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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show board member of the Shine a Light Foundation, Robert Banghart.
Now as you will hear, Robert has an incredibly powerful story from his early life, his journey
into the world of addiction, how that led him into homelessness, the countless people
who are homeless and live underneath the city of Las Vegas in their tunnel system, how he
survived his own attempted murder, his recovery, the encapsulating community that Shine a Light
Foundation creates for an addict to get themself back off the streets and onto their feet and
so much more.
Now before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment,
go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and
leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for
others to find.
And this is a free library of over 1,000 episodes now, so all I ask in return is that you help
share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on
planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Robert Banghart.
Enjoy.
Well Robert, I want to start by saying two things.
Firstly, thank you to our mutual friend, Johan Hari, for even me learning who you are.
And secondly, I want to welcome you onto the Behind the Shield podcast today.
He's a great advocate for us.
He's been a supporter and a longtime friend and mentor for many years and thank you for
having me.
So where on planet earth are we finding you today?
Right now I am at the Shine a Light Foundation offices in Las Vegas.
Brilliant.
Well, I would have to start at the very beginning of your kind of life's journey.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings?
Oh, OK.
I was born in New Jersey.
I was born in a really small town in northwest New Jersey called Morristown.
Small town, rural, you know, I mean, I think back east the town's rural is very different
than what rural means than in other parts of the country.
A lot of towns close by and I was only 45 minutes from New York City, but I was also
45 minutes from like Poconos, Deep Woods, National Parks.
So it was a really beautiful place to live.
You know, I had a I had a lot of good opportunities if I had wanted to.
You know, my family dynamic is that there was a kind of a double edged sword.
Right.
There was a lot of alcoholism in my family.
But you know, my mom, my first memory growing up was of my dad beating my mom and leaving
and he disappeared.
I never saw him ever again.
So I you know, my my version, my story is that I believe I was born alcoholic, that
I was always restless, irritable and discontent.
I was always uncomfortable and I was always very much an actor.
You know, if you hear my mom say it, that I was I was a happy kid.
And I think in moments I was I had a you know, a decent upbringing.
But you know, I was kind of gravitated towards the chaos.
Right.
I think that that was kind of my first drug of choice.
If that makes any sense, Loma for drugs and alcohol, he was acting out because I was always
uncomfortable.
You know, some of my my earliest feelings were of disconnection and not feeling a part
of and, you know, the self love and all that stuff.
And some of that stuff, I don't know, you know, maybe that was just part of being a
kid.
I just don't think that to the extreme that I took it that it was, you know, and my mom
remarried shortly after and not shortly after in my mind shortly after I was young.
But she married a man that I call my dad that raised me as his son that, you know, was,
you know, that figure in my life and still is to this day.
And, you know, he he he inherited me, you know, and I was a chaotic little kid that
was resentful that, you know, throw things in his face.
And, you know, I use that analogy, the double double edged sword, because he was learning
how to be a dad.
Right.
And it's easy for me to say that now.
But at the time, I didn't understand any of that.
You know, I thought he was too harsh.
I thought he was this.
And, you know, they they had he would work overnight and my mom would work during the
day and they provided a home and meals and safety.
Right.
Like we weren't rich, especially in the beginning.
But I mean, like I had all the opportunity in the world to live a successful life, you
know, if I wasn't an alcoholic addict.
But but I am.
And, you know, I gravitated towards bad behavior pretty young.
And, you know, I was acting out.
I was very, very like I used to I used the visual example of a round peg in a square
hole.
That's the story of my life.
I never really felt connected to anything.
And even at a very young age, I had like really like twisted thoughts, you know what I mean?
Like thinking of like wanting it to end and suicide and different things.
Never never a plan, nothing like that.
But just, you know, it was very hot and cold.
It was I was was not somebody that was very balanced.
And, you know, that would be the story of my life.
It's interesting.
A lot of people who were either fostered or adopted or, you know, the the parent or both
parents, you know, were we lost them to the overdose or they were incarcerated or they
just simply left that when people are older and they kind of look back and unpack it with
a mature lens, there seems to be a reoccurring theme that that child at that moment thought
that they just weren't you know, why was I not good enough for my dad to stay?
Why was I not good enough for, you know, whatever relative to not dive into a bottle?
When you look back now, do you think that was one of the root causes of the way you
were feeling?
It definitely played a part.
You know, it definitely played a part.
I I just had this thought.
I mean, it's probably the first time I've thought about it since I got sober.
It was, you know, very early on when my mom was, you know, trying to figure this out,
single mom, two kids like she has some family support.
But like, I'm sure it was hard.
I can only imagine I was too young to really, really understand it.
But, you know, I had a babysitter that used to lock us in the basement all day long and
then let us out a half hour before my mom came home, you know, and that's not my mom's
fault.
My mom is struggling, doing her best to keep us together and safe.
And she did an amazing job.
You know what I mean?
But there was so there was things that happened 100 percent right.
Like traumas and different experiences.
But I just don't believe that that's why I'm alcoholic.
Right.
Like it wasn't beneficial.
It didn't help.
But I think that, you know, I am because I am.
I think once you once you unpack your life and really get into recovery and start doing
the work and look back with it, like you said, a clear lens and an empathetic lens, you start
to understand that like, yes, some bad things happen to me, but bad things happen to people
all the time.
You know?
It's not an excuse to burn your life down.
Right.
And for me, it was if I'm an addict, I have it.
It's the disease of no choice.
So like I didn't I didn't ever make a choice to burn my life down.
Right.
Like it was the disease of no choice.
I was powerless over it.
So you know, I I look back at my mom and my my you know, my dad, my my the one the man
that raised me and I have nothing but love and respect for everything they tried to do
in the midst of my my chaotic mind.
You know, like they did a lot.
And you know, my mom went through a lot before, you know, so and I didn't I didn't help the
situation, but I have a lot of respect for what they they persevered through because
they in spite of me, tried to give me a really beautiful life.
And you know, and to this day, are my biggest supporters.
I think there's a term that I've used a lot recently.
Reasons not excuses.
If you know, if you play the victim, you're like, well, this happened to me and this is
why I'm like this, then, you know, I disagree with that philosophy.
But if you also don't look around and go, but this did happen to me and it did have
an impact, then I think it kind of gets in the way of healing, too.
So you've got to you've got to give yourself some grace and acknowledge the things that
did happen.
Like I was in a house fire when I was four and my parents got divorced.
There were some things, you know, but they didn't leave me down a dark path because I
was so fortunate for all the good things.
It's just like you're saying, but, you know, if if as a firefighter, you know, for example,
I'm like, oh, you know, what's wrong with me?
And then, oh, it must have been that fire that you were on.
And I'm not acknowledging the first, you know, 26 years of my life when I wasn't a firefighter,
then I'm missing part of the healing.
So I think this is the thing I hear a lot of people say, you know, my parents did the
best with what they had.
And I agree with that 100 percent.
It's not about blame, but it's also kind of understanding that certain things like the
babysitter event and you're watching your your mom being beaten and your dad walking
out.
Those things still had an impact on a small child.
Yeah, 100 percent.
And like I use the I'm really big on perspective, right?
It's something that I have to practice because addiction is mental health.
Right.
It is.
And I have to practice certain tools every day and I'm not perfect at it by any means.
But I think about like certain things.
Like I heard a story one time about a gentleman in India.
He had been born.
He was living on the streets his entire life.
He was a young kid selling like rice kernels to survive and feed his family.
And he went on to be one of the wealthiest people in India.
You know, I think about that stuff to think that like what happened to me is not an excuse
to not succeed or be happy.
Right.
It did happen to me.
I own it.
I can heal from it.
I can walk through it.
But it's not going to I'm not going to allow it to to reoccurringly happen to me again.
Right.
In smaller increments and paper cuts and hold me back from a beautiful life.
And you know, and both sides of it is that, you know, my parents were amazing.
They did an amazing job with what they had and they provided, you know, so there's no
nothing that I did had anything to do with, you know, my parents.
Yeah.
What about sports and exercise?
What were you playing and doing when you were in the school age?
Oh, I think I, you know, a little bit of soccer, a little bit of football.
I tried those things.
I just I would always become very uncomfortable and I would either, you know, quit or not
believe in myself.
You know what I mean?
There's a lot of self doubt and fear.
And, you know, I I remember I was 14 years old and somebody knocked on our front door
and this man, I never met him before, but something about him I could I could I saw
something in him that reminded me of me kind of like ended up being an uncle that I had
never met before in my entire life.
And he told me that my dad had overdosed and died.
So you know, and then shortly after that, my grandfather, who was like the only man
in my life up to that point that I would really give respect to, he passed away very shortly
after that.
And, you know, so again, there was things that happened, right.
And for me, it wasn't now in retrospect, looking back, those weren't things that made
me the way I am.
Those were things that I used as an excuse to continue to do the things that I was doing,
right.
Because I didn't I was just so uncomfortable, so uncomfortable.
And, you know, again, in retrospect, looking back now, having some knowledge of recovery
and, you know, the natures of what it is that I have, I understand that I was restful,
irritable, discontent, and I was seeking relief.
Right.
And at first it was behaviors and acting out and how I treated people and all that.
And then, you know, then later on it would become more obviously.
Before the man you call father came into your life, when you look back, even though you
had the undying love of your mother, was there an element of feeling unsafe in that volatile
relationship with, you know, your original father, for lack of a better word?
I was so young.
You know, I read a book that said, what happened to you?
Right.
And I read a book on trauma and it talks about and the body keeps a score.
Another great book, right.
It talks about these traumas that happened to us in our infantile times before we have
a consciousness that our body carries, but that we may not remember.
