Avoid These Mistakes: Lessons from a $115M Exit | Eric Spofford DSH #611

This dude from South Boston, Kevin, he said, You want a job?

I was like, Yeah, I need a job.

He gave me my first job.

My first job was working at a call center.

You hated it?

It's terrible.

You want to know what's funny about it, though?

Do you want to know what they had us calling on?

God's so funny, he's got so many jokes.

We're collecting donations for the New Hampshire Police Association.

So, here I am, like collecting money for the cops, like on the way to armed robbery.

Wow, that's crazy.

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All right, guys, we are here with Eric Spofford.

He just spoke in Salt Lake City in front of 4,000 people, man.

What'd you talk about there?

Yeah, crazy, man.

I told a lot of my story.

You know, it's a story of coming from below rock bottom and being able to accomplish the impossible.

And so I shared a lot of that with them and some of the principles and just lessons that I learned along the way and tied in some entrepreneurship and business stuff and, you know, talked about shooting drugs and robbing people and selling my business for $115 million.

What a story, dude.

Let's start from fifth grade.

That's where you started selling drugs, right?

Yeah, man.

Yeah, I got started real young.

And fifth grade, selling weed, my first, you know, entrepreneurial endeavor was, you know, selling that Mexican brick pack weed back in my generation.

And just a badass little kid, dude, packing a BB gun, listening to rap music,

you know, getting in trouble, getting thrown out of school, getting all sorts of shit.

It's crazy.

Fifth grade, wow.

Did you have a father figure at the time?

Yeah, yeah, dude.

My dad was strong.

My dad, you know, was a blue-collar guy, cut trees down.

He was a logger, a little logging company.

And

it's just, I don't know, that's the way it was.

you didn't even know any of this was happening your parents

no they did i i i got in a lot of trouble and got caught for a lot of shit yeah yeah i don't i just i don't know why i was like that i really don't but i i grew up and just had this

affection for like

you know

being a punk kid you know you know if it wasn't for drug addiction taking me my taking me out and like bringing me to my knees and really like breaking me down to the point where I needed to change my life.

I probably would have ended up like a crime figure.

Wow.

So you were at that volume in terms of selling it.

I got there, not in fifth grade, but I got there, you know, I'm pretty intense.

I mean, if you follow me and know my journey, like I'm an intense dude.

I'm all in on everything that I do.

And so for that period of time growing up, like I was just all in on all the wrong things.

Right.

But

interesting journey along the way, find OxyCotton, 14 years old, 15, become a heroin addict.

15 to almost 22 was really like

about seven years of

just wild stories and addiction and pain and suffering.

Yeah.

Yeah, because you dropped out of school at 15.

Dropped out at 15.

And that was to pursue drugs full-time, pretty much?

Yes, sir.

Wow.

Yep.

And what was that moment at 22 where it just came to a halt?

A lot happened between 15 and it was actually

a couple months before my 22nd birthday.

And so it was this death by a thousand cuts snowball effect of burning my life to the ground in that I

broke all the promises and broke the hearts of the, you know, that I made to the people that love me.

I broke their hearts.

I overdosed five times, ended up on life support all five.

Wow.

In and out of jail, getting arrested, promising I'd never doing it again, doing it again.

A hundred more, I counted at one point of just all the little times and big times that I tried to change my life.

And I had in that time period more than a hundred times where I tried to be different.

I tried to get sober.

I tried to go go legit and failed miserably.

I ended up putting my dad in a position where he had to put me out, you know,

where like he said, you can't come home.

You can't come around here anymore.

You know, you're not welcome

because of what you've become.

And the last few years, I was on the street heavy.

bouncing around, you know, staying here, staying there,

you know, all sorts of stuff.

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Off and so the pivotal moment, what came down to it was I had just gotten out of jail,

had

a mean dope habit.

My addiction was out of control at the time.

I was walking through the hood and I was walking through the neighborhood that I was staying in, which was not a nice one.

And a guy that I knew from the street wanted to buy drugs.

This is December 6th of 2006.

And

he asked me if I could get him.

I said, yeah.

And I took him behind a building in that neighborhood and I rushed them, but I rushed him with a big kitchen knife.

And I robbed him for 82 bucks.

And I took 82 bucks, I bought four bags of heroin.

And that was the last time I ever used drugs or alcohol.

Wow.

And yeah, man, that night,

it's a crazy, crazy story, bro.

You know,

I get back to the apartment.

I buy the drugs.

I get back to the trap house on the third floor of this apartment building, triple decker in the shitty neighborhood that I'm in.

I am sleeping on a pile of blankets in this like drug house.

That's my life, right?

I have two pairs of clothes.

That's it.

I have no possession.

I have nothing.

And

I shoot these four bags of heroin and the neighborhood fills with police.

Blue lights everywhere.

The gig's up.

I'm like, they got me.

The house that I'm staying in, it's like a well-known like police.

Yeah, for sure.

So I'm like, they're coming in here.

Like, they're just going to come get me.

I'm going to prison.

And it is what it is.

And so I hid in the closet.

And in the closet, I stayed there all night long.

Didn't sleep.

Got on my, at some point, you know, in just the quiet hours of the middle of the night,

it's just you and God, you and silence, right?

And I just got on my knees and I just had this moment where I was like, I just started praying.

I wasn't like a religious guy.

I'd never actually been to church.

I'd never actually prayed.

Wow.

Just like it was brand new for me.

I don't know what else to do.

And so I just had this moment of kind of surrender

where I, the prayer went like this.

I said, God, you know,

if you're real,

this isn't going so well.

And, you know, I don't.

