The Pomp Podcast - #1144 Eric Spofford | Shocking Story Of Former Drug Addict Turned CEO

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

Eric Spofford is an entrepreneur, investor, and recovering drug addict. In this conversation, we talk about addiction, sober living, the Affordable Care Act, business economics, and real estate. This is an emotionally charged conversation that will impact many.

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off eric spofford is an entrepreneur investor and a recovering drug addict in this conversation we talk about addiction sober living the affordable care act the business economics behind a massive business that he built after he got sober what exactly it means to build real estate and an operating business, and then how behavioral health care has been changing. This is an emotionally charged conversation, and Eric has lived a wild life, including drugs, crime, and a whole bunch of things that many of you will find absolutely shocking.

I really appreciated this conversation with Eric. He was incredibly honest and forthcoming, and I think a lot of people will really appreciate and also benefit from this conversation. Here is my episode with Eric Spofford. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement

to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Eric here with me. I thought a great place to start is exactly why I started following you on Instagram is I saw you talking about addiction one day and I was like, oh, all right, let me, you know,

go learn more about this. And I don't know that much about it. Right. I think I probably have like an obsessive personality. So I've always been somebody who tries to avoid a lot of vices because I'm like, I probably would end up in a bad place. But you've got a very personal story with addiction and then you turned it into this massive business opportunity. And so maybe just like, where did this all start? Where did you start getting addicted to things when you were in high school, earlier college? Like tell me some of your story. No, no, much earlier. You know, alcoholism and addiction is a funny condition. And I think that it shows up in people in two ways. One is I do think that you can use and drink yourself over an imaginary line that you're

never going to come back on the other side of. You see people that have a normal relationship with alcohol and then at some point in their life, maybe something happens and they're responsive to that. And they become an alcoholic. Others, I think, are born that way. And that was me. I've had addiction since I was very little. I did everything in excess. And so, you know, I grew up in a town called Salem, New Hampshire. It's about 35 minutes north of downtown Boston, suburb of Boston, very blue collar. My father was a logger. He cut trees down for a living. uh my mom was generally a stay-at-home mom kind of a crazy childhood with you know a wild household and two wild parents um was it fun no no okay like i mean i had a generally decent child well

when you're a fucking kid you don't know guys where yeah you don't really know the difference right like you could grow up in iraq and bombs are going off and that's your normal right and And so for me, that was my normal, but it was loud, it was crazy. I was around drugs, alcohol in the neighborhood and my parents got divorced when I was in fifth grade and that was kind of like this pivotal moment for me. And I started drinking and I started smoking pot and I was 10 years old. I've always had been the kid with this lemonade stand and fixing up bikes and making a buck. And so that was the beginning of the journey for me.

I started using drugs and alcohol. I also started selling drugs at 10. Wait, wait, wait. At 10 years old, you're drinking alcohol and you were also smoking weed, doing crack? Smoking weed. Smoking weed. At 10 years old. Smoking weed.

I'm drinking stolen beers out of the, you know, the friend's parents' refrigerators. I'm drinking wine. I'm drinking Mad Dog 2020s. And I remember- Whatever you can get your hands on. Old heads, right? Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, and then an older kid in the neighborhood fronted me at first an ounce of weed, which turned into a quarter pound.

And I think to this day, as far as I know, I still have the state of New Hampshire's record as the youngest individual charged with a drug sales charge. Really? How old were you? Ten years old, fifth grade. You were ten years old and you got arrested for selling drugs? Hand-to-hand to a confidential informant. Really? So walk me through what that looks like.

So, uh, you're 10 years old, an older guy in the neighborhood, he gives you some weed and he's like, go sell it and then come back with the money. You basically just get the difference. Yeah. I wanted, I don't know if you remember anyone that's old enough to remember. These are cool. At least up in the North at the time, they had JNCO jeans. Remember JNCO jeans?

My parents would never buy me any fucking JNCO jeans. I was like, I'm getting them jeans. And so that's what happened. I started selling weed and, and, uh, hustling to get things that I wanted. It progressed very quickly for me. you know alcohol weed turned to try and coke turned to try and pills turned to big on ecstasy by the time i'm like 14 um but but at 10 years old you're selling drugs and like walk me through when you get arrested for the first time because to me it's just like fascinating experience where

you're selling drugs you said to a confidential informant like is he like yo are you 10 right like is it a shock it was another kid that had got busted by his parents his parents called the cops and the cops had this other kid. Wow. Set me up for real. And so, so I'm in fifth grade. My parents just got divorced. The bank just foreclosed on the home that I grew up in. I'm living in an apartment building with my mom and visiting with my dad at the time. And I'm on the bus and the bus pulls up to my apartment building and there's like four cruisers out front. And one of them is, has the dare, you know, the drug program wrap on the, on the car. And I get, I remember getting out vividly off the bus and walking up with my backpack and be like,

Oh, somebody fucked up. You know what I mean? Like, why are these guys here? Like what's going on? And I walk into my apartment and there's like five cops, my weed, my scale. And I'm like, Oh shit. Yeah. I'm pinched. Okay. So from there, once you got arrested, uh, I'm assuming they take you down to like the city or county uh jail or whatever like they actually didn't i was so young i don't think they knew what it was such an unprecedented event that um that they never actually put handcuffs on me but i had to go to court and i ended up getting a juvenile probation officer i was on probation like okay my entire childhood and was that an accelerant like the fact that there was you know because i think a lot of people could be like hey uh law enforcement

intervened i'll put that in air quotes because whatever they want to call whether it's an arrest whether it's probation whatever oh let's get them back on track or you almost like realize like it's not that bad right and then you basically just let me go do worse bigger badder things it's exactly what happened okay and so you go from weed to eventually you get to ecstasy and now you're personally taking you're not just selling but you're using all of the above okay and what are your friends doing are they into this stuff or they just think you're like the crazy friend that everyone has i hung out my friends were like other kind of kids from broken homes that um had similar backgrounds similar types of families and they were you know getting

in a lot of trouble uh you know one of my best friends frank got arrested at 12 on a gun charge got caught with a 22 caliber pistol um you know we're fighting all the time where it's it's a rough life it's a rough life all right yeah now how do you get from like 14 15 to eventually being you know 18 20 years old where i would consider society at least says like hey now you're a young adult right what is that path like are you just continuing to use all the way up uh through that okay um you know i'm selling drugs i'm using drugs i'm in that lifestyle you know and to put a mental picture to it. I'm 10 years old on like a Huffy bicycle, packing a BB gun with the Discman and the headphones, listening to like Dr. Dre, the chronic and Snoop Dogg and like Tupac and Biggie.

Like you're a gangster just with a BB gun. Yeah. Like in the suburbs, my dad's a logger. You know what I mean? And so I don't know, as confusing as that is, but, um, how much What's the impact of the music have? A ton. I don't know how old you are, but like a lot of that. I talk about that all the time. I think the culture of the music, which today I talk about like our diet and the things that we consume, the content we consume, the music we listen to, the books we read, the

podcast, the people we allow into our inner circle, all of that is so exponentially influential. And so coming up in that gangster rap era, like that was cool. You know what I mean? i think that's what i emulated as a white kid in new hampshire yeah but i think that was across the country i mean even my friends like the more that we listened to it the like more bad shit we did right and everyone's got kind of different severity in terms of what bad was for their area their friend group whatever but i i also think at the same time that the rap artists from the 1990s into the 2000s end up being some of the best entrepreneurs of our lifetime as well right and

so in some way, kind of knowing that you ended up going and starting businesses and really understanding kind of the business and investing world, do you think in hindsight that your experience in your teenage years taught you a lot about entrepreneurship and the ability to sell things? Yeah. Mental toughness, perseverance, FIU muscles, figure it out. You know what I mean? You get yourself in a lot of jams on the street. And so you constantly survival adaptation, like Yeah. What's the worst situation you got yourself in? Oh God. I mean, there's so many, you know, let me walk you through a little bit of, dude, I'm 14, 15 years old and this is 1999 Oxycontin pharmaceutical grade heroin being

mismarketed by Purdue Pharma as a non-addictive painkiller. It's really heroin in a pill is running rampant. Kid that I grew up with down the street comes over with a 40 milligram pill. We sniff the thing. I do half, he does half. I get high in opiates, that drug class of like, Same thing as heroin for the first time. And I fall in love. Out of all the drugs I'd ever done, I was like, this is the one. Like, I'm like Superman on this shit, right? And six months later, I'm 15 years old.

