And he seemed shocked because he never seen me drunk or hung over ever.

(00:38:11):
And the room could smell like vodka because it was coming out of my pores. And I remember he closed the door and there was no mention of it again because I don't think he thought there was a problem. And I think when he was my age, if not a little bit older, he had had exposure to alcohol. He just wasn't an alcoholic like me. Neither was my mom or my dad's family. So we didn't really think anything of it. There was no sit down where he was like, "Drinking is bad or you need to be careful." Because I don't think it ever crossed his mind that drinking could be a problem for me just like computer games were.

Matt Handy (00:38:43):
Yeah.

Dan Vaysburd (00:38:44):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:38:45):
Yeah. I don't know what the Russian culture is like other than that American trope that all Russians drink like fishes, that there is no alcoholism. They just drink. So I don't know if it's a lack of awareness that it could be a problem or if he was just like, "This is a one-off type thing." But does your dad have a heavy accent? He

Dan Vaysburd (00:39:09):
Does have a super heavy accent. Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:39:11):
Okay. Yeah. The whole time you're saying this, I'm picturing this guy with a beard, Like a heavy ... Is that correct? He

Dan Vaysburd (00:39:17):
Doesn't have a huge beard, but he is a heavy Soviet accent, super kind of strict, stoic, disciplinary, and that's definitely my dad. Yeah. So he fits a lot of the stereotypes.

Matt Handy (00:39:26):
Okay. Okay. So that was your first experience and then it just kind of evolved from there. Was it a consistent thing or ...

Dan Vaysburd (00:39:35):
Yeah, that became my favorite hobby. So the tennis started to dwindle down. I didn't want to really play tennis anymore like I used to. Definitely didn't want to play video games. The idea of that seemed lame to me. And my new favorite hobby was hanging out with my newfound friends in my senior class and just drinking with them. I just couldn't do liquor, so it had to be beer. Beer was my drug of choice. I liked beer because it was much more palatable, kind of just sip at it, and then it got easier as I drank more and more beer. So that was my favorite thing to do. So once or twice a week, if not more, for every week of senior year, I would get together with my friends or the people who I though were my new friends would just drink with them.

(00:40:15):
And I wouldn't black out every time, but there was no limit for me every time I would drink until there was no beer. And when there was liquor, I would drink it too. And there were a number of more times where I blacked out, but anytime I drank, there was no holding me back. And I just thought I became this crazy, exciting person when I drank, but I didn't know that what was happening was the manifestation of an allergy.

Matt Handy (00:40:40):
For sure. You talked about, they kind of labeled you, right? And it's something that I talk about pretty often about how we inherit social shame. And do you know what primitive beliefs are?

Dan Vaysburd (00:40:55):
For sure.

Matt Handy (00:40:55):
Okay. So this is where I think that addicts and alcoholics have primitive belief problems where we start associating things that shouldn't be associated. And then internally and externally, and our reality becomes this convoluted, misdiagnosed, mislabeled, misdefined whole thing where everything that we see is basically wrong. And one of the most detrimental parts around this is we self cannot critique self. So it's really hard, especially as a young person, to look at yourself and see the reality of whatever's going on, especially when you're now inheriting the shame and the guilt that other people are putting on you. And I wasn't the popular kid, but I always had drugs. So I hung out with the popular kids, but I still knew I'm not one of them. I'm not a football player. I played water polo, but I'm not a football player. I'm not a baseball player. I'm not super tall.

(00:42:00):
I'm 5'5". So I had all of these inadequacies I felt like. And then I have a brother who's right behind me, he's shorter than me, but good looking, charismatic kid, skates really well. And I felt like I was always competing with him to do better than my younger brother. And so there was all these really pointless, but really powerful thoughts that kind of controlled the direction that I went in my life because I was always trying to overcome these inadequacies. And I found that substances really just kind of quieted that part of my brain.

Dan Vaysburd (00:42:38):
100%.

Matt Handy (00:42:39):
Yeah. So it became a hobby and that's kind of like the typical path, right? It becomes the hobby and then the sports stop and then the academics slack. The academics didn't really fall off for you.

Dan Vaysburd (00:42:53):
I did everything I could to keep up appearances because although my addiction was powerful, it was still in its infant stage because I think it was progressive for me. And my desire to please my parents, impress my peers and make myself proud was strong enough that I could kind of skate by in school. So I finished my senior year doing pretty well actually. I think I got mostly As. Something I should mention is my mom passed when I was a senior year of high school, so that's also what kind of precipitated the increase in my drinking and later in my drug use. And then when I came to UCLA, obviously the stakes and the anti were upped significantly and that in tandem with the fact that I was starting to discover hard drugs, my grades for sure slipped. So I went from getting mostly A's and B's to Bs and Cs.

(00:43:50):
And the fact that those two classes that I took in the summer of 2013 at UCLA, when I came early, got summer session, I remember getting a C or like a C+ in both classes and I was dumbfounded because I'd only gotten one C in all of high school and I thought, shit, I need to get my act together. This is bad. And I was drinking every weekend and blacking out and smoking weed. And that spooked me enough that for the remainder of those four years, I was able to kind of skate by and get B's and C's and some A's too, because I desperately wanted to make my dad proud.

(00:44:29):
I wanted to keep up appearance. I didn't want to be labeled as a loser and I didn't want to think of myself as a loser. And so I did whatever it took to get passing grades. I even joined school clubs and engineering. I ended up landing an internship as a junior for my summer. That was the path you were supposed to do if you were on game, you were supposed to get that junior year internship and then get a full-time offer. And so I was able to keep up appearances for the most part. Even though in the background, my addiction is developing, I'm trying newer and harder drugs. And although there were definitely weeks and even months where I barely drank or did drugs sometimes because my desire to succeed and compete was so high that I could distance myself from the partying sometimes. But then when the exams were over or the internship or the job was over, when I completed that checkbox, like that milestone, whatever it is, like final project or job, I would go on a massive bender.

Matt Handy (00:45:30):
Game time.

Dan Vaysburd (00:45:31):
Yeah, it's game time. And my life revolved around getting high. I was either getting high or planning my next high or thinking about getting high. So I got really heavily entrenched in the music scene, music festivals, raves, concerts, and I would plan trips. I'd go on trips with friends or on my own and alcohol and drugs were always part of the picture. And that's how I would reward myself and also how I managed my life. That was how I dealt with the unpleasantness or the grayness of life was through my escapades with drugs and alcohol. So that's what characterized my life pretty much for the next decade from 18 to 28 was this double life.

Matt Handy (00:46:17):
Do you think that you being an immigrant kind of played into your drive to excel in academics and other stuff as well?

Dan Vaysburd (00:46:26):
For sure. Yeah. Being an immigrant growing up with the influence of my dad and my mom, especially my dad, growing up in that high pressure environment in New Jersey, for sure. And it was a double-edged sword on the good side of it. It got me to where I am today financially and from a discipline perspective. And it was really good for me. It might've even saved my life along with other positive habits like the tennis in addition to the academics. But on the negative side was I definitely experienced some degree of, I would call it psychological trauma and extreme stress as a kid because despite all the stress we go through as adults and I went through as an adult, sometimes I feel that some of the most stressful moments of my life were as a child waiting for an exam score, because in school the teacher will handout, your score is in paper.

(00:47:22):
And I distinctly remember, maybe this was because I was just not very well equipped to handle stress back then, but I think that along with just the sheer stress of wanting to do really well on this exam, because if I do well on this exam, I'm going to do well in this class and then I'm going to get a good GPA, then I'm going to get into a good college. It was so high. I remember my heart beating out of my chest waiting for an exam score. And so for whatever reason, maybe because I grew up in such a competitive environment, some of the most distinctly stressful experiences of my life didn't even have anything to do with drugs or alcohol or other addictions, but just with wanting to do well on exams as a kid.

Matt Handy (00:48:01):
Yeah, performance anxiety.

Dan Vaysburd (00:48:03):
Performance anxiety was just next level.

Matt Handy (00:48:05):
So one of my good friends, he's a neurologist and addiction medicine specialist, and I have him on the show all the time, but he always says, nobody escapes their childhood unscathed. And I kind of had that. That's crazy to hear you say that because I would have that kind of visceral reaction, but it wasn't to the test. I already knew I was going to fuck ... I already knew I fucked up this test. My anxiety was around how are my parents going to react before I even got the score, I had already in my head, I already know I fucked this shit up. So how are my parents going to freak out on me this time?

Dan Vaysburd (00:48:44):
Yeah, that was part of the picture for me as well. But there came a point where my self-imposed stress greater than equal to the stress from my dad and my mom. I put so much pressure on myself. I wanted to get good grades so I could get into that good college so badly. I wanted that more than anything. And now I was thinking recently, probably the greatest mental obsession of my life, even in the context of all my addictions, was getting into an Ivy League school, which ultimately didn't happen. And I'm actually, I'm really happy it turned out that way and I couldn't be happier with my college experience. But from the ages of as early as 10 to 17, I was so obsessed with getting into an Ivy League.

Matt Handy (00:49:29):
I mean, you grew up in an Ivy League town.

Dan Vaysburd (00:49:31):
Exactly.

Matt Handy (00:49:32):
Yeah.

Dan Vaysburd (00:49:32):
Exactly. So that was a big part of it. And yeah.

Matt Handy (00:49:36):
So your college experience, this is where you really started to go nose dive into all the crazy shit, right?

Dan Vaysburd (00:49:44):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:49:46):
So let's see, you were born in 93?

Dan Vaysburd (00:49:48):
95.

Matt Handy (00:49:49):
Okay. So you were around for all the massives, like the monster in town and all that shit was going on?

Dan Vaysburd (00:49:56):
Oh, like the raves. So by the time I came to California, it was 2013. They didn't even call them massives anymore, but I went to a lot of insomniac events at the Naus Center where I think all the monster massives were and stuff. Yeah. Those stopped right when I got to California, but I went to Beyond Escape, Nocturnal, multiple, multiple times, and a bunch of other festivals and raves and what they used to call massives maybe five or so years before me, I went to those massive equivalents and stuff. And yeah, I had some serious binges there.

Matt Handy (00:50:30):
Yeah. It's funny because I started going to Massives in 2006, and we had a friend that was a rep for Insomniac. And what we ended up finding out eventually was that it was just a big front. They were just selling drugs. That whole scene started because people had this great idea to sell drugs. "We're going to throw these events and we're just going to sell massive drugs there." But something that you said, it was you would make all these plans around these events or whatever, and I've known plenty of people like this. And in my head, the way that it worked was we would all say we were going to these events and it was the event was the event, but really what we were doing is we're all just going to go do drugs at this event and say that we're going for the event, but we're really all going to do drugs. That's really what it was.