I do not, I just remember not wanting to live another single day the way that I was living.

And I remember telling them that, like, if you can't do something different for me, like, I'd rather die.

Like, I'd rather just not be here.

I do not want to continue.

And I don't know how to do anything else.

And so I need some help.

And I never got high again.

Wow.

All from that prayer.

There was a lot of action that followed that prayer up, but that prayer was the beginning.

Yeah.

And, you know, my mom, God bless, she passed away back in 2020 of cancer, but

me and her had had a crazy relationship where, you know, she was in and out of my life.

I was in and out of hers.

And I hadn't spoken to her in some time, but it was the middle of the night, dude.

It was probably like 3.30 in the morning.

And I started her cell phone, started calling her, blowing her phone up.

after the prayer.

Like I said, the prayer, and the only thing I could think to do was call my mom.

And she picked up the phone finally I was like you have to come get me she's like what are you talking about I was like I can't I don't have time to explain you just need to come get me be here early in the morning and so the next morning um

a few hours come by I'm still awake the sun starts to come up and I go through the trap house and I start like putting together this disguise

I got like this white this like homeless dude that was staying there had this like white button-up shirt Yeah.

And I got like these khaki pants.

And I like put the button-up shirt in the khaki pants and like tied the belt on.

And then I got a pair of glasses.

I don't wear glasses, but like they've found them somewhere.

They're like reading glasses.

I put the glasses on and I just dressed myself like I was leaving the house to go to work.

And I walked out of the trap house building thinking that I was, I swear to God, as I was walking out, I was like, the second I walk out, I'm going to get tackled by cops.

And I walked out and beelined to my mom's Subaru,

opened the back door, jumped in the car across the back seat, laying down, shut the door behind me and screamed, go, go, go.

I remember stopping at a rest stop on the way back.

It was a couple hour drive to her house

and just puking my guts out in the bathroom of the rest stop from being sick.

and withdrawals from kicking a heroin habit.

Yeah.

That's where it started, man.

Wow.

Without transitioning into that.

That was day one.

Yeah, day one.

Day one.

December 7th of 2006.

That was that day.

That's my sobriety date, 12,706.

It's been one, 17 years.

I haven't used drugs or drank or had any mind-altering substances whatsoever since that day.

Incredible.

And have a lifelong commitment to never do it again.

That's so cool, man.

So your mom took you back in the house that day?

She let me let me stay on the couch for a couple weeks.

Okay.

Your dad wasn't happy, right?

My dad was pissed.

Oh, oh man yeah he wasn't he wasn't messing with me like it took me months of being sober for him to even start talking to me again really

yeah i mean dude i told him i told everyone that i was gonna do you know be different this time so many times yeah that they were like yeah okay kid shut up you know

i started walking to a meetings um

and

just took it one step at a time.

I was, you know, God gives you what God, you know, what you need when you need it.

He doesn't always give you what you want, but he'll always give you what you need.

And he doesn't make too, too hard of terms for those who seek him, you know?

And at the time, I was

not, you know, certainly not this spiritually evolved creature, but like I was saying these little prayers and walking to these meetings and just one thing at a time, like life started to work out for me, right?

I was at the meeting.

It's a crazy story, bro.

This kid keeps calling me, right?

So I would hustle drugs and sell them and do the street thing.

This kid keeps calling me the first few days and I'm like sick, bro.

I'm going through withdrawals trying to get clean.

And he's like, I need you to get me heroin.

I need you to get me heroin.

Obviously, I didn't call it heroin, but I need you to get dope.

And I was like, dude, I'm trying to get sober.

I'm trying to leave me alone.

Like, stop calling me.

And he kept calling.

I felt so disrespected by that, you know?

And I was like, you know what?

Cool, come down here.

Dude, I was like four or five days clean.

Yeah.

Maybe three or four.

and uh he had one of those little i don't remember the car little honda crx's it's like a two-passenger honda it's like a little two two-seater car he picked me up and i was like yeah bring me over here i gotta go in and get it and i had no intention of getting drugs bro not whatsoever he just pissed me off so much yeah this is the funny shit that would happen to me though and it was saturday it was a saturday And

I opened the door and I was like, I was like, I got to go in this building right here and get the shit.

Give me the money.

It's like 600 bucks.

Yeah.

And he was like, no, no, no, I'm not giving you the money.

I was like, no, give me the money.

I need to go get the stuff.

He'll call me fucking days.

What do you mean you're not giving me the money?

So I'm not giving you the money.

I'm like, all right, all right.

Let me see the money.

And he's like, oh, just make sure you're not trying to rip me off.

Show me the money.

And dude, the kid pulls out the like money and like fans it out.

And I just rocked him.

And I took the money, which isn't, I'm not proud of that.

But I ended up going to this NA meeting, right?

Yes.

NA.

Narcotics anonymous like aa but for drugs and it was a saturday night narcotics anonymous meeting bro and i'm like

five or six days clean 135 140 pounds so i'm like 206 right now geez think of how skinny i was and um

and i remember i just raised my hand and i was like i don't know what to do trying to stay clean Some kid wouldn't leave me alone, so I robbed him earlier.

All this money.

I probably shouldn't even have money right now because

only thing i really know how to do is get high

you guys want to go to denny's and dude i took the entire na meeting out to denny's with the money that i robbed this kid it was crazy wow and um and then at the meeting this dude from south boston kevin is sitting across me he's like what's your deal i'm like what do you mean what's my deal he's like what are you doing and started talking to him he's like you want a job i was like yeah i need a job he's like cool come down Monday morning.

And he gave me my first job.

My first job was working in a call center for $200 a week.