I stopped going to high school. I drop out. And I'm fully addicted to Oxycontin. And I'm in the process of moving from Oxycontin to heroin. and at 15 years old in in my 15th year i i finished it as a full-blown iv heroin addict really yeah it dropped out of school hardcore junkie running the streets like a like you know in a man's world and as somebody who uh after surgeries i've had to take uh some of these painkillers right and in pill form uh and i literally i've told story before uh i took one

of the pills and i went uh i was in college i went to class and i fell asleep like the shit it just it didn't make me addicted it's just like i couldn't operate on them right crushing them and snorting them versus the actual just like iv heroin what is the difference in terms of like how your body reacted was the heroin that much more addictive or did you feel like it was actually pretty similar in terms of crushing and snorting versus it's pretty similar i think that it's just different delivery system okay and so um crushing and snorting and uh you know takes longer for your body to to get the euphoric effects for it to filter through your system and for it to start to get in there it also isn't as potent so you have to do more it's like amateur hour compared

to the iv everyone that's that ends up there if they stay in the game long enough they end up iv because what happens is you build a tolerance and so i start off sniffing one bag of heroin and it gets me high as a kite but in a pretty short period of time i can sniff 20 of them and that's expensive but then i'm watching other people because now i'm in the world and i'm watching these people they're iv users and they're getting just as high off of one or two bags as i am 20 because they're shooting it and that's like a economic uh evaluation of like i could spend less money and get more high and it's more intense it's it's about the rush and iv when you use it and shoot it it rushes you it hits you in seconds and so that becomes a part of the thrill as well and

so you're 15 you're now full-on heroin addict uh where are you living are you still living at home um my mom i was such a badass little kid and my mom you know had her own issues that after i spent two years with her from 10 to 12 um she dropped me off of my dad's and pretty much disengaged from my life okay um and we we weren't seeing eye to eye and so now i'm staying with my dad um you know from third maybe around 13 years old i spend a year sleeping on a mattress in the corner of a bedroom that he had rented um he saves up some money we're able to get a small modest little ranch one-story house and we move into that together i i take up the basement you know cellar dweller and kind of created my own little drug den world down there by the time i was 14.

does he know any of this is going on or he just kind of doesn't want to really i think he kind of knows he doesn't know i'm constantly in trouble right like i'm constantly getting arrested you know when i was in school i'm getting suspended all the time the people at the school know who and what i am the police know who and what i am like and so but you know my dad is like a lot of parents where he just wanted to see the best in me and i think that i think there's also this thing that people think for young people like that especially that like it's a rite of passage or i'll outgrow it i don't know that he knew the severity like i knew that he probably knew that i drank alcohol and smoked pot but you you fast forward i i i shoot heroin for the first time at

15. At 17 years old, I'm working with him. We're cutting trees down. It's a dog hot summer day in the middle of New Hampshire in July. I remember it like it was yesterday. And my dad had some heavy equipment that we would work with and he had an excavator. He's running the excavator and I'm on the chainsaw notching and back cutting trees, taking down trees. And I'm dope sick. When you don't have heroin, you go into withdrawals. Wow. And so, I'm sick. So, I'm like, you know, sweating. I got sawdust all over me. It's like, you know, late morning and I'm sneaking off and like puking in the woods. I mean,

life is just miserable and I'm tired and I've been doing this for two years now. And I think that I'm done. And I remember just putting the saw down and walking up and jumping up on the track of the excavator and telling him, you know, turn it off. And he kills it and he's like, what's up? And I look him right in his face and I'm like, dad, I need help. Really? Yeah. And he's like, what do you mean? I'm like, I'm addicted to heroin. What was his reaction? He was floored. His eyes were this big. I mean, as a parent, you have to imagine that's like the

most terrifying fucking thing in the world. Your 17 year old baby that you've done your best with. And he, you know, he's a good dad and looks you in your face and tell you, tells you he's addicted to heroin. I mean, you go around the world, heroin addicts don't exactly have a great recovery rate and so um we shut that down we we left the job site we were back at the time we got on the phone book went to the yellow pages started calling through and and found um some professionals to help detox me off of heroin and that was really my first solid attempt at trying to get sober and so it was almost like he may have known some bad stuff was going on he didn't want to necessarily see it and then when you said it to him it almost sounds like

you kind of smacked him in the face and said hey i need help he knew there was no doubt in anyone's mind my friends were criminals we partied we lived a fast life we made money a fast way i think he knew all that in a general but he didn't know that i was like addicted to heroin he probably thought i just partied too much and you know didn't have a whole lot of regard for the law or a regular civilian lifestyle when you go to detox what is that experience like especially at 17. that that one was out i've been to plenty of inpatients because i was 17 and and a adolescent a minor that was outpatient and so they actually gave me the drugs and sent me home with them and they just say here's some drugs to take this will help you get off here's a regiment to follow i had to go

see them every day and check in and they told me what to take and you know they they oversaw the process it took about a week the problem with that a lot of people get twisted with addiction is they think that addiction is really about heroin and they think that the solution to addiction is sobriety i thought that my dad thought that i'm on heroin what's the very obvious answer you know get off heroin you know what i mean like but the problem is and this is what i suffered from the for the next five years almost i would get off heroin and i would get off all drugs and alcohol and i would be so uncomfortable in life i didn't know how to i didn't know how to do anything interesting i would be depressed anxious restless irritable

discontent full of fear paralyzed because because you missed the drugs or because you didn't know what else to do because that's what addiction is because people totally miss the mark on what addiction is heroin and alcohol and other drugs are some of the best forms of treatment for the disease of addiction the disease of addiction is an internal condition you talk to any alcoholic or watch them and they're in a state of sobriety and you watch them crack a bottle and you can hear a noise and watch a reaction it's this you don't need relief from life right now like you're having generally a good day right yeah i'm here with you exactly what's better but this guy he can't stand he's in unbearable psychic

mental and spiritual pain until that alcohol hits him until that bag of dope hits him and so what happened to me was i would intuitively with well-intentioned people get told you have to um, give up heroin and give up drugs and alcohol. And I would, and I would just be a complete disaster. And so over any period of time, it would get worse, not better. And I would feel totally out of control emotionally and mentally. And then I would eventually use and drink again to gain emotional control and, and take over my emotions. And, and the heroin and the drugs allowed me to regulate my affect and that's really addiction and so the to fast forward that the solution starts in abstinence it's a prerequisite to getting better from addiction

but you must be in some sort of recovery or personal development process that will bring about an internal transformation a rearrangement of what's going on inside of you and so that's that's eventually what happened there's a lot of story between here and there yeah well how old were you when you eventually got sober i got sober i was 21 years old it was two two months almost three months before my 22nd birthday okay december 7th of 2006. how many times do you think you went in and out of any sort of rehab or detox i tried to generalize it in attempts to get sober times that i was like this is it i'm done i'm all in a hundred or more really constantly i hated it so you you knew that you were addicted and you wanted a solution but you didn't know what

what the actual like sustainable struggled finding a solution for five years i was constantly like trying to storm the castle and then just ugh and getting high or drinking and going on another relapse and when you look back now uh when you did get sober what what ultimately like that was the time that you got sober was it not necessarily just like get off of the drugs get off the alcohol but it was replaced by something yeah let's talk about it so the the events of that day were very dramatic at this time you know i'm 17 18 years old my dad tells me you gotta leave i can't help you you no more. Right. I'm bad. I spend the next few years out on the street living like an animal. December 6th, the last day I ever used drugs of 2006. Um, there's a drug deal gone bad.

I pull a kitchen knife. The other guy's trying to buy the drugs. I don't have any drugs. I'm dope sick. I'm desperate. And I rob them with a kitchen knife. And, um, he essentially calls the police and and doesn't tell him it was a drug deal but reports me for armed robbery they swarm the neighborhood i hide all night i take i robbed him for 82 dollars that was that was my courageous so you you needed drugs so bad you were so addicted that you basically set up a fake drug deal set up a fake drug deal to rob him for 82 bucks that's what he had i took him for 82 dollars and i bought four bags of heroin with it and i hid in a closet that was the last time i ever used drugs okay no it's december 6th 2006. the next morning i woke up dude i'm like 197

pounds right now i was 135 pounds i was emaciated i was disowned by everybody that i know i didn't have a friend left in the world i'd run out of lies i was tired they say you have to hit rock bottom if that's true that's exactly where i was i i knew with a moment of clarity that i was dead or in prison if i didn't change now and so i had been up in portland maine for the last for those two years of addiction i took off from there um went down to new hampshire um reconnected with my mother who i hadn't really had a relationship with in some time and she let me um sleep on a couch for a couple weeks and what changed for me there was i walked to 12-step meetings and a group of unbelievable men that i will forever be grateful for they were all like 20 something years

older than me or more that have been sober for considerable time grabbed me up and sucked me in and started to teach me how to live so the cops never caught you for the armed robbery no um yes and no uh i ended up cleaning that up and along with a bunch of other legal stuff and when I was like a year and a half sober. Got it. So it's one of these situations where like you knew it was so bad that it wasn't just the drugs and alcohol too, right?

Like there was the legal stuff there. Like it was so much pressure. It almost, to me, feels like you're describing like the world is like closing in on you. A hundred percent. And you were like- I had nowhere left to go. It is going to catch me, right?

It is going to engulf me if I do not go and do something different. And what is the 12 steps? Like what is that group? Sure. It originated from Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935. you know, Alcoholics Anonymous, a fellowship that has meetings around the world now of people that have found sobriety. And, you know, the origination of that group is that a New York stockbroker named

Bill Wilson was struggling with alcoholism and he was introduced to a religious movement called the Oxford Group in the early 1900s. The Oxford Group was an interesting group where they broke off from the contemporary church basically because they were more radical in kind of a born-again transformational experience than a lot of the contemporary church. And in the Oxford group, they had a six-step program of spiritual action. And this guy, Bill Wilson, gets sober in that. He does this spiritual work. It is an inventory of your character defects, a confession to the congregation restitution to everyone that you've ever harmed it's prayer and meditation it's turning your will over to you know jesus christ the lord and savior uh hardcore christian

stuff he gets sober in that six months go by he's trying to take this to other alcoholics to help them alcoholic number two gets sober in akron ohio uh from his help that guy was dr bob a proctologist the drunk alcoholic, but doctor in Akron, Ohio. And in that that was the birth of Alcoholics Anonymous. Okay. And they went on to take that program of action and develop a specifically for alcoholics and that just mushroomed and exploded globally to help alcoholics and drug addicts.

