The Hopeaholics

In this episode of The Hopeaholics Podcast, we sit down with Dave Marquess, creator of Relapse vs Recovery , a recovery-based card game, to discuss his extraordinary journey through addiction, incarceration, and ultimately finding purpose in sobriety. Growing up in Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood, Dave was surrounded by addiction from an early age. With both parents struggling with sub...

At the height of her addiction, Abbey Fickley lost custody of her daughter to her own parents. Then, in one of the most painful turning points of her life, her father pressed felony charges against her. What followed was a journey through addiction, motherhood, sobriety, and the difficult reality of rebuilding a life in recovery. In this powerful episode of The Hopeaholics Podcast, we sit down wit...

At 18 years old, Ian Bick was running a nightclub and booking major artists. Just a few years later, everything came crashing down — leaving him facing massive debt, federal charges, and ultimately three years in federal prison. In this episode of The Hopeaholics Podcast, Ian Bick shares the unbelievable rise, fall, and comeback that completely changed the course of his life. Ian opens up about th...

In this re-released episode of The Hopeaholics Podcast #109, Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes shares warnings about fentanyl, the rise of counterfeit pills and the programs his department developed as the crisis grew. Sheriff Don Barnes has spent more than 35 years in law enforcement and has been confronting the fentanyl crisis in Orange County since his department began seeing the drug in 2015. ...

Retired Long Beach Fire Captain James Owen spent his career running toward other people’s emergencies while addiction, trauma, and post-traumatic stress were building behind the badge. In this episode of The Hopeaholics, James opens up about the murder of his close friend and fellow firefighter Captain Dave Rosa, surviving a motorcycle crash that broke his neck, losing and rebuilding his sobriety,...

Rachel Sereni is co-host of the 2 Girls in a Chair podcast and sober for over 2 years. She grew up mostly alone with her little sister while their dad worked two jobs, because their mother was addicted to opiates and spent most of Rachel's early childhood nodding out on the couch. Rachel got a DUI after she left work early to drink and forgot to pick up her son from school, woke up in jail wi...

Jesse Sanchez was 11 the first time he smoked weed, 14 when he tried cocaine and opiates, and 17 when he looked up from a carpet covered in crack and thought "holy s***, what are we doing." He eventually landed on heroin as his drug of choice and spent three years hiding it from his wife, driving 4.5 hours round trip to his dealer while she thought he was at work, once using a co-worker&...

Jessica Nolin is a content creator, recovery advocate, and co-host of 2 Girls in a Chair podcast. Jessica's dad dealt drugs her entire childhood and helped manage her anxiety by giving her a vodka orange at 12 along with random pills she didn't even know the names of. By 15 she was drinking daily. A few years ago she detoxed at home alone over nine days without telling anyone, sleeping a...

Adam Wittbrodt is a personal trainer and recovery advocate. He grew up with an alcoholic father who walked out on his 12th birthday and died before Adam turned 19. Carrying grief Adam spent the next decade and a half burying under IV heroin, forged checks, and 8 felonies. One day he collapsed at the front desk where he worked after injecting what he thought was heroin. It was laced with fentanyl a...

At 18 Riley moved to LA, got into the adult entertainment industry, made fast money, found cocaine & alcohol, and ran that combination through her entire 20s.  In 2023 she got pregnant but couldn't stop using. She missed 2 Christmases that she blamed on her daughter being sick when it was Riley being hungover. Riley's breaking point was being in closet at 4am doing coke, convinced th...

Nate Block is a professional crisis de-escalation instructor with Jumpstart Mastery, traveling the country to train correctional departments and agencies on how to work with people in crisis. Nate dropped out of high school and spent the years that followed bouncing between apartments, bar shows, and eventually a college town he moved to chasing a girl, working odd jobs and drinking past the point...

Shannon Hatfield grew up in section 8, her dad in federal prison, and her mom spent 2 decades working through OxyContin, black market heroin, and finally fentanyl. She's now a chiropractor running Evolve Sport and Spine working with professional athletes and anyone needing help. Shannon talks about what growing up inside that house actually looked like: finding her mom nodding out with cigare...

Noel Arevalo returns to the show to talk about three things she's been sitting with: how your breakthrough gives the people closest to you permission to do the same, how deep alcohol gets woven into your identity without you ever noticing, and how the people, places, and patterns that were dragging you down start to fall away naturally once you surrender the thing that was holding it all toge...