Wow.

Plus commissions, sitting there at a little fucking desk with a little headset with an auto-dialer.

You know, you hated it?

It's terrible.

You want to know what's funny about it, though?

Do you want to know what they had us calling on?

What?

Dude, here I am, big, bad gangster, right?

Fucking tough guy, killer from the streets, ego out of control, right?

Big badass.

God's so funny.

He's got so many jokes.

He puts on,

I go, I don't even know what the job is, right?

I go down there.

I'm like, whatever, dude, 200 bucks a week.

I can get some food.

Like, cool.

I'm in.

And, and he's like, all right, man, listen, you just sit here, explain this whole thing.

We're collecting donations for the New Hampshire Police Association.

So here I am, like, collecting money for the cops, like on the way to armed robbery.

Wow.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

So ironic.

So even though you had no money, you said you had a big ego?

Yeah, dude, like big street ego, right?

I mean, dudes hit jail with big egos that have nothing, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I had a whole lot of recovery and personal development work to do ahead of me.

That's interesting because now you've made a ton of money and I don't see any ego.

So

a lot of personal development there, right?

Huge.

Yeah.

I saw on another show, you're a big reader, even though you dropped out at 15, you said you're one of the most educated people you know.

I mean, arguably, you you know one of the most educated dropouts and and

yeah i forget how i said that i didn't mean to sound like more educated than everyone else but people always ask me like oh what's your last grade of school completed or where'd you go to school

the truth is that i dropped out of high school in the 10th grade of 15 years old the truth also is is that i'm highly educated Because I've been in self-education this entire time.

I taught myself enough on my own without ever stepping back into a formal classroom or any formal academic training or education or even getting a GED to build a business that did $55 million a year that I sold for $115 million, let alone the real estate and all the other stuff that I've accomplished in my life.

That's all through being able to understanding how to access information.

how to learn, how to process, how to digest it.

Right.

But some people are professional students forever.

They'll just sit there.

You see them with these masterminds, right?

And I'm like, well, fucker, I've seen you in like 20 masterminds.

What have you done?

Like, you know what I mean?

Like, what, what you, dude, you've heard from the best of the best.

You've heard from everybody at this point.

The next part is like being able to take that education, that information, and

make it actionable

with a plan of execution.

Yeah, take action on it, right?

100%.

Some people read all the time.

They go to events every day, but they don't do shit.

And then, but it's, it's, That's important, self-education, huge being,

you know, a student of the game.

But a lot of people lack the humility to even get that part down.

See that a lot on the scene, right?

They're so they're so committed to what they already know that their glass is so full that there's nothing left to even add to it, right?

Right?

So, like, staying with that hungry appetite, that curiosity of constantly in the pursuit for more information and

more understanding, but then also

being able to execute on the information.

Absolutely.

So, selling that company for 115 mil three years ago, did you feel like you lost a step after, or were you more motivated to keep going?

Dude, I don't talk about this a lot, but I sold that company on December 21st, 2021.

I was

36 years old.

I was 23 when I started it.

I grew up there.

Think about the life of a young man at 23 years old and how much happens between 23

and

36.

How many times do you evolve and change?

How much life happens in between then?

And so like, I was so ingrained in that business as part of my identity, part of my day-to-day.

When I sat at the closing table and everyone signed off on being closed,

and they said that they had sent the wires, I don't know why.

They had like retained me as a consultant.

I don't know why I thought this, but like

eight minutes later, I think I counted, it was eight minutes, and I went to refresh my company email and it asked me for my password.

And I was like, they waited eight minutes to lock me out.

God damn, like

you know and so i struggled like i went from

the general of 325 people on this team uh you know to having a mission to being busy to getting emails and all the little dopamine hits from the texts and the group texts and the and the emails and the you know and all

and being busy all day long to like

nothing wow that next day I woke up and it was like looking at my phone, like

nothing, bro.

No emails.

I had a new brand new email address.

Nobody was emailing me.

Like nobody was texting me.

My friends, you know what I mean?

Super stuff.

But like compared to like how busy my phone is now, if I can go with that thing for 25 minutes while I'm running a company, there's 50 things on there.

Right.

And so like the quietness, you know, the stillness and all of that created space where I struggled.

I was in Miami.

I like started going out,

like going to like clubs.

And I'm like, all right, yeah.

I'd never done it, bro.

I'm sober.

You know what I mean?

I got sober.

I was 21 years old.

So I'd never been to a real nightclub.

I'd never like done that whole thing.

And so I spent a couple months out doing that.

And I was like, this sucks.

Dude, this is so terrible.

I bought a plane.

I bought a boat,

big boat.

And

I like had all the stuff, dude.

And I was like, this is fucking miserable.

Wow.

Yeah, it's crazy, right?

That is crazy.

Cause you could buy whatever you want with that money.

I did, bro.

I bought a 92-foot boat.

I bought a mid-sized jet.

I bought a $20 million house in the hottest neighborhood in Miami.

Fuck Richard Miller.

Stupid shit, jewelry, fucking.

It's just cars.

Yeah.

It's just all kind of like, I was like, this sucks.

And so I made it a couple months and I was like, I need a mission, dude.

I'm not, I'm a guy that like

I got to get up and go.

You know what I mean?

I got to start.

I have to build.

I have to create.

I'm happiest when I'm in that.

And so that's when I made the decision to just like turn back into it and start building again.

Right.

Yeah.

How long did it take you to find that mission after you sold these?

A couple months.

It took me a couple months to realize that

I needed one.

And then it was a process of figuring out, okay, what am I going to do next?

You know?

Yeah.

