AllBetter

"Fellowship House" with Larry Moran Esq.

• Joe Van Wie • Season 3 • Episode 71

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Join us for an exclusive conversation with our esteemed partner, Larry Moran, as we delve into the heart of Fellowship House PHP/IOP/OP. Larry and I have been passionately crafting a program that resonates with authenticity and proves effective for individuals battling addiction and their families. Our journey together has been both fulfilling and enlightening, and we can't wait to share the insights we've gained.

In this special episode, Larry opens up about his incredible advocacy for veterans, his relentless efforts in addressing substance abuse, and his commitment to fostering crucial discussions around mental health. Prepare to be moved as Larry shares his inspiring story of vulnerability and transformation on a public platform.

Shifting gears, we explore the evolving perspectives on recovery and therapy. Larry reflects on his personal experiences with recovery, illustrating how it became a fundamental aspect of his identity. Dive into gripping tales from his time in law school and encounters with Lawyers Concern for Lawyers (LCL), a lifeline for legal professionals grappling with addiction. Experience the raw revelation of Larry's initial feelings of shame surrounding recovery and his empowering transition, viewing recovery as his superpower.

Our discussion then propels forward to envision the future of recovery. Larry vividly describes his vision for a wellness factory dedicated to addressing the i

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Speaker 1:

What did you eat for breakfast? Do you eat breakfast?

Speaker 2:

I do not. I drink a lot of coffee in the morning.

Speaker 1:

When was the last time you had breakfast?

Speaker 2:

Monday Monday All right, I eat breakfast for lunch a lot. That's a nice way to live.

Speaker 3:

Hi everyone, this is Jonathan Edwards. Your editor, joe did not record an intro to this episode, I'm assuming, because this particular guest has already been on the show. Something is we have to play the intro music or the flow of the beginning. Doesn't really work, but in order to play the intro music, we have to have a voiceover. So here we are. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the episode starting now.

Speaker 1:

Over here with Larry Moran and I want to pick right back up where I left off. How do you have your coffee?

Speaker 2:

Thanks for having me back, Joe.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, I forgot you. You drink coffee.

Speaker 2:

I drink less of coffee these days than I have in the last 15 years and it's because it now kind of affects my sleep pattern and it gives me unnecessary anxiety.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it does, and it's stronger as you get older. I drank a lot of coffee my whole life and I can't believe I haven't picked up on you. I don't remember sitting. I'm prolific at being at coffee shops and crushing sigs and drinking black coffee. I don't remember you sitting next to me drinking black coffee.

Speaker 2:

No, and this came up in a conversation with another sober guy at the end of the other night. We went to a restaurant. It was a BYOB. There were two of us who were sober, one who wasn't, one, who wasn't asked why I picked the BYOB and I told him I paid no attention to that stuff anymore. And then the sober guy grabbed the waiter and said give me a pot of black coffee and just put the pot right here in front of me. And he said, and he then proceeded to tell me that that's his order. You know, any meal of the day this was a 7 pm Wednesday dinner the guy ordered a pot of coffee as his beverage. So I started to explain that. You know, just looking at that is making me anxious.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's like 80s cop movies All right, departing from coffee. This is the second time you're back. The first time you're here, it gave a lot of people insight to your story and I think a lot of people listen that wouldn't have known that side of you or maybe just did in a general way and I had a lot of views. It's you, russell, and Tim Tim Kalpin who have your neck and neck.

Speaker 2:

I don't know how to take that. I'm weirdly proud of that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I was proud of it because of a. Your involvement in politics could seem adversarial to the other person on the other end of it, and to not have secrets that you're even scared of shows a different kind of strength in the field you've been in most of your life legal and politics. Did you ever view it in that lens that you're not afraid of your weaknesses?

Speaker 2:

Yes is the honest answer to that, and it was in this context, in an unrelated way, about I don't know at this point maybe eight years ago I was doing a public service television show with a court of common pleas judge on a local NBC affiliate and it was really to advocate for veterans. And it was tough to come up with a topic as you can imagine being the host of a podcast five nights a week just to come up with content to talk about and that became such a challenge and then I exhausted my research and I would just, frankly, run out of time. It was easier for me to talk about what I knew and so I started going on the show and talking about substance abuse, recovery and mental health and obviously that tied in to some of the harms that we were seeing at the time with veterans PTSD and suicide in particular. And there was an episode where I just got talking and I started talking about my own recovery and Judge Munley at the end of it pulled me aside and said you know we're in 16 counties and we broadcast to a million people.

