TV host, writer and producer Steve Goldbloom has done a lot in his 31 years on the planet: the Canadian (dual citizenship, yo) created the PBS Digital Studio comedy series Everything But the News, where he documented his misadventures exploring the tech scene, and which USA Today named Best Web Series. This was after his stint as a correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. He currently produces a weekly segment on PBS called Brief but Spectacular which is, he says, an interview without the interviewer.

Now he's launching Intimacy with Strangers, where he speaks with various people about intimacy, for Discovery and for this episode, we did something entirely unprecedented: while I interviewed him for the podcast, he simultaneously interviewed me for Intimacy With Strangers. Did this meta double project work? We'll find out when you listen to this podcast while watching the Intimacy with Strangers episode (that's overly ambitious, I get it; also I have no idea when IWS will air). Since he is neither an addict nor a person with serious issues (my diagnosis), we focused the conversation on developing and maintaining healthy relationships. In this episode, we discuss relationships that cause you to stare at the ceiling wondering what's happened to your life, whether or not just a few sessions with a therapist can do the trick and if, when we saw Boyhood and he elbowed me every few minutes, we were on a date or not (TBD).

All sober addicts have their stories, some more severe than others. Well, it's safe to say that author and former attorney Joseph Naus checks all the boxes on the "most severe" scale. Born to a heroin addict mother, Naus managed to rise from poverty to become a successful attorney. As this was happening, however, his sex addiction and alcoholism were increasingly controlling his life—causing him to cheat on girlfriends, visit massage parlors and eventually get a DUI. Then came the cataclysmic event that brought him to sobriety: the night when, in a black out, he tried to break into a massage parlor but instead broke into a guy's apartment, stripped naked (thinking he was in the massage parlor) and beat the guy up. He went to rehab and got sober but ended serving time (for attempted murder), was disbarred and has to register every year as a sex offender. Now over a decade sober, Naus chronicled this journey in his memoir, Straight Pepper Diet, and is at work on a second book. In this episode, we talk about the ways people respond when you write about them, how nicotine addiction is as intense as any other and why not to call your ex the minute you get sober to ask if if they want to edit your memoir, among other topics.