And now there's more I think there's like more than 215 12 step fellowships. It's like a 12 step fellowship for every problem you could have. gambling anonymous uh sex and love addicts anonymous over eaters anonymous everything yeah yeah so as you're doing this how important was it that the men who kind of took you under their wing and really helped you break the addiction that they were older than you like i think a lot of times um there's this weird dynamic where if they'd been in the same ages as you uh it may not have had the same impact as actually being older guys or no no i don't think so i think that then the recovery movement wasn't as popular as it is now we were at the infancy

stages of the nation's opioid epidemic young people weren't going through the life cycle of opioid addiction and treatment and finding recovery like they have been for some time now now the recovery scene is filled with young people helping other young people and it's beautiful But it just happened to be that at that time in that town, these guys were older than me. They were great mentors. They were tough as shit on me. I mean, they really were. In what way? They didn't spare my feelings at all. They loved me so much that they literally did not give a rat's ass about how I felt. They'd tell me exactly what they saw. They would tell me exactly what I need

to do. They'd be like, you are a selfish, self-centered, dishonest son of a bitch, and you need to change you know and um they were right i was it was the truth about me yeah then were you offended when they were honest sometimes yeah yeah what'd you do when they when you were offended nothing yeah nothing you probably could i sat there and i was offended you know it's fascinating because there's so many people today that are afraid of offending other people it's changed that thing has changed the way treatment is delivered and recovery is delivered explain it's what you're describing and how the world has changed about people being uh scared to offend other people and now you know you're very limited in what you can say like there's a

lot of censorship there's a lot of you know i don't know lines in the sand a lot of that around offending other people that now now i think it's it's really hurt the efficacy of the recovery movement and treatment because they care about what people think and they care about how they feel and they care about offending them and the problem is is that people like me by the millions that come into these systems we have broken operating systems of how we think how we feel like it should be offended that's a good thing the very thing that we're offending is the very thing that we need to smash and disassemble and recreate and so they end up walking on eggshells around people it's become very difficult i recently read david goggin's new book love him never finished

and uh in it he describes the situation where he came from a broken home uh really bad watched his father beat his mother i mean just everything that you know you hope that kids don't grow up in that childhood basically he experienced and in the beginning of the book he describes that he goes back, uh, to see his father after a number of years. And, uh, at one point, uh, they go to a very late dinner. His father has like a skate rink basically. And after it's closed up, they go to Denny's and he said, he's sitting there and his dad's drunk. And when his dad drank, that's when the bad shit came out. It's when the demons came out. And he basically says, I looked at this dude and I was about to whoop his ass. And he was just like, I was an adult now. Right. And I wanted him

to suffer the same way that I suffered the same way, my brother and my mother and all this stuff. and he says that there's something that changes i think the way he describes it is the weather changed in the booth because his dad realized well this dude ain't playing right like oh shit this ain't a kid anymore right and like and he just saw it in his eyes and he said uh basically they finished dinner in silence he drove him back he grabbed his keys and he left never talked to his dad again and there was something in there about he wasn't necessarily uh explicitly saying the truth or the, or offending him or anything, but it's that still like speaking to the core of the person. Right. And now in that situation, he just did with a look or whatever it was that

he was describing. But also I think what you're saying is like, these men basically told you the truth and the truth is incredibly powerful. It can be incredibly offensive, but actually you described it as they loved me so much that they told me the truth, right? They weren't doing it because they wanted to hurt your feelings or anything. They wanted you to get better. They wanted you to be a better person. They cared about me getting better and they cared about my recovery and they cared about my life far more than they cared about how I felt. Yeah. Which is a powerful thing. Super powerful. And a pretty mature thing for them to be able to see that. Yeah, totally. Because I think the ability to offend people for the right reasons

actually brings, it only comes from a place of maturity, right? In some weird way. Like there's people who are arrogant assholes, right? And they just go around offending everyone and there's no rhyme or reason and there shouldn't be any reason for doing that nor should society basically tolerate that type of nonsense yeah one of the things that they would say frequently is that we carry the truth with love interesting the truth without they would say the truth without love is cruelty but we carry the truth with love i like that yeah it makes sense right huge because because what they did a really good job with me and i was i was out of my fucking mind like well i was on that was a nightmare like i've been on the streets a long time i've been surrounded

by violence i've been as much as you can be in that life i've been in that life and so you know i'm sitting there staring at them and they're like telling me the truth and in my mind i'm like i'm gonna stab them with that fucking pen and like that's where i was at in the early days and like they just courageously were able to hold that space with me but they did something really magical in the beginning was they established rapport with me and I knew in my heart how much they cared about me. And that's why I stayed. And that's why I kept coming back because I was like, fuck, they're not trying to hurt me. Like they're, you know, I know they care about me. It's like that saying that, um, how the hell does it go? That they won't care how much, you know, until

they know how much you care. They did that very well with me, you know, and they spent time with and they picked me up and they brought me to meetings and they brought me to Denny's. And, you know, they also got me very quickly, one of the things they did was got me involved in service work. You know, hey, kid, go pick up the cigarette butts. I'm just here because I don't want to shoot heroin anymore.

What do cigarette butts have to do with that? And it got me out of myself and it got me, started to acclimate me to a life of service. If you had, like, physically fought them, who would have won, do you think? Were they physically bigger, stronger, tougher than you? There was a smorgasbord, a really widespread of people.

I mean, one of these guys was an investment banker. Another one was an attorney. Another one had done 25 years in prison on a murder bid and got out a long time ago. Like, the slice of society that this thing affects is everybody. It's not isolated to the tough guys, the corporate guys, the whatever it is. and so do you think it was a sense of respect that you had for them like like inherently i respected them i still do yeah i think a lot about um in high school i i wasn't the best behaved kid and just i can imagine similar to you uh they knew who i was and they knew

you know all the nonsense i was pulling a lot of entrepreneurs have that in common though right of course um and i remember i walked into a classroom and uh one of the teachers said to us uh he went through you know this is what the class is about this whatever and he just said we don't have behavior problems in here or we don't have discipline problems in here and he just said it and i always thought to myself like was it because it was a adult male saying it was it because he just addressed it and he's just like like i don't have time for that shit right yeah but for whatever reason i wasn't a single person there was a lot of badass kids in this one class yeah no problems right and i think about that because it's like actually if if i'm honest

myself i think we respected him right that there was a level of like i don't want to you would do dumb shit, because then that's going to cause you to have to deal with the dumb shit. And then I'm going to feel bad because I actually respect you in some weird way. And so this sounds like a very similar thing where you're like, absolutely. Even if you could physically have beat them up or whatever, and like kind of brought the same street mentality to it out of respect, you were like, oh, maybe they do have my best interest at heart. And so I'll go do what they're asking me to do. Yep. Yeah. It's fascinating. All right. So how do we get from you're going through this like detox process to eventually you actually start businesses and kind of figure out how to create

solutions for other people? One of the guys from recovery gives me a job in his call center. I start making a couple bucks. I get a $550 a month apartment in a not so great neighborhood and I'm walking to work and I'm walking to recovery meetings and I'm hanging out on the recovery scene and I'm, I'm actively doing this recovery process and doing the work that they're putting in front of me and I'm changing and, and I'm changing from the inside out. And I like the more I do, the more I get and the more I get, the more I like it. And I start to get excited about it. You're addicted. I'm addicted to it. And, um, and part of that excitement was I want to tell everyone else about it. And so I lived in like the hood, right? And right on like the outskirts

of the hood was this down and out state funded treatment center called Keystone Hall. And it was a rehab I never went to, but the place saved my life. And I used to walk from, I would get out of work and I would walk to the treatment center, right through the hood, past the dope dealers, past all the bullshit, head down and I would get to the rehab. And I was so poor, I didn't have any money, they would feed me. And I would just volunteer all my time and I would spend it with their clients. And I would talk to them about recovery and I'd tell them about my experience and I'd tell them, you know, I've been here for X amount of months. I've been here for a year. It's working for me. And I would show them the work that I was shown and I would start to take

them through that process. And, and in that, I found what still to this day, I know to be my God-given purpose on earth was to help other people just like me. And in that, everything that I'd been through since I was a little kid, to all the pain on the street, to all of it, it made it make sense and it gave it a why. And it made it valuable and it made it useful to other people. And in that, I fell in love with it. And so after a little while at the call center, I left, I went back, you know, after I've been sober a few months, my dad starts talking to me again i go back working for him cutting down trees i start saving money i'm doing side jobs i'm with the guys at that facility i'm at the recovery meetings i'm with the recovery people

and uh and you know i save up some money my dad uh believes in me at this point and when i'm about a year and a half sober um we put our coins together and come up with about 50 grand this is october 2008. okay this is you and your dad not a great economical time october 2008. i buy with my dad's help, I buy a three family apartment building, bank owned, foreclosed, vacant for 150 grand. And with this vision that I'm going to go and live here and I'm going to put a couple beds in each bedroom of every apartment. And I'm going to get those guys who are in that 30 day rehab, when they leave, they're going to come here and live with me. And they're going to pay me to stay in this bed it's called a sober house and this was a sober house before like i'd say sober house you

kind of know what that is this is 2008 like this is not popular the guys in recovery that i was telling i was going to do this like the are you talking about so just so people understand uh somebody is addicted to whatever the uh vice of choices they go to the actual uh treatment center but they're only there for some time boxed them out so 30 days 60 days whatever 30 days usually Okay. So 30 days. When they leave, the problem that you had identified was they're going to go right back into the environment. They're going back to the environment that got them there in the first place. I saw a problem, entrepreneurship. I saw a problem and I was like, well, fuck, I'm going to fix the problem. I'm going to give them a place to go. And then I provided structure.