And that's probably relatable to me that there's I'm sure there's something right that I'm
I don't know how I'm going to be able to unpack right that I have, you know, looked at and
thought about and prayed about and done a lot of writing on and, you know, but I don't
know.
You know what I mean?
I just keep if I keep practicing this, I feel like I have gotten freedom from a lot of that
stuff for the most part.
And then, you know, when it pops up, I got to get back into it.
What it reminds me, I mean, firstly, again, that that kind of fear, I was a very anxious
child.
You know, I was a very meek little boy and I look back and again, the fire and some other
things, you know, I'm sure we're part of that.
Then you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Safety is the first thing you have before food and water and everything.
If someone's trying to kill you and we'll get to your personal experience of that, you
know, then you're not thinking about food or hunger.
You know, you're thinking about I need to get away from this thing where it's interesting
because you said, you know, you never felt settled.
I had a conversation with someone a while ago and they'd written a book called Oh, goodness,
what was it called now?
I forget the title.
It was about anxiety.
It'll come back to me in a minute.
But it was the introvert said, excuse me.
So that's what it was called.
And the definition of an introvert was you can be around people, but it's where do you
get your power?
Where do you recharge?
And I thought, you know, I didn't think like I'm a big extrovert by any means, but I thought
it was kind of in the middle.
But I'm the kind of person where if I go into a group of people, I'm fine, but you'll turn
around and I'll be gone at some point.
And I've just hit my wall and I'm like, all right, I'm out of here now.
And so then when you look at a lot of us that weren't deep in opioid addiction, but for
example, drink alcohol, and you look at people pre gaming, which I used to do to have a drink
so you can go out and have a drink, you realize how many of us are introvert and how many
of us do struggle, how many of us don't feel comfortable, you know, in these certain things.
So I think, you know, yours is probably more extreme because you were exposed to certain
things that maybe some people weren't.
But I think that crawling under your skin, that not feeling comfortable and thinking that
everyone else is the life of the party kind of feeling, I think there's a lot more people
that suffer from that than we realize.
Oh, 100%.
I think that everything that an addict feels, they're human human feelings, right?
They're not some extra feelings that we don't understand.
It's just the way that we go about them, the way that we allow them to impact our lives
and the way that we take them to the extremes that separates us in that aspect, right?
So everything, and believe me, when I was young, before drugs and alcohol was a part
of my story, I just thought like I was an awkward kid, right?
Like I was just not adjusted to life, right?
You know, it was a lot of chaos like that, a lot of insecurity.
But it didn't feel like I was sick, right?
It didn't feel like, it just felt like I was awkward.
It felt like I was, you know, and it didn't really at that age have a whole lot of people
who weren't talking about their feelings and all the thoughts in their heads.
So it wasn't like I had a whole lot of relatability with anybody.
So I was drawn to those that were acting out like I was, right?
I found that, I almost want to say I went to the lowest common denominator, right?
The people that would accept me for who I was and the chaos because they were chaotic
too.
And, you know, so that because we didn't have the communication skills, like I said,
I don't think you're supposed to have them at that age.
So what about career aspirations?
When you were in the school ages, what were you dreaming of becoming?
Oh, so my grandmother was that grandfather that passed away, his wife, my grandmother
was a waitress.
And in my small town, it wasn't like you needed to work cards or, you know, nobody
was checking your ID, right?
You just showed up and they paid you cash.
So I was working in a kitchen pretty young, 13, 14 years old, I was working in a kitchen.
You know, I started as a busboy, kind of worked my way up.
And I don't know that I really had aspirations.
I think at some point I was thinking about going to culinary school, but then my life
got sidetracked.
I went to prison when I was 17 years old, I got certified as an adult.
So I spent three years in prison.
I had my parents on the front lawn in handcuffs while they're searching the house two different
times in the same week, you know, and so that kind of derailed a lot of that.
And when I got out, I was still in the same small town, right?
And all the cops know me, they know what I'm doing.
They know my reputation or whatever it is, the rumors.
So they're pulling me over all the time and they're searching the car.
They were trying to help me too.
Again, with the clearer set eyes, I look back and I realize there was a lot of conversations
they were trying to have with me and trying to see what they could do.
You know what I mean?
I don't know if recovery was really mentioned, but it was just definitely about changing
my life and my decision making.
So after a couple years of that, I just said, okay, I've got to get out of here.
I did a geographical and I came out to Vegas because I had a using buddy that was out here
and he had sold me on a dream and I came out here with a couple hundred bucks in my pocket.
I started working in some really nice restaurants.
That was chaotic.
It was, you know, the using buddy that I had was a lot further along the using path than
I had seen before.
And it was, I left that pretty quickly, but I started working at some really nice restaurants.
I was working for Wolfgang Puck.
I was working for Herman Lagasse.
I was building up a nice little career, but at each of those jobs, I tell this story a
lot, right?
I was working for Wolfgang Puck.
I was there for about two and a half years and I get a call from the chef.
He says, Hey, Wolfgang is coming to town.
He wants to talk to you.
At least that's what I heard, right?
I'm sure he wanted to talk to a lot of people.
And so we sit down finally when it gets to town and I thought for sure, like, this is
my call up to the majors.
He sees my talent, all these things.
And really he just, he proceeded to tell me about my alcoholism.
I mean, how I was miserable.
I was, you know, I was a hard worker, but I was always angry.
You know what I mean?
I was always coming into work on over.
And you know, at that time I wasn't ready to face all that stuff.
So what I heard was, you know, you're not going to value me, so I'm going to go somewhere
else.
And that would be a pattern for a long period of time in my life.
And you know, I got married during that time when we had a kid.
So she stayed with me for about 10 years and she was a saint.
Like, she put up with me through like the thick and throes of all my addiction.
And then eventually I spent the last two years of that relationship on methadone.
And I'm a huge proponent for meth medication, but I wasn't ready and I wasn't trying
to use it the right way.
So I would lay in bed all day long for like two years straight and the only time I would
get up would be to go get my dose or to army crawl through her parents' bedroom and steal
their jewelry and pawn that.
So I could get another dose or you know what I mean?
It's just the tail end of my addiction.
And finally she kicked me out and when she kicked me out I got arrested very shortly
after that.
And I did a little bit of time in a county jail, no big deal.
And then when I got out I decided to—I had never been homeless before in my life, so I
decided to go to a place called the Samaritan House.
And the Samaritan House is like the last house on the block.
And they had a house manager at the time that was very stern.
Like you're going to do this or you're going to get out.
And I was just scared enough to do it, you know.
And I did all the things I was supposed to do in my recovery.
And that time through recovery a lot of things came back really quick.
Like within six months I had everything, everything was good, you know.
And I started to believe that I was doing it, right.
I had figured it out and you know that's how my alcoholism attacked me.
So I was able to hang on for a couple more years like that.
I think I got to like three years I'd remarried, had another kid.
And I'd been asked to speak at a meeting at my three years.
And I don't know why.
I hadn't gone to a meeting in so long.
I went, I spoke, and I went home that night and my head was so loud that I put a needle
in my arm and I relapsed that night.
And within a month she had found, you know, like a needle in the trash or something and
she left.
And within a month I was homeless.
I had never been homeless before in my life.
You know my homelessness was very progressive.
I was, I started out in the shelters a little bit, you know what I mean.
That was pretty chaotic.
It was very, it's not like what you see in the movies by any means.
It was very, not something I would ever recommend.
And then eventually I got tired of that and I started sleeping on the streets around the
shelter and then I started camping out in different areas.
And eventually I made my way up to an area called the rescue mission.
The rescue mission is part of the homeless triangle where the three shelters are.
And then I lived in a bando for about two and a half years up there called the Moulin
Rouge.
It's like this big casino that's been abandoned for like sixty years.
And then eventually the day came.
One of my using buddies while I was out there said, hey, come with me.
And I went with them and he introduced me to what would be my home for the next two
and a half years was this tunnel that was really hidden.
You couldn't get into it.
Some tunnels in Vegas you can get into and walk into pretty easily and this one was very
hard to get into.
And it was isolated and it had a hierarchy.
It had like a mayor and there was some basic rules.
I call it Lord of the Flies.
Everybody from the outside was suspect and we were very careful about.
But internally there was a lot of chaos too and everybody's getting high and hustling.
And I'm a heroin user.
I did a lot of meth while I was out there obviously.
But I couldn't do heroin in my tunnel.
I had to like I'd get the itch to do heroin every once in a while and I have to go disappear
for a little while and come back and spent two and a half years underground.
I want to just kind of roll the clock back a little bit.
You're crawling under your skin.
You're never feeling comfortable as a child.
When did alcohol come in and then when did opiates come in?
So for me, you hear about it a lot in recovery.
People talk about the aha moment.
They had their first drink or they had their first whatever and they felt like they had
arrived or they felt free.
That's not really my experience and I don't know if it's because of the head trauma.
We'll get into that.
But like I don't ever remember the first time.
I mean it was around.
It was not in my house at all.
I think my dad drank a little bit but like a beer or two once on a holiday.
It was nothing.
I mean it was never in my house.
But I gravitated towards that chaos very early on.
So I was the kid that would steal a beer out of the cooler and go drink with the neighborhood
kids and we would all do that all the time.
Weed was always kind of around even when I was young.
And then I progressed.
I think heroin started for me probably 14, 15.
I started to delve into it a little bit.
But it progressed very fast.
I mean I was in prison at 17 so it was only two or three years.
And then when I got out I went right back to it.
The timeline for me is a little foggy.
Like I said I don't know if some of that is just because it was always around in a
sense in my neighborhood and whatnot and the people that I hung out with.
