Steve Martorano 
The Behavioral Corner is produced in partnership with Retreat Behavioral Health -- where healing happens.

The Behavioral Corner 
Hi, and welcome. I'm Steve Martorano, and this is the Behavioral Corner. You're invited to hang with us as we discuss how we live today, the choices we make, what we do, and how they affect our health and well-being. So you're on the corner, the Behavioral Corner. Please hang around for a while.

Steve Martorano 
Hi, everybody, welcome again to the Behavioral Corner. It's me, Steve Martorano, right where you left me hanging on the Corner, waiting for some interesting person to pass by. It's a great conceit, isn't it? Anyway, the Behavioral Corner is a podcast about everything, because everything affects our behavioral health. And we hope you've found us in the vast sea of podcasts. And if so, we'd love to hear from you now to do all that, like, review, apparently, there's a place you can review us because the world doesn't have enough critics. But we like feedback. So that's what the Behavioral Corner is all about. We are returning to a very familiar theme in the program. We've done it many times over the years because it's an important thing to remember. And that is that, in spite of the fact that substance abuse issues still plague us, they seem to grow larger all the time. And that is true to a certain extent, and certainly more deadly. Over the years, it is important to remind people that in spite of that, sometimes grin and picture, people get...people get better. They do they actually get better. And in my experience in talking to them, they often thrive. So we got to remind people of that because the good news travels slowly. The bad news is always with us. We offer you another voice in recovery. That's what we call it. Millions of people have traveled the same journey that our guest Ken Cox has traveled. Perhaps Ken has a bit of a nuance to his he's gone from, well, homelessness to the presidency of a very successful company. And he's with us here on the Corner. Ken, thanks for joining us.

Ken Cox 
Thank you so much, Steve, how are you today?

Steve Martorano 
Pretty good. Doing pretty good. Let's begin with your story. Tell me a story. Tell me about can tell me where you are right now in your life.

Ken Cox 
Where I am right now in my life is a fairly exciting place. Life, to me today is a gift every single day. And I've not always thought of life that way. When I was younger, I definitely thought of life as a punishment, not a gift. So today, I'm a father of two amazing children. My daughter is 16 years old, she is weird as hell. But just in the best possible ways. She's very interested in school and science and all of those things. And she's also an artist that does just amazing work. So super proud of her across the board. My son is 12. He is amazing as well. Joe is nonverbal, autistic, and just a bundle of energy. And as he knows...when you look in his eyes, you just know that he knows more about this universe than anybody else in it. He just can't communicate it to us, right? My wife, Sarah, runs our gym. We own a boxing school here in St. Louis, actually, it's the largest sanctioned boxing school in our district, we have about 500 students and my wife operates that gym for us. It's called BoxSTL. And we make the sport of boxing available to anybody from have any kind of skill level, all the way from the competition, all the way down to an eight or an 80-year-old that needs to you know, release some stress in a physical way, and hopefully get fit and create the mindset there. And outside of that, I run River City Internet Group, which is a group of startup companies, and online companies that we founded in 2000. I was one of the founding partners of River City Internet Group back then. And today I'm the president of that company.

Steve Martorano 
Wow, that would be a...that's a resume that anybody can be proud of. Boxing is really...talk about a turn. How in the world did you guys decide to start a boxing academy?

Ken Cox 
I had to stay alive...t the end of the day.

Steve Martorano 
Were you a boxer in your youth or...no?

Ken Cox 
No. I mean, I grew up and a town called Arnold, Missouri. At the time, it was growing really rapidly in St. Louis. And I don't want to get too into politics. But you know, in St. Louis, that was called white flight back then. Right. And Arnold was a white flight city. I think it's turned around a lot since I left when I was very young. Um, but in that community, we fought a lot, right? So we moved to Arnold when we were when I was three fights were simply every day, that was just something we did. Outside of that, when I got older, I always kept a part-time job at a bar, for obvious reasons, right? I always bar attended or a bounce and I fought a lot there. So when I found myself looking for an activity that I could do to help me stop drinking, right, I'm 39 years old. And I would and I told my wife, I'm like, I've always really wanted to box I really have always wanted to do it, but I've never had the means. Which is silly, right? Cuz you just need boxes, because I've always had the means to fight but I didn't have it means to go somewhere and put gloves on and actually do it as a...