Dan Vaysburd (00:51:27):
Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, for me, in all honesty, I did love the music. I did have this, and I still have this passion for electronic music. I remember growing up in my computer addiction, I would play with these European players, guys in Europe. And that's why I got into house music and techno and trance. And that carried me through age 18. So then when I come to 18 and I come to LA into SoCal and I suddenly see these festivals and concerts where they're playing EDM, even Trance and some of these other niche genres that I liked, I really liked the music, but it was hand in hand with the drug use for me. And I was probably just as much, if not more excited about the drug use as I was about the music. So I would kind of plan my night around the drugs.

(00:52:12):
I'd be like, "Okay, I got four pills with me. I'm going to pop the first one at 9:00 PM. I'm going to space it out an hour and a half, so I'm taking the next one at 10:30, next one at 1:00 or at 12:00." And ultimately I end up condensing the timeline. I end up taking all my drugs, I end up asking people for drugs, begging people for drugs. So the drugs very quickly started to dominate. And my first rave in October of 2013, having been in LA for only three months, I took Molly on that first rave and probably 90% of the festivals or massives or raves I went to, I was doing drugs.

Matt Handy (00:52:44):
October is monster,

Dan Vaysburd (00:52:46):
Right?This was an event at, I think now it's called Escape From Wonderland, but this was a hard style EDM event at the Shrine. Hardfest? And it wasn't Hard Fest. Hard Fest is actually for all kinds of EDM.This was the first genre of music called Hard Style. It's getting pretty big now in North America. It's

Matt Handy (00:53:06):
Like the 180 beats per minute shit.

Dan Vaysburd (00:53:07):
Yeah, like 160, 170, that kind of stuff. But this was my first rave and happened to be my favorite genre at the time. And yeah, it was at the Strine in downtown LA, close to USC. And yeah, I went with a group of new friends I'd met at UCLA and then took Molly for my first time and I was off to the races. And for me at the time, that first time taking Molly, different from having only done weed and alcohol up until that point, I thought at the time that this was my spiritual experience. I had arrived. I had never felt so good in my entire life. I felt like I was in conscious contact of God. I felt so free, so happy. It did everything. It quieted my mind. It made me feel accepted by others. It made me feel loved. It made me feel serene and at peace with the world, and that was really when I was off to the races. I thought I had arrived and I came to LA and I started drinking and smoking, but that first rave and that first come up from the Molly, that was when I really felt that I'd arrived and everything just went crazy after that.

(00:54:18):
I was going to raves almost every month, if not every month, and probably, to be frank, caused a lot of physical and mental damage to myself from all the Molly I took.

Matt Handy (00:54:29):
Yeah, it's a very dangerous drug. I remember in 2012, that dude got really busted in Sweden and all of the ecstasy disappeared. Do you remember this?

Dan Vaysburd (00:54:41):
No. I mean, I think I was in New Jersey at the time, but I could see that happening. Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:54:44):
Yeah. So there was one producer in the world and he made all of the press pills that everybody was getting, it was coming from one spot and he got busted and then this is bam, this is where Molly came in because anybody can synthesize it if they know how to do it, but pressing pills, that's a whole thing and like-

Dan Vaysburd (00:55:04):
Oh, for sure.

Matt Handy (00:55:05):
Yeah.

Dan Vaysburd (00:55:06):
Yeah. I was like a pill aficionado. So I actually preferred pressed pills to Molly because I felt that the pressed pills, it absorbed slower. And so what I would do is people would offer me Molly and I would take it if there was nothing else, but I preferred pressed pills. So I'd get pressed pills, I'd look them up on pillreports.com or pillreports.com. There's some other website ecstasydata.org or something, and I wanted for it to be a European pressed pill. So I'd look up, okay, where is this coming from? Is this a Dutch pill? How many milligrams are in there? Is it clean? Is it pure MDMA? Is it MDA? So that became an ecstasy connoisseur almost. Looking back, I didn't really consider myself a connoisseur. I just wanted to maximize my high. But now from where I'm sitting today, I'm like, wow, I was a connoisseur. That's kind of sad and fucked up. I was going down a bad path.

Matt Handy (00:55:58):
Yeah.

Dan Vaysburd (00:55:58):
Yeah. I

Matt Handy (00:55:59):
Had a friend that was like that. His name was Matt Marshita. He ended up overdosing in 2013, but-

Dan Vaysburd (00:56:05):
Did he pass away?

Matt Handy (00:56:07):
Yeah, he died in 2013, and we had a group of friends. It was Mateo, Matias, Matt Marshida, and me. So it was just all Matt. And we were like the fuck-ups. One of them was like, I talk about it all the time that there were heroin dealers at my high school. One of these dudes was one of those heroin dealers, and I started doing heroin with these guys, but that was the kid, he was a couple years older than us, but he's the guy that worked with insomniac, and so he had access to the craziest shit. Okay, so music, that whole scene, UCLA, 2013, yeah, that's definitely going to spice shit up for you.

Dan Vaysburd (00:56:55):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:56:55):
So while you were in school, you performed okay.

Dan Vaysburd (00:56:59):
Yeah. I kept up with appearances. I was doing the academics, had a couple of girlfriends on and off throughout. And I also did the fraternity scene, which I want to touch on a bit because that was, looking back now, it's funny, but at the time it was very telling about my allergy and my abnormal response to alcohol.

Matt Handy (00:57:21):
So you pledged?

Dan Vaysburd (00:57:22):
Yeah. So that was another one of my, almost an obsession that came in fall of 2013 as a freshman, and immediately I pledged the fraternity.

Matt Handy (00:57:32):
Which one?

Dan Vaysburd (00:57:33):
It was Sigma Pi.

Matt Handy (00:57:34):
Okay.

Dan Vaysburd (00:57:35):
And I remember my very first party with the house as a pledge. I was in one of the actives rooms. Did you pledge a fraternity when you were in college?

Matt Handy (00:57:47):
I went to the School of Hard Knocks.

Dan Vaysburd (00:57:49):
Okay. It sounds like you know how the whole process works.

Matt Handy (00:57:51):
No, I just have a lot of friends.

Dan Vaysburd (00:57:52):
Okay, got

Matt Handy (00:57:53):
It. But yeah, I was in prison. I was in jail when I was 18 in prison, heading to prison. So I was already ...

Dan Vaysburd (00:58:01):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:58:01):
Also, I got expelled for some really dumb shit when I was 16 and ended up graduating. I went to an accelerated program through the Juvenile Court Correctional School. So I ended up graduating high school in two months, and then my full-time job was doing drugs.

Dan Vaysburd (00:58:17):
Ah, I see.

Matt Handy (00:58:18):
So there was no academic future for me.

Dan Vaysburd (00:58:22):
Got it.

Matt Handy (00:58:23):
I caught my first felony. My whole plan was, I'm going to go to law school, I'm going to join the family firm and all this shit. First felony at 16, and I felt like the proverbial doors in my future shut on me. And from then on, it was like, fuck, what am I going to do?

Dan Vaysburd (00:58:38):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:58:39):
I might as well get high.

Dan Vaysburd (00:58:40):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (00:58:40):
And so that's just what I did.

Dan Vaysburd (00:58:42):
Yeah. It's good that ended up not being the case for you and you have a great life right now.

Matt Handy (00:58:46):
I mean, yeah, that was 20 years ago. And I really started my recovery journey in 2020 when I robbed a bank, and that was where shit was like, oh shit. They were trying to lock me up for the rest of my life. And I was like, okay, now is probably a really good time to get my shit together. So I ended up doing that.

Dan Vaysburd (00:59:08):
Yeah. So you mentioned getting expelled. I was expelled in a way as well, but from the fraternity, from that very first pledging process, I ended up taking one of the actives bottles of alcohol. I distinctly remember it was 99 bananas, which is like a Schnapps, 99 proof. And I remember just drinking it without his permission. They were watching me almost musically, and I just kept chugging the thing. And then I remember a bunch of girls came into the room and I knew they were from a specific sorority that had a reputation for doing Coke. I hadn't even tried Coke at the time, but I thought it was very funny. I had an inflated ego, especially in that inebriated state. And as we were doing a toast, I said to the Cokehouse and no one laughed to my astonishment. That is funny. A couple people take their shots, a couple people just put their toast down.

(00:59:55):
I think one of the girls just walked out of the room and one of the actives leans into me, said, Because if you ever say something like that again, I will do everything in my power to make sure you're removed from this fraternity. And remember, I've never heard anyone speak to me so seriously up until that point in my life. He says that, and I think he was actually one of the nicer guys. Another guy just pulls me out. They take me into a separate house because the fraternity house self was like two houses. They take me to a separate house. A bunch of actives were called in and they immediately dropped me from the fraternity.

Matt Handy (01:00:25):
Wow.

Dan Vaysburd (01:00:26):
And you think that'd be a wake up call for me. And it was definitely shocking. However, same thing happens the following quarter. Winter quarter, I pledge a different fraternity. Something similar happens except at this point, by winter, I'm doing drugs. I'm not just someone who likes to drink and blackout, which was my modus operandi every time I drank. Now I'm not nerd today. I'm like blackout dan. I'm crazy dance. I'm going to black out every time I drink and I'm going to give everyone a show. I'm going to be entertaining. By this point in winter, I'm also a drug user. I'm drug day and I developed a reputation for being a druggie, far cry from what I was known for in high school. So this time at this fraternity, I get drunk and I just picked up a bunch of capsules of Molly from someone I knew.

(01:01:08):
I just whip it out. I think I'm funny and I think I'm amusing it. And I think it's almost cool just to flex that you do drugs. That's how infantile my brain was at the time. And they see that someone pulls drugs away from me. And then I don't think I was dropped then, but then I ended up losing my pledge pin a day or two later. I text that to my pledgemaster. He has me come to the house and he robs me then. For that reason and also for losing the pin, that was the straw that broke the camel's back. And you think it would end there because I've just been dropped from two fraternities for two quarters in a row. I pledge another fraternity spring quarter freshman year. I get dropped again. This time there's no drugs in the picture. I don't say anything too stupid.

(01:01:49):
But I remember getting too drunk at this one party where I wasn't even supposed to drink at as a pledge. Another time where I got high on weed, I just was acting weird. So pretty much in every case, there were drugs or alcohol involved and my abnormal reaction to these substances got me in trouble. And so I've now been dropped from three fraternities, three quarters in a row in my freshman year at UCLA.

Matt Handy (01:02:10):
Dude, that is an accomplishment.

Dan Vaysburd (01:02:11):
Yeah, it's an accomplishment. And you think probably fraternities are not for me. Nope. The lie is strong. I have this massive delusion thinking. You did it again. This time I can do it. So fall quarter of sophomore year, same exact thing this happens with a fourth fraternity.

Matt Handy (01:02:26):
Got dropped again.