And so they would leave there and come with me. And we would, I mean, I lived with them for two years. That's how the business started. It was me and a revolving door of 11 guys. And I did the recovery work with them. We cooked together. We went to meetings together. I took them into the jails. I took them into other facilities to do service work and help other people. I mean, we did everything together. And a lot of those guys from that early day, they're still sober now. I mean, it was a long time ago, but, um, what were the economics of it? What were they paying you? Like a couple hundred bucks, like 700 bucks a month, 700 bucks a month. And then basically, uh, you were able to run this and this is like your full-time job. Like you're just,

No, I'm going to work. I'm still cutting down trees every day. Really. So I'm waking up with these guys, waking them all up. You know, it's very spiritual based. And so we're, you know, we're sitting in a circle, we're doing prayer, we're doing meditation together early in the morning. We're reading, you know, recovery literature, spiritual literature, whatever. And then they have jobs. And so they go to work, I go to work. After the workday ends, we all meet back. You know, we're doing family style dinners together. Every day was something different. We're going to a recovery meeting. We're going to speak to new people at this facility, a jail, whatever. And so, and there were rules, you know what I mean? You had to

make your bed. You had to, there was just a curfew. There was a lot of structure to it. And so as you're doing this, when do you go from, okay, I have this one facility to now I'm going to like turn this into a business. So 2008, 2010, I'm, you know, being a logger is a blood sport. it is a tough way to make a living and um what's so tough about it you're outside all day long in new hampshire you know you get about three months of decent weather and even that's hot so you're cold hot in the snow um you know you're cutting trees down it's it's just hard physical labor all day long you know 5 a.m wake up on the job site by 6 30 6 45 you know the type of people that work those jobs can be a little rough uh and so you can't you know your employees are

are, you know, problematic at times, but, uh, it's just always something, you know, and, and I just, I really loved what I was doing with that. And every day I'd wake up and be like, fuck, this sucks. You know what I mean? I'm, I got cut by chainsaws. I'm getting whipped by trees. I'm like, it just, it's like, I don't want to do this anymore. This is terrible. And, um, and I wanted to open a second house. And so at that time I went to my dad, tough conversation, tough moment, his only son his only child and i go to him and his business right is i'm the next generation you know and uh and told him i said dad i can't do this anymore i need to go full-time with this and that's when i made the pivot and so did he want you to take over the logging business yeah

yeah there's a lot of pressure my whole life like since i was a little kid he's like you know when you get up and run this business and uh you know that type of thing but and so it put a lot of pressure on having the courage to have that conversation with my dad of like, nah, I don't, I want to do my own thing. I want to be scared to happen with him. Terrified. Yeah. What was his reaction? Solemn. You know, he heard me. He probably saw it coming. I was so passionate about what I was doing, you know, and it was good at it. And so I opened a second one and then I opened a bigger one. Um, and how are you financing those? Did you know what's crazy? This is one of my sticks about a lot of entrepreneurs today

coming out of this economy that we've been in about investors and loans and debt and blah, blah, blah. Bro, if people could time travel back to 2008, 9, 10, even 11, you could walk into a bank and be like, can I finance this bottle of water? And they'd be like, are you fucking okay? Like, do you know what's going on outside? Get out of my bag.

Like, you couldn't get a loan for anything, right? Yeah. And so I bootstrapped that business from that initial seed money to buy that first building until I sold it in December of 2021. And I never took a single dollar of investment money for growth. And I never took a single dollar of a loan or debt into the business. My waterfall didn't have debt to pay down at the transaction. Right. And the company size at that time, we grew it, We were doing, you know, a little more than $50 million top line revenue, 325 employees. It was real business. And so what I did was this really old fashioned thing that's not very popular is called, I

worked hard and I spent less. You know what I mean? It takes fucking discipline though. When you have money in the bank and you're still buying cheap food and driving a shitty car and like not spending living in a crap place that's the discipline of like the entrepreneurship mine was driven by the economy which i'm grateful for uh but that's what i did so as you're doing this what what did you kind of learn right in terms of scaling this business because 300 employees is no joke uh also when you start getting into tens of millions of dollars of

revenue that that's real responsibility and it's real risk because now you could like really screw things up right you can get yourself in trouble pretty quickly you make a couple of bad decisions you buy a piece of real estate that goes underwater you know all these different things that start to happen what would you say was like the one or two things you did because you had what i'll call like the street education that's big business now now you're in a game of like you don't just you know wake up one day and like oh i know how to do real estate transactions right you don't wake up one day like oh i had to manage 300 people right sure you may know how to sell drugs on the street but that's a that's a different skill set maybe a related skill set but it's

different was there one or two things you did that you really credit to like being able to transition from just a pure street education actually being able to run a business like this yeah i'm a 15 year old dropout that still doesn't have a ged but what i do have is an unbelievably developed ability to learn i'm a sponge and so that's what i did i just kept it glass glass half empty the whole time and was constantly in this obsessive pursuit of learning from people learning from books learning from anything and everywhere that i could find information on teaching myself things yeah how many of the businesses in the recovery space are run by previous addicts is that a lot a lot of them a lot so like i'm assuming that has a huge piece in you being able to understand the

problem really really well and actually design um what seems to be one of the more cutting edge programs to actually be able to help people. Cause I think that the outcome here is not just like, Hey, we're collecting rent, right? The outcome is actually like, no, we are helping people improve their lives, stay sober and kind of become highly functioning, productive members of society. Right. And so like when you think about selling the business, why'd you sell it? From, from opening day till transaction day, it was 13 years, two months. And, um, you know, I started when I was 23 years old and I think I was 35, right? 35 when I sold it. And everything just has a life cycle. I was in New Hampshire. I didn't want to be there anymore. It was a tough,

I love it. I still love it. I'm back in it, you know, a little more than a year later, here we are. And, but it was just a tough business to be in. It was emotionally, you know, there's a lot that happened there i i poured everything that i had into that every single day i had all my eggs in one basket which is high risk um and i was surrounded by death people dying fentanyl happened fentanyl started coming into america about 2012 2013 what's going on with that stuff because that seems like the second coming of the opioid crisis like it was opioids uh and then it was fentanyl there's not there hasn't been a real bag of heroin on the streets in america in years what does that mean? Heroin isn't hair. There's no heroin addicts anymore. They don't sell heroin. They sell

fentanyl. Fentanyl is randomly 50 to a hundred times more potent than heroin. It, you know, prior to fentanyl showing up in the country, um, overdose death is like not that common. You don't like it's a once in a great while that it's normally through a mixture of other drugs and stuff. Fentanyl shows up and it just starts killing people. Really? And yeah. And so, you i look back and and you know it's funny you asked me a question earlier and you're like what was the worst thing you've ever been through if you isolate that to active addiction i could answer it if you put it in my lifespan it's fentanyl and not that it affected me directly from using it i've never actually used it i've been sober too long but it killed hundreds of my friends

thousands of my clients the amount of death that i was surrounded by really honestly me up and so i mean there was 2013 14 15 16 17 18 i'm i'm showing up to one two three funerals a week really bro i'm cons i've consoled hundreds of grieving parents if not close to a thousand i mean yeah like there's only so many moms burying their 20 something year old crying through your shirt that like before it's like you know it took a piece of me um and so there was just all this complexity of it. I was tired. There was a business sense. There was emotional. There was just time for the next chapter. I've been doing this a long time. And so, it all came to a perfect storm. And I had been ready. I actually transacted four times. And so, I sold Minority on three

different bytes to a family office at a scaling valuation. And then myself to the same family office, uh, and then to take chips off the table and mitigate risk and have money, you know, off to the side. And then myself and that family office divested out of it and had a full sale, uh, when I sold in December of 21. And I was still majority owner at that point. As you're talking to the family offices or, uh, whoever ended up purchasing the business, how much of, uh, who they're talking to is like you, the business person versus you, the guy from the street the guy from the here's the funny thing about recovery and the life experience is i sit here and like openly you know with however many people are going to watch this

talk about all this stuff that most people would probably have a lot of shame about would have a lot of regret would you know be embarrassed and not willingly just put out there but through the process that i've been through we say that we die the death of self here and so like that guy's dead Like, I go to bed at 10 p.m. I'm up at 5. I'm a dad to two boys. Like, I take care of my senior dad. He lives with me up north.

Like, I haven't been a street guy in a very long time. Yeah. You know? And so, you know, I'm Eric the business guy. You know, it's still there, of course. But I'm Eric the business guy, Eric the family guy, Eric the friend, Eric the guy that, you know, has morals and values. and anything that had ever happened back in the day has been unthinkable for me for a very long time. Like I don't think I could even bring myself to do it because that operating system has just

been gone for a very long time. Yeah. One of the most impressive parts of the business that you built is you really built two businesses, right? So you've got the, what I'll call the operating business where you're actually servicing these clients. You're able to get them into a better position in life and kind of make them those productive citizens, but there's also a real estate component to it. Talk a little bit about the strategy as you built the company and kind of why you had the two different sides. You know, what's funny is a lot of it, I learned as I went, but I always, I owned the real estate in the first sober house. I like owning real estate. I believe heavily in real estate as an asset class. It's my most preferred

asset class. I still own a lot of real estate. And so as I was growing, I was purchasing the real estate and fitting up the facilities, you know, Eric, the landlord and the real estate holding company, and then leasing them back to the operating company and starting these de novo startups, you know, in those physical plants. And so I did that through, you know, probably, I don't know, close to 20 sites. Wow. Varying sizes, right? Big, small, medium, but yep. And why just stay in the recovery space? Obviously, there's a whole bunch of different things in healthcare that you could have gone into, right? But you stayed in recovery just because you knew it and then you cared about it or was there other reasons?

