August 8th, 2024 - Guest Richard Taite

that only mister Richard Tate. Richard, I will let you introduce yourself.

It's the first of its kind anywhere. And I purchased an affordable treatment center called One Method Center with twenty four beds. It's in network with a few things right now. It will be in network with everything hopefully by the end of the year. Our dream is really to scale to one thousand beds with the in network program and treat the military and take the homeless right off the street and treat them. We're going to do a pilot

program of twenty five people right off the street. They overlap, so a lot of them are veterans, and we're going to do a pilot program. We're going to follow them around for six months, and we're going to submit the data to the city, the state, and the federal government, and we're going to let them know this is a model for the country. I can't take the streets anymore, man, I just can't take them. Okay, I see a kid. We were talking about kids beforehand. Congratulations on your newborn,

big deal, huge deal. And when I see a child in an encampment, my throat starts to close. I can't even take it. And I've lived here fifty eight years in LA and you know, all my friends are here, my famili's here. I don't really go on vacation, you know, because I live in LA and with where the fuck am I going? You know what I mean? It's the most beautiful city in the world on a Sunday morning at six point thirty when you drive about the city,

it's just beautiful. Now, we live in the you know, in certain areas in the third world country, and I just and I just can't take it.

But when they help people, that's a business too. If you came to my restaurant, Richard, and you're in there and someone came in and said, hey, at five o'clock, I'm going to pay you one hundred dollars for every person that's in your restaurant, I wouldn't make it easy for you to leave, you know what I'm saying. And there is a business side to that as well. Of course, it takes money to buy beds to put electricity on.

But when grants are coming through and people are getting like five six million dollars and the end result is the same every year, something's got to change. Like, yes, they're providing a roof for someone said, that's cool, but where's the next step? And I like the approach that you're taking, man. And of course governments, cities, states, they love that data, so I think that's very important. And

obviously you do too. You seem like a smart guy, you know, to give that to them, to track the program and say this is working, this isn't working, because you know as well as I know, that's not going to work for every single person, but when it works for eighty percent of them, that could be huge.

there to do that and get more of them. I haven't really decided. I'm actually going. When I get back, I have to give a talk in the Hamptons. But when i'm back, I'm going to go with a film crew and I'm going to check out these places so that I have it and I can go back and look at it. I've got a concussion. I forget everything, so I have to go ahead and do that so that when I miss something, I can go back and look at it over and over and over again and

figure out what this is. Talk to everyone who works there and people that live there, get the vibe of it, See what they need, what's good, what could be worked on? You know that kind of thing. But you know that's dream man. That's why I came back. I ain't missing any meals anymore. Okay, that ain't happening. The Ventanyl issue

is the worst. Okay. I've been telling people since two thousand and fifteen, fourteen whatever it is, maybe even thirteen, that this is the worst epidemic we've ever faced, Okay, and it's going to get worse. And cut two, I come back five years later, it's exponentially worse. Okay. With ventanyl, then you've got car fentanyl, which is fifty times stronger or something like that than ventanyl. And then you've got trank, okay, which is xylazine, which is a animal tranquilizer, which is

why they call it trank mixed with ventanyl. Right, So it's a flesh eating drug. You hunch over and like literally like your knuckles are touching the ground and it opens up sores in your arms and legs where you inject, and then they just keep injecting into the sore and you're literally looking at their bone and you can't save anybody because narcan doesn't work with it. So and it's very hard to get off. And most people that are taking fentanyl and trank and car fentanyl don't know it.

They don't know it sure because seven out of ten pills right now in powder have fentanyl in it, right, So you go ahead and you buy a percocet and you think you're getting a perkoset and you're not getting a purchase at laced with ventanyl, right, And that's why people are dying. You have to look at it like this, and I always explain it the same way. Okay, so I'm very disciplined and I stay on message. The chemicals to make fentanyl are brought from China and they are

sent to Latin American countries, primarily Mexico. And then you've got some guy in a half's mat suit with a big wooden stick and a huge vat and he's stirring the shit, right, very scientific, and then they load him into pill form, right into molds. And think of it like a chocolate chip cookie. You bite into a chocolate chip cookie, You've got all these chocolate chips, the chocolate chips are fed, and all you're dead. Sometimes you don't get any chips, or one chip, well you're not that high,

so you take another one. Now you're dead. Okay. So it's not if people are going to be dying, it's when they're going to be dying for sure. I mean, this is just the worst epidemic we've ever had. And by the way, trank is coming to a suburb near you, so and not that that's going to make a difference because these are going to be richer people or whatever.