Steve Martorano 
...try to figure out how to win. It's one thing to know how to fight. It's another thing to try to win.

Ken Cox 
...as a sport or something for positivity, right. So I always knew I liked doing it. But I didn't have a functional, safe way to do it. So I was like, well, let's try it. Let's figure out boxing. And I went to all these different boxing gyms. And now I'm 40 years old, I'm 310 pounds. In St. Louis, the boxing gyms are a little rough. So, you know, here I am an executive who tried to run companies trying to figure out how to get fit, trying to figure out how to quit drinking. You know, I've lost my insurance, I'm about to lose my wife about losing everything. And I finally found a gym that I could go to and just hit the heavy bag. Right? Just and that's it. I didn't have to hit anybody else. And I got some training there. And I'm like, Okay, I love this. And I went home, I told my wife, like if I could do that an hour a day, I can do anything. If I can do that for one hour a day then there's nothing else in the world that I can't do. That became more challenging and challenging. As I was watching the gym, I'm running my other businesses which are struggling at the time. 2016 was one hell of a year. You know, everything was struggling across the board, my life, my health, the businesses, everything. And I can see this gym failing, right? I can tell like the bathrooms weren't clean. The people weren't there. The community was awesome, but there was no good central management. And as I saw it going downhill. I told my wife this gym is gonna go under, it's gonna go under, and I'm going to die.

Steve Martorano 
It was therapeutic for you?

Ken Cox 
At the time, I didn't know what else I could do. Nothing else. I couldn't go to the gym and exercise. I couldn't ride the bike. I couldn't walk. I couldn't talk to somebody about anything at the time. But somebody was like if I can't have this, then I don't know how I can survive. Right? So I reached out to the owner. I'm like, "What are you doing with this thing? He was like, "Man, it sucks. So bad. I really love it. My wife and I bought it. And we were really going to grow this business. But then my wife got really sick. And I couldn't leave my day job, because that was insuring her. So we're just letting this business kind of float because we love the community, but we can't focus on it." So I'm like, "Well, why don't you give it to me?" "I can't do that." But we ended up coming up with a wildly creative structure. For me to take the gym over. I cashed out my 401 K so that we could get it above where we needed to be financially. My wife to came on board to operate the gym while I was doing this for a boxing school...a wildly successful boxing school here in St. Louis, and our digital platform is being built at the moment. And you know, long term I think it's going to be just a beautiful little business that we get to give to the community.

Steve Martorano 
You know, it's an amazing, extraordinary story. And boxing I didn't expect to be talking about with you, but I'm struck by how one of the use the word cliche but not, you know, negatively, one of the cliches or truisms...all cliches are true...is boxing has historically been a path out of poverty for a lot of people, you know, it is a lot of redemption stories in boxing. Yours is...one of the best ones I've ever heard. And that's a remarkable story. But we have in the context of journalism bury the lede, as they say here, and that is that you are sober after having not been sober. So how long is that sobriety has been part of your life now?