Dan Vaysburd (01:02:27):
Again, from a fourth fraternity. That's how strong the obsession of my mind was. Another characteristic of what I now know is my alcoholism. I get dropped again for similar reasons, getting too drunk, vomiting, just being a nuisance when drunk.

Matt Handy (01:02:42):
That is amazing. I've never heard of that.

Dan Vaysburd (01:02:44):
Neither have I. I've never heard of anyone in my life getting dropped from four fraternities. I've never shared that in a public forum either. I think one or two of my friends knows that, but it's kind of a niche thing. You got to be in North America and the whole fraternity concept was almost like an American thing.

(01:02:59):
But yes, I got dropped from four fraternities from four quarters in a row in college. And then ultimately the silver lining is that I end up getting a girlfriend when I'm a sophomore in college. I kind of quiet down just by virtue of necessity. She kind of keeps me in line because we spend a lot of nights in watching TV and stuff, doing normal boyfriend, girlfriend stuff. I end up pledging a fifth fraternity in spring of my sophomore year, but I don't really drink at the functions. I remember we would play, they would make us do some pledge stuff like, "Don't fuck your brother," which is when they line you up and you got to finish a bottle. I remember there was some alcohol in the mix, but I think I had matured a little bit. And then the girlfriend situation, and I never remember getting too drunk as a pledge.

(01:03:44):
And so I crossed. I ended up becoming an active brother and I'm still a brother of that fraternity to this day. There were never really any situations that pledge quarter that got me in trouble. There were some issues down the road. After I broke up with that girl in spring of senior year, I had some issues come up, but while I was with her, that kind of kept me in line. I ended up getting my dream, which was to pledge a fraternity and ultimately be a part of fraternity. And it was a rewarding experience in many ways.

Matt Handy (01:04:13):
Man, that's crazy. Four fraternities.

Dan Vaysburd (01:04:15):
Dropped in four fraternities. Four.

Matt Handy (01:04:18):
That's got to be a record.

Dan Vaysburd (01:04:19):
Definitely a record. I don't know how anyone could beat that record. It's insane. I don't know if there's a physical record of it because when you're a pledge, you're not in some online database. Maybe you are now because it's been like 10 years, but yeah.

Matt Handy (01:04:35):
That's got to be a record.

Dan Vaysburd (01:04:36):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (01:04:36):
That's got to be a record.

Dan Vaysburd (01:04:38):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (01:04:39):
That's crazy.

Dan Vaysburd (01:04:40):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (01:04:40):
Okay. So now how did you get into drugs though?

Dan Vaysburd (01:04:43):
Yeah. So smoking weed casually, not really liking it, but doing it anyway to fit in and just to connect with people. Drinking whenever I could on Fridays and Saturdays, which I liked. I liked the effect produced by alcohol. It was a good, warm, fuzzy feeling. It gave me all the characteristics that I wanted when sober. Confidence. Being able to approach and talk to girls, being well-liked, not caring what people think. That was my drug of choice. Up until October of 2013, that first rave that I went to, and then I developed a mental obsession with Molly and ecstasy. So that very quickly became my drug of choice. And that's what kind of stayed my drug of choice, that whole 10-year period of using from 18 to 28. And throughout college, I mean, I tried a couple of drugs for sure. I mean, more than a couple like cocaine, ketamine.

(01:05:35):
I even tried DMT ones, acid mushrooms. Didn't like any of them. Molly was my thing. I loved it. And I knew both consciously and unconsciously that it was very bad for me. And the urban legend, which maybe isn't even so much of an urban legends that I created holes in your brain, which I don't think it creates physical holes or it might create ... You probably know this way better than me, but it creates maybe holes in your synapses or neural-

Matt Handy (01:06:01):
It creates dead matter.

Dan Vaysburd (01:06:04):
Shit.

Matt Handy (01:06:04):
And so the holes that they're talking about when they do brain scans, typically a whole brain will light up with electrical signaling. But for people that use meth and MDMA, because the base of it is methamphetamine, it does. It fries the synapsis in your brain and it will cause dead spots where it's just inactive. And so it looks on scans like there's a hole because it's like a black spot on the scan.

Dan Vaysburd (01:06:31):
Yeah. That doesn't sound too good. It

Matt Handy (01:06:33):
Isn't.

Dan Vaysburd (01:06:33):
What if someone does ... Well, I guess it really is case by case, but can someone ever physically recover from that? What if they-

Matt Handy (01:06:41):
Oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan Vaysburd (01:06:43):
They heal those dead spots?

Matt Handy (01:06:44):
Yeah, yeah. Ultimately what ends up happening is your dopamine response reregulates itself and you're able to rewire the synapsis in your brain, but for the most part, 18 months to two years.

Dan Vaysburd (01:06:59):
18 months or two is for recovery of those dead spots and the dopamine regulation.

Matt Handy (01:07:06):
Yeah, yeah. So the serotonin reaction and the dopamine reaction, especially if you're using fairly regularly MDMA, it causes those levels to crash really, really bad.

Dan Vaysburd (01:07:19):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (01:07:20):
And then would you ever get super depressed?

Dan Vaysburd (01:07:23):
So here's how I reacted. I never felt a feeling of depression, but a day or two after a heavy molly binge, I'd find myself very emotional. So I'd cry for no reason. Almost like happy tears. I'd have an afterglow and I would think of something small in my life that typically wouldn't make me cry and I'd just cry. Almost like tears of happiness. I just find myself very emotional.

(01:07:45):
I wouldn't really get that depressed feeling like I hate my life too much, but I would get that from alcohol. But what I would get that was very disturbing was severe crippling anxiety. So naturally I was quite anxious. Weed could amplify that a lot short term. With Molly, if I was doing Molly consistently, I remember distinctly in May of 2014, I went into the Englewood Forum to see Armand Van Buren perform. And that probably the biggest Molly binge in my life. I did five capsules in quick succession. My tolerance was already high because I was fresh onto the whole seat and I was doing it consistently for seven months every other two weeks or one month. I'd done so much molly this one night. I didn't even drank anything. I remember waking up the next morning with these waves of anxiety, literally like waves, and it was a really shitty feeling and I knew it was from the molly binge.

(01:08:43):
And these waves would persist. Anytime I would drink, now the drinking hangovers are way worse than they were in the beginning. And anytime I did Molly, and I noticed even if I didn't do Molly for a couple of weeks or months, I'd still get random bounce of anxiety and it scared me. I hated the feeling of being anxious, even more than my neutral resting anxiety state, it was killing me. I scared the crap out of me. And I think there was definitely a couple of points throughout this 10-year period from 2013 to 2024 where I didn't use Molly at all just because of having realized with the maturity I did have, how strong this drug was and how damaging it was to my health because I would feel serious chemical level anxiety and it scared me. And that ultimately led me to kind of substitute in different drugs, but get into that later.

Matt Handy (01:09:39):
So all throughout your college experience, what was your athletics like?

Dan Vaysburd (01:09:43):
So tennis pretty much fell out of the picture. I did club tennis for a couple of months, but the silver lining was that I got obsessed with lifting weights. So I had my academics, was kind of skating by there. I had the party scene, which was the light of my life. It was like the most exciting thing for me was partying. That's how I connected with other people. That's how I felt I connected with the universe, when in fact I was actually disconnecting.

Matt Handy (01:10:07):
For sure.

Dan Vaysburd (01:10:08):
That was the most exciting one. And then the third one was fitness. So I was developing a passion, almost an obsession for fitness. I was watching YouTube as a senior in high school in New Jersey, and I saw this bodybuilder online named Ziz at all.

Matt Handy (01:10:26):
Oh yeah.

Dan Vaysburd (01:10:26):
Okay, good. So you know about him. It'll make all this much easier to explain. And that spoke to me spiritually. And I think in a good spiritual way. I mean, I knew the guy liked EDM and this guy took drugs as well, and that ultimately was probably a part of his death. I don't know for sure, but it spoke to me because he has these before and after photos. And in the before photo, he's this very skinny, awkward gamer kid. And after photo, he's like jacked, ripped, tan, good looking, well liked by others.

Matt Handy (01:10:59):
Tatted.

Dan Vaysburd (01:11:00):
Yeah, tatted all these positive features. And he just seems so well liked and charismatic. He has this charisma that the guy on the left, his old self doesn't have. And something about it just spoke to me in a deep way that I couldn't even fully articulate. And even now, it was just the spiritual thing. I'm like, damn, this is inspiring. And I didn't start lifting right away. I remember I started to broach the topic of some people in my senior class who I knew lifted some of the bigger dudes on the football team. I'd be like, "Yo, what protein powder should I buy or what do I do? " And they would give me a ton of advice and I didn't really take any of it. I remember I bought this optimum nutrition way, the most expensive one, the hydrolyzed one. It was extraberry flavored. And I thought, if you just take this way, that's going to put muscle on you because that's how fitness works.

(01:11:46):
You take protein powder and just puts on muscle right.That's what I thought. And so I did that a couple times. I went to the gym a couple times as a senior, nothing more than that. When I finally came to UCLA and the studying and the partying started, I finally started lifting seriously as well. So that was also kind of my saving grace. And in fact, I think if I was going to quit tennis, if it wasn't for fitness, wasn't for lifting, I don't think I would be alive sitting here with each today.

Matt Handy (01:12:15):
For sure.

Dan Vaysburd (01:12:16):
Yeah. And yeah, I can go on for ages about that.

Matt Handy (01:12:19):
I mean, go ahead.

Dan Vaysburd (01:12:21):
Yeah. I mean, so I had this double life. I was the well polished engineering students and I had the party line. Is

Matt Handy (01:12:27):
That what your master's ended up being in?

Dan Vaysburd (01:12:29):
Yeah, my bachelor's in mechanical engineering. I had an internship at Boeing after my junior year.

Matt Handy (01:12:34):
Oh,

Dan Vaysburd (01:12:34):
Wow. Yeah. I liked the subject. I liked the physics especially. Even though my dad never pushed me to do physics, he was more of the math guy. The physics seemed to click. I liked the applied version of math. So I studied mechanical engineering, got okay grades, got that internship, had an offer to go back, but it was either this ... I think it was a combination of greed and just wanting to keep up with the Joneses because a lot of my peers and friends from back home weren't becoming engineers actually. Even though engineering was a stable, well-paying career on paper, there was something that was more well-paying and that was investment banking.

(01:13:11):
And this was really prominent where I grew up in Central Jersey because this is what my dad did and I grew up an hour away from the city. This is always in the back of my mind. And as a child, I would go to take her child to work there at least four or five times throughout my childhood. I went to the trading floor where my dad worked and I spoke with his colleagues and that fascination, maybe you'd call it shiny object fascination, was always in the back of my mind as a kid. And I had inklings of working on a trading floor one day. I mostly had forgotten about that as a college kid. In my mind, I was an engineer. I painted myself psychologically as a mechanical engineer. I was studying engineering. I was in a rocket design club. I was going to build rockets or something and now I was at Boeing.