Speaker 2:

And I didn't at the time, but I was proud to have just told my story that way to a television audience that consisted of what he said. We're up to a million households and I felt like, okay, it's out there. Now I'm wearing this on my sleeve. But it was also really at the time when I had a problem reflection. I started realizing that's recovery, where I can just stand in front of who I am especially. You know the wreckage of the past, but most especially you know the story of redemption recovery.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I don't subscribe for all people, but that's my recovery because my personality, you know, is just drawn to public life or public things. I don't mind being in front of something. And I struggled with that at the end of a 14 year tenure of sobriety that I felt like I had a hidden life. I didn't feel sober, I didn't wear it on my sleeve and I found out I'm the guy that has to like it's not. It's not something that I'm afraid of committing to, because it is exactly who I am. I don't want a persona separating my recovery and this is like oh, this is my, my persona, life. Yeah, and you said you're proud of it. What does that mean? Is there no retreat now, like publicly that you're in recovery? Does it make you feel whole?

Speaker 2:

It's a little bit more subjective than that. Let me give you a little bit more of my story. I'm a lawyer. When I began my most recent trip through law school the successful one, orientation I migrated to an individual who was at my orientation. He was speaking on behalf of Lawyers Concern for Lawyers LCL is the acronym and it's a subset of essentially alcoholics anonymous, but it's almost like I can be a little bit cynical. It was like an elite subset, like you know just for lawyers and judges.

Speaker 2:

And it was helpful at the time I started going to some meetings that were cloistered. They weren't part of the intro group list. It wasn't in pink cloud.

Speaker 2:

I think they were secret meetings of Lawyers, concern for Lawyers, and that's what it seemed like. They were just kind of like hidden away. So it didn't appeal to me. I only went to two or three of them. But when I started practicing law and I came back to the Scranton community I found the same thing was going on in the basement of the Medical Arts Building and there was a federal judge that was attending these meetings For instance. He's no longer alive. I didn't even know he was sober. It was like the secret society where nobody was supposed to know. And it reminded me of I remember watching the show and liking the West Wing, which was written by a guy who was openly in recovery named Aaron Sorkin, who was also struggled with relapse and in the early 2000s and the show was popular and I was watching it like regularly.

Speaker 2:

I remember there was an episode the White House Chief of Staff, who was openly in AA, and the vice president, who's not openly in AA. They want to go to a meeting together and the Chief of Staff, leo McGarry, explains to the vice president that they have a very secret meeting down by the you know where the situation room is in the basement of the White House, where essentially dignitaries in and around the hill and nobody has to know about it. And that was a part of the episode too. And I remember at the time, watching this in the early 2000s, thinking like that's what AA is. You got to be secretive about it and if you're a dignitarier or you're somebody of prominence, you don't want anybody to find out about this. So like we have this whole secret society where we can meet and we can kind of expose ourselves to just these certain people.

Speaker 2:

And I'll be honest with you, I stayed confused about AA for a very long time and a little bit because of those experiences, and I'm not really trying to be cynical, I'm not really criticizing it. It works for some people. It didn't work for me because it kept me feeling like there was something to be ashamed of, there was something that I had to keep secret. It was almost, like you know, it was like an allergy or a deficiency, as opposed to what I think of it is now as an enhancement and almost like a superpower, like I'm proud of the wisdom and the enlightenment and the serenity that I found in recovery.

Speaker 2:

I didn't know that when I was kind of bouncing around and trying to figure out if I was going to be exposed at a meeting and this culture that came out of the profession that I'm in that kind of showed me by just the way that it was built, that you had to kind of keep this thing cloistered and secretive or people will use your addiction against you. Nobody used their addiction against them better than I did. My addiction kept me stuck in the mud, defeated me, and I was the cause of that for far too long. So this is a long one way of saying that's part of it, my story, but really the actual benefit of my recovery is living it.

