I read Michael Bougari’s book The Disease of Me before we sat down to record this episode, and that was the right call. By the time we got on, I felt like I already knew who he was — not because the book is a polished, carefully packaged personal brand, but because it reads exactly like the person who wrote it: honest, unguarded, and sometimes uncomfortable in the best possible way.

The book opens with a section called “Why You Shouldn’t Read This Book,” which Michael basically uses as a disclaimer. Right there, before chapter one, he writes:

I am not a psychologist, nor do I have any fancy initials after my name. I do have a bachelor’s degree that took more than six years to finish. I’m not a self-help guru. For as long as I can remember, I have been trying to help myself, and I have failed miserably at it.

That sets the tone for everything that follows. No toxic positivity. No memes. No pretending that the answers are easy if you just follow the right steps. What Michael offers instead is his story — the unvarnished version. And the story is a lot.

The Triple Count of Adversity

Michael describes his book as being organized around what he calls “the triple count of adversity”: sports, addiction, and cancer. He argues that just about everyone is touched by at least one of these three — either directly or through someone they love. Michael went through all three, and he went through the extremes of each.

He was drafted by the Boston Red Sox and had everything physically to make it in professional baseball. What he didn’t have, by his own account, was the mental piece. He describes being driven almost entirely by insecurity and a desperate need for external validation — chasing something he could never quite name.

Baseball was my first addiction. Drugs and alcohol are a symptom of my disease. They make me worse. Addiction is not my disease. It’s me.

His career ended before it really began. He was hurt in his first spring training and never got the chance to find out how far his physical gifts might have taken him. What followed was years of substance use, self-destruction, and gradually burning through the patience of just about everyone around him.

The Brain Tumor

The cancer part of the story is the one that stops you cold. Michael was diagnosed with a medulloblastoma, described in the book as an extremely rare tumor of the central nervous system. The MRI scan is on the book cover and it’s a striking photo.

Here is where Michael’s brand of radical honesty gets particularly hard to argue with. He spent years blaming God for the brain tumor. Until he stopped. His words:

I was the one that chose to go out and buy human growth hormone and other anabolic steroids from a shady source and misuse them without medical supervision. That most likely gave me my brain tumor. I caused my brain tumor, not God.

He came up in the steroid era of baseball — McGuire, Bonds, Sosa were his heroes at age twelve. He thought he could do both: be the talented player and the party guy. That thinking caught up with him in a way he didn’t see coming. But getting there, and surviving it, became the basis for everything that came after.

He lost his hair. He lost feeling in his toes. He didn’t know if he’d walk normally again. Ten years later, he says he’s stronger physically than when he played baseball. His dog Lingo — a military base dog that found its way into Michael’s life through his mother — was born the same month Michael’s tumor was removed. That coincidence isn’t lost on either of them.

He was what saved me. He came to me in my darkest moment.

The Disease of Me

The title of the book is the key to understanding Michael’s whole framework. He distinguishes between addiction as a disease (which he understands scientifically and doesn’t dismiss for others) and his own experience, where he sees himself as the problem — not the substances.

His logic is straightforward: if he views his substance use as a disease, it gives him an easy out. “Oh, I have a disease, I can’t help myself.” Instead, he holds himself accountable in a more direct way — he calls himself the disease. The drugs and alcohol just made it worse.

What changed everything was personal responsibility. Once he was willing to stop blaming the Red Sox for his arm injury, stop blaming God for his tumor, and start looking at his own choices honestly, something shifted:

All the bad things that happened to me in my life were my fault, right? They’re just products of the choices that I’ve made. Once I started to take that personal responsibility, I began to look at things in a different way.

He’s careful to say he didn’t get better quickly or cleanly. His description of the process: “I just clawed my way out of it. I dragged myself.” There was no single breakthrough moment, no sudden switch that flipped. It was accumulative, gritty, and ongoing.

What Actually Helped

Throughout the book (and the conversation), Michael returns to the same theme: therapy rarely gave him hope. What gave him hope was other people’s stories. Not people with the same experiences, but people who found something inside themselves to get through impossible circumstances and came out with a different view of the world. That’s why the book is full of other people’s stories — they’re what kept him going.

He also makes an interesting point about credibility. He’s drawn to people who have actual skin in the game — people who have lived what they’re talking about. His ears, he says, open differently when he hears from someone who has been through something. Which is exactly why he says things in the book that a more calculated author might have left out.

And there’s his dog. Michael and Lingo now participate in the PEP house program at University Hospitals and Rainbow Babies Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, visiting adult cancer patients. He avoided it at first. Now it’s part of how he sustains everything he’s built:

I can only have those thoughts when I help somebody else without the expectation of something in return. That’s how helping other people helps me.

Lessons From This Conversation

A few things from this episode:

Honesty before help. Michael’s whole approach starts with the acknowledgment that he can’t help you with your issues — he has enough of his own. But he can share his experience. That distinction matters. There’s a version of this that sounds like a disclaimer, but with Michael it’s the foundation of why the book lands the way it does.

The thoughts don’t go away. He makes the point that writing this book didn’t change his thinking. He still has the same judgmental, arrogant thoughts he always had. What changed is that he learned to identify them and not act on them. This is refreshing. It doesn’t ask you to become someone you’re not — it asks you to work with who you actually are.

Personal responsibility is painful to accept. I said this during the interview and I meant it. Getting to a place where you stop blaming everything and everyone else and look at your own choices is not easy. Michael argues it’s necessary. But he doesn’t claim it happened quickly or without a fight.

Real influence looks different from the highlight reel. Michael has a way of framing this that I think is worth holding onto and that is that the real question isn’t how many followers you have, it’s whether you put your shopping cart back, hold the door, and treat strangers decently when no camera is rolling. That’s what he tells the kids he speaks to. I think that’s what he means when he says he’s a real influencer.

Connection beats therapy (sometimes). This isn’t anti-therapy, but it’s an honest observation: for Michael, sitting with a therapist rarely produced hope. What produced hope was hearing how someone else got through something. The book is essentially a collection of those stories stitched around his own.

God of his understanding. He says it simply and doesn’t dress it up: “I have a god of my understanding that ironically I don’t understand — and that’s perfect for me.” That’s a framework a lot of people can work with regardless of where they land on religion.

The Letter

The book ends with an epilogue — a letter Michael wrote to his younger self. He opens it by saying, affectionately, “you are an idiot and not that important.” It gets more serious from there. He closes with something I read aloud on the show because it felt like the right note to end on:

Embrace the struggle. Have fun. Laugh at yourself. Know that God doesn’t do anything by mistake. You are always right where you need to be. Embrace your spirituality and find your faith.

I compared it to content of a letter St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians — not because Michael is a saint (he’d be the first to say otherwise), but because it has that same quality of a person putting their real experience on the page and handing it to strangers. Michael took it in stride. He’ll take either comparison.

Where to Find Michael Bougari

Michael’s book The Disease of Me is available on Amazon. It’s a substantive read — and the appendix and references alone are worth your time if you’re interested in this genre and want to go deeper into the sources that shaped Michael’s recovery and thinking.

His website is michaelbugary.com — well organized, with tabs for speaking engagements, resources, and more. He speaks at athletic facilities, schools, treatment centers, and hospitals, and tailors his message to wherever he’s showing up.

If you want to hear the full conversation, the podcast is available on:

• Lens of Hopefulness Newsletter on Substack

• YouTube

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

• Audible

The show is called Lens of Hopefulness with John Passadino. If this piece gives you enough to think about, the full conversation will give you more.

Article and podcast copyright 2026 Passadino Publishing LLC

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lensofhopefulness.substack.com