(01:13:56):
I'm, okay, I'm going to be a mechanical engineer. I'm a physics guy. I'm not going to go to Wall Street. Lo and behold, I graduated senior year and I have an offer to go do consulting at a consulting firm. At this point, engineering or physical old school engineering had lost this luster. I wanted to be working in an office instead of working in a satellite factory, which is what I was doing at Boeing, or I wanted to maybe go to grad school. And then I offered to study financial engineering also at UCLA and their business school. And I was kind of tempted to go with the consulting offer because I had wanted to get a high paying full-time job so badly when they told me the base salary at the time, which just sounded amazing to me. I wanted that COVID position so bad, that feeling of stability and security and respect from others and admiration and the approval of my parents and peers.

(01:14:45):
But I had this grad school offer. And I remember calling my dad and he said, "Hey, if you do go to grad school, you have my blessing. I'll pay for it. And I think this is the better option. Hey, you can make X, Y, Z amount as a consultant, but you'll make even more money if you go into finance." I'm like, I thought about it for months. And I finally, I remember distinctly laying on a cabana in Cancun with my girlfriend at the time and thinking, "You know what? I'm blessed. I'm able to go to grad school on my parents' dime. I'm not laid in with student debt like a lot of most other people are. I'm going to do this. I have this blessing in front of me and I'm going to do it. " So I ended up going to grad school studying financial engineering, which isn't really engineering.

(01:15:28):
It's like a combination of math and computer science and finance. And then I ended up getting that master's degree and going to New York, which I said I would never do. I'm never going back to the East Coast. I'm never going to New York. But now the offering salary was even higher and there was a prospect of a bonus, the prospect of working on a trading floor, which I thought, okay, this has actually been my dream my whole life was to do what my dad does. I'm going to go after this. And so that's what I did. And I spent close to four years in New York and that was a whole bender in and of itself. I imagine. Yeah, I could go into that too. That was a whole thing.

Matt Handy (01:16:02):
So let's go into that because I'm curious, how did your anxiety react to that kind of high stress level situation?

Dan Vaysburd (01:16:11):
Not well. So I get into this trading floor environments and also to New York. I've moved into New York and-

Matt Handy (01:16:20):
Which this is high pace, high stress, right?

Dan Vaysburd (01:16:25):
Yeah. Pretty high pace, high stress. I happened to be put in a pretty slow pace group in the beginning. There is this Russian Jewish guy in this morning-

Matt Handy (01:16:36):
Are you still practicing Jew?

Dan Vaysburd (01:16:37):
No, no. So my dad is ethnically Jewish, but he doesn't practice Judaism. His brother actually is a practicing Jew and lives in Israel and he has 14 kids. Oh my gosh. 14 or maybe even 15. I don't even know the number of cousins on my dad's side. So my dad's brother's kids in Israel and near Jerusalem. Never met any of them. Only three of the 15 have smartphones and two of those three smartphones are kosher smartphones. And the one guy that has a non-kosher smartphone that lives on his own, I keep in touch with this guy. Yeah.

Matt Handy (01:17:13):
What is a kosher smartphone?

Dan Vaysburd (01:17:14):
A kosher smartphone, from what I understand is a smartphone that's just locked up. I don't know how it works in Mormonism. I'm sure there's some Mormon families in Utah or what have you that have a lot of restrictions. I mean, the Amish people is next level, but with the Kosher smartphone, it just has a lot of restrictions. You can't use the internet freely. It's funny. It sounds hilarious because usually you think of kosher as food, coach is marvelous. It just has these restrictions. It's locked down. And there's one guy, he's the oldest or second oldest. I talked to this guy and actually I did meet him for the first time this past June when I went to Israel. So I met one of my cousins. So my dad's brother is Orthodox Jew, but my dad growing up as an ethnic Jew in Soviet Union, his family did not practice Judaism. So I wasn't brought up as a Jew, although I went to Jewish school briefly as a kindergartner.

Matt Handy (01:18:03):
What is your first language?

Dan Vaysburd (01:18:05):
Russian.

Matt Handy (01:18:05):
Okay.

Dan Vaysburd (01:18:06):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (01:18:06):
Okay.

Dan Vaysburd (01:18:06):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (01:18:08):
Okay. So go back to Wall Street.

Dan Vaysburd (01:18:10):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's funny because it was a fast-paced trading floor, but my first group was kind of this sleepy mortgage-backed security analysis group. Everyone in that group is a PhD. They're all kind of like my dad. So I'm actually placed in a group of people that are all pure quants, very similar to my dad. So I'm literally doing kind of close to what he does except with a different asset class. I think my dad, he did equity derivatives, like stock options and treasuries. So I'm in this mortgage group, but everyone is super educated. And these guys, even though it's a fast-paced environment around this, they're all very slow paced. They're more intellectual. They kind of like to sip their coffee or tea and kind of solve problems very methodically and slowly. And you need guys like that in the trading world, especially now.

(01:19:00):
You need guys who are ... Their brains are fast, but they solve highly complex problems and highly complex problems can't be solved immediately. Kind of like a trader has to make a lot of split second decisions that are less complex. These quants in this group that I was in are addressing very complicated problems. These guys are working with prepayment speeds for mortgages because when you buy a house, when you pay off a mortgage, you can prepay it by either paying more or selling the house or default things. That's actually important for people who trade mortgage-backed securities. So I was in a group that essentially did prepayment analysis, as well as some other analysis on mortgage-backed securities. So it's kind of a sleepy group, but I wanted more. And this is kind of how the addict brain works because for me, my addiction is characterized by more ism or not enoughism, whatever it is, drugs, alcohol, sex, validation, money.

(01:19:53):
So I end up getting this coded position that I kind of wanted my whole life, my whole damn life, because what was the whole point of going to an Ivy League to get a top job ideally on Wall Street? And so now I'm on Wall Street. I'm like a 21-year-old analyst. I'm working on a trading floor in Tribeca in downtown New York and Manhattan. I haven't made people would literally kill for this spot. People like in Africa and Asia and Europe, even in North America, they would kill to have what I have, a young bachelor at the studio apartment in the financial district working as a quantitative analyst with a double degree from UCLA. I had it made, but of course it's not enough. I want more. And my idea of what more was at the time was, okay, this is boring. My boss is kind of weird. These guys are too slow paced. I actually want it to be more fast-paced. Even though I haven't even demonstrated a proper ability to react to stress like that, I want to be a trader. I want to be in a trading group. So I spent six months in that group and I pretty much begged them to allow me to switch because I had started my rotation at this bank early because I kind of graduated at an odd time.

(01:21:05):
I graduated in December of 2018 from my master's. So I started my rotation in this mortgage group in March 2019. And then in July when everyone else arrives from different colleges and grad schools, I enter that mix and I reapply for a different group in this big bank and I get exactly what I wanted or what I thought I wanted. I get put in a very, very fast paced trading group that traded bond ETFs and portfolios of bonds and I'm throwing it into the frying pan. God gives me exactly what I want and very quickly I'm drowning because not only am I a- equipped psychologically to handle these people, these personalities and this work, but my addiction is developing because now when I'm not at work or at the gym, I'm doing cocaine on the weekends, drinking, doing cocaine. I'm on five different dating apps.

(01:21:56):
My sex addiction is exploding. That's a whole other part of the circle. So I'm kind of almost living four lives. I'm living the career life as an investment banker trader. I'm living the gym life. I'm in the gym almost every day if I'm not hungover. I'm drinking and doing drugs every weekend, or ideally every weekend if I can help it. And then I'm also on the dating app scene in Manhattan, New York, going on as many dates as humanly possible, calendaring everything, taking the worst aspects of my addict personality, using them for evil. And I'm just living this crazy life. And at the time, I kind of took pride in it. I kind of respected myself for, oh, I'm sleeping with so many girls and I'm making all this money and I can drink like a fish and I'm doing Coke. I had this massively inflated ego. Now looking back from where I'm seated today in recovery, I'm just like, holy moly, what a sick and twisted life.

Matt Handy (01:22:55):
Yeah. I mean, so obviously I'm very, very far removed from the financial trading world and chilling at, but how accurate is Wolf of Wall Street? Have you seen it?

Dan Vaysburd (01:23:07):
Of course. Yeah. I don't think it's as accurate now as it might've used to be. I know back then in, call it the '80s and '70s, you could smoke cigarettes on the trading floor, cocaine I think peaked back then I think in terms of its use among white collar workers, but that whole Wall Street, Wolf of Wall Street ethos, it's still there. There's still guys who live that life. All my Coke had friends in New York were either in finance or consulting or law or some other upper echelon "field" where high stress, high money, high stakes. And so it's a burnoff steam. People are doing Coke on the weekends, but they're in the minority, man. That's what my sense tells me. For any normal person or even an above average person, in terms of ability to handle such a crazy life, you can't do Coke on the weekends and perform in these jobs. So the degenerates who were like myself back then, they're in the minority, both on Wall Street. Yeah, a lot of the people now both on Wall Street and consulting are people who not only are coming from good schools, but they have pretty good heads on their shoulders.

(01:24:22):
They're looking to make a career for themself and their priority is not doing Coke and parting like it was for me. They're for the most part normal people. They might have some other idiosyncrasies. They might have some other less than healthy ways to blow off stress. They might have anger issues, which I saw a lot of in trading. They might like to gamble a little bit or they might be a foodie or something harmless like that, but people who are like the way I used to be, it's in the minority.

(01:24:55):
The degenerates that you see in Wolf of Wall Street, they're in the minority now. Right now, if you go onto a Wall Street trading floor or a consulting floor, it's a bunch of people who are- Like buttoned up people. People are pretty buttoned up in the best way possible for the most part.

Matt Handy (01:25:10):
Okay. So how long did that go for?

Dan Vaysburd (01:25:13):
So that escapade lasted from March of 2019 all the way to August of 2023. And the first three of those years were in New York. I worked for two investment banks in New York and then I got sick of New York. I thought New York was my problem. And in a way it was because every single friend and acquaintance I had there was drinking and/or doing drugs. And so I removed myself from New York in June of 2022, went on a Euro trip, and then I came back to LA in August of 2022 for my third and final investment banking job was a banker in LA for a bit. And I continued to live my New York life in LA, but on a smaller scale, the sex addiction was turned down. In terms of turned down a notch, it was unmanageable. The drinking, I turned it down a notch and the drugs, I turned it down a couple notch as well because it was killing me in New York.