But also I have pretty severe head trauma where my memory is not of those times is not
as good as I think it should be.
Johan and I have both interviewed a gentleman, Zhao Gu Lao, who was the man who spearheaded
decriminalization of addiction in Portugal.
And as a first responder for 14 years we get to see here in America the epic failure of
prohibition.
How it's empowered gangs and dealers and the sex working industry.
All these areas that we see a lot of criminality coming from is down to the prohibition of
drugs.
What Portugal did is they took someone like you and they put them into the medical system
not the criminal system.
So through your eyes as an addict speak to me about the resistance to getting clean,
getting healthy in an environment where you basically have to go to the underworld for
your fix.
Yeah.
I mean there's a lot of guilt and shame.
And there's a lot of areas in life where unfortunately we put a lot of guilt and shame.
As an addict I definitely felt it.
I'm living underground and I don't feel like I'm a part of society.
I live in the same world as you but I'm not.
Even to the psychosis or the mentality I share about this a lot is the people making decisions
aren't the ones with the lived experience thinking about these things.
It took me a month to learn how to sleep in a bed when I got sober.
I hadn't watched TV in five years.
I hadn't had three hot meals in a day in five years.
And I could spend the rest of this interview talking about all the things that were not
in my life for five years.
So when you do that, when you take away hope, when you have no hope you don't plan.
There's no need for a Google calendar.
There's nothing going on.
I'm living directly in this moment.
I prayed that I wouldn't wake up for at least a year, year and a half every day.
I would be mad that I woke up.
But when you do that, you take away all that outside distractions and all of Maslow's hierarchy
of needs.
I've just thrown them away.
I don't care.
And now I live in the same world as you but you're thinking about what you're doing later
on and when you're going to get your Starbucks and what game's on tonight.
And I'm thinking about where's my next fix?
What do I got to do to get my next fix?
Where am I going to lay my head?
All those things that the basic primal needs.
So my Maslow's became very different than the average human being.
And then you're walking around.
I had four teeth.
I was 120 pounds.
My beard's growing out.
I haven't had a haircut.
I haven't showered in five years.
There's no hope in that.
You know what I mean?
It completely changes your perspective on the world.
Talk to me about you kind of touched on some of the dark side of even your shelter experience.
So people assume, OK, well, people go to a homeless shelter and they've got all the things
that they would need.
Clearly there's a spectrum, probably some incredible shelters.
And then we saw even during Katrina, the horrible things that would happen in a giant football
stadium when people were clumped together.
So what are the things that people don't realize about some of the shelters or some of the
areas that are homeless are able to get into on some nights?
So what I would say is this.
All I can share about is my own experience.
I've never been in any other shelters but the one that I was in.
So I'm not trying to group all of them by any means.
I think you touched on that.
So my personal experience was that it was very much a numbers game.
Fill the beds.
And there was one or two people working.
They were like the security.
They were very rough, very.
And again, I can look back now like the crowd was very rough.
So they probably had to be on some level.
But it wasn't very empathetic.
It wasn't conditioned.
It was very get in by 10, get out by six.
And that's it.
And think about the guilt and shame of that.
You're carrying everything you own all night long while you're sleeping.
You're wondering if it's going to get stolen by somebody else in there.
And then you wake up at 6 o'clock in the morning, get out.
And then you're walking around the streets.
So if I go apply for a job, I've got all my property with me.
Now I've got to throw that in a bush or somewhere to hide that, hope it doesn't get stolen,
go inside, apply for a job that I know I'm not going to get.
So it's just the hopelessness just continues to stack up.
I like to use the visual representation of paper guts.
A lot of my homelessness was not these major traumatic events.
There were some, 100%.
It's not a lot of it was more slow evolution, paper cuts, just bleeding to death by a thousand
paper cuts.
I say the same thing in the fire service.
Some of us were, for example, at the Vegas shooting, and that was a very large trauma
of the capital T as they say.
But most of us, it's 10, 20, 30 years of all these calls, all these nights without sleeping.
And it is, I use exactly the same phrase all the time, death by a thousand cuts.
Compassion, fatigue, and all of it's very real.
As you are progressing through the years, experiencing homelessness, did you notice
any common denominators by some of the men and women that you encountered that were also
experiencing the same thing?
I mean, there were some generalities.
I think that it's also very individualized at the same time.
So it's definitely that two sides of the coin.
I think in a general way, there was a ton of substance use disorder.
There was mental health.
There was a lot of stuff like that.
A lot of substance use disorder is such a hard track to operating and to working, right?
Because it's not they have to be willing, right?
And that is almost so hard to explain to anybody that doesn't exist in this space, right?
That they have to be willing.
You can give them tons of options, but if they're not willing, it doesn't matter, right?
They have to get to a place where they're willing.
And unfortunately, none of us want this, but pain is the motivator, right?
Pain is the motivator.
And again, that's relatable to a lot of us in our regular lives, but just not to the
degree that they're in, right?
What I saw out there was a lot of chaos.
A lot of, I recently, literally two weeks ago, went back to my old tunnel.
I've gone back a couple of times and where I stayed at, there was another section, maybe
a thousand feet up the tunnel.
And when I stayed in my tunnel, it was kind of blocked off because there was constant
running water.
My area was dry, but just above it was wet.
So I never really went up that way.
And I went back two weeks ago, we dropped in and I walked to that section that I had
never really been to and I found everybody that lived in my tunnel.
They were there.
They were still there.
There were a lot of them.
And somebody had overdosed the night before.
And it just, it brought me back to that feeling of like, you have no idea.
Like if I'm living here, just homeless in general, let alone underground, right?
Like who's watching?
Who knows that they're there?
Nobody.
Like anything could happen.
And I saw it happen, right?
I saw shootings, I saw stabbings, I saw, you know, random cars driving by and throwing
stuff and people getting in cars and I don't see them again.
And, you know, there was a girl that was homeless in my area, part of my kind of homeless family.
And one day she disappeared.
Never saw her again.
Then I get sober and I find out that she reached out to me on social media that she had gotten
picked up on a warrant, transferred back to Utah, got sober, she's married today as
kids, all that, sober.
But on the streets we thought she got killed.
And the same thing for me when I got attacked.
You know, I went back a year later and everybody's, we heard you died in the tracks and all this.
It's like, and I say those stories not to glorify that, but just like to say it like
nobody really knows what's going on, right?
Like nobody knows.
Anything could happen.
And that's a really weird place to be.
And I don't know that many human beings feel that, right?
To know that like your life is just not valued.
Nobody knows.
You know, like if I didn't come in to work today, it's going to trigger some alarms.
If I don't go home tonight, it's going to trigger some alarms.
When I was out there, nobody knew where I was for weeks at a time and nobody cared.
I think nobody cared.
There were people in my life that cared, my mom, my family, but like, I mean, you know,
in that moment space, no.
Well, I think this is what makes comments like, oh, they just need to make good decisions.
You know, just pull yourself out of it kind of thing is I've said this is, you know, take
out addiction for a moment.
Let's just put in obesity.
You know, we have an absolute crisis in this country at the moment.
70 percent of Americans are overweight and I think it's 45 percent now are obese.
And you know, I could stand on an ivory tower and say, well, all you need to do is just
be like me, eat well and exercise.
But that's all well and good.
But you're talking to a farm boy, an English farm boy that grew up where there was orchards
and vegetable gardens and, you know, acres and acres that I would be out playing.
So my baseline was that.
We'll take a kid from the Bronx who may be the only playground is concrete and it's controlled
by a gang.
And the only place they know to get food is a bodega.
And I'm going to look down my nose at that kid and say, just make good choices.
And it's the same with addiction.
It's all well and good.
And I'm, you know, I'm happy for you that you weren't an addict, you know, judgy person.
But to tell someone who's living on the street to get a job or tell an addict to just, you
know, make good choices, you're missing the biggest part of the problem, which is the
environment.
If the environment, an addict, if they purchase the thing that they need is a crime and they
get punished and penalized for it and there's guilt and shame, how easy is it for someone
to say, I need help when they're living on the streets?
So if we're not talking about the environment, how dare we judge, you know, the quote unquote
ownership of the individual solely on its own?
I agree.
And I would even take it a step further, right?
The physical environment, of course, plays a part.
But as an addict, the mental environment as well, right?
It's so much deeper than that.
And you know, it's a lack of empathy and a lack of understanding.
And I think that, you know, luckily, in the last 10, 15 years, it's kind of come to the
forefront more.
It's out there more, it's more public now.
We're beginning to see some inroads into different areas where we can really, it's
officially notated as a disease.
So there's more.
But you know, in the common man, if you don't have experience with it, you don't have empathy
until it happens to you, right?
Until it happens to somebody close to you.
And the nature of this disease is that it does impact everybody.
Whether they realize it or not, it does.
This was not a choice for me.
Well, speak to me about the tunnels.
People are like, oh, there's a tunnel and there's a mare.
You know, firstly, what structurally, why were those tunnels there under Las Vegas?
What purpose did they serve?
So in Vegas, we have about 600 miles of tunnel.
So if you've never lived in a desert, the ground is very hard.
So it's not like, you know, I grew up in New Jersey, it rains, the water soaks into the
ground eventually, you know, a little bit of flooding, no big deal.
Out here is exactly the opposite.
It's like concrete.
It does not absorb at all.
So smallest amount of rain, you're going to have two inches of water on the ground.
It doesn't rain very often, but when it does, it's very impactful.
So the city designed the 600 miles.
And if you know Vegas at all, it's the northwest side of the city is higher.
And that's kind of where it opens up and comes into the city.
And the southeast side is lower.