Like, what am I going to do?

Real estate.

I do a lot of real estate, bro.

It's so fucking boring.

I'm glad someone said it, right?

Because no one talks about it.

Stop pretending like real estate is sexy.

It's not.

It's great.

You want to create wealth.

You want to create cash flow.

You don't to invest and capture appreciation in your money, turn your cash into an asset, depreciation for taxes.

Like there's all the, dude, I can talk on it all day long.

I've been talking about real estate for this podcast.

Talk about real estate.

I've been doing it forever.

I've done hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions.

But God, it's boring, dude.

It's hurry up and wait.

Put the offer in, wait.

They respond, think about it, respond to them, volley it back.

Do this, wait, do that, wait, do this, this, wait, get the deal closed, wait, wait.

Like, it's just like, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom.

So I like, yes, I was doing real estate, but I was so bored with it.

And don't get me wrong, I still do real estate.

I love it.

It's necessary.

You should.

But then I was like, I need to do, I need to be like active in a mission.

So that's when I did, took up really two things.

One of which was

I've started another addiction treatment business.

We're on our second facility now.

Nice.

So we have a big one that we built from scratch in Ohio.

We have another one we've recently acquired and are integrating in West Palm Beach, Florida.

We're sitting probably cumulatively,

I don't know, maybe like 140 employees.

Wow, that was quick.

Yeah.

You know, I started putting the game plan together in 2022.

and got to real estate in 2022 and developed the business, hired the staff.

And we admitted our first patient on January 1st of 2023.

Holy crap.

So a year old.

Yeah, it's well, you know, a year and what's it?

Three months?

April.

Yeah.

So 15 months, 16 months, something like that.

So we're kicking ass.

We're fucking kicking ass and taking names.

We're just getting started.

Because you've already done it before.

So you could probably do it in half the time on it.

100%.

And that was part of that figuring it out, right?

Was like, do I, I was looking at restaurants and nightclubs and solar businesses and, you know, all these different things.

that I'm like

anything that you do there's there's this index of time that it takes to become a world-class expert at it but I'm a world-class expert at addiction treatment I've been doing it my entire adult life

I understand it inside and out and so like the learning curve on something else was going to set me back so much time plus i'm in recovery it's a labor of love i want to help people and i really you know care about the business and care about the people and the mission.

And so we're doing very well with that.

And that's busy.

It's non-stop.

And so it's very mission-based.

It's very fast.

That's more exciting, right?

You know.

And then the other thing that I did was entered into kind of our space was I decided to want to build like a personal brand

content.

See if I could, you know, I had no idea how it would go.

I really didn't.

I was like, I don't know.

You know what I mean?

I'd already been like in the covered in the news for more than a decade and like very well known in my home state, my home area,

but not on social media through content

and not, you know, speaking on stages for 4,000 people, you know, doing stuff like that.

You've been killing it too.

Thank you.

Yeah, getting a ton of views.

Yeah, I appreciate it.

And so, you know, made the decision to pivot and start to build that up.

And that is probably one of the funnest things that I'm doing because I get to do stuff like this, dude.

I get to pull up and see you

and meet cool people and go to events like Limitless and meet, I mean, dude, think about who was there.

Everyone was

Trump.

Trump Jr., dude, like even Ed Milad,

Pedros, Pedros, some of the best humans that you could ever wish to meet at one spot, you know?

Yeah.

And like, just how impactful that is to be able to be a part of that community.

Dude, the ripple effect just from from that event will be probably a billion dollars.

Crazy.

Just all the business that's going to be done over the next 10, 25 years from that event.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so I've really enjoyed that.

And, and, and that has been more a game of like

relationships and impact, right?

Yeah.

I was at the gym this morning, dude, three in Vegas, bro.

I'm, I'm in Vegas maybe

three or four times a year.

And dude, I had like three different people come up and like thank me for my content and tell not just like, hey, thank, you know, take a picture and thank you for content, but like, bro, you inspired me to stop smoking weed.

Wow.

You inspired me to stop drinking.

Like

it happened to me just in both airports.

I probably met six or seven different people between Utah and Vegas.

And like that stuff is like, bro, that's the, that's legacy shit.

Yeah, that hits deep, man.

You're saving families now.

Yeah, so that's cool, you know?

Absolutely.

I enjoy that.

And you yourself were in a sober house, right?

For two years, you lived with 11 guys.

When I started it, yeah, I mean, I myself was a client at many sober houses before I finally got sober.

And then that was the beginning of the business.

Was

yeah, yeah.

And I think that's important that you got that perspective as a client.

And I think that's a big part of why you're trusting me.

People ask me all the time.

They're like, how'd you figure that business out?

I was like, I was a client one time.

I went to so many of them.

I saw all of them.

You probably saw the shitty ones, the good ones.

100%.

What they were doing, what worked right,

what went well, what didn't.

Yeah.

100%.

most of them have high turnover right yeah dude I mean the statistics for people finding recovery are not good it's very hard right out of every person that comes into an inpatient treatment facility they say

whoever they is the people with the studies say that one out of 33 will make it to a year of sobriety dang that's it it's only three percent three percent super low hundred people come in dude three are making it to a year why do you think it's so low this is how challenging it is a lot of it's mental right it's all mental it's all mental in action and like

dude like you come to recovery what do you need to change everything

absolutely everything bro everything's got to go yeah you know your old ideas your belief systems your friends where you go like all of it you have to change all of it you know

and it's very hard and so you know like people you ask them to give up

addiction as a as an illness is like this internal condition of unrest, unease, and discomfort, right?