(01:26:07):
And the city just became glaring because I lived this crazy, unsustainable, unhealthy lifestyle. Everything about the city started to get to me, the noise, the smell, the people. I could not handle my unmanageable life in New York anymore. So I kind of needed to escape to LA, to the warmth and just to step away from that life because I think if not insanity, then death was on the horizon because I was doing anything that was in front of me. I would do any Coke because I liked to think at the time that me and my Coke had friends were sophisticated. We're all like college or grad school educated. So we have defense no testing kits. We think we're super slick. And there's times where it came up positive for my friend, I think, and he would toss it. But there was of course times where we didn't test, we didn't have a kit

(01:26:57):
And someone would just do it and it's like, I think it's clean. And so we just did it. So there's countless situations like that where we run out of test kits or we're too lazy to get a test kit. And I was the one who was usually the guinea pig because I want to get high so badly, I'm willing to risk my life to do that line of Coke because for me, the Coke use is precipitated by drinking. I don't remember a single time I did Coke unless I drank first. And once I have that little bit of alcohol on me, the desire to use Coke is so, so strong. And I know I'm not the only one now. There's a whole thought pattern or community of people like this on Instagram and social media who talk about the effect alcohol has on them. And for them, it's immediately cocaine.

(01:27:41):
So that's pretty much what characterizes three and a half, four years in New York was lots of alcohol, lots of cocaine, occasional MGMA use, but it kind of wisened up I realized that as unmanageable as all this sex addiction and cocaine and alcohol was, it wasn't as bad or so I thought as the Molly, because the Molly at this point was debilitating.

Matt Handy (01:28:03):
Yeah. The toll around not all drugs are made equal and the price you pay is different for everything for sure. That's probably a really smart decision not to really overdo that.

Dan Vaysburd (01:28:17):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (01:28:17):
So you come back to LA, you're working in the baking industry still.

Dan Vaysburd (01:28:22):
Yeah. Yeah. Still kind of hanging on by a thread. I got that because then my obsession in New York became coming back to LA. I was thoroughly sick of New York. I wanted to be back with palm trees, which I think was good because I think if I had saved for any longer, I would've continued hanging out with those friends and dancing on the edge of a knife and playing with my life. So I come back to LA and I'm living that banker life on a smaller scale. I'm still in my addiction, still not wanting to face reality or only able to face it on my terms with the drugs and the sex and whatever I could get my hands on to kind of soothe my mind, quiet my mind. And I actually have a brief stint of sobriety when I come back to LA because I come back to LA and I'm almost like in this elevated frequency state, I end up getting this book by Jocko Willing.

(01:29:13):
I forgot what it was called. I think, well, first of all, I got this book by Deo Gongs, Can't Hurt Me. Oh, and then Discipline Equals Freedom by Jocko Willing. I end up discovering Wes Watson online. Of course, you know Wes Watson. And so I get exposed to this different way of looking at life. And Wes actually was the first individual I ever see online who puts decedents in my mind that it's actually not cool to drink and do drugs.

(01:29:41):
That's when the seed was first planted. And in fact, I think I first saw his videos as I was in New York, but I wasn't ready to give up the drugs and alcohol because it was such a fundamental part of my identity. Even though I was using them less, there was no amounts of motivational books or motivational speakers, no matter how good they were that could save me. And I almost thought about getting a program from Wes. I remember I got on the phone with him. I couldn't pull the trigger because I think I knew subconsciously I wasn't ready to leave my substance use behind. I lived this scaled down life in LA in terms of the addictions. Then I think a combination of all that motivational reading and watching videos led me to want to get sober. From December of 2022 to February of 2023, so roughly three months, I actually had three months of sobriety, no recovery for sure,

(01:30:33):
But sobriety. I just did that by just ladening my schedule with just a crazy amount of obligations. I ended up getting a part-time trainer job at LA Fitness. I'm doing my investment baking job from nine to five or nine to six. The investment banking job was scaled down to, it wasn't the crazy hours I was working in New York. I'm a part-time trainer now at a gym playing with the idea of maybe having a side passion, maybe I'll even be a trainer, which is what ended up happening. I ended up doing jujitsu after learning about it from Jocko Willing's book. I prep for my first half marathon. I'm doing all this stuff just to stay busy. And my life honestly becomes just so unmanageable to the point I don't even have time to drink or use drugs. So I'm sober, sort of healthy, but I'm miserable.

(01:31:24):
There's some bright spots with the half marathon and just the running euphoria. And I discovered different ways to achieve high frequency states without needing to constantly be having sex or doing drugs or drinking. So my mind is exposed to a different way of living, but it's not enough to fully transform me because I don't really have a spiritual framework. I only have a physical framework. For some people you see online, they supposedly quit drugs and alcohol because they just start running ultramarathons something. And that's really cool. Some people don't need the 12 steps and don't want the 12 steps. I totally respect that for me. It wasn't until I discovered the 12 steps later on after another year of suffering and going back and forth between using drugs and alcohol that I finally surrendered control and started my recovery.

Matt Handy (01:32:16):
What was your exposure to the rooms?

Dan Vaysburd (01:32:18):
So after that one brief AA meeting as a 17-year-old, I didn't have any exposure. I didn't know anyone who went to AA. I knew nothing about AA other than that one experience. And why would I? I'm not an alcoholic. Why would I be going to AA? Because an alcoholic is someone who drinks every day. And an alcoholic is someone, they drink so much that they can't stop drinking. I'm clearly not an alcoholic because I only drink once a week. That's the kind of thought patterns I had because I had no idea what an alcoholic was. And I remember when I was a junior in high school, our English teacher, I don't know how the topic came up, but she said, "It doesn't matter how much you drink or how often you drink. It's what happens when you drink." And that idea was in the back of my mind and it wasn't reignited until 2024 when I started recovery.

(01:33:07):
And at this point, a couple of things had happened. I'd quit that banking job and I quit the personal training job. And at this point I'm out of options because I've tried changing jobs. I've tried changing careers. I've tried just about everything, changing girlfriends, changing cities. And I'm still, it's the same me. I can't run away for myself.

(01:33:24):
And so I go on this sabbatical or what I thought was a sabbatical in my mind. From August of 2023 to January 2024, I quit both those jobs and sold all my possessions. I go to 10 countries over a five-month period, end up falling in love with the girl. I make her subconsciously my higher power. Obviously that doesn't work out. I come back to LA in January of 2024, and I'm just out of options because nothing's working. I've traveled, I've done everything except have a spiritual experience and actually work on my sobriety, but nothing seems to be helping. And now not even the drugs and alcohol make me feel any good because I'd made this woman my higher power and now we were broken up and I had nothing to look forward to in life. I was so devastated. I didn't want to drink. I didn't want to get high.

(01:34:15):
I didn't want to date. None of my old ski slopes that I had used to make myself happy or working anymore. I was out of options. There was no chemical or personal thing that could make me happy. But I ended up getting a job as a full-time personal trainer and I take the risk and I change careers. And I think, okay, there's no fucking way I can tell people how to train and eat and live their life. I'm still drinking and doing drugs on the weekends. So I think I need to get sober. And so I don't know what caused it. Maybe it was the combination of all those things, but I write, "Go to an AA meeting on a piece of paper." I don't know why I wrote that, but I did. And so I go to a Zoom meeting and it's super lame because it's Zoom.

(01:34:59):
There's like, no, I don't really ... And Zoom's actually cool. I've been to Zoom meetings since then, but I'm not feeling it spiritually or psychologically. It's like whatever. I'm like, okay, I think I'm good off AA, but just to be safe, I'm going to go to an in- person meeting. And so I go to an in- person meeting and it's in the park. It's in a park like a mile away from me. I still live pretty close to that park. It's called Beamon Park in Cedio City in Los Angeles. And immediately I see this curly-haired woman there and I recognize her from the gym where I work. She looks at me. I sort of recognize her. I'm not sure if it's her. And she says, "Hey, how much time do you have? " I'm like, "Oh, I got 30 minutes," because I think she asked me how much time I have to talk. I think actually at five minutes, she just kind of nods and smiles and she says, "Okay, do you have a sponsor?" I'm like, "No." And she's like, "Do you want? " And I'm like, "Sure." I didn't want to say no. And she ended up connecting me with my first sponsor right after that first day meeting. And the reason she was there was that wasn't even her home group at that park near me. She was just called to be a speaker there that day.

Matt Handy (01:36:12):
Wow.

Dan Vaysburd (01:36:12):
Yeah. She happened to just be a speaker there. She didn't even go to that meeting regularly. And she takes my number, gives my number to some guy. And five minutes after I meet her, this guy texted me, says, "Hey, Dan, I heard you like to drink." And in the text, he's these a bunch of beer emojis. I'm like, "What the hell is this guy inviting me to drink? He's way too casual about it. What's going on? I thought this was AA. This is supposed to be very sobering in the most literal sense of the world. We're supposed to be serious and we shouldn't even talk about drinking, but he's using beer." I'm like, "What the hell is going on? " And I see in his iPhone photo, he's smiling at the beach or something. I'm just like, "All right, I don't know what's going on.

(01:36:55):
" But he wanted to meet up. And so we meet up at a coffee shop near my spot. I think if not that same day, then the next day he meets me, he's this very jolly, cheerful guy. And he brings me a copy of The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, The Blue and Yellow Book. And he says he's only been sober two months, but he seems super happy. He seems so happy and cheerful. We talk like me and you are talking except it's over a cup of coffee. He's like, "Yeah, dude, I went on a travel experience too. I went all over California and I lived in a tent and I saw two bobcats fighting and I've tried everything to get sober. I tried religion. I tried to travel. Nothing's worked until I found out, hey, I haven't been sober for this long." Because he had been sober for three months actually when I met him.

(01:37:45):
It was more than two. I've never been sober this long. It really works. And at the time I didn't know, but reading with others when you're three months of the program is pretty unusual, but I later learned that that's how my fellowship does it. That's how some people do it is the whole program is helping others. The 12th step that people think is taking others to the steps, that's just the intervention. That's what my now sponsor says is the 12th step, that's just the intervention. You should be serving others from step zero. That's the whole program is helping others. And so yeah, that was my first real attempt at actual recovery and it sort of worked. So my first sobriety day was, it was someday in February of 2024. I was doing the steps of this guy who was three months clean. We're meeting up weekly once a week for an hour at a coffee shop. We had finished Bill's story. Do you use the AA text or use NA or ...

Matt Handy (01:38:46):
I'm not a 12-step guy.

Dan Vaysburd (01:38:48):
Oh, okay.