Speaker 2:

I used to think the part of my story that I like to tell was that AA is just a small part of my life. It doesn't have to define me or affect me. I don't believe that anymore. I think everything good in my life flows from the principles of 12 step recovery and the spirituality and the serenity that I've derived from that, and I think it's part of my mission and my duty to live that in every aspect of my life.

Speaker 1:

That's perfect in the sense. That's what I want to talk to you about today, because your in AA would be considered big book Nazis Me maybe at one point, but I'm kind of an outlier with my spirituality. I want to talk specifically about. You received what you would call recovery, fundamentally from the experience of working the 12 steps and being in AA, not from being, say, a fellowship guys and I don't disparage guys who just gets over from fellowship meetings. I know it's not for me, it's not the condition I have. You need both, for most people have the experience of working the steps, finding the community.

Speaker 1:

That being said, what would you say you're not fundamental about and in lines of what you're describing, you thought you had a perception of AA. It wasn't wrong. It evolved into something else. What is evolved? Say the last five years, that maybe you were afraid that if you applied this to yourself for your own recovery ideas that it wouldn't work, but maybe it works for other people. Is there any space there that you've had change or an evolution about the terms, terms of recovery, other people's experience? That isn't fundamentally AA. Aa, 12 steps, meet every week and go through the book.

Speaker 2:

Sure, and it's honestly been another part of my personal story and it's been growing and supporting my wife and trying to heal some of her own emotional wounds and trying to find what works for her who's not an alcoholic or an addict, and then coming to the realization with her that a 12 step solution works for her. Who's not an alcoholic and an addict? So watching that happen in my own family, in my own household, has given me all the proof that I need that AA or NA doesn't have the monopoly on emotional regulation through the framework of whether you call them 12 steps or, as the Oxford group call them, six steps, as long as there's the basic framework for what I believe is going back to that Oxford group, like the ego deflation, the moral inventory, the willingness to dig deep to find what makes us as individuals triggered, what's going on, what's stirred up inside of us. That's the real problem, that's the real pursuit and ultimately the real solution. Whatever that is, however, we do that inventory, that work and then finding some mechanism to overcome that with faith.

Speaker 2:

If those components are there, I don't think AA has the monopoly on it. I don't think you're going to find that exclusively in a meeting. I've become a strong believer that, in a word, to heal emotionally, mentally and spiritually, we've got to find the trauma. And that's new in the last five years, joe, my faith and my belief in evidence-based clinical pursuits of betterment. It's not exclusively found or to reside in an AA meeting room or in a residential primary treatment center. I think this work is ongoing and my wife, for instance, participates in a program called ACA Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Family Members. Yeah, that's a good organization. Their 12 steps are identical to Alcoholics Anonymous, except for the first one. Their step one says we admit it, we were powerless over our dysfunctional family member. Thereafter it's pretty much the same. I don't try to judge support groups that don't have that, but what I do like to see and find is some other mechanism for getting members to look at themselves as the problem, as opposed to outside, external people or influences.

Speaker 1:

Now, do you have experience with therapy? I do.

Speaker 2:

I have a therapist.

Speaker 1:

Different forms of therapy, too, like psychoanalytic.

Speaker 2:

I don't. I'm aware of it. I don't have personal experience with anything other than conventional talk therapy with a psychologist.

Speaker 1:

Let me ask you this Tell me in summary you've had therapy before working the steps or what you would call profound personality change that overcame your addiction. Have you had therapy afterwards? Yes, what's the difference?

Speaker 2:

Night and day.

Speaker 1:

How would you describe?

Speaker 2:

it. I was exactly as the book describes it. I was the guy that never gave therapists a fair shake before I had a personality change. I was pursuing therapy because I think others were convincing me. You know, it probably wasn't of my own volition I was. It was probably an effort. It was an effort of a half measure. I didn't want to do the hard work of recovering. So I thought, and I also was in denial and I was self deceiving in a lot of ways, believing that I could drink and use drugs like a normal person eventually, if I could just get a handle on Like all the normal people you know.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, if I could just get a handle on my immaturity or on my anxiety or on my depression or on my bipolar condition. These were my experiences and the recesses of my memory, because I just they weren't helpful to me. But I think it was my fault. I don't criticize those clinicians because I don't think I was giving them a fair shake, I don't think I was honest with them. But having had a personality change sufficient to overcome my alcoholism and then, as part of that kind of rededicating myself as much as I can to a spiritual life, I find my pursuit of mental health and my use of therapy is very productive and it's selfish. I use it that way to really try to get at what makes me tick. And I use it the same way I use four, five, six, seven, eight, nine if.