You see an addict or an alcoholic in sobriety while they're in the grips of their illness, right?

They're not doing so hot, right?

You ever see an alcoholic try to like white knuckle staying sober?

It's tough, right?

My dad was an alcoholic.

Yeah.

And so like, I don't know if you can relate to this.

I don't know if it's true.

We've never talked about it, but like in periods of time where your dad would like give up drinking for a couple of days or a couple weeks he's probably a bear yeah suffering with anxiety depression restlessness irritability discontentedness like you know like crazy

because we have such a difficult time regulating our affect and our emotions because we become so accustomed to

i can take this pop that top drink it And a hundred times out of a hundred times, I know exactly how I'm going to feel.

Right.

And I'm impervious to the world around me.

Right.

Like, if I'm drunk, I'm on, you know, drinking, or I'm under the effects of heroin,

dude, anything could happen.

And I'd be like,

whoa.

You know what I mean?

You'd be emotionless.

Yeah, yeah, fully, totally.

So that just totally numbs you.

Full affect regulation.

Damn.

And so you think about that.

And now we take it away from you.

Like, you can't have it anymore.

Now figure it out.

And you do the work.

Yeah.

And sometimes you're in jail, so you're just withdrawing in jail, too.

yeah that must be tough geez what was the longest stint you had in uh jail months i was in and out a lot okay yeah i wasn't like a big long nothing serious nothing like years no i never did years or anything no no

that's not my story which is impressive because you were dealing it so most of those guys get bro listen let me tell you something

It's crazy, you know, running in a circle like myself, I get lumped into all these guys with these crazy stories and like all this stuff.

And like somehow, like going to prison for long periods of time becomes a badge of honor.

Like,

just to put this out there for the world, like going to prison doesn't make you like a gangster criminal.

It just means you got fucking caught.

Yeah.

Like,

you see what I'm saying?

Yeah, they call it street crowd, right?

I like my gangsters and my criminals are the ones that don't get caught.

Yeah.

You know, the smart, intelligent ones.

Yeah, I'd rather roll with those guys for sure.

Yeah, you know, and so I did my best to try to avoid ending up in there for a long period of time.

Did it, man?

On your site, you have a tab dedicated to a lawsuit.

Yeah.

You're suing New Hampshire Public Radio?

I did.

It's over.

Okay.

What was that about?

92 days after I sold my company, they wrote, they were a very liberal news agency.

I have had very conservative political ties for a long period of time.

I was...

tight with the Republican governor.

I, you know,

had ties to the Trump administration.

I mean, I did a lot, and they're a very liberal organization, and they wrote a defamatory hit piece on me

saying that I sent, it was, I sold my business December 21st, 2021, and the article came out in March of 2022.

Okay.

And they said that I sent a disappearing picture of my penis on Snapchat to a former patient in 2017.

Wow.

And made it like headline news and called that sexual assault.

Jeez.

I was was like, oh, I didn't realize I could assault someone with a fucking dick pic.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

They said, did you send a dick pic?

I said, many, just not that one.

You know, I never did it.

It was complete fucking fabricated bullshit.

Damn.

And they came at me hard, this little New Hampshire, you know, thing.

And it was a bunch of shit.

And so, you know, I'm a fighter, dude.

Like, if I was wrong, I would have taken the L.

I've done it plenty of times in my life.

I would be like, you know what, guys?

I was at a rough time in life and my conduct was not good.

And I own it and it is what it is.

But the fact is, is that they wrote an article with

no evidence.

There's no picture.

They didn't even have a pick.

They didn't have anyone that said they saw the pick.

Oh, they didn't even have a girl.

They had the girl.

That's it.

Oh, okay.

And there's this whole other, there's this whole other, like, she had asked me for all this free treatment for her friends and tried.

This is, of course, such a big story here to unpack that,

you know, I never had a chance to defend myself.

They never even, they said, like, well, we asked him for a comment.

They just said,

they never like gave me like, hey, this is what they said.

Would you like to respond?

If they had, I would have been like, yeah, I have that girl texting me for two fucking years.

Here's all the messages

like of me ignoring her and like all this crazy shit.

And she was like asking me for free scholarship beds.

And I was just nuts, bro.

Crazy.

And so, yeah, when they came at me, I had to sit back and I was like, I got two sons, I got two little boys.

And I was like, I can't just take this, dude.

I'm not, I'm not like in this day of, you know, when things have cooled off a lot.

That was 2022.

This is 2024.

Yeah.

But you remember, like, they had all this, like, fucking everyone getting me too'd and all this crazy media and all this crazy shit going on.

Some of which for those dudes was probably deserved.

You know what I mean?

Some of which probably was not.

Yeah, cancel culture was huge that year.

I remember.

Huge.

I was scared of it that year.

Dude, it was 92 days after I sold my business.

Yeah, so they could still revoke it, right?

They came out of the woodwork.

Yeah, something like that could make, I don't know what, what could happen.

I don't, nothing.

I mean,

there was no case there, right?

I never was, I never had a single litigation attorney contact me to sue me.

They, they structured the headline in a way where people thought that I was arrested.

Oh, my God.

Law enforcement never one time contacted me with a single question, not a fucking email, nothing.

Crazy.

Like, there was no investigation.

There was no report.

There was no civil suit.

There was no anything.

There were no witnesses.

There were no evidence.

Yeah.

It was just one fucking lunatic reporter who's obsessed with me, who hasn't written anything about anything besides me since the beginning of COVID.

Her entire career has been fucking chasing me around.

That's insane.

Just for political belief?

I don't know, dude.

She needs a mental health evaluation.

Yeah, I kind of don't.