Because everything gets desensitized everything. Remember back in the day, I think it was like ten years ago, maybe nine years ago in Connecticut, those first graders all got shot. There were like twenty one kids that passed away in a couple teachers and right then everybody, for me, for sure, I'm like, Okay, that's it. That's where the country draws the line. Okay, this is changing right now. Okay, twenty

one five year olds first graders. Yeah, it's over ninety percent of Republicans n r A members wanted background checks. Everybody did. Do you think anything got done? Nothing got done. Okay, so this is just going to be the new normal. Okay. We never in our wildest dreams thought we'd ever see encampments on sidewalks, and now it's people just step over people to get to where they got to go. You got to leave this place better than you found it, man, that's it.

just mixes right to the next thing. And when people are I don't want to say dumb enough, maybe on educated enough to realize, like you said, it's coming miscalculation of community standards, I guess you know, oh, our standards are better than that, And well, no, you don't understand how this works, do you There is something that can be out in front of it, you know, and we can help those people when they do need it. Like you were saying about the project that you have coming up,

I'm that is music to my ears, man. And I don't know if you're working with like behavioral facilities out there, because you know, some people I know here they need like adult foster living, like they need a place to go. They cannot care for themselves, some of them, whether it be they were just out there because of that, whether drugs has taken their mental state to that place, but

they cannot care for themselves. They don't know how to wash themselves, they don't know how to pay rent, they don't know how to do these basic things that you and I, yeah, sure we know how to do that, but some of these people don't. So I think you know, getting them to that next level, you know, and kind of separating them out to like, Okay, this person has a substitute disorder, this person needs a little bit more care than that. You know, this person has both. You know,

like let's let's see what we can do. But that seems like a large task.

their way out of this thing. But what happens is is if you stay on the street too long, develop something called a learned helplessness, which is just a fancy way of saying, what's the use, and you give up. It's like crawling into the fetal position, just being despondent, like nobody gives a shit about you in the world. That's what we have to prevent. Not that we can't fix that, but it takes a while. It takes what it takes. I didn't know how to take care of

myself either. I was homeless for a little while. I didn't know how to take care of myself and wash myself and work and pay the rent. Fuck I got money. I was thinking about paying the rent, but the shit turned into crack couponts. I mean, that's just the way what was for me. Everybody gets a turn, everybody and it's their turn. And if you know how to fix shit like that, and you don't, you're a dick.

thousand of my most favorite dollars in two months. I didn't get one client that used to get me eighteen clients, so I was pretty scared and I had to figure it out. But I figured it out because I have one hundred and twenty employees and I'm not going to fail, right, So I figured it out. But it cost me a fortune to figure it out. Not everybody has. Not everybody stupid enough to donkey off all their cash to figure something out, Okay, but I have no respect for none.

So I just like to build things. So we're going to build it. And so that's one. The second thing is when I left in twenty eighteen, you are getting paid about sixty seven cents on the dollar for every dollar you build. Today it's twenty five cents on the dollar. That's right before when I left, the average length of stay was just over twenty seven days. Today it's about twenty three days. So you know they're not approving more time.

They're paying you sixty percent less. And if you're working on a twenty five or thirty percent margin like most of these places are, now, you're losing thirty cents on the dollar every month and you're slowly going out of business. The people in treatment don't understand that. They don't get it until it's too late, because census in the treatment industry goes up and down. It's not a regular thing.

It goes up and down, so they just think it's a downturn, and then the downturn never goes back up, and before you know it, you can't make payroll in thirty six hours. And that's why I bought one method, because they couldn't make payroll. So these are the two reasons why people are struggling, the two major reasons. I mean, labor costs went way up after the pandemic. Nobody wanted

to work. Now everybody works, and they have to be taught how to You know, everything when you don't do something for a while, at atrophies right, so you know, they have to be coached up and everything again, and that's why people are failing right now. And just to illustrate that, when I left and sold Cliffside in eighteen, there were eighteen thousand treatment centers in the country. At

the end of last year. When I started again, it was twelve thousand and change by the end of this and eighty five percent of that happened in twenty twenty three. Now cut to this year. I guarantee that by the end of the year, when the numbers come out in January or February or whenever they come out, I can tell you now that there's going to be under ten thousand treatment centers. They're all going out of business. They

can't figure it out. You know. It's one thing to have insurance contracts so that you know what you're going to be getting right and you can provide the treatment that you need to provide. It's another thing to not know how to get clients. You're not paid a certain amount. I get it, they're not staying as long. I get it. That just means you need more clients, you need more volume. Well, that's the hardest thing to do right in this business.