Matt Handy (01:38:49):
But I've read the book probably 15 times and I've done the steps a bunch of times. I had my personal recovery journey, I had some really negative experiences and interactions, and Suboxone saved my life. And there's a huge stigma in the rooms around using MAT, right? It's medication assisted treatment. And that's actually how I got involved with Taylor was I was going into meetings. I mean, I was going to three or four meetings a day and just desperately trying not to use. And I had this realization, I was like, "I need help faster than they will accept me, so I need to figure something else out. " And I heard Taylor say something on a video and I just called him and I was like, "This is what's going on. I fucking need help." And he was like, "Stop going to those meetings or you're going to fucking use and go to the gym tomorrow and call me. " I was like, "Okay." And that's kind of how it started. And he was like, "Dude, don't go kill yourself. Go do a hundred pushups and walk on the treadmill and then call me. " I was like, "Okay, all right." And then dude, it was just Taylor and I clicked in such a sick way. And I mean, I tell people all the time, Suboxone saved my life and Taylor put me on the path that I'm on. The treatment center, all of this is really a domino effect of getting involved with Taylor.

Dan Vaysburd (01:40:25):
Yeah, it's so interesting. Had you been an exercise person before working with Taylor?

Matt Handy (01:40:32):
So in high school, so I surfed my entire childhood. I skated during my teenage years, but I played water polo at a really high level and the club that I was a part of, our coaches were former Olympians for water polo and shit like that. And then throughout prison, obviously there's two things that you can do in prison. There's you can do drugs and you can work out. And so I did both of those. And so working out was never a passion that I had. It was just something that I did. And it was out of necessity as a teenager because in order to do what I wanted to do, I still had to satisfy my obligations here, which by the time I was a teenager, it was church and sports. Those were the rules. You were going to church and you're playing sports.

Dan Vaysburd (01:41:22):
Okay.

Matt Handy (01:41:23):
It wasn't really even like you have to perform well in school, it was you have to play sports. So never a serious gym rat, never ... And I hate going to the gym to this day. So I built an entire gym at my house because I hate going to the gym. So I solved that by building my own gym. And so now I just walk to my garage and I have the fucking dope gym.

Dan Vaysburd (01:41:47):
Nice.

Matt Handy (01:41:48):
And so Taylor really put it in my head that ... And this kind of feeds into later on what happened with me coming into contact with my doctor that I'm working with now. We're in business together. We've started companies and he is proving a model right now around relapse prediction, not relapse prevention, not all these coping skills or whatever. He's saying, instead of focusing on the relapse event, let's focus on what happened before. And so if we can educate people around the hyperactivity of the amygdala and re-triggering of trauma and surrounding circumstances, we can prevent the relapse in a real way. But since relapse prevention has kind of been bastardized in the recovery community where when I'm in relapse mode, and maybe this is your experience too, but when I'm in relapse mode, there is no, okay, I got to find the phone numbers or do box breathing.

(01:42:50):
It's like when using becomes a viable option, all that shit's out the window. So how do we address the issue that gets you to that point? And you've probably heard it too, you've relapsed way before you picked up. What does that actually mean though?

Dan Vaysburd (01:43:05):
Yeah, no. So I was three months into doing the steps with this guy on step one or two. And the phenomenon of, not the phenomenon of craving, but the mental obsession was still there thinking that I got at least one more run in me and I missed the effect of being inebriated. I missed drinking and I certainly missed the effect produced by ecstasy. I was often wistfully thinking about going to a rave or a festival and doing ecstasy just one more time. And besides, I'm reading The Alcohololic Anonymous big book, so maybe I could still technically be sober if I just do ecstasy. And so I brought it up to my sponsor at the time and I think he reacted in the best way possible. He said, "Hey man, it's up to you.

(01:43:54):
If you only want to do ecstasy and not drink, that's cool, man. Just be careful." And I said, "Okay, cool, Ben." So that's what I did. I went to EDC in May of 2024, which is my last relapse, Sunday, May 19th, 2024. And although the mental obsession is twofold, it's like one, I got one more run in me. So I'm not going to drink because I don't like drinking as much as I like ecstasy. So I'm just going to do ecstasy. And it's funny, it's almost scary when I recall it. I go to the fucking Porta Potty to take a piss and the Porta Potty is littered with fucking alcohol. And as soon as the smell of alcohol hits my nose, I immediately develop the phenomenon of craving. I don't end up drinking anything that Porta Potty. That would've been gnarly, pretty funny in retrospect. But I get to the festival and I immediately ask one of my ... I ended up going to my coworkers at the time.

(01:44:51):
I immediately asked one of my coworkers first drink and then I ended up buying my own. And very quickly, the ecstasy was premeditated. I'm full on planning on taking ecstasy. I take the most ecstasy out of anyone. I'm throwing people into the mosh pit, going insane, egging people on to do more pills, which is crazy. Normally people don't party like this.

(01:45:14):
Normal ravers or people who take exterior drugs don't react like this, especially in the music festival when they do drugs and alcohol. So my reaction is not only abnormal, but I'm back to where I was before. I'm in my addiction. I haven't drank or used for three months. I've even opened a big book with a sponsor in AA, but I'm back to where I was because I have sober time, but not much recovery. So the night ends about as good as it could end. No one dies. I end up living, but I've done ... I don't even know how much except maybe close to a gram of MDMA, God knows. So I wake up ... So I'm high into the early hours of Monday morning, Monday, May 20, 2024, and now my sobriety date for what it's worth is May 21, 2024. So I've been clean a little bit over 18 months now and I had enough recovery to get back into the book when I stopped.

(01:46:07):
And that didn't prevent the fascination or the mental obsession to go away immediately, but I do the steps and I have a couple of spiritual experiences. I do the inventory. I have a new sponsor at this point because this guy who was working with me, I think he hadn't gotten to that point yet because he was only a couple months ahead of me. And so I ended up working with a new sponsor and I do my inventory with this guy. And for the first time in my life, I actually look at myself. Obviously, self is not a good assessment of self, as he said, but actually with my sponsor's guidance, I actually look at myself from as unbiased a view as possible with my fears, some of which I had never thought about. I had so many fears, some of which were random. My resentments, my sex inventory, and I have a massive spiritual lift, both while doing it alone at home on my coffee table, doing this pretty gnarly inventory, thinking about my relationship with my mom, my dad, random teachers growing up in school who I'd forgotten about, but who impacted me some good, some bad, random people in my life.

(01:47:14):
I look at my fears and how they're connected to my resentments. I look at my sexism story and I feel like this presence of God or presence of some higher power. And for the first time in my life, I feel the compulsion to drink and use lift from my body. Even if only for a little bit, I feel it kind of go away because now I don't have a desire to numb as much. Something's changing. I don't know what it is, but something's changing. And then I share that inventory with the sponsor. We do some character defect work, and then we do the amends. And that was my second spiritual experience, was writing the amends. I got pretty emotional doing it on my own, just like I did with the inventory. Then I share the amends with whoever was willing to share. And some people like my mom obviously couldn't respond to my amends.

(01:48:03):
I even wrote an amends like our family cat. Obviously the cat can't respond, but I have a series of spiritual experiences doing the amends and the compulsion starts to lift even more. It's still there, but it starts to lift. Something is changing in me. There's some sort of psychological change occurring. I start doing prayer.

(01:48:25):
I didn't really do meditation at the time. I didn't even know what that was and that we didn't really spend too much time on that step, but we do the 11th step together. I try to take regular inventory, and then my sponsor walks me through the 12 steps says, "Okay, man, I've kind of hinted at this already. Now it's time for you to take others to the work." And that's what's really kept me sober for the time I've had almost 19 months now. Just taking others through the work, obviously doing the steps on my own, practicing my inventory regularly, being aware of my character defects, humbly asking God to remove those defects for me, relinquishing power of my life, my will every day, but most importantly, taking others to the steps, because at least for me and for other people in my fellowship, when you take others through the steps, that's and you practice all three legs of that triangle, the unity, the service, and the recovery.

(01:49:16):
So that is the most important thing, if not the only thing that's kept me sober and kept me also recovered, kept me content with this present moment instead of constantly fantasizing about sex or drugs or alcohol or more money or more respect. That's the light of my life now. So whereas the light of my life used to be getting high, popping pills, sniffing lines and having compulsive sex. Now the light of my life is just helping people. So that's pretty much my whole recovery story in a nutshell.

Matt Handy (01:49:46):
Okay. So where did bodybuilding, because you're semi-pro doing it because I know you compete, right?

Dan Vaysburd (01:49:53):
Yeah, yeah. Bodybuilding was always kind of in the background here. Going back to the Ziz experience, I was lifting weights regularly. It was my healthy addiction. And even to this day, I don't know how I balance this crazy quadruple life that I had, the academics and the work and then the partying and then the bodybuilding and then the social life. I don't know how I did it, but bodybuilding was always in the background. I was lifting almost every day. And by 2022 when I was prepping for my trip to Europe, right after I left New York, I was lifting every day. I was obsessed with it. I was going every day after work. And if I didn't lift, it's because I was hungover or I'd have to be very hungover to not go work out. So it's always in the background and I'm not getting the best results this whole time.

(01:50:41):
I'm strong. I have muscle, but I don't have much definition because I pretty much eat like an asshole because Monday through Friday, I'm just treading water at work or school. I'm hungover or coming down or depressed or just fantasizing about my next high. So I don't really have ... I have zero discipline. I'm just doing the bare minimum. I go to work, I lift and I wipe my ass. That's it. My discipline is non-existence. I don't know anything about personal development up until the rooms I didn't know anything about prayer or meditation or wake up time or burpees or high frequency states. I don't know about any of this shit. I don't want to know about any of it. I just care about getting high, having sex and making money and that's it. And lifting, although it's healthy, it feels my ego and I do feel some what I now know is a high frequency effect I'm lifting, but it's just for aesthetics and for ego.

(01:51:35):
So that's the role that bodybuilding plays. Before this Euro trip in 2022, I did have a couple stints of sobriety because I had this test or this series of tests I was prepping for called the CFA, Chartered Financial Analyst Exam. So there was periods of sobriety that led me to reevaluate my life, think, I mean, I'm working at my third investment bank now. Why am I doing this? Clearly I'm way more passionate about lifting weights, even if the passion is a bit ego-driven. Why am I working in finance? And I start dieting and tracking my food for the first time. For vanity purposes, I'm going to Europe and I want to look good. I want to have abs because I'm spending all this time in the gym. I don't really have abs because I'm eating like an asshole and I'm drinking like a fish. And I also have this disordered eating pattern.

(01:52:24):
I do Coke and Molly, I don't eat for a day. Then I have a massive food binge. So I'm not fat because I work out every day and I have athletic genetics, but I don't look good. I'm persistently bloated. I'm constantly inflamed. I'm consuming 20 drinks and one night I have tons of acne and pimples. My body, even though I'm so young, just cannot handle this constant recurring onslaught of just heavy alcohol and drug use and disordered eating. But I managed to get in pretty good shape because I'm busy studying for these exams. I go to Europe, end up looking pretty good, or so I thought. And then I moved to LA and I do my first bodybuilding show, still not have a little bit of sobriety, like self-imposed due to work or due to all the jiu-jitsu and running I was doing, obviously no recovery.