It kind of bumpy along the way.
But so they designed the tunnels to all run to the southeast at some point and get out
to the wetlands and out to Lake Mead.
So they're flood drains to help with the water because the strip used to flood.
Before I moved here in 99, there was a flood where people were on top of their cars on
the freeway.
Like it was really bad.
So the design is needed.
And obviously, unfortunately, it gives us this dichotomy that like a lot of places don't
have because homelessness is everywhere.
Right.
But in Vegas, you've got these glitzing, glimmy five billion dollar casinos and right below
it, these dark tunnels.
And it gives this like it's if you're an author, it's a great story piece.
Right.
It's a great it's a great attraction point.
But we've got about 1500 people living under a city like I'll be under Caesar's Palace
this weekend.
So you know, and we've been able to shine a light on the issue, utilize that to get
the message out and get more help to our friends.
But yes, I don't think we're the only city with tunnels.
But I think that because we're the only one with the casinos.
Right.
And obviously gives it that dichotomy.
You know, everybody wants to see it.
And then, of course, there's like a lore now.
Right.
Because it's this deep, dark underground.
And you know, when I went there, every tunnel, the best way I can tell you is that every
tunnel is very different.
Literally every time is very different.
My tunnel in the beginning had a mayor, there was some structure.
And I use that term loosely.
Right.
Like he was he was the guy that had the dope.
He had been there the longest and he would kind of set out some rules.
But it wasn't like a long list of rules.
Right.
And but then over time, he I think he got locked up at some point and then he stopped
coming around.
So it kind of turned into chaos.
And then, you know, like if you go there now, there's like six, seven people living there.
So they change and sometimes very individualized.
So literally, it's a tale of a thousand cities anywhere, anywhere you went.
They all have their own personality.
What is the overall philosophy on homelessness in Vegas?
And is it moving towards a progressive direction?
Because one of the things that nauseates me the most is people who I know subscribe to
certain religions, then leave their holy building and want homeless people shooed away from
their neighborhood or think that Narcan is wasted on the addict, you know, very, very
non-Christian or whatever.
They subscribe to philosophy.
So I've seen, you know, neighborhoods where they've literally dropped homeless off to
a different jurisdiction before.
And then obviously, you know, I've heard about some more progressive ones where they're actually
trying to address the root causes and address homelessness that way.
So what have you seen over your time in Vegas in the last couple of decades?
So I again, both sides of the coin.
Right.
There's some people in our city, a lot of our community partners doing amazing work,
holistically, there's still more work to be done.
Right.
There's definitely more work to be done.
And I feel like really where we've.
If I was to sell this to you and say, I would ask you this.
Do you have life insurance?
I actually don't.
I'm self employed.
Health insurance, car insurance.
I have car insurance.
I don't have health insurance either.
Back in England, I do.
We have national health there.
Do you have homeless insurance?
I do not have homeless insurance.
No.
I don't have insurance.
Right.
It doesn't exist, right?
But you understand the point.
Yes.
Most people don't think it's going to happen to them.
And it's almost seven out of 10 Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
Seven out of 10 people that you know right now could be a paycheck or two away from being
homeless.
That's one car accident.
It's one something.
So to understand the depths of the problem is the first thing we need to do.
And if I asked you, what is the safety net?
What is the safety net where you live right now?
What would you tell me?
It's a loaded question.
I've been asking this for like the last three months because it came to me in a conference,
right, where I'm sitting in a room full of people that work within the safety net and
they're asking questions and I don't know why it came to me.
I just said, I just, when my time came on the panel, I just stopped and I said, I just
started asking people in the audience, I said, what's the safety net?
What's the safety net?
The true definition of a safety net is any service, private to government, that helps
you attain or maintain from whatever crisis you're experiencing, right?
So that means that it is literally everything.
It is your parents, your mom, if you God willing you have, friends, all the way to that shelter
and everything in between.
And most of the in between is nonprofits, right?
Some big boys, but mostly nonprofits.
So we started looking at it, right, based on our own experience.
So I went through detox 50 times, a three to five stay in detox 50 times ballpark, right?
The number is very big.
Each time I got out of that detox, I got a piece of paper.
They told me where to go, go to the shelter, go here, they'll help you.
And I walk out of that place after a five day detox from heroin going, I don't know,
you know, and what do I know?
I know what I know.
And that's where I'm going to go back to.
And that was my experience.
But that facility reported somewhere a successful completion, right?
And they got more money and they kept doing what they're doing.
And that was all of our experiences, right?
How the safety net didn't really work for us, didn't really work together.
There was no continuity.
So we started doing Shine and Shine was founded a long time before we got involved into it.
But taking it from what it was to what it is today in about 2000, what was it, 2017?
So in 2000, no, yeah, 2017, I might be wrong, 2024, no, 2017, I apologize.
So 2017, Paul is interviewed by the founder of Shine a Light for a book that he's doing.
And at the time he works in treatment.
And Jeff Iverson is one of our mentors and close friends.
He goes to him and says, listen, I want to start trying to help people get off the streets.
I don't want to just talk to them.
I want to do all that too.
But like when they reach out for help, I want to be able to help them.
So he comes up with continuity case management through our IPath program.
And that's a lot of words, right?
Best way I can describe continuity case management to you is this, right?
If you and I go to dinner tonight and it's 10 other people and in front of those 10 people,
you say, hey, Rob, listen, the parking lot was really packed when we came in.
We had to park far away.
I forgot where we parked.
But I know I parked next to you.
Can you walk me to my car and show me where my car is?
Now in front of everybody, I say, yep, I can do that.
I look like a really good dude.
And when I see those other 10 people later on in life, they're going to go, that's a
really good dude, right?
But here's the truth.
I walked you halfway out in the parking lot and say, hey, listen, I got to go.
Turn around, went back inside, and you're walking around the parking lot.
So that's how the safety net works together, was working together, right?
Not those silos, right?
Nobody is transitioning.
So instead of us building another treatment center, instead of us building this building
or doing this and adding another piece to the safety net, we said, how do we help this?
So we came up with continuity case management.
So at a base level, we're a referral source for these facilities, right?
That's the buy-in, right, on a simplistic level.
I'm going to refer clients to you.
What I'm asking is, allow us to help you case manage.
And I use this, the triangle, because I'm a visual guy.
At one point is the client, at one point is us, always, throughout the entire process.
The other point will change as they're transitioned, but they always have us as a mentor, as a
guide, somebody with lived experience and the access to the resources to help walk them
through the process.
That's what was missing.
So until we do that, how do we even know if the safety net works?
Nobody even knows what it is.
Nobody even knows how they're working together.
And there's all these little veins in it.
These guys work with these guys.
These guys don't work with these guys.
I don't like this guy.
Why?
You know what I mean?
How do we break these walls down?
And sometimes they don't work with them because they're not doing the right thing.
And I can respect that, right?
But let's find all the people that are trying to do the right thing and let's create pathways
that can help people.
Because you asked me earlier, right?
Like every individual person that's homeless is an individual, has an individual story,
has individual needs.
So we have to be able to walk them through.
We need the entire safety net to be able to help them paint their story.
Because if I asked them to do it the way I did it, they might not be able to do it.
And vice versa for me when I went through, right?
So how do I hand them a paintbrush and help them paint their story with the resources
that are available throughout the city at all different levels of care?
And levels of care means they go from detox, they go into treatment with housing.
Then they go into sober living, into independent housing, all the while getting those, the
lovely catch word that every facility likes to use, the wraparound services, right?
The ID, the birth, the social.
And then we're meeting with them to find out what their needs actually are.
Do they need job training?
Do they need more treatment?
Trauma therapy?
What is it?
What's your pathway?
How can we help you, right?
And nobody's doing that.
Nobody's doing that.
They're case managed at that facility.
But the second you walk out the door, you're not their problem anymore.
So that's how we help build a pathway for the next 18 months.
But the goal being at the end of those 18 months, you're in our life.
Yeah, you're graduating our program, that's great.
But you've already volunteered with us.
You're in our lives.
We're going to movies, dinners.
And the first part of our program is outreach, right?
But it's not just into the tunnels and washes.
It's into the community.
Meeting events, who we are as people advocating.
I use the term layers, not levels, because levels promotes a hierarchy.
But there's layers.
And where can we fit in all these different layers and advocate?
And then they get to see us and then the next wave and the next wave and the next wave of
pulling more and more people up.
So now we've touched in nine years 1,300 people's lives.
We've got 240 active clients right now that I could tell you where they're at.
I always use this example.
And pardon me for looking down.
I just want to show you something real quick that is the best example.
This is, I don't know if you can see it, but this is Matt.
And it says today, right?
I don't know if you can see it.
That's today.
So Matt graduated our program 18, 18, two years ago, 18 months.
I have no buy in with Matt.
I'm not reporting on Matt.
I'm not making nothing, right?
Matt is one of my greatest examples of continuity case management, why this succeeds.
Matt comes in.
He's been homeless for many years.
He had some head trauma like me.
He had been attacked as well.
He had some mental health.
He reaches out.
IPath is instant placement.
There's no wait list.
He calls.
Within an hour, we pick him up.
We bring him into detox.
He's clinically and medically assessed for detox.
He goes into detox three to five days.
The triangle is engaged.
He meets.
They decide we're going to go into housing with treatment.
So he does 90 days at Crossroads, which is a treatment facility.
While there, he doesn't even know this, right?
But a lot of our volunteers for our outreach and our tribe also work in treatment.
So he's surrounded by like, you know, an instant 10 to 15 friends that are checking in on,
talking to him.
And we're all walking them off this, those little ledges that we all experienced right
in the journey.