So I sued him.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

I was like, all right, you know, and at least I, and the reason I put it on my website, it's 398 pages.

Yeah, it was long.

I couldn't even go through the whole thing.

But it's like, bro, you got a question about it?

Here's everything.

Yeah.

Full open kimono, right?

Like it's all there, every related document to the entire thing.

So if you have a question about it, you Google it, you see the stupid article, you can go to my fucking website, the whole lawsuit's there.

And so before you have a goddamn thing to say, you better read the whole thing before you form an opinion.

Yeah.

Because the facts are crazy.

Dude, she used my kids' mom,

my, my, like, contentious,

open custody dispute, not a great situation with my oldest son's mother

was one of the people coordinating people against me really in cahoots with the fucking reporter.

That's going to be a biased opinion, obviously.

You think?

She's my baby mama.

You know what I mean?

I don't know about the rest of you gentlemen.

If your baby mamas are in huge support of you, but

so anyways, I don't really want to talk about too much, but that's what happened, dude.

They came for me and I had to stand on my back legs and fight for what I thought was right.

Yeah, I feel that.

Yeah, certain info.

I'm careful with publicizing.

Politics is one of them, you know.

It was the biggest mistake of my career.

Really?

If I had never, dude, go read the article.

Okay.

And it's that.

And then, and then.

the two-thirds of the article or something is about my political relationships, how much money I've made, how much stuff I have.

Like it was just this total smear job about nothing that's fucking relevant.

And it was like tying me to all the political stuff.

And I threw myself in the political arena.

I testified to the United States Senate in 2015.

And the Republican Party is the one who put me in there in Washington, D.C., on the Senate floor, Eric Spofford.

Crazy.

December 7th.

It's the day that I was celebrating nine years of sobriety.

And that was in 2015, which is the same year that is leading up to the 2016 election cycle where Trump gets fucking elected.

And so I, in that time period, I got in there with good intentions,

but addiction became a very politicized issue.

In the 2016

election, it was the number one issue for voters.

Really?

Yes.

People don't know.

Oh, I had no idea.

Google it.

It was, I mean, now that's what, eight years ago?

Yeah.

Right.

So what was the divide there?

Like a certain side was in favor of these houses, certain side wasn't?

No, they were both trying to jockey the issue.

And so in, if you were an addiction treatment or recovery

person of status with an audience,

you either got grabbed up by the Republicans or the Democrats.

Oh, okay.

And they like show ponied you.

And that's exactly what happened to me.

I got show ponied.

And here's our recovery guy with the Republicans, which put a giant target on my back.

Dang.

For sure, dude.

Yeah, because you're segmenting half the population at that point.

I didn't know that.

I mean, candidly, like, I wasn't all I was thinking was,

mind you, bro, in 2015, the political scene's a lot different.

Yeah, it was way more casual.

Way more

conversations.

Across the aisle shit is fine.

Like, people weren't

crazy yet.

Like, that stuff is about to happen.

Right.

When I got in there, it didn't happen.

And so I got caught in all of that.

And, like, the truth is this, is that, like,

I don't care that much.

You know what I mean?

I really don't.

And so they painted me as this big Republican.

I donated to Republicans.

They had all the money that I gave them.

And they accused me of fucking getting these con.

It was crazy, bro.

And I care about like freedom.

I care about our country.

I care about addiction.

I care about like, we all have our core issues, right?

Like, this is the stuff I really care about.

All of it's important, but like,

I really care about these issues.

And addiction for me was mine because

all the impact that it had on my life, it killed all my friends.

Wow.

All my friends are dead, bro.

Holy crap.

I was crying that stage.

I played it off.

If you watch that talk again, for anyone that wants to see it, it'll be on my YouTube, The limitless speech, it's 20 minutes long.

There's a point in that talk where I stopped and I said that

I just explained to people that like everybody that I grew up with is dead.

All of them.

They're all gone.

Every single one of them.

I'm the last of the Mohicans.

I'm the only survivor.

Holy crap.

And I say it that dramatically so you can really understand how much I mean.

Like,

bro, I'll give you an image.

I'm like in my teenage years, 16 17 18 years old partying at my dad's house it's a summer night that's happened a hundred times

i i got people in my backyard people in my basement you know it's up in new england so we have those basements with like the bulkheads with the stairs with the double doors open yeah we got the big tall speakers with the speaker wire like going out into the backyard this the cd player bumping dude playing music people drinking beers smoking blunts chilling right

I can I can remember some of these parties walking through them Philly blunt cracks you know you used to crack the blunts and open them up the Philly blunts rolling up weed all my friends all the homies drinking and I'm like walking through and seeing this one and these people are talking and this group over here and that group over there

group and I remember that and this isn't a made-up thing these are like actual memories that I have of of these parties that I would have at my dad's house.

And there's maybe a hundred people there, 75 people.

And out of those, there's probably like fucking less than five that are still alive.

That's insane.

When I think about that memory walking through, bro, I'm looking at a bunch of ghosts.

They're all gone.

I attended every one of their funerals.

Every one of their fucking mothers cried on my shoulder.

Oh, my gosh.

And so when it came to like mission time, this is how I got into politics.

I started, something needs to get done.

I started reaching out.

And how I got into the Republican thing was they were the first ones that grabbed me.

If the Republicans, I didn't even, when I started doing that, bro, this sounds stupid.

People might make fun of me.

I couldn't have fucking told you what a Democrat or Republican was.

We had some senators and I just started writing everyone.

I was like, something needs to get done here.

Like, what are we doing?

And then the Republicans grabbed me up.

Like, I didn't care about politics at all.

