Episode #057 · Austin Rampt
One More Is Never Enough
How bad does it have to get before someone decides to change?
Austin Rampt started using drugs and alcohol at 13, looking for relief from anxiety and shame he didn’t yet know how to name. What followed is a story that almost defies belief—addiction, recovery, extraordinary business success, relapse, and more than one moment that seems like it should have changed everything.
In this episode, we talk about why consequences alone aren’t always enough to make someone change, the connection between achievement and escape, and what Austin began to understand about vulnerability after years of believing that if people really saw him, they would leave. We also talk about fatherhood, regret, and the long process of learning how to stay present in a life you actually want to be part of.
What Austin Was Trying to Run From at 13
Austin names two emotions when he looks back at his childhood: anxiety and shame. He had neurological tics that made his body twitch and sometimes produced audible noises from the back of the classroom. He was overweight and other kids were brutal about all of it.
At home there were two parents who showed up physically and were often absent emotionally. Austin remembers being nine, ten, eleven years old, watching his mother start drinking at five and be in tears by eight.
At 13, he and a friend stole tall boys from the friend's dad and drank them in the garage. Partway into the third one, something shifted. "Like I was driving through a rainstorm my entire life, and this was the first time I went under a bridge."
Within a couple of months he was smoking pot and taking Xanax. By 15 he was addicted to painkillers, supplied by a neighbor who traded him methadone and oxys for weed.
"By age 17, I was smoking crack. It was that quick for me, like before I'm even outta high school."
Why the House Fire and the Heart Attack Weren't Enough
The summer between his junior and senior year of high school, Austin was growing weed in his closet under an elaborate grow light setup. His mom hung clothes over one of the lights. He flipped the wall switch around seven without looking, and by 8:15 he heard crackling behind the door. "flames just shot out, and I burnt our family home to the ground." Total loss.
He took the fire as more evidence of what he already believed about himself, and he started smoking crack soon after. "My mission in life was to stay inebriated as often as I possibly can."
He carried that mission to USF. An ex-girlfriend fronted him money to start dealing, and he moved from pot to Xanax. By the second or third semester he had flunked out.
Days after getting out of a Bible-based program his grandma suggested, at 21, he went on a methadone, Xanax and crack binge, his heart gave out, and he woke up in the ICU. His mother asked, "do you want blood? 'Cause I have nothing left to give you." Stopping, he says, never crossed his mind.
From a Sting on 22nd Street to Nine Years Sober
Just before he turned 22, his mother showed up at his door on a day he was too depressed to argue and drove him to Choices, a rehab that no longer exists. He talked his way into medication on arrival. "I had convinced them that I needed a prescription to Klonopin," he says. He left 40 days later, a few days early, when his grandmother died.
After her funeral, he waited for his dad to nap and took a cab to 22nd Street in Tampa, where he had bought drugs at 14, but the neighborhood had been gentrified. Standing there in khakis and a button-down, he was approached by two men. "And the skinny guy has a shirt on that says: No Snitching At Any Time." It was a sting. He spent 45 days in jail.
His father drove him to Palm Beach County afterward, paid for two weeks at a halfway house, and told him not to come home. That was his first entry into 12-step recovery. He got a sponsor, worked the process, and stayed sober from 22 to 31.
In those years he married, had his two oldest children, and built a peptide business into seven figures a year and thought, "Maybe we made too big of a deal over this whole drinking and using thing."
When Achievement Became the Same Sickness in a New Form
Nine years sober, Austin was the guy who knew what to share in a meeting and sponsored all the men who asked. "On the outside, it might look like I'm doing the right thing, but really it was just a new version of the same old sickness," he says. The achievement never touched the hole he was chasing.
At 31, the relapse arrived as kratom and a thought that he could get instant relief without anyone knowing. Extracts, then pills and crack. He overdosed in a bathroom at the Fort Lauderdale Hard Rock, dropped a glass tray of drugs, and woke eight or nine hours later to a cleaning lady screaming. Security suggested he stay a couple of days and sleep it off. He reached California in renal failure.
His family used Florida's Marchman Act. Police came through a hotel door as he was about to shoot heroin, and a magistrate gave him rehab or jail. He left rehab after five or six days and flew to Cancun, where a cartel handler brought him kilos and a pharmacy delivered Xanax.
Years later, sober again, married, four kids, he took kratom in Orlando and ended up injecting fentanyl he'd ordered online. His wife caught him at the beach in March 2024.
Learning to Live in Honesty and Vulnerability
He went to treatment after that and had a thought he'd never had walking through those doors before: everything he wanted was already his, and all that was being asked of him was to not give it away again.
When I ask about regrets, he says they used to be enormous, and almost all of them were about how he had affected people he cared about. Now he says, "I really like the person that I am today. I really do," and he's come to believe every one of those experiences had to happen to put him in this chair.
I ask how he feels about this being the reigning story of his life, and whether he thinks he'll ever outgrow it. He says he isn't sure he wants to. Telling it has connected him to addicts and to people with no relationship to addiction at all, and connection, he's realized, is what he wants more than anything.
"But the problem was what's required for that is honesty and vulnerability. And those are the things that scared me more than anything else."
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Austin Rampt
Austin Rampt is the author of One Last Hit, a raw and honest memoir about his journey through addiction, rock bottom, and rebuilding his life. He is an entrepreneur, public speaker, a member of 12-step recovery and a father of five. Austin shares his story with unfiltered authenticity, connecting with people who know what it means to hit a wall and fight their way back. He's proof that the comeback is always possible.