It's, you know, to your, to what you recently asked me about Eric, the street guy, it's Eric, the recovery guy is different than that. And so it's my labor of love. It's my passion. And so I'm not a guy in recovery for an eating disorder or autism or a significant mental health disorder. I am a man in long-term recovery from addiction and alcoholism. And so it's, it's just, you know, what I've been passionate about for a long time and what I know best. Yeah. This, your entire story is like, has this like emotional component to it, but also if you can kind of separate out the emotional part and you look at it from a business perspective, what is unique is that you were able to learn a number of the things that you needed, but also you had great market

timing, although you probably didn't know. I actually don't know. I actually did. I almost started to say that when you asked me why i sold and so i apologize after i checked all those boxes and i divested those three times in march of 2021 i was tired and i was all of those things but i was also looking around in the world and going we're at the top so we'll forget about the sale i i was actually talking about uh in the beginning because of the headwinds of the addiction a lot of it was timing for sure because there was a immense explosion of drug addiction yeah but also there was the incoming insurance coverage of addiction. So talk a little bit about,

yes, we know that the drug problem got very bad, kind of 2010 and beyond, but also talk a little bit about the ability to switch from individuals themselves having to pay to the insurance companies now being obligated to cover the addiction treatments. So Affordable Health Care Act, Obamacare comes out. And prior to that, health insurance policies

were not required to cover substance use disorder, addiction treatment, or mental treatment as a required benefit. And they had this section of those policies that was affected by a parity law. Excuse me one sec. And parity essentially said that we need to stop treating addiction and mental health disorders like they're the little annoying cousin of healthcare, that these are real diseases, they need to be treated and covered like real diseases, no different than diabetes. And so that law came out and it required insurance companies to provide a benefit for addiction treatment. And that's when the industry started to explode. And I just happened to be in a good position because I'd already been there. Like I'd been in the sober

living since 2008. That was 2011, 12. I was already growing. And so that happened. And then another significant thing was, um, was the 2016, uh, campaign that was essentially run on addiction as a main issue. Like Donald explain Donald Trump, local politicians, you know, really highlighted addiction, um, and overdose death and those things as a very important issue of their campaign. I mean, my home state, Donald Trump, uh, called a drug and fist. New Hampshire is a drug infested den, beautiful place, but drug infested den. Wow. And so I'm in New Hampshire first in the primary.

Politicians are ramping up and that, you know, the presidential races, they start coming through 18 months ahead of time, two years ahead of time. They're already starting to, you know, trickle testing, making sure that they got a good message. And then, you know, the local politician, the governor and all that, all those races. And so at that time, I get I get really a lot of of tailwinds through that. And I kind of get inducted into this political scene. I testify to the United States Senate in 2015 on the opioid epidemic.

I'm meeting presidential candidates that are coming through New Hampshire front and center. Are you surprised? Like, do you ever like pinch yourself? I can't I can't believe I'm testifying right now. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. If they had only seen me then. Right. Well, I you know, what's funny is I walk into, you know, this building in Washington, D.C. with United States senators to give this three hours of testimony and Q&A with them on the issue. And I'm here I am looking, you know, Lamar Alexander, the oldest sitting Republican senator from Tennessee, and answering his questions and tell him about how I used to sell drugs and rob people and do heroin. and i'm just like where what is going what is my life you know what i mean how did i get here i i can imagine that that is uh one of those moments where you're like it's cool but also

shocking if like if you'd only told your younger self like one day you'll testify in front of senators about this yeah i mean and that's been true of a lot of my life you know what i mean like people people oftentimes are when they learn my story or they kind of get a gist of it they're taken back and shocked and have questions and i'm like i just like i don't know figured it out yeah i don't know i don't know how i got here either so i'm as confused as you you know at what point did you start uh really like leaning into instagram because i think part of what's fascinating you got this like great story right and kind of you've overcome so much adversity and uh i think you're a couple years older than me i got a cell phone in high school i think it

was the first cell phone i ever got um there's a lot of young kids who they understand how to use this stuff better than you know you and i understand pretty good how to use it yeah but there's like 18 year old kids running around right now they literally don't remember a life before a cell phone right yeah no doubt and so like at what point were you like you know what i need to get on the internet like i need to like go build a person i remember it it's probably 2019 2020-ish somewhere in there and you know i have an instagram i probably have about like 2 000 followers i got pictures like a normal person like yeah i'm like a normal guy on instagram i got a couple of friends yeah yeah i got i got pictures of my dog you know i got pictures of my kid you know i got normal

on there and um someone sends me a clip from this guy gary vaynerchuk and at the time gary was like going hard in content on build a personal brand attention and like that was his stick uh at the time and i start watching it and i'm like he's right this guy is right and this could really help a lot of people this could help bring attention and mind you i was also primed i've been being covered by the media since 2008. i'm hanging out with politicians i'm talking to people in trump's administration i mean the governor frequently meeting and talking like i'm in the paper i'm on the news i'm getting called into this called into that like i have attention real world attention not social media attention so i just had this thought i'm like

it's kind of all made it here and so he was doing this thing called 4ds where you pay and you go down to new york to hudson yards and there's 10 of you and you sit in his office and meet a bunch of his team and spend time with him and learn about social media marketing and that's what i did i went down to i knew nothing about any of it and so somewhere around the time period i went down to gary vaynerchuk's office met him for the first time and and came out of that and i was like this is something i need to do yeah you remember how much uh he was charging 10 grand ahead and yeah so it's expensive but it's not uh completely out of the realm for people who have a business or yeah whatever yeah good investment i i would do it again yeah and when you're sitting in that room

like what, at what point are you like, this could help me with my business? Is it, they could help me personally? Like, like what's going through your head as to like, why you're like, yeah, I got to do this. It started to come into focus for me about how attention was a commodity and how that could just have general uplift to anything that I do. And that a personal brand and, and being known out there and telling your story and being the first and having eyeballs and all of that can be beneficial to whatever you know like i get messages every single day of people that i've never met i probably never will meet i got one this morning guy told me quit drinking three weeks ago and i'm his inspiration you know if i can do that by posting on my story and putting

out some content and have a positive impact i mean that in itself makes it worth it let alone business opportunities drawing attention to whatever it is that i'm doing um and you know So it's really worked out for me. It's also helped me network and socialize with amazing people. That's how I met you. Yeah, that is how we met. This morning, you hit your snooze button a couple of times. I saw and I think it's important. Like you have overcome so much. You are so disciplined. You have been able to stay sober for so long, but like now hitting the snooze button a couple of times is not, you know, going and doing heroin again. That's right. Yeah. But, but there are these

like kind of self-correcting mechanisms. And you were talking about like, look, there's like a discipline component to it how do you think about your life and the structure of it now especially like it almost seems to some degree you got sober you had a business you focused on that business for you know 12 13 years when you sell the business you're like you're not going to work anymore right and you're trying to figure out like what else to do like talk a little bit about that i felt here's what actually happened i'll be raw and real i fell apart really dude well i'm up in New Hampshire, you know, restaurants close at eight 30, you know, they're all the sidewalks up and, um, and I sell my business and I have more money than I've ever even seen in my life. And I,

I buy a house down here in Miami and I'm down here and I, I got no reason to wake up. I have nowhere to be. I don't, I'm not worried about making payroll. I'm not worried about sales. I'm not worried about, I'm worried about nothing like literally. And, um, and I ended up staying up late and I ended up being out too much. I mean, you know, in Miami dinner oftentimes starts at 11, 12 o'clock at night. That's when the reservations for, you know what I mean? And so now I'm sleeping in and, uh, and I had been disciplined my entire journey in recovery. I've been incredibly disciplined. And it was just now that this, you know, being out of the business, relocating and spending a lot of time down here. And, you know, I, I put on weight. I, I, um,

I, and I just hit this thing and I was like, I'm fucking miserable. The outside world looking at me should be, I bought a jet. I bought a yacht. I bought a killer house in Miami. I bought a Rolls Royce truck. I bought like, I'm like, hold on, back up. How much did you buy? It's about a jet, a boat, a Rolls Royce truck and a house. Is that it? Or you got more shit? I'm sure I got more shit. That's the big stuff. And like, and I'm sitting here and I'm like, I can go anywhere I want and do anything I want. And you know, I'm not fucking happy. Yeah. I'm not happy. And it just hit me. And I was like, it was the fucking, one of the most profound life lessons that I've been through in more modern times, of course, was like, I'm a guy

that I don't give a fuck if you give me a billion dollars right now, I'd be up at 5 a.m. tomorrow. I got to get up and make the donuts every day. That's what I do. I'm a grinder. I love the process. I love building. I love the discipline. I love the structure. That's also what I talked about on my story this morning was like, why do we do things for the effect produced? And the analysis is, you drink because you like how that feels. You do drugs because you like how that feels. But you also have to tie that to, do you like the result? And so I live a very structured, disciplined life. I'm up at 5 a.m. I get an early morning, you know, for me, it's prayer, it's meditation, it's reading, it's, you know, contemplation, it's manifestation.