(01:53:15):
But for this first bodybuilding show in 2023, I do a 10-week prep. I go to Bali, Indonesia to decompress. I drink like crazy and I come back and then 10 weeks of sobriety, again, another wave of sobriety that's miserable. I miss partying and drinking and lustful activity the whole time during this prep. And there is a point in the prep where I had a mental break that I'm like, God, help me get through this. Why did I sign up for this bodybuilding show? But I get through it. I do pretty well for that show, especially for my first time. And then after that show, I quit both jobs. Actually, the two weeks up to that first bodybuilding show, I had a pretty chill investment banking job. It's not my third job in investment banking, but it's unmanageable to balance it with the bodybuilding show. So I'm in a massive caloric deficit and somehow I'm thugging it out and powering through.

(01:54:10):
But I get a call from one of my managers at work and he says, dude, we need you on this deal and you need to do all this work. So whereas the first 11 months of this job were pretty chill, I was able to not only party at first, but later get a second job and do jujitsu and running. And it was like a chill banking job, but suddenly it became not chill the two weeks up to this show. And so I ended up having to resign from that job because I'm like, okay, I hate this job anyway. I don't like the people and I'm not about to work on this deal right now and try to balance my bodybuilding show. So I just quit the job. I put it in a two weeks notice, but those two weeks I didn't do any work. It was not very-

Matt Handy (01:54:49):
Productive.

Dan Vaysburd (01:54:50):
It was not productive and I didn't put my best foot forward. I literally had to make an amends to those two guys who were overseeing me, the guy who hired me and the guy who was the deal team captain I had to apologize two years later, literally last year, I apologized. Actually earlier this year, because I tried to take regular inventory and I was like, "Oh, I owe these guys an apology." Anyways, I do the show and then at this point I'm so burnt out because at this point I'm sick of LA. At first I was sick of New York. Now I'm sick of LA. And so I do this bodybuilding show. I go to hard summer, so I go to Hard Fest, do a bunch of drugs, have a very scary ketamine experience, haven't done ketamine since then. And then I go travel for five months and there's a bunch of things that happened there, but I come back to LA and then yeah, come back to LA and then ended up doing another show this year in May of this year, May 2025.

(01:55:44):
But I didn't do as well as I thought because by the time I did the show, that was literally my one year sobriety birthday. So I'm going to do another show in either April or May of next year, not only having two years of sobriety, but also just better able to manage bodybuilding prep.

Matt Handy (01:56:00):
What category do you compete in?

Dan Vaysburd (01:56:01):
Men's physique. Yeah. So men's physique is the guys at the board stores. Board shorts. Technically nothing below the waist is judged.

Matt Handy (01:56:08):
Really?

Dan Vaysburd (01:56:09):
They technically don't judge your legs or your calves, but I think it does make a difference. The way you train your leg, it affects how the board shorts fan. I still train legs all the time.

Matt Handy (01:56:18):
I mean, you hear Arnold talk about it, right?

Dan Vaysburd (01:56:20):
Yeah. Yeah. He wasn't to men's physique. He was classic, but technically men's physique, at least in my Federation, nothing below the waist is judged.

Matt Handy (01:56:28):
Yeah. Arnold talks about men's physique and he is like, "What is this? Why do they not look at their legs?" Yeah. So funny and all natural. Okay.

Dan Vaysburd (01:56:41):
Yeah. The Federation that I do is all natural. I was never tested, but that's because I didn't place well, dude. I placed okay in my first show because I didn't only novice. Novices guys, so are only competing for their first or second or third time. And then my last show, which I think I should have performed way better, not judge it better, but I think I should have come in way better.

Matt Handy (01:57:04):
I mean, are you prepping a routine and all that shit too, like a flex routine? Oh,

Dan Vaysburd (01:57:10):
So in my Federation, the way they do it is you're pretty much, when you're posing with the other guys, it's fixed. You just pose how they tell you to do- Oh,

Matt Handy (01:57:20):
They tell you.

Dan Vaysburd (01:57:21):
Yeah. You still practice the poses. You practice your relaxed pose and then side chest, side tricep, intercostal, back double bicep. So there's five poses that they can tell you to do most somewhat randomly. You just do what they tell you. You can add your own flare, you can add your own transitions. There's an individual routine where you can kind of add your own flare and spice, but it's mostly a fixed set of poses and it's up to you to add your own personality to it. But it's, yeah.

Matt Handy (01:57:49):
So what is your whole goal around that? Are you just doing it because you like it or are you trying to go somewhere with it?

Dan Vaysburd (01:57:57):
Yeah, honestly, me stepping on stage for the first time in 2022 was super, or 2023, it was super overdue because at this point I'd been lifting for a decade almost every day, but I don't have much to show for it because I'm drinking every weekend.

(01:58:16):
I'm lifting all the time. I'm working my butt off, but mostly eating like a dickhead and I'm partying in an insane, exorbitant amount. So my body doesn't reflect all the time I'm spending in the gym. So I'd always wanted to compete. Even the Ziz guy, he had this sort of bodybuilding physique and his brother is a professional now. He's a prolific competitor. So it was about time for me. I would always pose and flex in front of the mirror, but I didn't have the substance or even the balls to step on stage. So I finally did it. And after that, I just wasn't in a good space mentally because I'd spend all this time just prepping for the show and missing my drugs and alcohol that I took a two-year break essentially that I competed again this year, didn't do as well as I think I should have.

(01:59:10):
And so now I'm going to compete again for a third time next year. And the goal is just to show off my hard work and just the aesthetic, artistic aspect of it. I don't really plan to monetize it. Although looking good on stage is good for showing your clients what can be done as an online fitness coach or a personal trainer is like, "Hey, this is what I do. I track my food. I do these habits. I do these workouts. I know you don't want to look like this, but this is what can be done." So because a lot of people, they'll see their coach or their trainer on stage will be like, "Okay, this guy is next level ripped." I would be happy if I was half that ripped, or at least that's what I think is the kind of dialogue that goes on.

(01:59:49):
Okay, if this guy's just ripped on stage.

Matt Handy (01:59:51):
It is.

Dan Vaysburd (01:59:52):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (01:59:52):
It is the kind of dialogue that goes on. Taylor doesn't compete. I don't think he ever will, but I look at him all the time I'm like, dude, if I could get fucking half that good, I'd be happy.

Dan Vaysburd (02:00:03):
For sure. Yeah. Guy's a monster.

Matt Handy (02:00:05):
He is a monster.

Dan Vaysburd (02:00:06):
Yeah. His videos are crazy. I think literally right when I came back to LA after my travels in January of 2024, I discovered him on YouTube through Wes. I don't know if it's because I saw him on ... I think it's because I saw him on West's YouTube channel briefly. It was a brief mention. Kind of like TCAB mentioned to you, Wes mentioned TCAB. And so I started watching his videos daily, him talking about the Foreign Legion, Seals. He has this crazy charisma, crazy presence. And 90% of his videos are him just talking to the camera like this, kind of like Wes, but he's not a copycat. He's got his own personality. And he has a crazy resume. And you don't even need to know that he's been in the seals or been in the Foreign Legion to know he's badass. For his presence, like tattoos aside, girl aside, it doesn't even really matter.

(02:00:56):
You can just tell when a man has a crazy resume and it has nothing to do with a piece of paper. His charisma says everything. So I was hooked. I was watching these guys' videos every day for two months, like story one, story two, and so on and so forth. And I almost reached out for coaching, but I ended up working with Wes. I bought a program from Wes. He gave me the blueprints. Obviously I didn't do anything. I didn't incorporate any of it. It wasn't until a year later. So that was later I bought a program from Wes in December of 2024. Probably like 11 months after discovering TCAV, I ended up reaching out to Wes and I finally started putting in Wes's blueprints into action three months ago, like almost a year after-

Matt Handy (02:01:39):
How's that going?

Dan Vaysburd (02:01:40):
It went really well. So I didn't do his mid-level program, which is where he teaches you how to get ripped because I felt I was ripped enough and I think I'd reached that point already. So I was like, okay, I want to coach people. And so at this point I had left my company as a trainer, both through a combination of my own desire and God just doing for me what I couldn't do for myself. And I thought, okay, I need to take another look at this because the call that I had with Wes was recorded. And so I opened up my Dropbox and I rewatched the call. I'm like, okay, I need to take notes on this. I take notes. I rewatch it twice. And I start putting his blueprints into action, doing his posts, doing the story schedule. And it starts to really work. And it works in the sense that I start to get a lot of online clients from family, friends, coworkers, fraternity brothers, people I knew from internships in college, in childhood. I ended up getting 20 online clients and 15 of them are still with me. And I still run a private training business right now. I work out of a studio in LA. So I have two businesses that have the in- person private training, which is something I want to wind down eventually, and then online coaching. So the blueprint worked. It was phenomenal. My goal right now where we're seated today is to be able to expand on that blueprint to actually reach people who I wouldn't otherwise know online because people who know me in real life, they trust me. People who don't know me in real life, they might see one of my videos right now and be like, who the fuck is this guy? And I don't really care. I don't really trust him. So that's pretty much where I am right now. I'm at this juncture where I have this blueprint, but I'm working with a different mentor right now to kind of expand on the blueprint and be able to reach more people.

Matt Handy (02:03:24):
That's dope. Yeah. There's a lot of online controversy around that blueprint. And so my story around Wes is very different than the ... It isn't the bodybuilding, it's the prison thing. And so all that aside, I started watching Wes in 2018 or something like that. And I mean, this was the peak of my ... I'm slamming and heroin. I'm homeless.

(02:03:55):
And my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, would hear me listening to this stuff and she'd be like, "What the fuck are you doing? Look at the life that you're living. Why are you watching this shit?" And all the way back then, because of prison, I had already read a ton of all the Great General's books and a bunch of self-development stuff that typically a lot of other people would look at and be like, "What are you fucking reading? The 48 Laws of Power and the artist deduction and stuff like this. " And back then, looking at it now, what I was really doing was taking notes and just like, okay, this is obviously there was something inside of me that desired to be like that, but it isn't conducive with the life of slamming heroin and living under a bridge. Yeah. It's very interesting to see where the seed gets planted and then where it ends up taking root and sprouting and shit like that.

(02:05:01):
But yeah, the controversy around that blueprint, I mean, there's a lot of detractors and haters and all of the negative coverage or whatever people are going through or whatever, but I've always thought it was interesting that so many people still participate in those programs and then end up taking that blueprint and going and making money. So I could never be a personal trainer. It's just not something that I want to do.

Dan Vaysburd (02:05:32):
Yeah, you have your own path.