Ken Cox 
So that would have been 2016 Let's just go back to the very beginning. Drugs and alcohol were just around me my entire life. My mom was a bartender. The very first house that we got together...an apartment was above a bar. Right? So literally, I grew up in a bar, pushing schools together and sleeping on it, you know, eating beer nuts, playing shuffleboard, all of it, right? That was my childhood growing up, at least the first few years. And then my mom met my dad in the bar at the bar she worked at (my stepdad). And then they end up getting married and they got married, I think, I was three years old and they got married - when they met and got married. He's an alcoholic. My mom's an alcoholic. My mom was a bartender, he worked the second shift. My house is a party every night 3 am. Literally, like, you know, Dad's getting off work. Mom's getting off work. They close at the bar and tentacle people show up at the house. And you know, it's just a good time. So I'm getting people drinks and beers and sipping on them the whole time. By the age of 10, I was drinking every day secretly. Right? At 13, I got into a lot of trouble. A whole lot of trouble at 13. I quit drinking at the age of 13. I still did other recreational cannabis. But at 13 I quit drinking until I turned 22. I got into a pretty bad accident at the age of 20. I got hit by an 18-wheeler. When I was about 18 months in rehab, I lost my original career path, which was the camera operator. What I was at that time was what I wanted to be. I wanted to be filming video and I wanted to be a camera operator. But since I had dislocated my shoulder and hurt my spine a little bit, I couldn't hold the camera anymore. So I went more into management and IT after that. And then started drinking casually and to then go into the bars and then I went to sit casually. But at that point, it was back to you know, just normal every day. But it was normal for me. Right? It was that's what everybody was doing. So that was pretty hard until 2016. And in that year, I went from 210 pounds...210-220 pounds to 310 lbs in one year, right. My partner Steve Szachta was a co-founder of the company. He passed away from lung cancer and throat cancer loss are all of our anchor tenants. My anchor clients lost them in 2016 with the coal company collapse. There as many coal companies filed for bankruptcy that year. And 60% of our business was infrastructure for coal facilities, lines out to the coal mines so that they could weigh and report back to the Market Plus the data center. We operated the data center for the largest coal company in the world at that time, and I got super sick I was I had strep throat, oddly enough, so it was like four days, three or four days into my strep throat. And I got called into the data center. It was late at night. And I showed up there was some kind of problem. I wasn't feeling good. But there was some kind of problem with power-ups or something I'm not sure. I get there to get the issue resolved. The issue is now fixed. And I walk into what we have they're called heat mitigation rooms. And no, most people don't know what it is. Basically, it's a 10,000-square-foot room where we dump heat from servers into this giant room so it can dissipate, right? I go into this giant room. It's a 10,000-square-foot room and I'm walking through to the elevator to leave. And I just laid out I can't move at all. I'm completely freezing, can't move. I'm thinking I'm having a heart attack. I'm dying at that moment. And my wife is pissed at me for this because she didn't know about and so I wrote about it recently. I don't remember a lot of the next stages. The next thing I remember I'm in the hospital with the doctor and they're like, they can't figure out what's wrong with me. My blood pressure shooting up and down. He's like your heart's fine, dude, like, your heart's absolutely fine. We can't figure it out. But your blood pressure is going through the roof and then dropping back down. And I was just basically going through this rolling panic attack situation to where I would calm down and go right back into a panic attack. And if you've ever had a significant panic attack, it feels like you're dying. So these were just rolling nonstop. And they kept asking me "Do you still drink?" I was like, "Yes." Right?

Steve Martorano 
They did ask you that, though. They thought there was some correlation.

Ken Cox 
He asked me four or five times and finally, he said, "When was the last time you had a drink?" Now, I've always just been open and honest about my drinking, right? I go to the doctors, and they're like, "How much do you drink?" I'm like "A fifth a day and about 20 beers." right? So...

Steve Martorano 
A day?

Ken Cox 
That's my day, right? That was my day, I would have, you know, a couple of shots in the morning, I'd have a couple of beers at lunch that would last me through till the night and I'd sit in the program with a fifth of whiskey until two or three in the morning.

Steve Martorano  
And yet you did not see it as a problem?

Ken Cox 
Very occasionally, my doctor would say, "You need to watch that." Right?

Steve Martorano 
But I mean, he was talking to you from a physician's standpoint about your health. You, of course, were on you know, the train wreck and ruin.

Ken Cox 
Nobody even like this is just normal, because I'm so functional. I just go through my day. And this is who I am. This is what I've been through my whole life. For the most part, right?