Speaker 1:

I have to.

Speaker 2:

Hopefully I don't. I can stay fit and I can stay in 10, 11, 12, but I'm not perfect and I find myself at least once a month, if not twice a month, doing a session with a therapist.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and.

Speaker 2:

I derive benefit and medicine from that that I don't get from my 12 step program.

Speaker 1:

It's interesting because we wouldn't be having this conversation. It was five years earlier. We would have had some harder, more concrete ideas. Right, let's talk about fellowship house. Yeah, the last three years. Why do we do this? What else is there to do, man? What else is there to do? Life just goes, it shows up and goes away. We're doing something interesting and, I think, meaningful. I think between the combined experience of what you experienced and spoke pretty much in great detail last episode about your experience of foundation house in Maine, trying to take the vision and everything that you experienced there, how can this work in Scranton with more resources are offered in Scranton from universities and colleges.

Speaker 1:

My love for secular, highly resistant or chronic relapses I relate to that story profoundly. I relate to thinking and you understand alcoholics, anonymous and electrically, and it's not worth trying again Like you might have to get used to being the drunk that dies, and I think there's a lot of people the population's growing of people like that and their critical thought will get them killed because it's compromised the way they're looking at A. So those combined kind of takes on how you could approach recovery, I think something really exciting to happen. We're here at a mile marker. The doors are open, the outpatient is running, the IOP is running, dharma recovery starts actually tonight, fridays, at 7.30 at the house. And where do you think we go from here? You have what's your pitch.

Speaker 2:

Thanks, joe, thanks, well, thanks in a big way for everything you've done the last two years to get us to this place. My pitch is that we had a vision and we are staying the course and we are not just undeterred. But everything I've been seeing since we first conceived of this has made me more committed to this and more convinced that this is the right model for getting people better, and I gave an interview on our open house and I watched it. The video that you cut together and one of the lines that I use is still the best way to describe my hope for this is that it becomes a factory of getting people better, a wellness factory, and the only other than some of the things I've picked up in the last two years that have showed me that this is gonna work. I only had to go on my own experience and I don't think there were harder cases than I was. I know I've met some maybe you have an argument that you were but I know how difficult it was to get through to me and I know a lot of good clinicians and a lot of good treatment centers tried, and I know the well intentions of my family and friends and deans and counselors and administrators it was. I was a tough nut to crack and what ultimately got me better was, in this order, pain and willingness and then the right kind of culture and then layered in with the right kind of supports that did not make me seem like I was being punished. And I found that in Portland, maine, and I'm grateful still to Foundation House for the program that they continue to offer, that they've pioneered, that they've only expanded on.

Speaker 2:

It wasn't that program when I was there. It was different. There were less amenities, there was less money, they weren't in business very long, it was sober living. But the culture was there, culture of man, your life's just starting, the party. You might have thought for 10 years, like a foolish college student, larry, that sobriety was about the party being over. You don't know what life is, you haven't lived life yet and that was true. And finding that I wasn't living life, that my world had gotten small, that addiction had taken things away from me and isolated me and I didn't know it, and then just realizing that and seeing the fun and the contentment and others that were similarly situated, was immediately helpful and hopeful and comforting to me.

Speaker 2:

And it didn't take much, it just took that in the beginning, but it also took time, and what I needed was every bit of the four to six months I think that I spent there I don't have a precise handle on it because I haven't thought about it in a while, but I think it was closer to six months and it was definitely more than four and I thought I had recovered, of course, because I was naive and I had a big head of steam. And now, looking back on that, it gave me a really good beginning. But I needed every bit of that because I still didn't know what I didn't know, and it gave me the beginning of the spiritual experience that I ultimately achieved in sobriety, and there is just no way I would have gotten that in a 28 or even 60 day program. And so, yeah, I mean, this is the why of it. The why of it is, I believe, young men. That's what we're focusing on, and I think we've similarly situated to what I was in 2009.