Matt Handy (02:05:33):
Yeah. But if it wasn't for Wes, I don't think I would've ever met Taylor because the way that Taylor got involved with what he's doing today, that was kind of a piece of what put him on that path too.

Dan Vaysburd (02:05:47):
Yeah, no, I'm very grateful to have come across Wes online because although I'm only sober and alive today because of I credit it to my service of others with recovery.

Matt Handy (02:05:59):
For sure.

Dan Vaysburd (02:06:00):
And to a small extent, my vocation, my actual job by serving others, that doesn't hurt. But Wes, like you said, he first planted that seed in my brain that it's actually not cool to drink and use drugs because for me, that thought never occurred to me. I loved not just drinking and using drugs, but I loved the idea of the lifestyle associated with it. And it was a point of pride for me. And people who didn't use drugs and alcohol were in my mind squares. To me, Mormons were squares, Orthodox Jews were squares. And now actually, especially in recovery, I realized that a lot of these religions have a lot of positive aspects. And I look at it with a lot of admiration that, but people at work who don't drink or use drugs or squares, and even if you drink, if you don't use drugs, in my mind at the time, you're a square.

(02:06:51):
That's so fucking lame. How do you not do Coke when you're drunk?That was my mindset and mentality. I loved this lifestyle, especially the idea of the lifestyle when I wasn't in a hangover or come down. This was part of a crucial part of my identity. I couldn't imagine a life without drugs because drugs is how I used to regulate my emotional state because life could seem shitty sometimes, but at least I got Friday coming up, I got this festival coming up, I have this dates to look forward to some girl. I'm going to get some chemical high soon or some dopamine release. So it never occurred to me that drinking and drugging and womanizing were actually really not admirable behaviors, but the way Wes broke it down is like essentially you're a bitch if you drink or use drugs. And he doesn't even use the word addict or alcoholic.

(02:07:42):
He's just like, if you're a man and he takes a really hard line approach to it, at least he used to, if you drink or use drugs, you suck, essentially, long story short. And that impacted me because at least for me and maybe a lot of other men, we don't really learn through kindness. We learn through fucking shame. Shame is a shitty emotion. It's the lowest frequency emotion you could feel. It fucking sucks, but it's the only way I learn.

(02:08:08):
I had so many feelings of shame and so many hangovers and relapses and come downs. It took an unending amount of shame for me to finally want to make a change. And that's what Wes did for me. That's how he planted the seed is he made me feel shameful.

Matt Handy (02:08:24):
Yeah, the shame around ... So it's 2025 and drinking is socially acceptable to the point where if you don't drink, you're weird in a lot of circles. And then a few years ago, along comes this movement around manhood and it kind of coincided with the toxic masculinity thing where all of a sudden just being a man in general was looked at as a fucked up thing. And at the same time, there was this whole genre of men that started to very publicly say that stoicism, sobriety, traditional gender roles and shit, that is the direction that we need to go because that is what we got away from that put us in this fucked up situation societally that we're in. And then obviously, like I said, my girl would listen to me, listen to this guy rag on people that were doing drugs while I'm putting a needle in my arm. And she'd be like, "Do you see the disconnect here?" And like, "Yeah, I get it, but I have to listen to this. " And so now you think downstream years later, you and I sitting here having this conversation and we are a byproduct of somebody standing up and saying, "That shit's fucked up." And it's like literally both of us had this experience with this guy that a lot of people demonize and villainize and he's got his own little arc going right now or whatever. But I even talked to Taylor about, "Hey, how do men fall from grace and what is the purpose around what's going on? " And he was like, "Dude, it's the ebb and flow of manhohood where you need to learn." Ultimately, any man's downfall can be wasted or any man's downfall can be the foundation of their next rise. And so it's amazing to see that ... Dude, think about where ... We obviously have very different backgrounds and stories, but I tell everybody, the bottom line is this, addiction works like this. You're born, you grow up, maybe shit happens, maybe it doesn't. You find substances, you fuck your life up, And then you decide to put it down and your life gets better.

(02:11:01):
That's kind of the baseline of everybody's story, and you can copy and paste all the details and it's different. But what you're saying around how you stay sober and what you attribute it to today, I tell people all the time, because I'm not a 12-step dune, the way that I vocalize what's going on and shit is a little outside of that framework. And I tell people all the time, if you're going to get sober and not help people, just stay using. It's fucking pointless for you to go through all this shit and then just sit in a chair somewhere.

Dan Vaysburd (02:11:34):
Well said. Yeah. How can you have this gift and not share it with people 12 step or not 12 step? If you used to be a drinker or drug user, no matter how much or how hard or what you call yourself, how can you be able to leave that toxic behavior in your past and you have this beautiful new life? How can you not share it with others?

Matt Handy (02:11:56):
Yeah, for sure. It blows my mind that there are people out there that have been given this gift that have been handed back their life in spades and they don't feel that draw and that obligation to pass this on. And today, the way that society is going, at least for our generation and maybe the generation after us, is we have no real interaction with men that are example figures in the way that they did 50 years ago. Also, historically, probably thousands of years of history, there was always a coming of age ritual for a lot of men, and there's nothing like that anymore. You just stumble out of boyhood into manhood and you're expected to pay taxes and now you can buy beer. That's kind of the coming of age experience of a lot of people. And so when you get sober and you're exposed ... I had a guest, he was like, "Dude, I fell in love with what masculinity was when I got sober." He had this example of these people and these men who respected themself, respected women, they gave freely, they were generous with their time, they had no expectation around repayment for what they were giving away. And it really started to click for this specific guest that I don't need to have the respect and admiration of people that it doesn't really fucking matter anyway. What ultimately is going to help me is the things that I do for people and never ask for anything back.

(02:13:42):
And so it's like sobriety in and of itself, and this is kind of to go full circle, recovery, this is why I talk about it as a superpower, is because we don't know the effect that ... And I'm not trying to say that we should expect that there will be an effect downstream or a ripple effect that we're going to have, but whether we expect it or not, it's going to happen. And who knows if because you got sober, it changes this person's life who changes this person's life, who ultimately changes the fucking world. And so when I talk about the gifts of sobriety and the gifts of recovery, and I look at it through a very different framework because I do a lot of recovery coaching and peer support work, and that's really the framework that I look through recovery at. And just to give you a taste of how this ended up happening was somebody, when I got into that side of the work, he was like, "Well, how do you know when somebody's sober?

(02:14:44):
How do you know when somebody's in recovery?"

Dan Vaysburd (02:14:47):
Are you asking me?

Matt Handy (02:14:48):
Yeah.

Dan Vaysburd (02:14:48):
Yeah. So for me, if I could pick one tailtale sign of whether someone's actually in recovery or not is, do they give freely to others without expecting anything to return?

Matt Handy (02:15:01):
That's a good one. Yeah. That is a good one. This guy looked at me, I was like, "What is this guy looking for? " And I started giving these good answers about, has he done the steps? Is he going to meetings? Does he have sponsees? Does he all this shit?

Dan Vaysburd (02:15:15):
They're just words.

Matt Handy (02:15:16):
Right. He said, "A person is in recovery when and if they say they are, and they are moving towards that goal of becoming a better person." And it was like a bomb went off in my head and I was like, "The framework that I've looked at recovery through has been restrictive on my life." And so now I look at people and I say, there's an opportunity for everybody to get better and it doesn't matter how you start. And so the way that I attack it and the way that I approach it for all my clients, for everybody is, my executive director is a good example of this. He got sober and didn't go to a meeting for nine years. And then his recovery put him in such a place where he was like, "My recovery is not enough." And now he sponsors people and goes to meetings religiously.

(02:16:02):
And so with my experience around the rooms and stuff like that, I know I'm not the only one. I'm not the only person out there that is rejecting ... At one point, I was rejecting recovery because I was rejecting the rooms. And I'm here to tell people they are not one and the same.

Dan Vaysburd (02:16:20):
For sure.

Matt Handy (02:16:20):
Recovery is how you paint it. And so if that leads you into the rooms eventually, that is my goal. I want you to have the fullest experience of your recovery that you could possibly have, but if you're rejecting recovery because you're rejecting that system, it's false. You need to come into recovery and experience it however you want. And if it leads you there, great. And if it doesn't, at least you're recovered. So that's just kind of how I handle it as far as working with others.

Dan Vaysburd (02:16:52):
Yeah. I think there's so many ways to give back. I know a dude who, I mean, he says he was an addict, alcoholic. I no doubt believe it. His form of service is he turned to intense physical activity, running marathons, ultras, trail runs, and he gives back through social media. I know for sure he's inspired hundreds, if not thousands of people to get sober. Eli Webby.

Matt Handy (02:17:19):
Okay.

Dan Vaysburd (02:17:20):
Yeah. And then, I mean, there's people like TCAV and West Watson. Those guys are not going to rooms, but there's no doubt these two men and other tons of men maybe will even change someone's life on this podcast who help others outside of the rooms, help others through public channels, help others through YouTube or social media. So there's so many ways to be of service. For me, my service work in the rooms, or I don't even go to so many meetings per se, but my bookwork and my stepwork with others is really core of who I am right now. Maybe that won't always be the case. Maybe I'll actually do more of it as time goes on. I don't know. Right now it's a core, but I don't judge people who aren't in the rooms. I only ever judge people by one characteristic, whether or not they're sober or not, and do they give freely to others?

(02:18:10):
Are they generous with others? To me, that's all that matters. Outside of your habits is, for me, the definition of a high value man, even the high value woman is, do they give freely to others without expecting anything to return? That's it.

Matt Handy (02:18:27):
Yeah, for sure. Well, all right, dude. I really appreciate you. I mean, really appreciate you

Dan Vaysburd (02:18:33):
Coming. Likewise, man.

Matt Handy (02:18:34):
Yeah. Yeah, it's really cool.

Dan Vaysburd (02:18:35):
Yeah.

Matt Handy (02:18:36):
And dude, you can come on whenever you want. If you're ever out here again, definitely hit me up and we'll do this again.

Dan Vaysburd (02:18:43):
Oh yeah.

Matt Handy (02:18:44):
Thank you.

Dan Vaysburd (02:18:44):
Let's run it. Thank you, man.

Matt Handy (02:18:48):
Thanks for listening to My Last Relapse. I'm Matt Handy, the founder of Harmony Grove Behavioral Health, Houston, Texas, where our mission is to provide compassionate, evidence-based care for anyone facing addiction, mental health challenges, and co-occurring disorders. Find out more at harmonygrovebh.com. Follow and subscribe to My Last Relapse on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you like to stream podcasts. Got a question for us? Leave a message or voicemail at mylastrelapse.com. If you're feeling overwhelmed or struggling, you don't have to face it alone. Reaching out for support is a sign of strength and help is always available. If you or anyone you know needs help, give us a call 24 hours a day at 888-691-8295.