And I'm normally out the door for the gym by like 545 ish. And I get my workout in, the world is quiet my phone is quiet and i get my workout in i come back a shower i eat my first meal for the day diet very important uh and by like about 7 30 in the morning like i'm ready for the world and like some of them haven't even woken up yet i beat them you know i fuck with them all the time i'm like i'm so much richer than you how the fuck am i up earlier than you are but there is a mentality it's like one of the things uh my wife and i talk a lot about is like there's the easy life and then there's like a hard life yeah and a lot of people are grinding their asses off to get to the easy life and so many of our friends have been fortunate to get

some version of that some of them more so than others whatever but once they get a taste of the easy life there's a fork in the road some of them double triple quadruple down on the easy life nice thing you know they're like i'm retired i'm chilling you know whatever i want the easiest cake job possible whatever and some of them are like yo i miss the hard life i need the hard i need the difficulty i need the edge i need the things that keep me going do you know that my investment banker in my m a legal team and my tax advisors and all this group of like insanely expensive advisory group that surrounded me through these processes were like you're gonna to miss this. And I was like, I don't really think I am. Like, I don't, I don't know about

that. You give me a hundred million dollars and like, I'm going to be just fine. Don't you worry about me? And they were right. You know what I mean? Like the discipline, the grind, the stress, the hunt, the kill, the, the build, the camaraderie, the team, the mission, all of it. And now, you know, I'm happy. I'm back in it. I'm back in it. I got problems all day long and grateful for them yeah what are your goals now you really want to know yeah um i don't want this to sound come off the wrong way and and i i need to explain the why behind it for people to to me for me to feel understood but i'm working on a net worth of a billion dollars okay i don't think that's a crazy idea i don't think it's a crazy idea either right small club not because i just

just told you i have a plane i have i have a jet i have a boat i have a house like i have like if i have more money i don't even know what i would do with it to be frank with you um so it's not for that right and i already told you i got to get up in the morning it's not going to change my life i'm not going to do anything differently because i am a fully tattooed former criminal drug addict 15 year old 10th grade dropout without a fucking ged and i want to be the first one to do that And not for me, because I want to show them it can be done. If I can get there, what can you do? You know, if I can achieve this, if I hit that goal over the next 15, 20 years,

then what's possible for the rest of you. And frankly, I don't want to say it's going to become easier over time, but they're gonna have more tools that they can leverage, right? People don't, people underestimate that, you know, guys in our age bracket, like we had it a lot harder in the early days of entrepreneurship. I started my business. I didn't even have a MySpace. Think about that.

The internet was not the internet. You still went to the library and checked out books and read them. You went and sat in the seats at Barnes & Noble if you couldn't afford them and read them and put them back. And so access to information, access to creating businesses and opportunity is insane these days.

Yeah, I think a lot about the new technology solves problems that other people previously had, it creates new problems as well right so one of the things that's fascinating to me about your story is uh you're dealing with these addictions that in 2005 let's say many people especially the insurance companies did not look at uh drug addiction or others as these health care problems they looked at it maybe in other ways they didn't want to cover or what have you today i actually think a digital addiction as similar to what 2005 was for drug or alcoholism right and and one of the things that last year uh i told story before somebody handed me a physical book and i

tried to read and i couldn't read it and i and not because i can't read i thankfully had you know enough education to read i couldn't concentrate i could not sit with the physical book and not reach for my phone every 30 seconds and i was like this is bad and so i told a friend that kind of offhand comment at dinner one night and he goes get your phone out all right he goes look to see how many times your phone lights up and so on the uh iphone you can see how many notifications and stuff 750 something notifications every single day and i just looked at him and he's like dude literally every time that thing lights up he goes whether you realize it or not if you see it out of the corner of your eye if it's sitting next to your desk while you're working

or reading or whatever he's like you're looking right and he's like and so shut that shit as busy as us if it doesn't go off for 20 minutes you're like what the fuck did something in the world and so uh what's interesting is like yes the internet and social media and all these things they solve all these problems it is amazing and they provide all these uh different things but now it's introduced new problems where now i look and i see a lot of these young founders dude they spend more time on fucking twitter or instagram than they do building their business we've seen it in the patient population and treatment of how they've changed so much So I have a couple of things that I really want to tell you about.

One is information that most people should know if they're concerned with addiction. It fucking blew my mind. A lot of how we think about addiction is based out of this early experiment in the 80s and the early 90s where they took a lab science box and they put a rat in it. It's like a little rat cage. and they put two bottles of drinking water and they had regular water and then they had drug infused water. They ran the experiment with heroin and they ran the experiment with cocaine. In that experiment, what happens is, is the rat tries both. He feels the euphoric effects of the drugs. He goes back to the drugs. He continues to use the drugs. He becomes physically addicted

and almost most of those rats end up overdosing and dying the that that is in psychology textbooks for people that are our health care and mental health providers and you know for doctors and nurses and folks they don't give a lot of education on addiction and so the philosophy out of that is drugs are bad they have chemical hooks if you do drugs that they're going to get you and you're to become this like this addicted rat out of that philosophy is also the prohibition mindset the war on drugs we have to eradicate the problem we eradicate the substance follow this guy a social scientist up in vancouver canada he's an old man now his name is bruce alexander he wrote a book um called the globalization of addiction it's unbelievable and he ties addiction to to economy

and Western civilization. And he comes around and says, well, wait a minute. We've, we've isolated the rat and he starts an experiment called Rat Park and he builds a rat cage that's 10 feet long and eight feet wide or some shit. It's huge. And he puts wood chips and aluminum cans and, you know, wheels and rat food and, you know, shiny shit and toys and tunnels. and he and he puts a bunch of rats in there male rats female rats they're having sex they're rat pops they're they're doing what they're meant to be doing in the best possible environment that a rat could i was gonna say it sounds like awesome awesome yeah and my guy built them tunnels listen he comes in and he introduces drinking water and he introduces heroin water the rats out of

curiosity. Try both. They watch over time. The rats favor the drinking water and they occasionally use the drug water and get intoxicated because rats like the party every once in a while. No rats become physically addicted to the heroin, unlike every rat in the isolated box. Wow. Not only that, he takes isolated rats. He gets them addicted to heroin and then he removes them and he puts them into Rat Park. Now, modern day Western civilization thinking and philosophy around drugs is in Rat Park, if the drugs are available, we got to eradicate them, all these rats are going to become junkies. It also will tell us, most people would jump to a conclusion that this physically addicted addict junkie rat

entering a productive, healthy rat society is going to, with access to drugs, is going to be a menace to society and continue to use the drugs. The rat is aware there's drinking water and there's drug water. It is physically addicted to opiates. It is going to experience painful withdrawal symptoms if it does not use that drugs and it knows it and it knows it's available. It kicks the habit almost every time no rats become addicted and no rats overdose and die in rat park because what the one context of the study of addiction and the treatment of addiction and solutions for this is that has been evaded entirely as environment because if we look at environment all of a sudden we have to take fucking responsibility it's genetics it's trauma

It's the substance. It's the bad neighborhood. It's all of these things that we place the blame on. So out of this, he births this thing called the dislocation theory of addiction. And essentially, if you look at slices of generations over time, I think everyone would agree that society from addiction and mental health standpoint is getting worse generation over generation in in decade blocks the 50s 60s 70s 90s 2000 2020s like we're fucking worse now than we were 10 years ago 10 years ago was worse than it was 10 years before that what's happening our society is becoming more and more dislocated digital devices are enormous and so when you take when you think about what a human being is what are we strip away all this bullshit

we're a pack tribal mental animal and so we have a basic necessity for human connection for bonds we have uh we need a life that has hope and so all of these things in the way that we're living and continue to live and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy has continued to create an elevated stress response on human beings that bruce alexander would describe substance use problems as a maladaptive response to an overwhelming stress condition. It's phenomenally interesting. You know why it doesn't blow up? Why? How does pharma make money on that? How do you profit on that? You have to disassemble things. There's no way to make money. Follow? And so when you look at the magic of the recovery community, recovery community, essentially, you look at what

I learned this and it like blew my mind. And I was like, I got sober and I met these men and like they became my tribe. They became my rat park. They were the fucking connections. They were the people. You look at so many of these different things that, that about the world that we live in the middle class, you know, you're a Democrat and you think it's the fucking rich people's fault or rich people you think they take all our money whatever it is but the fact is is the hope of a young person today is getting less and less my grandfather uh in 1952 bought a modest small uh single-story home on two acres of land and he had a wife that was a stay-at-home mom and he raised three boys he was a steel worker in a mill he owned two acres of land and a home and had a

stay-at-home wife you can't even be a fucking construction worker and have an apartment let alone have a girlfriend you gotta feed her you know and so growing up and in this environment it's just tougher and tougher and tougher for people the future is bleak for them you think about in in in the game in the game of life what we're told okay we grow up we're either have or have not if you're not wildly successful you're you're going to get a job you're going to go there for 40, 45 years. You're going to hopefully get a job, then get a better job and then get a better job. Most of your money is going to pay your bills. You're going to have a fucking life that you can't stand so much that hopefully you get two, three, four weeks of vacation and can afford

to get on a plane and go somewhere nice as the highlight reel to your existence. And then at the end of that, what happens? You get a fucking retirement and a pension, you get fixed income. and what do we do to our elderly we're all facing that road if you live long enough like you're going to end up with some kids that fucking visit you in some facility playing chess with some other asshole and like it's just the future for most people is not bright and so when you think about that like of course they're using fucking drugs of course it's getting worse when you talk about environment what it immediately makes me think of is uh the book uh being mortal by a tool gawande He talked specifically about old age, death, and one of the assisted living centers realized if we put live plants, not fake plants, not no plants, actual real living plants around the center in people's rooms, they live longer, they're happier, they have kind of a better quality of life.

Yep. If you surround people with life, they end up actually thriving. Absolutely. And it's so fascinating because it also parlays perfectly into James Clear's entire idea of like, if you change your identity, it changes your habits. So if you tell people, I don't drink, you're not going to drink. Right. But if you just say, Oh, you know what? I'm going to have the personal will to just say, nah, I'm good on the drink tonight. Right. You have to actually start to identify it, right? I'm somebody who goes to the gym. Now you start to go to the gym, right? Like if you can make it your identity and to your point, if you're a part of the recovery community, right? If you're one of the rats in that park and you're like, no, this is what we do,

then you're good. Even if you do like the party every once in a while, you're still able to majority of the time stay where you need to be. It's pretty powerful. The problem, it is very powerful. And when you think about the problem, the frustrating thing that that has been a problem that's been persevering in front of me that that bothers me is we've figured out for the ones that make it out that are able to ask for help we know how to get them well you give me you call me tomorrow and say someone i care about as addiction or alcoholism i have a solution for you i know how to help them they have to do the work but they can get better and recover what what nothing is being done about is disassembling the machine that's creating them

and so you know it which is getting worse day over day year over year you know when you look back at the last 20 years of your life what's the biggest surprise to you you honestly yeah I can't believe I'm still alive really yeah I was 15 years old I used to like openly talk about like yeah I'm probably not gonna live past like 21 and I used to live like that you know five overdoses on life support I've been stabbed a couple times I had my head split open by a crowbar. I've walked away from- Wait, hold on. Back up. Back up. I'll say. You overdosed five times? Yeah. What is that experience like? I thought, first time I thought I got abducted by aliens.