Speaker 2:

If there are also hard cases to crack, they can probably similarly benefit from a similar program to Foundation House. And you're asking me about Scranton. It just happens to be another situation where I couldn't see the forest for the trees. I grew up here. I took for granted the things that we have in this community and it wasn't until we had to really think through Fellowship House that we started really started paying attention to the attributes of Northeast Pennsylvania our proximity to major highways. That puts us within I think some estimates are four hours drive of three quarters of the United States population.

Speaker 1:

It used to be called the middle of the megalopolis.

Speaker 2:

Any major community in the Eastern Seaboard we can get there pretty reasonably in a car from Scranton and the colleges and universities. It was shocking when I really started to list and put on paper the very many institutions of higher education in and around Scranton and I know that that was important not just to me but to my family and to the people that suffered with me when I was in my addiction was like, okay, when Larry, when that switch turns on, or when Larry was able to kind of pull himself out of his spiral, what's next? When is he gonna finish that degree? Where is he gonna go to school? They were pretty quick with those questions while I was in these institutions what's next?

Speaker 2:

And it wasn't just my family, as I was meeting families of other young men who were coming here to recover. That was what their questions were. Their concerns were Well, when is he gonna start his upward mobility? When is he where? What's that gonna look like? And Scranton is the answer. Scranton's about about 100,000 people. If you look around at a similarly sized American city, you're not gonna find a dozen colleges, universities. It's just weirdly true of Scranton and this is something that I will happily admit as part of this conversation. It is a time warp and the cost of living is out of whack. I mean, you drive into Scranton, you're 25 years behind and architecture and technology, but the prices and that's a really good thing that young men can come to Scranton to start over and they can support themselves very easily with what we call in this industry a bread and butter job. And I thought that would be appealing to families like mine who had been burdened financially by addiction.

Speaker 1:

And stop right there, the guys that are with us. It's not like they're gonna be knocking on doors and applying. They can, but we have job placement. How would you summarize the job placements we just achieved, saying the last year, for people in IOP, op that were unemployed? We're having hurdles with criminal backgrounds that were just marginal crimes of addiction and we found every one of these guys a job, which it's hard to stay sober for a year if you have no income.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so, yeah, the quick answer is 100%. I don't think we've not been able to play somebody in a job. Let's come here and we make that commitment as part of our program and it's also part of our curriculum. It's, you know, you're there to know that recovery is first and foremost. You know, we obviously value the assessment at the beginning and we need to know, you know which levels of care to place a patient in.

Speaker 2:

But at some point that patient is gonna achieve a level of care that we believe supports getting a job or going to school, and that's part of the commitment we make to families that we're going to. We're gonna make that happen because it's part of the next step of recovery. So, yeah, I believe very strongly, and if we're making that commitment, that if you're sending your child here to be a patient and he's not looking to go to school, we're gonna put him to work and it'll be an esteemable job. It'll be a job that there won't be much of a limit on potential. But yeah, I don't know of other programs that offer that.

Speaker 1:

No, and there's programs we're about to announce that we're partnering with and offering their services for job training. That would be four months could subsidize living. We'd be making those announcements. But you said something really important about that Job, no job, house no house. Wife no wife. That's a great line in Alcoholics Anonymous. Can you stay sober? And we kind of seem to assess that not only in our admissions application but the initial assessment of especially for the housing green, rich. And we're really taking a metric of your desire and your commitment to a new life, irregardless of the job. But the job's there, the supports are going to show up. But I think that might be the most important factor is screening Right With us.

Speaker 2:

Well, it's not just a commitment we make generally as a marketing pitch to families. It's a commitment we make to the communities where these facilities are located. It's a commitment we make to our employees, to ourselves, that we want to create and maintain a culture here of people who want to get better. Yeah, now, we're not going to get that 100%. We know the reality of this disease. But we want to give the people who do want to get better the best chance, and I've been in programs where there's, you know, the culture changes when the population turns over, and it could take. I was one of these bad apples when I was at Alina Lodge. I thought I was cool hand Luke, that I was just going to be the anti guy, that if you said this was red, I was going to make an argument that it was blue.