If you don't if you don't have those two things, you're in trouble right now.

to just suck it up. And the guy tell it, throws me some some sheets and says, you know how to make a bed and I say, yeah, yeah, I know how to make a bed. And he's like, well,

here you go, you're in that room. So I go in this room and I was the only one in the room, but there were two other people coming that that night apparently, And so I picked the bed that I wanted and I looked down at it and it was a very thin mattress and there were bloodstains on it, and I was again, you know, you did this to yourself. You know you got to suck it up. So I make the bed and then I lay there and I

started thinking, like, this is an all men's facility. You know, if it was a women's facility, I can say, Okay, the monthly thing happens. But then I started thinking, I'm like, this is a men's facility. Like somebody get stabbed in this motherfucker, you know, Like what is going on? Dope? I was like, what the fuck is going So I'm like I'm laying there more and I'm still trying to like tough myself through it, like you put yourself in.

And I'm like, you know what, I don't think I'm gonna do this, you know, I don't think this is gonna work for me. So I go out and I started to walk to the office and let him know like this isn't this isn't where I need to be and this is not what your website look like. And this dude walks up and he's like, yo, man, you've got a cigarette, you know, And I was like, well, sure, just don't you know, have sex with me when I'm not looking here you go. So I get some cigarettes

and I watched in office. I'm like, yeah, this isn't working, you know. I was like, I gotta go and they're like, I, well, you're gonna owe us for this, you know, and it was like thirty grand or something. I was like, this is a what we call false advertising, and I would love to see a bill for this because I'm not paying you guys nothing. And they're like, all right, get out. I'm like, well, can you guys call me a cab and they're like nope. They just threw me right out

in the street. Arion Palm Springs and I call this guy who called himself a recovery treatment coordinator and he kept telling me, man, I'm not getting paid anything for this. I'm not getting he was making sure, you know. And I'm like, that's the first thing a liar tells me. I'm not a liar. I've had people say that to me and I'm like, okay, well you're a liar then, dude, because we all lie about something and for you just to say that right off the rip, you know, I

think you're a liar. But I call him up and I'm like, dude, what's up? So then they send me to La. This dude drives down to get me, brings me to LA. I was staying in this house it's called the Orange House. It was in the West Hollywood or something, and that was crazy, man, my first experience.

And I go through this whole intake process and the lady's telling me that I need to be on some kind of medication and I was like, but I just want to quit drinking, and she was like, no, we need to put you on something because we need to charge your insurance company for it. And when she said that to me, and for the next probably three years, I did not trust anybody, right, I thought they were all for the money. And then eventually, you know, I

get out of radio, I don't have insurance. I'm on Medicaid. So then you got to be bounced around through the state places, which some are okay, some aren't, but it's still maybe never trust them. And now, like I kind of laugh about it now because I'm like, oh, that place was early after my Medicaid money, because you know, Medicaid they don't pay shit, you know, Like, but now

I look about it, it is kind of funny. But that first experience, and that's why when we have people, because what we do is we take people to them from treatment. We have a recovery community center where we let people host their own meetings. If you want to play with tonka trucks, bring them in. Let's go that. If that can keep you sober, if you can build a community and you can have fun doing it, let's do it. We don't have one of those meetings yet, but we do have art, we have music. I mean,

we let them pick whatever they want, you know. But that treatment thing, you know, taking people to them from treatment when they have no other way to get there is huge, and we use recovery coaches to do it. We have great conversations and sometimes we're driving all over the state. You know, we're in northern Michigan, we drive to Detroit, you know, it's four hour trip, you know,

and we're just talking. There's nothing we're selling this person in the back seat, you know, and it becomes a natural conversation and that is such a huge advantage for people. And we're hoping to get some funny so we can like track that and actually report that to the state because you know, they all they love the numbers, so you got to give them the numbers, and you know, the funding to track that stuff would be nice. But there's some grants out there and we're doing what we can.

But it's such a huge thing, and the state looks at it like, oh, well, you've just given transportation. They say you can't bill for recovery coaching and gas mileage because that's double dipping. And I'm like, those are two different services, man, you know, and some of that stuff can be very frustrating.