(TW ED) My ED Caused Heart Failure & Almost Killed Me w/ Kate Avnaim | The Hopeaholics Podcast #354 Kate Avnaim's father was diagnosed with brain cancer when she was just 6 months old. When Kate was 13 they found it had spread through his whole brain. He chose quality time over more rounds of chemo. She was furious at him but she just didn't understand yet. He passed away and her mom...

We Fell In Love Thanks To Sobriety w/ Nic And Ant (@nic_n_ant) | The Hopeaholics Podcast #353 Nicole and Anthony one of the most recognized and popular sober/recovery couples in social media. They met in a recovery meeting in 2018. She had six years and he was 60 days out of detox. His first year clean was a mess. Lies, cheating, not working a program. Both going through divorces simultaneously, h...

Jess Seiwert grew up in Kansas. He was abused at home from age 5 to 12. After 9/11 he joined the Army at 18, made sergeant, survived an IED blast, and came home with a Purple Heart and an Oxycontin addiction. One day he woke up in county jail charged with first-degree attempted murder and kidnapping after his best friend slept with his wife while he was passed out. He walked out with 14 felony con...

Gregg Champion's father was killed in a head-on collision with another drunk driver when Gregg was 4. He grew up angry, filled that with alcohol and attention, and spent his 20s collecting DUIs, assaults, a marijuana trafficking operation out of a van, and two arrests in the same 24-hour stretch at Mardi Gras. He got sober at 25, went back and finished his ASU degree sober with a 4.0, sits on...

Golf Prospect w Full Ride to UCLA. Meth Took It All w/ Danny Dalton | The Hopeaholics Podcast #350  Danny Dalton grew up in Huntington Beach playing golf when Tiger Woods was the standard everyone chased. He was good enough to earn a full scholarship to UCLA. He lost it junior year and spent the next decade filling the gap with cocaine, then meth, then heroin. This episode covers the whole run. Th...

They Said I'd Never See My Kids Again. Got Them Back Sober w/ Ian Day | The Hopeaholics Podcast #349 Ian Day grew up a standout athlete in a one-stoplight town in Indiana with one bar. His first drinks were sips of Miller Lite off his grandpa's lawn mower. By 17 he was smoking weed every day and panhandling in his high school hallways for lunch money because he'd spent it all on dru...

My Baby Passed In The Car Because I Blacked Out w/ Carolina Ayala | The Hopeaholics Podcast #348  Chad and Natalie sit down with Carolina Ayala, founder of The Happier Life Project, a recovery community organization built to give people the peer support she never had. She was drinking, using, and married by 15, and had watched two of her closest friends get killed before she was old enough to grad...

From USC Football to Cartel Cocaine w/ "Cocaine Quarterback" Owen Hanson | The Hopeaholics Podcast #347 The "Cocaine Quarterback" Owen Hanson was a volleyball player at USC who wanted to get stronger and start again. That led him to smuggling steroids in from a vet in Tijuana. He walked onto the football team and began selling Adderall, Xanax, and cocaine to teammates. After th...

I Was A Lawyer Smuggling Heroin for the Mexican Mafia w/ Jason Keller | The Hopeaholics Podcast #346 Jason Keller was a criminal defense attorney with his own firm when he started smuggling drugs into jail for his clients. Papers that looked like textbook material turned out to be black tar heroin flattened between the pages. Then it was a cell phone. Then a charger. All for the Mexican Mafia. He...

He Collapsed My Lungs & Ended Up WANTED w/ Kristin Swan (TW abuse) | The Hopeaholics Podcast #345 Kristin grew up in Lakeville, Massachusetts, an hour south of Boston, in a house where disease was already present before she arrived at it. Her mother drank and went to meetings and died the day right after Mother's Day. Both her cousins are gone from fentanyl poisoning. By 15 she was cyclin...

Chad and Natalie sit down with Matt Bowyer, the Orange County bookie at the center of the Shohei Ohtani gambling scandal, for the full story behind the headlines. Matt ran one of the largest illegal sports betting operations in the country for over 30 years. At his peak he had 1,250 clients nationwide, 48 agents, and processed over $1 billion in wagers in 2023 alone. He was also betting millions o...

Chad and Natalie sit down with Sean Couper, a personal trainer and 4.5 year sober alcoholic who spent three decades functioning at a high level in corporate healthcare.  Sean covers his full story: growing up between Florida and California without a real father figure, a first drink at five years old, thirty years of high-functioning alcoholism that nearly ended with liver and kidney failure, thre...