Speaker 1:

It was just the Larry, they call that that oppositional defines disorder. They.

Speaker 2:

I had oppositional defines disorder in spades when I was being put into institutions involuntarily and I would imagine that you know 90 more than 90% of our patients are going to be in some level of involuntary commitment. It's not going to, it's just a reality. Nobody's going to show up here with his bags pack saying I'm happy to start my life over by coming to rehab.

Speaker 1:

Or feeling coerced by people. They they want it to trust.

Speaker 2:

And that's okay because I, you know, we, we got to give those people the space to grow into the awareness of their affliction and what recovery can be. But we also can't do it at the expense of the ones who are living in that community trying to get better. So so you know it's, it's, there's no science to it, but you're exactly right. So it's going to take a lot of attention to the initial screenings and the assessments and we're going to have to be prepared to make some mistakes as well.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, it's interesting to talk about this in a podcast, to kind of give the broad strokes of what we're doing, what we envisioned. You talked a little bit about schools, the offerings here, employment, but we're starting to put together a program like this, programming that immerses you into the community, a Russell pre-nosed cooking. It's a family that's been here 120 years. If you know Rush, you feel like you're from Scranton, so that's happening on Mondays and then interharmonies about to start every Friday. Do you think we're on track or on target of how you could present this to a family that's now deciding to send their, their son, or they're coming up with the decision together to go to a partial hospitalization program to put extend treatment for another 90 days? How would you describe that they, your son, can be a part of Scranton outside of the employment, and how would you describe that to them what Scranton is as a culture?

Speaker 2:

It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's. Let's quote our president, who's from Scranton being from Scranton is like going home, yeah Right, Isn't that what Joe Biden says? Sure, and I'm not trying to put any specific political bent on this, but I think it is a good way to describe it as a guy who was born here and, just like the president, I didn't always live here. I've lived other parts of this country. I've lived in Maine, I've lived in Minneapolis, I've, you know, I have family that's lived for a long time out in California and I've.

Speaker 2:

I've been all over this country and I've experienced the treatment communities and the sober communities in other parts of the country and I put Scranton's recovery community up against any other, any other city in America. That's first and foremost. My wife isn't from here, but she spent some time living here and she still remarks about every time we go to a restaurant. You know there's going to be three or four people and they might be people that are 60 years older than I am. We're going to come to the table and give me a remember when you know chitchat. That doesn't happen where she grew up, it doesn't happen everywhere.

Speaker 2:

There is a camaraderie, there is a familial, intangible air of Scranton. It is what the president says. It's like coming home and and as somebody who had the experience of feeling alienated and feeling alone in the final days of my addiction, now I did it to myself. All I really wanted was to earn the ability to come home. You know I felt like I was, you know, untethered and out in the wilderness. Now it was by my own actions, by my own decisions and certainly by my you know affliction, but I needed to know that things were going to be okay in the beginning. I needed to have a connection and a sense of safety and a sense of stability and a sense of warmth and every, every, every way, and I think this Scranton as a, as a city, as a culture, provides that as an intangible, and then later that in with the other attributes that we were talking about. I hope I'm answering your question, but that's that's the best way that I can. I can describe it.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to review this tonight. I'll give you transcripts. We've done a handful of adventures together politically and marketing, had our interests aligned and partners on things before this is something totally different. I guess I didn't know how different it would be because we're both in recovery thinking all right we've been the product of treatment many times that this would be all right. It felt right. But there was a lot of things we didn't know and I'm surprised by how much I didn't know about the guts of setting up a treatment center, a level of care, what the business apparatus is around a treatment center. And it's been a lot over the last three years. It has not deterred us. It actually it's been the most exciting and the hardest thing I ever did, most hard things I've left or abandoned.

Speaker 1:

This wasn't for me. This wasn't the case With me saying all that. I guess I'm trying to give context. We went to our first drug and alcohol conference. It's called the Cape Cod Symposium. What was your takeaway from that? With that, what I just said, in bringing us up to that conference, what was your take on that?