Steve Martorano 
You had both barrels of the worst thing that can happen to somebody with it alcohol or a substance abuse problem is one-year high functioning. And secondly, you grew up in the context of a normal, alcohol-soaked environment. So it didn't look like anybody was doing anything unusual, right?

Ken Cox 
Yeah, So he asked me, "When was the last time you had a drink?" "Well, I've had strep throat. So it's been a couple of days." He's like, "Oh, okay, I know exactly what's going on now."

Steve Martorano 
A couple of days, huh?

Ken Cox 
I was going through withdrawals, like and it was pretty significant. And then they did my blood work. And my liver panels were in the eight hundred...850...880, somewhere in there. And he's like, "Well, I can either help you quit drinking today. Or you can leave the office, you're having panic attacks, go have a couple of beers, and you'll be fine. And you'll be dead in a couple of years."

Steve Martorano 
People don't appreciate how dangerous it is the withdrawal from alcohol. It is not a standard withdrawal, I mean, there are no withdrawals that are standard. But as I understand it, alcohol withdrawal without medical supervision can kill you. I mean, we know the image of an opioid user doing cold turkey. It's a horrible, horrible experience, but it's not as dangerous as withdrawing from alcohol.

Ken Cox 
It was scary. And I've done it a couple of times, you know, and I would love to say that that was the moment in my bucket that said, Oh, shit, I'm gonna change everything. And I haven't drunk since that day. But that would be an absolute lie. Right? This was several years of fighting with myself, fighting with the doctors, and getting my liver panels back down. You can drink a couple if you want to if you really think you know if you can handle it. And then right back to the fifth day. Within a couple of days, a couple of weeks Oh, nothing happened yesterday. I could do it again today.

Steve Martorano 
But no stints in a traditional substance abuse facility? You didn't go to treatment for this?

Ken Cox 
I did not check myself at all. I have been in the SMART Recovery meetings since then.

Steve Martorano 
SMART is the program where people try to return to responsible drinking. Am I right about that?

Ken Cox 
So smart...and I chose SMART for a lot of reasons. It doesn't have a religious aspect to it is one of them. And then abstinence is not necessarily the only solution. So for alcoholic that said, you know, right out of the gate. I knew if you tell me never again back then you said you can never drink today, I'm fine with never drinking again. I don't know what happened in my brain at some point to I know that I can never drink again.

Steve Martorano 
And the notions of abstinence, at a certain point would have been a nonstarter for you. I mean, look in the world of recovery, particularly in the world of AA, they'll say you're crazy. You can never drink again. Not necessarily true. There are so many roads to recovery years I got to tell you is an astonishing one. And then the boxing thing, which is also saving your life. So 2016 sounded pretty lousy. Of course, you had the pandemic look forward to a few years later so...

Ken Cox 
In that timeframe, I mean, I did really well. We got the company's River City, we got it stable, right? And we had a path to get out of our trouble. My shareholders were phenomenal through this process, right? Bankruptcy was completely off the table. So we knew we weren't going that way. I had a great group that could fund shortfalls, and it was a lot of negotiations and things like that. We had the gym. We're starting. I'm not drinking at the time, right? So I'm dropping weight I'm at the gym regularly, and we're moving forward. I competed in Golden Gloves. I ended up competing on February 29...28th and 29th of 2020 right before the pandemic.

Steve Martorano 
At what point were you homeless?

Ken Cox 
I was born homeless. My mother for all of her bad things she busted their ass, right? So she was homeless when she was pregnant with me. When we were at the hospital to have me, my cousin's got together and said, Hey, we can't let her be homeless with a baby. So they got together and got enough, I guess, enough money to let me and her move into the apartment above my cousin's bar.

Steve Martorano 
You have siblings.

Ken Cox 
I found out later in life that I have a half-sister that I've never met. From my biological father. I've also recently realized my biological father that I've never met, I guess. He was in court once when I was 13. But I never met him. And I saw him face to face and he was signing over custody of me. He has a daughter, I just found out that he passed away. I don't know how I feel about that. Right. I found out like four or five months ago, it I guess I'm still processing that information. My stepfather had three sons and a daughter, who lived with me off and on throughout my childhood. And then they had a stepfather that had some other stepchildren as well. So you know, the good thing is growing up in a low-income community, there are lots of kids.