So levels up from that goes into sober living, where we pay for the first three months.
And now he's got six months, right?
Well, Matt's story is that he went into sober living, and two months later, he's been in
seven different sober livings.
Never got high, never punched anybody, right?
He couldn't adjust.
He had a hard time readjusting the society, finding his people.
He was this and that.
But each time, because of our MOUs, our working agreements with all these different partners,
we have a no street policy, which means they cannot street them.
They cannot kick them in the streets.
They have to call us and give us a chance to come pick them up.
And that's what they did.
I mean, unless they, you know, punch somebody or grab their stuff and leave, right, which
can happen as well, but doesn't usually.
Seven times, I apologize, six times they picked him up and kept him connected to the safety
net, right?
But nobody's doing that.
You make a mistake here, you're out.
People catch you when you land a detox again.
Fast forward two years later, I know where Matt is.
I talked to Matt.
Our running joke for the last two and a half months, three months has been that he stood
me up for lunch because he works for the union.
He travels sometimes and he works for the, what is it, Nevada Paving.
So he's the guy that's doing all the construction with the cones.
So I'm sarcastic.
I love to bust his chops about it all the time and how he's ruining my life.
But he was in the office about three weeks ago doing an interview with a YouTuber that
came out and telling his story.
And I got to meet his fiance.
I'm probably going to go to St. George here in the next week or two to watch him get married.
You know, like that's an outcome, right?
So that detox facility that I went through 50 times thought an outcome was a head in
a bed and me successfully completing.
The outcome really was that I went on to be homeless for five more years, overdosed 10
times, you know, almost get murdered.
Like that's not an outcome I want to report.
I want to, I'll track all the inputs to tell a story of how I got to your successful outcome,
which is that you texting me two years later, you know, how you're nervous about your wedding.
That's amazing.
I think this underlines so many things that firstly, there's this complete mythology that
someone's an addict and then they go to rehab and then they're better.
But everyone I know, whether it's alcohol or opiates or meth or whatever their thing
has been, it's over and over and over again.
You said 50, you know, Matt, you know, seven times in this particular example, we know
just just trying to stay housed, but that this isn't just going to be a click your fingers
and everything's good again.
What I love about their philosophy, it reminds me of Tom Erbihar, who had on a couple of
times, he was the superintendent of Bastoi prison in Norway.
And their whole philosophy was you've got this person, they've made a mistake, they're
paying for their crime.
You know, they've had their freedom taken away.
But their whole thing is, but let's turn them into a functioning member of society because
one day they will move back into your street.
They will be your neighbor again.
Things that 95% of all incarcerated people will will be released.
And so they live in a house, not a prison.
I said, it's a community.
They live in a house, they cook, they clean, they go to work.
They go to school, you know, at this job creation when they're leaving, because that's one of
the biggest things I hear from the prison side is you're basically almost creating homelessness.
If someone's been in two or three years, where are they going to go when they walk out?
And then when you look at the Portuguese model, they took a lot of the money from the quote
unquote war on drugs, like arresting addicts.
And they put it into mental health counseling, addiction counseling, job creation, housing.
So again, they they wrapped, as you said, this particular person to a point where their
environment environment now, like forged success.
And of course, there are anomalies, there's going to be people that no matter what you
do still don't find their way out.
And it's tragic.
But this large group that you do manage to grab, they go from using tax money to creating
tax money as a functioning member of society.
So this is what's so maddening is the proactive solutions that you're doing there in Las Vegas
makes perfect sense.
Don't let that person go until you've got them to a place where they're truly back on
their feet, create an environment that drives success, not another relapse.
That's why Oregon's now going to make it illegal again, right?
Because they didn't do the same model.
They like the idea.
And that's the issue, right?
You see this a lot.
They like the issue.
They like cookie cutter.
They'd like to look good.
But all of these issues are not look good issues.
These are roll your sleeves up as a community.
And let's really get into this.
But they don't.
Right.
They want they want what makes them feel good in the moment.
Right.
They don't really want freedom from this.
They want relief.
They want it.
You know what I mean?
So it's frustrating.
You know, in Oregon, they had a really good chance to be successful.
And instead of putting all that money into the services, they just made it legal.
And you wonder why you wonder why it's chaos.
And you wonder why, you know, the city's falling apart.
Now you want to make it illegal again.
Of course it is.
You didn't you didn't follow the model.
No, exactly.
I can't help but feel like that was, you know, by some may be deliberate.
Look, you see, it doesn't work.
Let's go back to filling the prisons and so we can make more money.
You know, if you did it properly the first time.
I mean, look at the Obamacare versus national health in the country that I grew up in at
the time I grew up in when it was still good and supported by the government.
You know, no one went without health care.
You get nailed by a bus and the only thing they're asking you is how are you doing?
Not social security number.
And you know, we're going to take your house for these medical bills.
Just get better.
You know, so, you know, these proactive solutions and it just apply national health to our health
care right now.
Imagine if we had a national health 2.0 where it was using taxpayers money.
The drive then would be, well, shoot, we need to make Americans as healthy as possible so
we don't use much of this tax money.
Beautiful.
That's a win win.
And you're going to save billions.
It's the same with this.
You know, if we invest in the addiction and the homelessness and the things that we've
discussed, then you are going to not only solve the addiction crisis, but hand in hand,
the homelessness is going to drop dramatically and a lot of these things are going to take
care of themselves.
But if you just do it half ass, just like you said with the North Northwest, then all
your opposition are going to point their fingers and say, we told you it wouldn't work because
you never did it right in the first place.
Yeah.
I love what you said about the prisons.
I've watched a lot of videos of prisons in Europe, not all of them, obviously, specific
ones that were just switch the mentality, right?
That these are human beings.
They're going to get out.
So let's do everything in our power to prepare them for when they get out so they can be
successful and like, but let's be fair.
It's the biggest business in America.
What incentive does a prison have to not have their customers come back?
Exactly.
So much so that they've got private prisons and all.
Just commissary in prison is a billion dollar business.
We've incentivized the wrong things, right?
George Carlin says it best and I don't care about his politics or even know his politics.
He's a comedian, but nobody has figured out a way to monetize helping the homeless.
I promise you the second they do, it'll be Shine the Light sponsored by Coca-Cola and
the Denver Broncos.
I'll be wearing jerseys and trucks and lights as soon as they do, but they haven't, right?
Or they haven't tried to anyway.
Because it's not that important to them.
Let's just be completely transparent.
There's a quote that I love.
It's like, what are you willing to sacrifice for?
Those are the things that, those commitments are the ones that I want to talk about because
that's what this is.
You have to be willing to sacrifice.
And I jokingly say this, right?
We're literally a couple of ex-heroin addicts with backpacks that are rewriting the narrative
of how we address homelessness in our city.
Could you imagine what we could do as a city?
We're just two people.
There's three people that started and now it's 250, 300 volunteer force and seven employees.
So like, still, like how did we figure out to navigate the safety net and make your safety
network together?
Yeah.
I say the same thing.
How did a moderately intelligent, median level Englishman who just happened to come over
here and become a firefighter, figure out some of the things that I've been talking
about when it comes to the mental and physical ill health of our firefighters, when there
are chiefs and unions and all kinds of people that are paid a huge amount of money to address
this very thing.
So I completely understand.
I am not an intelligent man.
I am not a veteran of the fire service.
I only spent 14 years.
There's people that spend 30, 40 years.
Why me?
Where is everyone?
Where is the help?
And so I think this is an important question.
What needs to happen in Las Vegas to stick with your city to give you guys the support
to actually be able to apply this to all of the people experiencing homelessness?
We've been growing at a great pace and gaining support and gaining, you know, for us, it's
a nonprofit.
It's always about money, right?
We're constantly trying to raise money.
We've kind of, we're not, we're not an organization that's ever going to take restrictive funds,
right?
We're just trying to do what we do and that's what makes us successful.
So constantly raising money, constantly talking about it.
We're massive advocates.
I speak anywhere I can.
Just to talk about this issue and put it in front of people because I think that that's
really what it is, right?
I think there's a section of people that just don't know, right?
And then there's a section of people that don't want to know, right?
They just don't want to, either don't want to believe it or don't think that it's real
or whatever it is, right?
Because growth and awareness, it takes a certain amount of uncomfortability and it smashes
certain illusions, right?
Like that I like, I like my illusions sometimes, right?
And facing that stuff, which is vital to any kind of change is, is hard sometimes, you
know, like they don't want to believe it or, you know, they're, they don't want to believe
that it's happening in that part of the city because that's the nice quiet part where they
live.
But like this is, it's all about humility and understanding that these are community
issues.
And we don't want to change until we all come together.
But there's so many, a lot of times, you know, with a lot of issues, there's a lot of interests,
right?
In different ways.
And, you know, I don't know, it's, we're doing great work and it's happening and we
have tons of great partners and like, I feel the needle moving and I feel like the perspective
is changing, but never at the pace that it needs to.
Why do you think it is in such a faith based country that, for example, in the Bible, just
to choose that one, because that's the one I know, that's what I was raised on.
You know, Jesus is out there anointing the feet of the poor and, you know, counseling
sex workers and all the things.
Yet there's such a resistance when it comes to the homeless, the, the, you know, truly
empathetic proactive solutions to the homelessness and the addiction.
I struggle with the fact that someone can walk out of one of those buildings and then,
as I said, be, you know, move on the homeless, get them out of my community or stop wasting
Narcan.
I see a huge disconnect between the true goodness that I know exists in these holy books and
clearly the messages that these people are receiving.
So you mentioned that there are some beautiful nonprofits and there's a lot of them that
are churches and other faith based things that are out there walking the walk a hundred
percent.
