Blogazine  /  Forbes & Friends

The Road to Joshua

By Forbes Riley ·

Intro written in 2026 from Forbes and Joshua's public interviews, for Forbes to approve or rewrite. The original 2018 post had photos but no text.

Joshua and I met in 2018, and nothing about it followed the script. Joshua Self is a former Chippendale turned world-champion bodybuilder. I was in the middle of launching Virdition, my book about carving your own path in Hollywood, and somewhere between a gym, a river bank and a Las Vegas book launch, we became a team.

We've told the whole story since, on stages and on podcasts, about healing, honesty and the difference between chasing someone and choosing them. Those conversations are easy to find. This page is the part that came first: the pictures from that summer, when it was just the two of us and a road we hadn't mapped yet.

Joshua Self seated in a gym, photographed by Doc Ajay Johnson Joshua Self in a blue shirt, photographed by Doc Ajay Johnson Forbes and Joshua by a river at sunset, July 2018 Forbes Riley and Joshua Self Forbes and Joshua at the Virdition book launch in Las Vegas

Photos: Doc Ajay Johnson (studio portraits) and Forbes' own camera.

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