Speaker 2:

So before I get into it, I did not answer your last question, so it ties into that. I wanted to. Just when you were talking about Russell Prano and you're talking about what we're doing with inner harmony, I want to just make a confession right now, the time of my life when you and I were conceiving of this, I was up to my eyeballs in daddy daughter duty, the same way you are right now. Two young ones and I just I didn't have a lot of fun in my life at the time. So as it became a fantasy, as we were putting this together of, well, I'd like to be going to rail riders games. I'd be like to be going to Sixers games.

Speaker 2:

I would like to be doing cooking classes with Russell. I'd like to be doing putting the gear on and doing some mixed martial arts with Jimmy Simrel. I'd like to find some more time for meditation and candidly, I thought, if we put all that into this program, my wife would support me doing all that, and she is, and I'm thrilled about it and I'm having more fun just in these initial experiential sessions that we're doing than I could even describe. So part of it is they're just the things that I enjoy doing, I think there are things that you enjoy doing.

Speaker 2:

But I wasn't doing enough of it three years ago when we first started kicking this around and I thought, if I'm going to put this out there as part of a clinical program, I don't want to be a hypocrite. I want to be layering in as part of our curriculum, as part of our culture, the things that I know I enjoy and my friends enjoy, and it wasn't just to add fodder and verbiage to a program agenda. It was so we can actually have a lot of fun while we're getting people better. Yeah, it's a lifestyle. But now to pivot to your question about what I'm really. I guess we're in it now. The credentialing, the licensing, the business part of the treatment business yeah, I guess I leapt before I looked in this regard, Because I kind of believe that if I had done to this part of this business what I've done in other businesses, that I've been really analyzed, it really looked at the time and the effort and the expense and the frustration.

Speaker 1:

One of the lack of professionals. Consultants help.

Speaker 2:

There's a chance we might not be doing. I mean, I'd be sitting there. I would have just said forget it. But Joe, no, I'm really now more excited about this than I was even in the beginning, but I was before we became owners of Fellowship House. I was cynical about and toward the treatment business. Yeah, I had judgments. I thought it was a for-profit kind of gross beast that had grown out of a greedy culture of Wall Street and snobbish medical professionals.

Speaker 1:

There's half-truths in it.

Speaker 2:

I really did not live the experience that I lived, and I was wrong. I think there's still a little bit of that. I'm sure that it is never industry, but what I am finding is that this is a tough business, but I'm glad it's regulated. I'm glad that not just anybody can be a licensed, credentialed treatment provider. I'm glad it's hard. I'm glad to go through the effort of competing for contracts with insurance payers.

Speaker 2:

As part of that effort, we have to showcase our program. We have to say here's what we are as Fellowship House, here's who our clinicians are, here's who our counselors are, here's who our medical director is. Here's what we've done in the last two years. Even though we haven't opened the door, we've achieved these licenses, we've renovated these properties. I'm proud to actually put that package in front of a bureaucracy whether it's a governmental regulator or a panel of insurance evaluators, and hearing what they have to say, because what I'm seeing is they're judging us on what we've done. And we're doing pretty well, joe. Yeah, realistically, this is our first test. This is the new business for both of us. We were passionate about it. We want to help people, but in terms of like, have we gotten anywhere? We got in network this week.

Speaker 1:

Yes, we got in network for two.

Speaker 2:

We're getting these emails saying hey, we are in network with this provider at these rates. That is less to me about. Hey, should Shane, we make him money? Then, wow, we've actually succeeded. We've done A, b and C and all the way through X, y and Z and it's resulted in a regulator or an insurance provider that's a big publicly traded company, recognizing that we've done something pretty special. And now we are a professional entity and we are allowed and encouraged to go and carry the message forward and help people get better.

Speaker 1:

I didn't hear anyone say that to me yet.

Speaker 1:

Your head's. Just you know I'm in the computer all day with Timmy and Tim's doing an unbelievable job, so that's kind of cool. Oh, I'm sorry. Where does it go from here? In the sense, what do you see marketing? As for rehab, you know my feeling about marketing. I've been doing it a while. I'm good at coming up with a message, creating content, but it seems like I was able to do it as like being asleep. I spent a lot of time doing it asleep, unconsciously, manipulatively, having fun, causing trouble. I never marketed something that I want to do with my heart, with some sincerity. That shows not only who I am, what we're doing. How do you see it? I know the way I see it, but I guess I'm trying to flush out a full. How do you do that? Did you ever market something? Because you never had to market your law firm? Really no.