But why do you think we have as much resistance when we're supposed to be such a faith based
country?
Well, what's the opposite of faith?
It's fear, right?
Fear is a lack of faith and fear on many levels, right?
That it could happen to them that, you know, and then it's, you know, some lack of empathy.
Why are you, you know, they don't want it around them almost like it's up, it's going
to get on them, right?
Like, so it's just, yeah, it's a lot, it's a lot of fear.
It's a lot of fear.
So you touched on the head trauma and your attempted murder.
We haven't really got to you leaving the tunnel.
So kind of talk to me about kind of what the, if any factors were leading to that attack.
And then let's talk about that.
And then you turning the corner yourself.
So my, my hustle when I was out there, it was like a, you know, low bottom dumpster
diver, crime of opportunity, real petty stuff.
I wasn't really, you know, hard core person, but I was always the guy that would get stuff
for people.
They'd tell me they needed it.
I'd go find it, you know, steal it, whatever.
And this particular day, the last day that I was out there, I, I think I had come up
on a dumpster where there was like an eviction, right?
And I find the suitcase and it was obviously somebody's personal property that the company
had thrown out as they were, you know, doing the eviction or clean out.
And it had a whole bunch of stuff in it, right?
And, you know, electronics, I just grabbed it and I took off and nothing about that was
illegal, right?
And I go through my, I go through my neighborhood and the area that I was living at where my
tunnel was that there was a, the Cubans ran my neighborhood, they controlled all the dope
for us.
And so I would always go by and give them something whenever I came up, right?
I would always kind of like a, like a tribute, I guess you would say, right?
Like, cause they always watch out for me.
Cause I was always doing something.
They'd always be like, Hey, this guy's looking for you.
Hey, we heard this, whatever I thought anyway, you know what I mean?
Maybe that's just the, some of that was probably delusion from being out there for
so long, but it was a lot of interactions.
And so when I went through and did that, I think I flashed, I think I opened it too wide.
I think somebody saw that I had.
And so I left there, went to my tunnel and then I, and my tunnel was, there was some
train tracks, they call it the homeless highway.
So maybe a thousand feet down from where my tunnel was on these tracks was four businesses.
And if you didn't live in the area or know of them, you would have no idea they were
there.
They didn't face the street really dark and none of them are there right now.
So I'm not even sure they were legal, but I went to the fourth business and I dropped
off all that stuff I had found.
Cause I, it was a guy that I used for stuff like that.
And he told me to come back.
It was a lot of stuff.
He wanted to check it out.
I said, okay.
I left, I went and got high, came back.
And when I came back, it was dark.
And when I, as I was walking up, I saw three guys that I knew waiting outside and they
had a hatchet, a knife and a pipe.
And I knew exactly what was about to happen.
Cause we were kind of like competition out there.
We had the same hustles and I had never really liked them.
But I also, you know, the true nature of what it is as an addict on the other side of them
was what I needed.
I had to get there, right?
And so I'm massless.
I'm not caring about, I don't care about my own safety.
I've got to get to this.
So they attacked me, they hit me with the hatchet in the head a couple of times.
I've got all the scars and you know, cracked my skull a couple of times, hit me with the
pipe a bunch of times.
They lacerated my liver.
They stabbed me in the leg and they, they dragged me on those train tracks right there
and they left me for dead.
So the first business, not the fourth, the first business, there was an overnight security
guard that I had fostered a relationship with over the years.
We would get high together.
Sometimes he'd feed me sometimes and he was a relatively decent guy.
And I had no idea he was working that night, but he had been working that night and he
saw it all happen and he called the, you know, the ambulance, the cops and they came, pulled
me off the train tracks and I'm dead.
They revived me.
So I wake up, I still think I'm fighting for my life and you know, I'm bleeding,
blood and I got knives sticking out of my leg, all kinds of stuff going on.
And they hit me with morphine and the train is coming by.
So it's loud.
Like I'm just complete chaos.
They hit me with some morphine and I died again.
I woke up in the hospital three days later on life support and I woke up to a nurse strapped
to the bed.
I've got all the bells and whistles going on and she's yelling at me.
I still think I'm fighting for my life.
So I'm flailing around doing my best at whatever and I feel a hand touch my forehead and I
hear the words calm down and I felt the presence of God in that room.
So you know, God came to me through a shot of morphine on life support.
And from there I spent the next four or five days there then I was transitioned into a
physical therapy hospital where I spent the next month.
I had a broken jaw that they couldn't wire because of the swelling in my brain.
You know, and if you're early in recovery it's a really beautiful thing.
I wouldn't recommend getting hit by an axe but if you are it's actually really a good
thing because it really affects your memory.
So all my anger and my resentments, my fear, it would go away.
I would forget it, you know.
My fiance would say that some of that carried with me to this day but you know, I think
it's gotten better but you know, and I'm joking.
But like in that hospital really what happened was a gentleman that has become my best friend
and our director here, our president of SHINE, came to the hospital and just offered me the
next step.
You know, he told me a lot about how my family had been looking for me and you know, kind
of unpacked a lot of what the last five years looked from their perspective and he offered
me treatment on a scholarship and I just said okay, that was it.
You know what I mean?
It wasn't, I didn't say okay to what my life would be like for the next six years plus
but I just said okay.
I knew in that moment that if I didn't take this opportunity, if I went back to being
homeless I was going to die.
That was as close as I had ever come to dying in my life and I knew that it wasn't going
to get any better and I also felt like I was really frail, like I wouldn't even be able
to defend myself.
So I said okay and I started my journey.
What worked at that time, Johann wrote the book Chasing the Scream, another one, Lost
Connections but there's a quote that I love, he said the opposite of addiction isn't sobriety,
the opposite of addiction is connection and when you look at even some of the biochemistry
when it comes to some of these substances, we assume that one hit and you're hooked and
it's the substance but more often than not as you mentioned with the mental health side,
the substance is a lot of times just filling a void for a person.
It could be anything from social media to porn to gambling or opiates and alcohol.
What worked this time that stopped you relapsing when you'd had a 50 count years prior?
Pain, pain, I was broken.
That's not everybody's story when they come into recovery.
Everybody is broken spiritually and mentally but also I was physically broken, that was
the lowest point of my entire life.
I was 120 pounds, broken jaw, lacerated liver, stitches, staples, just so frail and so weak
that I just didn't have any more fight in me that day.
I just kept winning days, that's it.
That inability to settle that you had as a kid, did that start coming out when the sobriety
was forced on you originally?
There was a lot of uncomfortable moments, you're unpacking a lot of stuff and that's
not going to be an easy road but I don't know that it definitely wasn't bad.
There's a perspective change that has to happen.
I'm seeking relief, I'm seeking instant gratification and nothing about recovery is instant gratification,
it's freedom which is a lot of hard work and it's completely worth it but it's very
hard to understand that.
Our director says this all the time, it's like when you do outreach think about this.
If I walked up to you right now James and said, look, great life, beautiful life, here's
the deal, come with me right now, leave everything you know, come with me right now and I'm going
to give you a life that's 10 times better than the one that you have.
Could you do it?
No, because I would assume that my life now was as good as it was going to get.
So why is it any different with homelessness in addition?
Exactly.
I used that analogy earlier with the paper cuts, my life had become so small that a backpack
and a little spot in a tunnel was my entire life and if it all went away as long as I
could start over, I'm a survivalist, right, that the mentality was right.
So my world had become so small that that was my world and now you're asking me to come
in and go to detox and go through a crippling heroin withdrawal, go to treatment, do this,
do that, be here on, the world seemed so big, overwhelmingly big that it didn't seem like
I could ever do it again and then you factor in like, you know, I'm 42, I think I've wasted
my whole life, you know, I've abandoned my family, my kids, all these things, like the
weight of all that and now this guy is telling me, so if I hadn't been in that pain, because
like I had been in recovery before, I knew where there were services at, right, like
I never tried to access them, that's my story, you know, so in that moment of complete defeat,
physically, mentally and spiritually, you know, I feel the presence of God, it wasn't
enough for me to build a relationship with him, but it was like this, I use the analogy
like there's a new player at the table, right, that's my Vegas analogy.
I had never felt that before, I had never had an understanding that there was anything
higher than me, right, and not that I had been in situations before where I knew other
people were in control and all that stuff, but I'm talking about like on a spiritual
level, I'd never done, I'd never felt that and just that alone was enough for me to go,
okay, just okay and it would take me a while to build a relationship and faith and all
that but that, it happened, you know.
What about the tools that you use, I mean, again, you know, you're dealing with a life
of trauma, you know, some, as you said, contrasted with an absolutely loving household that you
grew up in a little bit later, but you know, there's things that had to be dealt with,
there's voids that had to be filled with kind of healthy coping mechanisms, there's
traumas that had to be processed.
I don't think people realize how vast the toolbox is and now, you know, in 2024, we're
realizing that even, you know, psychedelics and some other things that we were never thinking
about before are being very effective, especially in military and first responders.
So what were some of the things that you started using to kind of, you know, as a rung on the
health ladder that you were climbing?
For me, it was a spiritual fellowship, you know, I was surrounded by guys that were,
you know, of the same disease that were, you know, working a program and, you know, and
service, right?
Like I, I'm not somebody that's trying to tell anybody else how to heal, that's
not my business, right?
Like I think we all have to have our own ways to do that and none of them are better than
any, whatever works for you is the way, right?
And for me, really without my permission, it was service, right?
So I was able to take that restless, irritable, and discontent, that energy that I had running
all over the place when I was homeless, hustling and all that, and shift it into service and
giving back, really, right?