I did. Yeah. You know, I'm in the backseat of a car with some, you know, some homeless couple driving around and I just copped a bunch of heroin for everyone. And, you know, I mix the stuff up in a needle and I shoot the stuff up in a car and that's all i know and then i come to and i got these big you know square hospital lights above me and i'm on a cold gurney and and um and you know masks and lights and everything and um it's really confusing uh waking up to that yeah does it get easier like by the third fourth fifth one do you like know what's happening or is it still kind of by the third fourth fifth one i'm so fucking miserable in my life that i wake up and i'm pissed off that they brought me back wow

i'm like this would have been just fine you know i've been fine and you know checking out today i would have been all right how'd you get stabbed running around the hood doing drugs selling drugs getting in beefs with people you know yeah yeah did you and this is a weird question but one of the things about um whether it's uh projects or uh certain communities did you ever you ever get stabbed by someone and then friends with them afterwards or was it nah fuck you you stabbed me and don't let me see you in the street yeah yeah got it um you know but i did here's an interesting thing to your point um nobody that stabbed me because i don't really know those people all that well um we didn't even speak the same language so they didn't communicate very well

and and now you know i look back i take responsibility i was in a neighborhood that shouldn't have been in doing that i shouldn't have been doing and trying to get away with things in a game that i shouldn't have been trying to get away with and so like increasing the odds i knew the risks you know what i mean i might get stabbed but it you know you weren't walking down park avenue part of getting better this is this is this is i don't know if you asked me this question i feel like you asked me something like this the most powerful experience or the one thing that I attribute my transformational experience to is this one part of the process. And there's a lot of work you have to do to get to it, to get you ready for it and have a shift in thinking and

a shift in feeling and emotions and thoughts. But it's this process that they call amends. And so I sat down with these men and they were like, Eric, if you want to obtain lifelong sobriety and if you want to have this transformational experience, you need to do what what we did. And we went through this process of amends. And what that was, was I made a list of everyone that I'd ever harmed ever. I didn't get to judge how big or small the harm was. If it was a yes or no question, did you harm them? Yes or no? Yes. They go on the list. And then the rules were this, were that if I could make an amend to them, As long as it didn't hurt them or someone else, I had to make it. Personal consequence meant

nothing. I had to put myself in harm's way to accomplish this. And then how you made it was also very structured. And they're very disciplined about this. You never say you're sorry. Your whole fucking life you've been sorry. If people applied what you did to the word sorry, all sorry would mean was, fuck, I got caught. I'm going to do it again. So we don't say sorry in this process. People think it's like you go around apologizing. We don't apologize. You might express regret. And so what we would do is I would go in in these different situations of people and places and I would say, you know, I'm a drug addict and I harmed you. And how I've identified that I've harmed you is I stole from you. I assaulted you. I cheated on you. I whatever. And I'm willing to

do absolutely anything I can to make that right. What can I do to make that? Did I leave anything out? Is there anything that I've harmed you with that I'm unaware of? And you shut up and you let them talk. Sometimes they're like, no, sometimes two hours of them berating you goes by. And then um and then the next question is what what can i do to make this right and whatever they tell you to do you do there were 300 people almost on my list i made amends to put people that i was involved in violence with i made amends to stores that i robbed i made amends i mean if you can think of it i i went and cleaned up all of it what's the craziest thing someone asked you to do say that again what's the craziest thing someone asked you to do is to make amends to them oh god

um i was talking about this the other day uh i made i used to steal from walmart i treated that place like a personal atm right and um sam walton wasn't happy with you no no he's pissed and um and so i went into the walmart and um and and i asked to speak to the manager and and i waited around and i the manager came up i went through my spiel my name's eric i'm a drug addict i want if you don't know them you say i'm on a life and death mission of recovery my life depends upon being here today i've wronged your store how i wronged your store was i stole from here by the best count i probably stole 57 flat screen tvs you know a hundred or more fucking electric toothbrushes infamil by the i mean like do we used to run in there and put when flat screens

actually cost something back then we'd stack up the the flat roll away and um and roll it through the front door and we would know loss prevention was going to come and you know sometimes would sneaking get away with the but sometimes they'd roll out and they'd be like they'd always say the same you know what they say when you're stealing what excuse me sir that's what we called it you get excuse me sir and uh they go excuse me sir and we're like back the up i'm you know and just act crazy and they'd be like oh you know i make 17 an hour take it yeah and don't have a gun yeah exactly and so um so i tell the manager this and this is a longer version uh than the story i told the other day this is what actually happened and she's like long face

like, and she's like, uh, I'm going to have to get loss prevention. Wait right here. I was like, oh fuck. I'm like, I'm going to jail. This is like my third amendment I've ever made. I'm brand new. Right. And they told me Walmart would be an easy one. I'm like, this is not easy. And, um, and so the guy comes out and he happens to be like a higher up in loss prevention. And I go through the process with him and he says, give me your information. And I'm like, all right. And I'm like, I'm going to jail. Like they're going to prosecute me for this. And a couple of days later, he calls me up and says, Eric, listen, we got a real problem with addiction down here at Walmart and we've got a real problem, a lot of people stealing.

And we'd appreciate it if you come in and meet with us and help us out, figure out what the hell, what the hell these addicts are doing to rob us blind. And so I went down, I went to occasionally, they would call when they wanted me to, they would call me and I would go into these trainings and I would teach them all the scams of how we robbed Walmart. It was crazy, right? I mean, we used to go in and take like those electric razors that cost like $100, $200 or electric toothbrushes, and I would get like one of each or a couple of them, and

I would have like a Walmart bag, and I would just put them in the bag, and I would walk to the return desk and return them and get gift cards and then sell the gift cards for 50 cents on the dollar. And it was like ding, ding, ding. It was like 15 minutes. I'd have the guy that was buying the gift cards in the fucking parking lot waiting for me. Go up, hit him with a gift card.

He has 300. Give me $1.50. Cool. them out it's crazy and so that was one another what was their reaction when you're telling them like things like that right which are like they're like you do what yeah yeah they're like stupid but they're still like damn 150 300 like this adds up quick every day yeah you know what i mean like yeah i can't go to walmart i've been there four times this month you know drive me two hours to some other walmart and uh it's crazy bro home depot same thing but um i'd have those little

faucets, you know, the expensive, you know, thing, those things like 500 bucks, a thousand bucks, I'd walk it right up, return it. And, uh, and they would just do it. Cause they'd say, give you store credit, gift card. Yeah. They give you a store credit card and have a nice day. And you know, yeah. And I'd sell those to all the contractors, the home Depot card. So they're getting 50 cents on the dollar money. They love you. Yeah. They love me. And, um, and another time, uh, when I did all those, that overdosing and, uh, four of those overdoses, I ended up in the same emergency room. Wow. Parkland Medical Center. And like, I would like overdose like 30 minutes away. And like somehow they brought me to this fucking place. I drove past five hospitals to get

here. And, um, and I was, you know, I was not pleasant. Like when I thought I got abducted by aliens that first time I woke up, I was naked. They cut my clothes off of me. I felt a cold hand grab me to stuff a catheter in me. They're holding me down. I jumped up, punched a male nurse. I running around, they sedated me, put me out. I woke up like two days later. Every time I would come to down there, I'd cause a scene. One time I'm running around the nurse's station, the emergency room with a Johnny wide open, naked, they're chasing me, you know, just crazy shit. And I AMA'd every single time. They were like, please don't leave. I'm like, I'm fucking out. See ya. Ripping IV lines out of my arm and bouncing out of the hospital, going to get high

and, um, powerlessness just can't not. And so I walk into that emergency room. This is a powerful one. And, um, and I, I asked to speak to whoever runs the emergency room. I'd like the little triage desk. And, um, and they, I got to sit there for like three hours, of course. And this woman comes out and says, can I help you? I said, yeah, can we talk somewhere privately? And we walked through the hospital. We go to this conference room and we sit down and she's like, what can I help you with? And I start telling her the story. I said, Hey, listen, you know, a few years ago, I'm a drug addict. I'm in recovery. I harmed your facility here, your hospital. And a few years ago, there was a span of like six months that I ended up in here like four times on overdoses.

And she's looking at me and I start telling her, I said, you know, this was one time that I came through and I punched a nurse. This is the other time. And she starts fucking crying. She starts crying. She starts crying. And I'm like, okay, like this isn't going as expected. You know what I mean? me it's business as usual like like i've done this 242 times yeah exactly and um and she says eric i remember you wow and um and you came in here so much and you were so dramatic with your stage and then we never saw you again honestly we thought you were dead we talked about you we still talk about you occasionally wondering what happened to you and um and she's crying i start crying and

she says something that fucking hits me like a like a mike tyson punch she says we never see people like you get well and i was like and um and i said what can i do you know we're crying we're hugging you know we're having a moment i said what can i do to make this right she says I'd like to leave your number at the nurse's station." And when we get addicts here that come here, we see them all the time that overdose. They don't listen to us. We're just some nurses.