I wasn't even thinking about that.

So you would have went Democrat if they approached you first.

I would have went the issue, anyone that would have listened, my fucking friends are dying.

Not only are my friends dying and I talk about them, I'm on the front lines of America's addiction crisis and I'm watching thousands of young people die.

There are 112,000 people died of fentanyl overdoses in America last year.

You are statistically, as an 18 to 50 year old American, more likely to die of a drug overdose than a car accident.

It surpassed car accidents as a leading cause of loss of accidental loss of life years ago.

Wow.

Think about that.

That's not talked about.

New Hampshire, my home state, is one of the top per capita overdose death

states in the country.

It leads the top three spots are New Hampshire, Ohio, and Kentucky.

Why is New Hampshire so bad?

I don't fucking know, dude.

Seems so random.

It's so random.

It really is.

I have never been able to figure that out.

Because they're like, oh, well, maybe it's because there's not a lot going on there.

I'm like, there's not much going on in North Dakota either or Idaho or Indiana or, you know what I mean?

Like, there's a lot of boring states.

Yeah.

So I don't know why that is, man.

I really don't.

But

I'm watching people die

just falling out around, dude.

Like, I don't know how to explain.

There were days, single days, where my phone would ring and I would know five people that died.

Holy crap, on one day?

Yes.

Which sounds dramatic, bro, but like it was wiping out an entire generation right in front of me.

Yeah, because one bad bachelor spread.

Mind you, I'm the CEO of the largest addiction treatment provider in all of New England.

So I have visibility, like

stem to stern.

You know what I mean?

You got all the data.

Yeah.

And so, I mean, we treated, we had 5,000 patients a year.

Holy crap.

That's like 10 a day.

15 a day.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

It's a ton.

and

and so, like, it was just overwhelming, bro.

It was traumatizing, and it was overwhelming.

And so, that's how I got involved in politics.

I did not get involved in politics because I was like,

you know, what I'm trying to think of something to say.

I don't even like that, I didn't care about any of it.

The only thing that I cared about was what was right in front of me.

Yeah, so the Republicans helped out, though.

Did they?

I mean, some things got done, but

we haven't even moderately slowed down this problem.

Like, nothing's better.

It's worse.

Yeah.

Gets worse every year, right?

Health in general is just declining every single year.

Yeah.

And so.

So is the fix just making more of these centers?

Is that going to fix it?

Or is there more proactive?

No, because you're going to think of it like this.

Only a small percentage of the people that even need treatment get treatment.

So by the time they need treatment, they're they're already a drug addict.

So you have to fix the front of the problem.

There's a manufacturing line that's creating this.

So you have to start asking hard questions like,

why are people becoming alcoholics?

And why are people becoming drug addicts?

There's more now than ever.

This

look at my grandparents, probably your great-grandparents or something's generation.

It wasn't like this.

Was it a predominant problem the way that it is today?

He's an amazing guy.

His name is Bruce Alexander.

He's a social scientist from Vancouver, Canada.

He wrote the foreword to a book that I published, co-authored in 2019 called Real People, Real Recovery, Overcoming Addiction in Modern America.

If anyone wants to look that up, it's on Amazon or wherever else you buy books.

And he wrote his own book called The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in the Poverty of Spirit.

And I believe that

he scratched the surface of the root cause of addiction.

It's in a really interesting way.

I'll tell you about it.

He looked at the belief systems of how we teach addiction to our clinical and medical people in the textbooks.

And essentially what he found was there's a science experiment that A lot of people are familiar with, right?

They take a rat, they put it in a rat cage, they give it two bottles of drinking water.

One has regular H2O, and the other one is infused with drugs.

They run it with morphine, which is essentially heroin, and they also run it with cocaine.

In that,

the rat tries both, feels the euphoric intoxicating effects of the drug water, prefers the drug water.

continues to become addicted to drugs, starts to refuse food, goes through full-blown addiction, and almost always overdoses and dies or dies of drug-related complications from using the drugs, right?

The belief system that's born out of that is that

drugs are bad,

there are chemical hooks in heroin and cocaine, right?

Don't you believe this?

Like, if you do heroin, what's going to happen?

You'll do it again, you'll be a heroin addict, yeah, right?

Cocaine's addictive, don't do it.

That's interesting.

So, the substance is the problem,

so the substance is chemical hooks.

And so, what stems out of that

Prohibition mindset.

The war on drugs.

If we, I mean, how many Americans believe that if we eradicate the streets of heroin and cocaine, that there will be no more addiction?

Well, we spent fucking a trillion dollars on it.

So somebody better at least believe it.

It's not true, but they should at least be convicted in that belief, right?

Yeah.

Bruce looks at it.

You see, so you see this little rat and this philosophy and how it stems all the way into how it's had widespread ripple effect throughout society.

It's crazy.

Okay.

Bruce looks at it and says, Bruce is like in his 80s, by the way, now.

I had him come to New Hampshire for a live event.

He took a train the whole way.

I didn't even know that was possible.

I didn't either.

He figured it out.

He went here and went there and went here, and then he ended up at there.

But he looks at it and says, wait a minute.

We have not considered the environment.

What's the worst form of punishment we have for a human being?

Jail, prison.

And if you're bad in prison, what do they do?

Sentence you to death.

If you're bad in prison, what do they do?

They make you stay longer, right?

They isolate you.

Oh, isolate, yeah.

They go to shoe, security housing unit.

Isolation.

One man cell, 23-hour lockdown.

They let you out to maybe shower if you're not bird bathing in your cell or let you out to an isolated cage.

It's complete isolation.