are generally very good souls. Now, whether or not they have the ability to help anybody is debatable. I think only about certainly in the single digits, and I would argue two or three percent of the people that actually work in treatment centers have the ability to help anybody. But or a real alcoholic like me, somebody who came in had a back surgery and took pills for a couple months or three months or six months or whatever it is, and it's got them right. They don't have

it because they're physically dependent. That's one thing. Okay, anybody can do that, but the owners. But they're generally kind souls and they're certainly not going to hurt anybody, and they're going to just time matters, right, So they're going to help people based on that. They'll meet people they connect to, they'll have a therapeutic alliance that they'll meet friends there for support. That's all good. But the people who are shitty are generally the ownership. And there's nothing

worse than Florida. People will call me and say, you know, I don't want to come to La you know, you know there's this place in Florida, and like, hold on, go to Georgia, go anywhere. Okay, literally anywhere but Florida. Because there's so many bad actors in Florida. You don't know who's righteous and who isn't. This is the home of pill mills, where they were selling pill mills pills

in parking lots of fast food restaurants. This is the beginning of the labs where you know, you take a cup of urine and you charge thirty nine hundred bucks for it, and they do it. I mean, these guys did it three times a day, so they're making twelve ten grand, you know, after some cuts, they're making ten grand aday just on piss. I mean they're in the piss business. They're not in the treatment business. Now they cut a lot of that down, so now you're not

getting paid on any of that. I mean I didn't have a lab until like twenty sixteen, two years before I sold cliff Side. Everyone was charging thirty eight ninety five, thirty nine, twenty five, whatever it was, And we were charging five hundred and seventy seven dollars because I just wanted to make certain that and I had an opinion letter from an attorney that said I could charge seven fifty.

But I didn't even think that was right. I think you could make one hundred dollars testing somebody twice a week, and that was enough cushion for me to where I wouldn't lose money. I don't want to make any money. I just didn't want to lose money. But I did want to know who the hell was loaded in my place, and not wait a week to find out. I wanted to know in you know, a couple of hours, because we gave a shit about our people. But the owners are usually the worst man. They just are. And it's

not because they start out being bad people. Maybe they don't, but you have a bunch of employees and you have the stress of it, and you just, you know, you take shortcuts, like not giving people back their money after being there a day when they're you know, they were lured there under false pretenses. And it's even worse than that. You know, they have something called the Florida shuffle right where you know you got. They'll take in somebody with

great insurance or cash. The guy leaves the insurance company, stop stops paying, the parents, stop paying whatever it is. They leave, a girl, a hot girl is there right to meet them, takes them, pumps them full of cocaine and benzos and alcohol opiates, you know, so that they're poly substance users, right. That means that they use a ton of shit, right, and a ton of different shit, and then they I'm back and they tell the parents you know, oh he's fucked up again. We need the help.

Or he tells the insurance company. I'm sorry, you know, it didn't hold, didn't take. And that's the kind of stuff that they do. They do the body brokering where they're buying clients, all this stuff where they take their breaks on the front end, you know what I mean, and they apologize for it later, and it's based out of necessity for these people a lot of times more than it is greed.

are people. Okay, good luck with that, always taking anybody's guns. But do you really need a gun with a magazine that can take out twenty one kids in five minutes? Twenty one first graders? Really that's what you need. So when you talk about people body broke ying and doing that other shit with these women, and everything. It's depressing, but I've learned to live with my disappointment. It's sad. I mean, I'm disappointed, you know, and I'm doing the best I can to, you know, get a foot in

the door. I may be on a commission for the VA to where I me and this commission go and we talk to the city Council and we make recommendations on stuff like this. You know, they're not going to listen. They don't give a fuck. But we're going to do this, and we're going to go We're going to exhaust all our legislative remedies. We're gon we're going to do this one and we're going to do that one, and I'm going to learn about it. A good friend of mine

will be the district attorney on November fifth. He's going to beat the shit out of this freak gascon because he's a good man. So the encampment's done. The smashing grabs where you run into a place and steal nine hundred and ninety five dollars with a shit and traumatize everybody in the store, and the knockover old ladies and mothers with strollers and shit and traumatize all the employees that's done this ventanyl thing. Okay, they're going to start

prosecuting for that. You know. I've been running a PSA up in Sacramento to shame these folks to pass something called Alexandra's Law, which is basically just a traffic ticket, and it basically what it says is, okay, drug dealer, this is your one get out of jail free card. But the next time you're fucked. And that can't pass. It can't pass because the Democrats won't pass it. And I'm not a Democrat. I'm not a Republican. I'm the adult in the room. I'm in the middle. I love

my Republican brothers and sisters. I love my Democrat brothers and sisters. I just don't like the crazies on each end of the poll. Let's not do crazy. Let's get back to common sense, take care of each other, do right by everyone, and leave this place better than we found it. Okay, there's nothing to get here, there's only to give. That's childlike thinking because people aren't acting like that. They're too self interested and too polarized due to social media.

These are problems that we've got right now, and they lead into and overlap into our areas.