Would you come speak to them? And I said, absolutely. And over years, I probably saw, I don't know, 150, 200 people bedside in that emergency room. They'd call me two in the morning, two in the afternoon. Eric, we got one down here. Will you come talk to him? And true to my word, you know,

I'd go down there and sit next to them and help a lot of people get sober out of that emergency room. Not everyone listened, but got a few of them. And so just very powerful, powerful experiences like that. Most of them didn't work out the way that I thought they were going to. I had one where, it's kind of a crazy story, where I'd been up shooting cocaine for like three days, right? And you start losing your mind after a couple of days being up doing cocaine. And we had heard that these dudes that we knew had robbed a mini golf place and they robbed the safe. And, you know, they robbed the safe. And I was with a couple of bad dudes and we thought we were badder than those dudes.

And so we were like, well, they robbed the safe. They got the money. Let's rob them. And so that's what we did. And so- Followed the money. Yeah. We set them up.

We went to someone that knew them and they said, come over. And they came in. And it's a long story. But what ended up happening was we robbed them. One of them had a handgun that we didn't know about. My friend got shot. I got shot at, dumped a clip trying to catch me coming out of this house.

My friend got shot in the chest through here. My other friend got shot through his hand and and they took off and everyone dispersed. And and it was this crazy situation, you know. And so in my head, I'm like, I'm a fuck, kill this kid. This kid dead. like you're gonna shoot at me try to kill me and uh that was the first time you shot it no um but in that situation i'm like it's on right and now i got filled with anger i'm filled with hate

he ends up getting pinched because some of the other people tell on him he goes to prison for six years for this wow that kid i put him listen my this is the shift in perspective of old self is dead new self is different a totally different perspective at the time we on the street you shot him you tried to kill me you i go through this recovery process and i start to wake up to some truth around it and i said this guy was you know in the same life that i was but i placed him in a position where he needed to defend himself and as a result that cost him six years of incarceration he went in as a you know i think a 19 20 year old dude and came out 25 26 after doing state prison time. And the state brought, no one told, but the state prosecuted them

off the medical records and, you know, they had enough evidence, but no one testified. And, and so I write this, I, you know, I go through this recovery process and like, I went from, I want to kill this kid to like, fuck, I feel really bad for him. I feel a lot of compassion for what I did for him. And so I'm ready to make this amend and, and I got to this place of of forgiveness with him and ownership of my side of the street, but I don't know where he is. And, and you know, a lot of people live on the street. We don't have big social profiles. Like, you know what I mean? We're hard to find intentionally. And so my friend dies and I go to the funeral or the wake or whatever it was. And then I go to the after

thing and it's a big bonfire and it's at night and I walk up to this fire and I, I sneak between two people it's like shadowy and you can't really see you know and i look to my right and it's him wow and i'm like and he looks at me and i look at him and we're both like this i go can i talk to you i put my hands on body language he goes yeah we can talk and i walk off and i make my approach he says you know i appreciate that and i was wrong too and me and shake hands as men, and one last thing to worry about on the street, and we're all good. I think the funny thing about the immense process and the spiritual journey and the path is it places you in positions that you can't see. You just have to blindly do the work and have the

faith, and you don't know. I got this cat working for me. He moves from Maryland to take a job for me. There's a city. It's like a top 10 worst city in the country. I used to run around. I grew up right outside of, it's called Lawrence, Massachusetts. It's like a drug heathen, like gangs. It's bad. He spent a lot of time there. And I'm telling him about it on like a Sunday afternoon. I'm like, yeah, he's like, bro, let's go for a ride. And they got good Spanish food down there. So we went down to the hood and I'm driving around the hood and just telling stories with this guy that I'm friends with that took a job for me. And I'm driving down Broadway years later and I see him and he's walking with some prostitute and he's about 50 pounds

underweight he's strung out on drugs and i'm like holy and i bust a ue in the middle of the street i roll up on him i'm like bro i jump out of the truck and he just puts his head down and i'm like what's going on and he spills beans he's like yeah i did a up i'm living on the street i can't stop shooting dope smoking crack this hooker girlfriend you You know, like, I'm like, it's a mess. I'm like, get in. And, you know, we were able to get him to treatment. We were able to get him to recovery.

It placed me in a position to be useful to him. And he's sober today. He's in recovery. Yeah, he's living a good life. Yeah. When you think of this process, like that story you just told, what immediately jumps to mind for me is Delonte West.

I don't know if this is, he's a NBA player, former NBA player who, um, on multiple occasions, cause he, former NBA player. So people know who he is, uh, who are into the sports or whatever. And, um, uh, if I remember correctly, there was a photo a couple of years ago that went super viral online, uh, cause he was at a red light begging for money. And, uh, people were like, Whoa, fall from grace, right? You go from playing the NBA to now, you know, you're on the street. And, uh, there's a whole bunch of people who tried to help i think even uh there's a story mark cuban like got in his car or something and i went and found him and like god was like hey we'll help you you know we use the mass facility whatever we

got we you know it's got billions of dollars like yeah we will do what is necessary every resource available i think they sent him to a treatment center and there was like some photos that came out he was like riding horses i mean like the the full-blown probably 50 000 a year you know uh we're gonna get you you're gonna get you well a couple months later photos again he's back on on the street yeah and so i think about like your friend who you saw on the street you were able to get him sober doesn't sound like you sent him to a fifty thousand dollar a year facility doesn't sound like you know he was going viral on the internet any of this stuff in that situation it seems like somebody like a mark human did everything he possibly could you couldn't ask

somebody to do more right what do you think is the difference as to why one person ends up being sober and the other one doesn't. Is it just something that they have to want it or is there something else? I mean, they have to want it. Um, they have to do the work, but they also have to be given the proper guidance and direction of what work to do. Um, and so, you know, it really is situational. Them having to want it is huge, you know, drag the horse to water type of thing. but what's interesting in that is people in recovery can speak to people with this condition in a manner, a language of the heart that nobody else can. Like I've been here, I've been through that. I'm on the other side of it. And it's really meaningful. You know, in a broader context,

I like to tell people that your pain, your trauma, we all go through it. We're all living a human experience. We've all got something that hurts, right? And maybe that's a gift. Whatever you've been through uniquely qualifies you to help people that go through that. But one of the things that's interesting to tie in the business aspect to this about now the addiction treatment center business starts to boom off of the Affordable Health Care Act, private equity companies and groups and financial institutions start to flood in and they get slaughtered on their first round and more in the modern day, they're smarter money. But the next frontier that private equity groups have to figure out in order to be successful in this business

is that. And what I mean by that, and I've had management meetings, I've met with plenty of I'm like, listen, until you guys in your suits and your Harvard MBAs, until you guys figure out that that kid with a criminal record and a face tattoo, who's an employee, is one of the most important people in this facility, you're going to fuck this business up over and over and over again. Because what they're doing is they're coming in and you look at what they do. They buy veterinary clinics, dentists, you know, these different health care, urgent care clinics, and they consolidate and they systemize and they KPI them to death and they sterilize the business and everything is process driven and blah, blah, blah. This is a business that must include the language of the heart. And it's like a different, those guys don't do a good job all the time. Some do, but really understanding that piece of it that, you know, when you buy a veterinary clinic, you don't need a dog to help dogs. you know what i mean yeah and you don't have to be a tooth to be a dentist but in this like you

need people in recovery you have to have that language of the heart and so it's a lot of the trouble that the financial markets and private equity groups are having and figuring it out about this business and how to scale and consolidate you know also it sounds like maybe your star employee doesn't look like that your star employee in some of these other businesses that's what i mean right and so they come in and they see that guy's a threat and they see this one that has a degree and a master's degree and is a therapist they're like oh star employee bad that guy has criminal record and purple hair you know and they they start to do what they do in other businesses and they sterilize them and um you know with the patient facing and

the people that are actually going to help the people that go in there um you know it takes an army it takes a village but those people are incredibly powerful and you need them yeah if somebody's watching this right now and they're addicted to any substance, what is like the one or two things that you think is important for them to hear? That here's the promise of recovery, that you never have to use drugs or alcohol again. But what's even more meaningful is you never have to want to. And so that you can absolutely live a life of freedom, freedom from the obsession of drink and drug and freedom from the pain of what sobriety is if you're willing and able to do the

work um you know that that is absolutely possible for you and that if you can do the work that you have no i mean bro i got sober when 16 years ago on the run for armed robbery amongst a bunch of other crap a fucking degenerate that didn't have a single friend in the world i had no idea my life was ending up like this one foot in front of the other do the work persevere and you just have no idea how god's going to use you and what this thing's going to look like yeah it's um it's powerful right you had the experience and and i think part of uh what is true of most businesses is the founder they have to care they have to understand right they they see the problem they feel the problem they know how to solve the problem uh and many times you know all the like

bullshit uh uh mantras online or whatever you know solve your problem or whatever what is so unique about your story is that your problem yeah a lot of other people had it but every single one of those people have their own story they have their own experience they have their specific thing that is going to be the breakthrough right how many times did somebody try to help you before you wanted to do it before you found the thing that worked for you like it's such a unique thing it's It's not like, hey, everyone needs a fucking piece of software to do Excel. Got it. It counts.

This is a much more personal, emotional thing. And while that is more challenging, it's also much more valuable when you figure it out as you guys did, which I think people kind of – it's a hard business, it seems like, right? It's a very hard business. But they can be very valuable when you figure it out. I agree. It's a labor of love. Yeah. Where can we send people to find you online if they want to learn more?

Instagram is the best place at Eric Spofford find me there awesome listen thank you so much for doing this appreciate you we definitely want to do it

again in the future as you go build the business all over again that's it crazy