Steve Martorano 
Once again, your circumstances seem to match everyone else's. So I mean, how bad do you know when you're in the middle of it? How bad does it seem? Our guest is Ken Cox, he is the president of the company. He's described the company he's described. And he has just laid out an extraordinary path. That leads him to where he is today. Very successful, as I said, as a great family. He is of good cheer, you can see in spite of the story, and boxing played a role in that and many other circumstances. This is a guy that fought his way out of potentially not potentially an actual life-threatening situation. You heard him say he was going to drink himself to death, the doctor told him that. And he made the extraordinary decision that well, that's not a good idea. Let's not do that, you know, why can't your story remind me of something that I'm always struck by when I talk to folks who have been through situations that have to do with substance abuse? And at the end of it when they get to the place where they're sober, and their lives are so much better. It's almost as though "Well, that was pretty rough. That road was pretty rough. And I wouldn't want to do it again. But look where he got me."

Ken Cox 
It gets better subjective. You know, a lot of people believe that, oh, you quit drinking all your bullshit gone. Well, turns out you're still a little bit of an asshole. But now you got to deal with that sober when you're drunk, kind of blow all that shit up, like, Oh, he's drunk, blah, blah, blah. But when you're sober, and you realize that you're still...

Steve Martorano 
Yeah, it's a great point that people don't appreciate because they haven't been there. But you know, it's a great rationalization for somebody that's got an enormous, you know, he's dragging around an enormous amount of baggage, you know, foolishness and bad behavior. But you know, I drink, give me a break.

Ken Cox 
Yeah, I was drunk. It's an excuse for everything. And it felt like when I really looked back at it, everything that I did, I was rewarded. When I drank, I got more clients, I got, you know, I'm not not that attractive of a man. But my wife is a beautiful woman. This is so, you know, I was rewarded for that.

Steve Martorano 
Yeah. It turns out to be great in the moment, but in the long run gonna wind up catching up.

Ken Cox 
I'm a pretty simple, man. So when you reward me for stuff, I'm going to keep doing that. Yeah. So turning that off in your brain is pretty hard to do.

Steve Martorano 
It's very hard to do.

Ken Cox 
Yeah.

Steve Martorano 
So do you speak to other people? I mean, you must be around a lot of young people with the gym and everything. Do you have the occasion to talk about your history with alcohol?

Ken Cox 
I made the decision about two years ago with my wife. Well, not even two years ago, this is become out of COVID. So about two years ago, and I hit a couple of bumps in COVID. And then the SMART Recovery meetings opening back up in person again was a huge, huge moment for me. Because I was slipping before that I was going right back down the same path. So having that community of people that I can go to and talk to very regularly for me has been a significant key to my recovery and staying there.

Steve Martorano 
Did you ever try an AA meeting?

Ken Cox 
Um...I did at the age of 13. I went through a program called Tough Love and I have been in the 12-step program since then.

Steve Martorano 
And let me guess as a 13-year-old, you walk into the room and went, "Good God, who are these old, old drunken guys?"

Ken Cox 
It was a program, you know, for the town that I grew up in. And it is backward as it was in so many ways. There were some things that were really progressive about it. And we had programs and our city hall for youth addiction and things like that. And we were in it was a youth program. Like I was in an AA, it was youth AA.

Steve Martorano 
But it didn't take for you, right?

Ken Cox 
I've been on a spiritual journey my entire life. And a tended to be a very authoritative way of doing things. And I'm just not that kind of person.

Steve Martorano 
When people ask me about AA, you know, I'm not in recovery and but I've been to some meetings, you know, what it's like, and I think I understand it. And what I tell people to go, "Come on? You know, AA, come on?" And I go, "Listen, here's the deal. It works for the people it works for, and there are millions, there are millions of them. And so you want to argue about that. Go ahead, but I'm telling you it works for the people that work for."