It's the worst form of punishment besides capital punishment that we have for human beings is isolation.

We ran this experiment on a rat who is in the worst form of punishment that we could possibly offer a human.

And so he came along and said, let's try something different.

And he tried this experiment called Rat Park.

And Rat Park was, he built this enormous rat cage.

And it had wood chips and rat toys and aluminum cans.

And like, dude, everything that a rat would want is in this giant freaking rat cage.

It's like 10 feet long.

And

in Rat Park, it's got tunnels, all sorts of shit.

And in Rat Park,

he introduces the drinking water and he introduces the drug water.

If heroin has the chemical compound that will create addiction within a rat or a human being, and that's true.

And the substance is the problem, then the environment doesn't matter.

Meaning that those rats are going to be in rat park, they're going to go up there, they're going to try both, and they're going to do what the other rat did in isolation.

And they're all going to, what's going to happen?

If we just gave heroin to society right now, same thing, what's going to happen?

Everyone's going to become a heroin addict.

In this thing, all these rats should become addicted to heroin, right?

Yeah.

The rats try both.

They get intoxicated.

They feel the euphoric effects.

They understand the presence of the drugged water.

They understand the regular drinking water.

They rarely ever use the drugged water.

Every once in a while, they'll take a little bit because they like to party, but not one rat becomes addicted.

Not one rat becomes physically addicted.

And no rats die of any overdoses.

Wow.

So it's all environment.

So, interesting enough, to complete the experiment talk, and then we'll unpack that a little bit and what that means for society

and why this will never get any airplay.

He goes and takes a rat and puts it in an isolated box, gets it addicted.

Now you have this rat that's in isolation that's addicted to heroin.

And now he goes and introduces it into this lovely rat park where these rats are procreating, having rat babies, playing in the tunnels and the aluminum cans, and living this very productive, modern rat civilized life, right?

It's like releasing someone from, you know, whatever, into society.

What happens?

The rat

understands the drugged water's presence, understands the drinking water, sees the rat community and chooses to not use drugs, chooses to endure painful withdrawals to come off of the drugs and become part of the rat park community.

It does not continue to be this derelict, drug add, drug-addicted rat that it should be if a lot of the ways that we think about addiction in modern America and society and western civilization is correct and so what he came around came off of that with is what he describes as the dislocation theory of addiction and the dislocation theory of addiction when you look at uh decade over decade and really peel this back it's like wow this makes a lot of sense we have a growing stress response we are

under significantly more stress as

20 something and 30 something how old are you 27.

okay i'm I'm glad I didn't fuck that up.

20-something and 30-something men than our parents were at 20 and 30-something.

So, you think people are more stressed?

100% they are.

Interesting.

100%.

And as opposed to our grandparents and our great-grandparents.

Society is fractured.

It's fragmented, right?

Connection is the opposite of addiction.

When you look at what a human being is, is that we are

native tribal animals, sophisticated pack animals that are meant to be interconnected to each other and have jobs and roles and tasks and missions.

We're so far away from our traditional ways and our cultures that

we've become completely dislocated.

And as a result of that, we live under a heightened state of stress response.

I mean,

look at the numbers.

Look at how many people are diagnosed with a mental health illness.

Look at how many people take, I don't know the number, but it's enormous.

How many people are prescribed SSRI antidepressants and antipsychotic medication?

And there are 330 million Americans and there are 46.5 million Americans that have a substance use disorder.

Jeez.

Think about that.

Really high.

Fucking enormous.

It's huge.

It's the most prevalent crisis this country is facing that nobody talks about.

Even I got diagnosed and I feel like I got pretty good mental resilience, but I got hit with anxiety and depression in college yeah

pretty crazy very you know and so

you know

why will that never why will that it why that information if you have addiction

that information is mind-blowing right

why will it never get legs how do you make money on it medicine

That's this is about changing society.

This is about changing the way that we live.

You can't prescribe rat park to someone, right?

Right.

And so the reason why it'll never really be impactful on

policy or things that happen in modern society is exactly that.

Big pharma, you know, just there's no way to capitalize on it.

That makes sense, though.

That's why something like AA works because you're around a bunch of sober people.

AA is nothing but modern day rat park for fucking alcoholics.

It's a community.

uh traditions there's like it's it literally that is why it works yeah and that's why it was so unbelievably successful even though it's so unorganized and not profitable oh it's not profitable they don't make any money oh wow i didn't know nobody nobody you can't buy stock in aa but don't you pay them like a fee no you go free oh really they pass a basket and you put a dollar in it as a donation so they buy cookies and coffee for the meeting oh that's cool that's how it should be though 100 yeah But that's why it blew up and that's why it's so successful.

You know?

Love it.

Yeah.

That's great advice, though, because people watching this, there's going to be someone with addiction if they just get around it.

Bro, fuck, always.

I get, dude, I get dozens.

I love them.

I read every single one of them.

I try to respond to as many as I can messages and people that come up to me of like,

you know, that see this content and like it's impactful to them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just change your circle, get around sober people.

100%.

It's everything.

Wow.

That study is fascinating.

I never would have thought that.

Super, bro.

Yeah, I would have flamed the drug.

Yeah, anyone who thinks that's fascinating, you can get Bruce Alexander's book, Globalization of Addiction: A Study in the Poverty of Spirit.

That's a book that really, it's like this thing.

Love it.

We'll link it below, man.

Anything else you want to promote or close off with?

Nah, man.

Just talking shit.

Appreciate it, man.

We'll link your IG below.

Yeah, appreciate it.

Thanks so much for coming on, man.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Thanks for watching, guys.

As always, see you tomorrow.