And complaining the whole way, you know what I mean?
Because I'm new in recovery and I'm miserable and all that, but I did it, I showed up, right?
In spite of me, I showed up, I showed up, I showed up.
And for me, what I realized is that I healed from a lot of things in service to other people,
right?
I found self-worth, I found all these things and, you know, and in the long run, I found
a relationship with a higher power that I can do business with, right?
Service helped me to find my faith.
That's what worked for me, you know what I mean?
I've lost count of how many times, firstly, on the bad side, how many times I've heard
of a first responder or a member of the military struggle once they transition out, whether
they're fired, whether they got hurt, whether they retired, because that was their tribe,
but that was also their purpose.
They got up every morning and like, I'm going to go on a fire engine and help people who
are hurting for 24 hours.
Conversely, people that have been through their own struggles, I've watched this kind
of beacon of light element emerge where once they've actually healed to a point, I mean,
obviously you're on a roller coaster forever, but that kind of aha moment where people came
out of the shadows and said, hey, I'm hurting too.
And they, because they see themselves in that person, was there a moment or was there a
kind of period where you kind of realized, oh, wow, I'm not even so much the recipient
of the healing now.
I'm actually able to use my story and use my scars to help other people.
Oh yeah, there's a lot of them.
I think in doing outreach, because I got involved with Shine as soon as I got out of treatment,
because Shine at the time was based in that same treatment center that I went through.
I just started going out with them and talking to people and getting to know them.
And at that time, I'm only three months off the street, so I knew a lot of people out
there and they knew me on a personal level and they saw me gaining weight.
They saw me, you know what I mean?
So it was those little examples of things that they were starting to see in me.
And then you start to build up stories of the people that you interact with and how
you're able to show up for them.
And in the beginning, I think there was very simple things.
It was like, go pick them up or show up and just talk to them, spend time with them.
Like little things that I could share with them at that time that impacted them and me.
I remember being like six or seven months sober and I'm living in a sober living.
And I walk in the bathroom, I look in the mirror, and it's the first time in my entire
life that I was ever just okay with what I saw.
Not high, not low, I was okay.
I had always been uncomfortable.
It was the first time I was like, ooh.
And I couldn't tell you what specific thing that I was doing that led me up.
It was all of it, right?
And in spite of me, you know, because it wasn't like enjoyable for me to be of service in
the beginning.
I was really going to hang out or I was doing it because I was directed to do it and didn't
want to be homeless anymore.
But that's okay, right?
Willingness looks like what it looks like.
It doesn't matter as long as you have it.
One of the things I think that made the Portuguese model so successful when it came to decriminalization
of addiction was if you and I were in a car and we got pulled over and we both had a user's
amount of anything, you know, it can be meth, it can be heroin, whatever it was, we're not
arrested.
We're simply detained and put into almost like an educational conversation on the resources
that are available to us.
And so that way you're not being told we command you to go get rehab.
You know, we command you to go get this mental health counseling.
What they're doing, they're removing the criminality in the first place.
So again, that guilt and shame is gone.
You know, that then lures a lot of people to ask for help because they're not worried
about am I going to get locked up in the process?
But also there's that autonomy.
And I think this is important.
You know, people have said, oh, we try programs here where we send people to rehab.
And so, yeah, but did they want to go to rehab?
Like you said, were they at that point where they were ready to get help?
And this is what I think is great about the Portuguese model is now you create an environment
for that individual to say, I need help and help is everywhere.
Like, you know, I don't have any problems finding help versus, you know, this I command
you to get sober mentality in some of these programs that just out of, you know, not spite
the wrong word, but the fact that someone of authority tells me I need to go and do that
thing might in turn just that that dynamic have the equal and opposite effect.
Like no, I'm not going to go because you told me to go.
It's like, you know, it almost it baffles me.
It baffles me.
It's like they don't understand what it is.
Right.
You don't understand the disease.
You don't like so education is vital.
And empathy and understanding, we need to really look at what it is.
And addicts and alcoholics by nature are defiant by nature.
It's it's a it's an earmark of what it is that we have.
Right.
And if you're creating environments of guilt and shame, then you become the enemy.
Right.
It almost becomes this like regardless of what it is, even going into treatment becomes
the enemy because it's just I have to go.
I have to do this.
It's like there's a lot of that.
There's a lot like even in Vegas, we have the camping van now that's coming online here
soon.
Right.
It's like it's a lot of a lot of I use the visual representation of house painters.
A lot of people in big offices like to come up with these glorious ideas that look at
it.
Imagine if you're painting a house.
Right.
Let's say homeless.
This is a house and the house needs to get painted.
Right.
Somebody will come up with some great idea to get a bunch of funding.
And what they'll do is they'll get that big spray gun out right and spray the whole house
with a new coat of paint and look the house looks beautiful.
But like how do you paint a house with a spray gun when it's you know all these intricacies?
We've got to get out brushes.
We've got to look at this.
We've got to but they don't want to do that.
Right.
They want to they want to throw some money over here.
This new facility we've got and look it's going to be great.
And then with homeless with that with addiction like how are you you're going to punish me
for disease.
The scary part about it is right that if I had cancer you wouldn't do that.
Right.
But because I steal from you it's any more or less a disease or I deserve any more or
less empathy.
And I'm not here to say that people shouldn't be punished for crimes.
I'm not saying that you know some addicts won't need to go to jail at some point.
I get it.
Right.
But to say that that's our holistic approach to humans is just not.
But like I could sit on that soapbox all day long.
You know like so many issues of like kindness is nobody's trigger.
Right.
Guilt and shame is everybody's trigger.
So why when you're trying to foster connection and connection to services connection to all
of these things guilt and shame is not the way to go about it.
Like and then we can go deep further.
Right.
How do the drugs even end up here.
You know I mean like but that's a whole another episode.
Well I think you know if you look at the statistics we the US makes up 4 percent of the world's
population.
We consume 75 percent of the world's opioids.
We have almost now 25 percent of the world's incarcerated people.
So if the war on drugs worked then we wouldn't have gangs you know and we wouldn't have you
know homelessness everywhere.
Like we'd be the model you know.
But I would argue that you know parts of Scandinavia and Portugal are the model.
You know we it's an epic failure and it goes back to the 30s.
Harry Anstinger is the origin story.
So clearly what we're doing isn't working.
It's just that simple.
And you know for me like for example witnessing the absolute failure you know in uniform of
drug prohibition I'm a huge advocate for you know the Portuguese model or even complete
you know legalization but I saw decriminalization because that was empathy for the addicts.
But you know you're not legalizing certain things because obviously there is a gray area
you know marijuana for example is having a lot of healing elements.
So you know psilocybin and MDMA.
But then you've got crystal meth and some of these other ones that arguably maybe aren't
really you know benefiting society.
So you could still have classes.
But you know to me just abolishing the prohibition of drugs full stop and you know decriminalizing
addiction you know not only will free up resources to get the smugglers the dealers just like
you pertain to but you know free up the court systems minimize the amount of time people
are even in custody so they can actually you know post bail and get out and go back to
their family.
You know the upside to me is amazing and the longitudinal study has just been an epic failure
and I've witnessed it.
You know I've scraped the bodies off the streets for 14 years.
If you could be king for a day what would be all the pieces that you would put in place
to proactively make a huge dent in the issue that we've been talking about the last hour
or so.
I think one of the greatest things I've heard a year and a half ago I was at a conference
and a doctor came up and he was the opening speaker and he said that how many people here
think that the system is broken and everybody of course starts clapping and yelling and
he goes it's not.
He's like the system as its design works for exactly the people it was designed for by
the people it was designed for.
He's like that's the problem.
He's like it needs to be blown up because it was not designed for us.
So it's not a current system in the situation that we're in but if I was king for a day
you would have to look at every issue.
How are they getting in right?
All the way down to the addict and support all of those services like you can't have
a jail or a prison where there's no reformatory.
You can't.
It's impossible.
Right.
Like it doesn't make any sense.
Like to isolate somebody in a prison with other prisoners where they're not getting
any help they need all it's fostering is further criminality and addiction.
So it's negative into negative into negative.
So how do we turn negatives into positives?
How do we turn those at every step?
Right.
I'm a huge proponent for harm reduction.
All of it.
Safe use sites.
I'm a huge proponent for all of it but they never support it the way it's supposed to
be sorted.
Right.
We have a camping ban in Las Vegas that's about to come into effect where it's going
to be illegal to camp on the streets.
Illegal.
And like I'm going to be honest with you I don't really have an issue with the camping
ban.
I have an issue with the fact that we start with the stick before the carrot.
The carrot's not even in place.
The carts in front of the horse.
It's Oregon all over again.
Right.
And because they want to clean up the streets for the businesses and the casinos.
Like I said I'm not so unempathetic that I don't understand that somebody taking a
shit in front of your business is a bad look for your business.
But holistically as a city we've got to look at and ensure that we have these pathways
created that when the person is willing.
You know what I mean?
And I'm not even saying that jail can't play some part in it.
But why does jail have to be such a drastic difference from everything else going on?
Why isn't the rehabilitation happening in jail?
So that when they come out again they're connected.
Why aren't like the safety net needs to work together to be a true safety net.
Right now we have safety bubbles.
And hopefully you land in one of those bubbles.
And when you're out of that bubble good luck.
That's not a proactive approach.
So I think for me it would be continuity through all things.
Beautiful.
Well I want to throw a few closing questions at you before we make sure you know we talk
about Shine and Light and where people can contribute.
First question, is there a book or are there books that you love to recommend?
It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated.
Wow.
So many good books.
You know obviously Johann Chasing the Scream was the game changer for me early in my recovery
and still is to this day.