Ken Cox 
I have seen it work for a lot of people. It's just not my jam. SMART Recovery is fine. As that works for me, I gotta, you know, building tools, to, to have a strategy for how I'm living my daily life. That to me is really important. Instead of having these 12 steps and things that I have to do, and I had to do it in this order, didn't really jive for me that well.

Steve Martorano  
So, here, here's a great example of something else that's true about recovery and sobriety. And that is, there are many paths, there are many ways to get there. Finding the right one is the...well, first of all, deciding that you're looking for a path to recovery, and finding the right one for you. And then you know, staying true to it. I've heard of SMART. I know that in some quarters, it's considered controversial. And in others, it's like you could it works. It worked for me and I'm sober, my life is better off a remarkable story again, I mean, a remarkable story. When you get boxing...you don't have a website for boxing...

Ken Cox 
We do. It's boxstl.com.

Steve Martorano 
Send me that loud, send the link, I'd love to put that link up on the Corner. You have fulfilled your mission and function today of being a voice in recovery.

Ken Cox 
Thank you.

Steve Martorano 
And I appreciate that a lot. I've talked to a lot of people. They've been down strange roads. Yours is just rich with detail and I think people listening can gain a lot from this. Because, you know, again, you didn't show up here saying here, here's how you're going to do it or else.

Ken Cox 
No, it's your path. It's your journey. And I think it's got to be you have to create it. I needed that step of abstinence, there's no way I want to live a normal life. I want to be able to go to a convention and grab a beer or have a beer dinner with a group of people. That's not in the cards for me. I tried it doesn't work.

Steve Martorano 
So interestingly enough, without you know, sobriety. I mean, abstinence is your lifestyle choice now, and not through any programmable mandate, but just the way it came out for you.

Ken Cox 
Absolutely. Even though the program that I'm in doesn't require it, there's no punishment for not for you know, it's like, Hey, man, I'm sorry, you fell off, right? There's no like, Oh, here's the reward. And then we're gonna take that away. There's none of that stuff, right? It's just people helping people and using tools that we can share and some of them work and some of them don't.

Steve Martorano 
Yeah, right. Well, there's something interesting about the name SMART for the program, because there are a lot of smart ideas behind this. After all, you know, when you fall off and you relapse or something, there's no need to chastise anybody, they're gonna get punished.

Ken Cox 
For the audience, if you're out there and you're looking for if you've got, you know, deep years of stuff that you're not talking about. One of the other big keys for me was EMDR therapy, coupled with SMART, coupled with psychotherapy. Like all of those things together, I think my recipe was not SMART Recovery, and my wife getting ready to leave me and my kids hating me. That wasn't the only part of the recipe. It was my weekly meetings with my counselor and my weekly meetings with my EMDR therapists.

Steve Martorano 
Yeah, it's another point that you make really well, I'm glad to have you do it. And that is that you know, this notion of, well, I got a problem. I'll go into something and it'll be 28 days and I'll be okay. The other And as long as I go to my meeting, so tell me if you agree, getting sober and staying sober is not one thing. It's a process. Do you agree with that?

Ken Cox 
Yes, it's an ever-growing process. I look at life and business and parenting as all the same. It's, hey, I'm creating these things in the world. And then I'm gonna screw them up from time to time and I'm just gonna try to fix them and get them right back on the right path, or the path that I envisioned their success of being.

Steve Martorano 
No, looks like you made it. Ken Cox. Thanks so much. Love to have you back again. And if you send me the link, I'd love to put the boxing thing up there. So people in the Midwest who hear this might gravitate over there. It's been great. Ken, thanks so much.

Ken Cox 
Thank you so much. Have a great day.

Steve Martorano  
You too. And you guys as well. Thank you for listening, watching, sharing, and liking critiquing the Behavioral Corner, we'll catch you next time.

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