I like to go back and walk through it.
But more recently I've gotten into a friend of mine, Ryan Hampton wrote a book called
Fentanyl Nation.
It's a really good book.
And then I have a personal favorite that has been impactful for me.
It's called New Pair of Glasses.
It's a really cheap five dollar paperback that changed my life.
And what else?
I think I mentioned What Happened to You, The Body Keeps the Score.
Those are great books.
Trauma related books and The Pathways of the Brain, How Trauma Affects You.
One of them was a book by Oprah.
So I didn't see that one coming but it was good.
That's funny with the title of the book.
I forget who said it to me.
It's not that I had this thought at all.
But someone said, you know, don't ask what's wrong with you.
Ask what happened to you.
And as I've had over a thousand conversations now, it's absolutely a thing.
Everyone has an origin story.
And then I just wrote my own second book that came out a few weeks ago.
And there's a multi-generational trauma story element woven in as well.
And it's not just your own experience as a child, but what happened to your parents,
what happened to your grandparents?
There are these dominoes that are falling that will continue going through these generations
until one of us actually stops and won't let that last domino fall.
But yeah, so I love that phrase.
What happened to you rather than what's wrong with you?
Snap out of it.
Get a job.
It's that lack of empathy we expect from people too.
You know, it's like when we don't have empathy, it's like they're bothering us, right?
With their thinking, what's wrong with you?
It's like, no, let's dig deeper.
Like if you really care.
That's work.
You know what I mean?
And I'm not perfect at that.
I'm walking through some stuff in my personal life right now that I'm being reminded that
I need to get better at that.
You know what I mean?
So it's a journey and a process, believe me.
You mentioned earlier about your kids.
I just had a Navy SEAL on and it was actually his father that was deep, deep in his meth
addiction with him.
And he was talking about it was psychedelics, ironically, of all things that was the kind
of corner turn for his father.
But then, you know, he was talking about the healing.
Okay, now you've overcome your addiction, but you've got this wake of destruction and
pain that you've left.
How do you then start picking up the pieces and trying to heal these relationships?
What have you been able to do with your own?
For me, I haven't been able to.
I haven't been able to.
One of my kids is an adult and I've reached out several times and got no response.
And then one is 10 and her mom will not let me see her.
So first of the year, I'm gonna have to get a lawyer and do all that and go down that
road.
I'm sorry to hear that.
And I've got a friend that he went through a divorce and his daughter didn't talk for
him for years, but then she came around.
And I do hear this a lot.
I mean, you know, hope is a superpower, of course.
But I hope that one day, you know, your oldest will hear a conversation like this and maybe
find a little bit more compassion and forgiveness because I get it.
You know, when people are hurt, they're hurt.
But again, when you really hear where that all came from originally, hopefully that will
kind of, you know, crack the door of that conversation again.
Yeah, I hope so.
Something I pray about every day.
You know, Johan actually wrote a letter to one of my children's mothers for me on my
behalf.
And it's kind of, I do a lot of work on social media and a lot of speaking and all that stuff.
And a lot of it is because my mom's watching, right?
Like I want my mom to be proud for the first time in her life.
Like she has a son she can be proud of.
But I think some of that too is that, you know, maybe someday my daughters will look
at that and think, okay, you know, I mean, let's.
Yeah, I hope so.
I really do.
Well, we talked about books.
What about films and documentaries that you love?
Oh, that's a good one.
I'm a huge fan of City of God.
I don't know if you've ever seen that.
I don't know if I saw that one, actually.
I'll write it down.
It's out of the favelas in Brazil.
True story about a photographer that grew up in the favelas in Brazil and his journey
through all the chaos and how he overcame it was a really great movie.
What else?
I'm trying to think here.
What else?
Move Me No Mountain was something we were kind of a part of a little bit.
It was a story about homelessness that just was filmed here in Vegas with a friend of
ours that was really good.
And then, I'm trying to think.
In the moment, I can't think of anything else.
I love movies.
I get to watch a lot of TV, but I like to watch TV.
Beautiful.
Yeah, I had a guy on Judge Craig Mitchell and he was the subject of what was it called?
Skid Row Marathon.
And he was a judge and again, had a lot of addiction, a lot of homelessness kind of come
through his courts.
And so, he was a runner and he started just inviting the local, whether they were homeless,
whether they were struggling with addiction and ended up competing in the marathons around
the world.
And again, such a beautiful story of just one person caring enough to do something.
He's already paid to help, to be a public servant, but he went over and above and just
created a movement there in Los Angeles.
I like a lot of YouTube.
I like following YouTubers because I get to see different parts of the world, different
perspectives that I didn't think.
That's kind of how I found the jails, the prisons, some prisons in Europe.
And even found in Romania, there was tunnel people, people living in the tunnels, but
the tunnels were very different, Eastern European style tunnels, like steam tunnels.
I saw that.
I like that.
I like seeing different.
It was really impressive.
I think it's super important that the rehabilitation factor and the way they took away shame was
by the end of it, the one that I saw, by the end of it, they never wore prison clothes.
They always wore their own clothes.
And by the end of it, they had had weekend passes.
They had a job outside of prison.
So there was no jump off the cliff.
Their family had seen them, knew they were there.
They were connected with their family, their employment.
And as a community, it destigmatized it too because they're used to seeing him and it
was beautiful.
Yeah, I mean, this is what I've said.
We beat our chests and say we're the greatest country in the world.
And I always say, well, firstly, it's not a competition.
Like we're a round rock.
We're all on it.
You know what I mean?
But secondly, we're not.
If you look at education, if you look at the addiction, you look at the violence in our
schools, you look at the obesity crisis, we're not winning in every area.
And the problem is because of that arrogance, we're not having the humility to say, Norway,
tell us about the prisons.
Portugal, tell me about drug.
You know, decriminalization in the UK.
Tell me about the original NHS, not the one that you've destroyed, but how it was supposed
to be.
Because then we can go, OK, well, it's not apples to apples, but let's take that blueprint
and apply it to make an American version of, you know, so having the humility to ask people
who are already doing it better than us, I think is how we really kind of move forward
in a lot of these issues.
Yeah, 100 percent.
You don't know until you know.
So you got to find somebody that does exactly.
All right.
Well, the next question, is there a person that you recommend to come on this podcast
as a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated professions of the
world?
I would recommend probably Jeffrey Iverson, Jamie Hatfield, Brent Nowak.
I've got a good group of guys around me, guys and girls.
Beautiful.
All right.
Well, then the very last question before we make sure everyone knows where to find Shine
Light Foundation and yourself, what do you do to decompress?
Last couple of years, not much.
I enjoy it.
It's my purpose.
Right.
So I have a beautiful family at home that I get to spend time with when I can and just
recently helped my fiance to open her business.
She started a business, which is going really well and little things, you know, date nights
and, you know, we're just really active in our recovery.
We're really active in the community.
So I enjoy those things.
We're going to F1 on Saturday.
Brilliant.
I'm not particularly an F1 fan, but I'm going for the event, you know, and be with friends.
Right.
I get to show up for people today.
I get to be.
Yeah.
There's a lot of money in that sport.
If only you get a sponsor from the F1 community to help with homelessness in America.
Yeah, we got a call from them.
They reached out to us.
This came by the office and we thought maybe there was a chance.
Still they beautifully gave us tickets.
They just wanted to partner with somebody to give us tickets, gave us all free tickets
to go.
So it was beautiful.
Yeah.
Hopefully that will lead to a further conversation then.
Yeah, for sure.
I think what we've seen in Vegas a lot, and I don't know where anywhere else, but in Vegas,
the narrative is changing, right?
People are getting tired of the old guard and the old way and not that they want to
tear them down, right?
But what else?
How can we add to this?
Okay, we've been supporting this for a long time.
You guys are self-sustaining now.
Let's go out and find the next one to prop up and how do we help this?
And I think like, I think ideally we're perfectly suited, right?
Because we're essentially the piece that works with everybody, the piece that connects all
the pieces, the piece that can, and then report data for 18 months.
Nobody can do that.
We can report data for 18 months that people can do three months, six months tops, and
then we can track all these things for a long period of time.
Yeah.
Well, and true successes, like you said, not just coming out of a rehab facility after
five days, but actually someone transitioning back to a home and a job and truly, you know,
being back on their feet.
Yeah.
And we got a graduation, our board downstairs, we have the, you know, where all our clients
are placed and then we have another board for our graduation.
So far we have 70 clients for our March graduation and we're working on like 30 more possibly.
Amazing.
Absolutely amazing.
Well, for people listening then, where can they learn more about Shine a Light Foundation?
How can they donate and, you know, where are the places online or social media?
Also website www.shinealightlv.com.
That's the same for our Instagram, Shine a Light LV, Facebook Shine a Light.
In the Instagram, it's in our bio where you can donate.
We have a match grant going right now.
So every dollar donated is automatically doubled by our board.
So it's a great opportunity to maximize your money and just shoot us a like, a post, a
follow.
Just, yeah, we're pretty active in our social media and we do it all ourselves.
Beautiful.
Well, I want to say thank you so much, Robert.
It's been such an amazing conversation.
Just your life story, obviously on its own is incredible.
But what I love about the human beings that come on the show, the common denominator is
these are people that have either been through horrendous struggles or, you know, have served
in uniform or judges, I wouldn't say costume, but whatever you call it they were, you know,
and then they just want to do more.
They want to keep serving.
They want to be a bigger part of the solution and to go through the crucible that you went
with your addiction and come out and be this incredible beacon of light with this community
that you've built has been so amazing to hear.
So I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the
Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you for having me.
I appreciate it.