Speaker 2:

I mean, listen to you. I'm smiling because the good news about this is, I think, collaboration and being able to partner with other people in this space. Other owners, other clinicians who have been doing it before us are doing it now with us. We don't share any sense of competition. We don't share any sense of rivalry that's at least what I'm getting from it. That's not true of my other businesses, that's not true of my law firm, that's not true of real estate development. That's not true of the construction business. I don't collaborate with other law firms a lot. I don't collaborate with other real estate developers. I don't collaborate with other contractors a lot, because there's just a culture of competition and rivalry.

Speaker 2:

I never saw us doing that here. I never wanted to and never engaged in it. To my delight, I've seen the opposite in this business, which is the idea that if we're successful, other providers are going to be successful, supporting each other, helping identify other levels of care that we don't offer. Having a closed continuum of care through relationships with other providers has made me really delighted about the whole idea of marketing this, because it's about lifting up other facilities. What I mean by that is an experience I had this week. I'm building a freestanding detox facility for two friends of ours who are going to own it and operate it.

Speaker 2:

The local newspaper called me because they saw the zoning hearing notice and they're asking me about it as if it was mine, because they knew what we had done with Fellowship Outs. When I explained that I'm just building it, I'm not going to own it, the reporter was curious about what that's going to look like and how we're going to coexist with our business being only a few miles down the street. I explained that it's the same way that we are coexisting right now that we send patients up to Elk Mountain to a PHP because we believe in the ownership and the clinicians that are there and we support them. If they're successful, we are going to be successful. Vice versa, they have some similar levels of care, there's some overlap, but there's no competition.

Speaker 2:

It is collaboration. It is how do we put our resources together? How do we put our talents and our vision, our shared vision of just helping a patient get better, whether we can provide that bed or that level of care or not? I find that the marketing here is really coming from word of mouth, from other providers, other businesses. You wouldn't get that. People who are in this space are telling would-be patients to call us and vice versa.

Speaker 1:

That's everything that's happened to date. It's collaboration. People see you're serious, you should be taken serious and care. You're following a standard and you're just kind of magnetized to the other providers that are doing that. The other ones that are playing some other strange game don't seem to last very long. You spoke to that with it first being regulation would be a barrier to get into this business. If somehow you could get through that and you have bad intentions, you're not going to be around very long because you're actively harming people.

Speaker 2:

We talk about our target patient as somebody who has relapsed or had been through multiple institutions. Our industry that we're now in has a term for that person. It's called alumni. Imagine that that's part of our business is. We're not going to get everybody better on the first pass. We want everybody who comes through our program to have a first-rate, first-class experience. Only if that person stumbles so they can come back, we have the shot to actually get them better. Whether it's from a business standpoint or from a caring clinical standpoint, I certainly don't understand any business or any medical or mental health provider that isn't in the business of making sure somebody has a terrific experience.

Speaker 1:

We have a lot of big announcements. We're taping this now with October 6th. By the end of this month, we'll be announcing a new schedule. It will be daytime and nighttime IOP and I'll offend our clinical center. The house is seeing screenings every week for admittance into Greenwich, looking for that population you just described. So there'll be a lot going on. It was good to catch up live as a podcast. Did you get through to Andy's before this started?

Speaker 2:

I'll be going down there knocking on the door, just showing up in the kitchen. You don't have to call or put any calls into Mellow or get like it was my fault for trying to get through to Andy's pizza on a Friday at five o'clock.

Speaker 1:

Man, I've never seen you make such a strategic mistake. Man there, thanks for coming in, Thanks for bringing me to the Mid-Valley. Anything. I should have asked you that I didn't.

Speaker 2:

I don't think so, but you know where to find me if you think of something else You're it, you're my guest.

Speaker 1:

You're going to have to cover for me, probably in the spring.

Speaker 2:

You'll be the host.

Speaker 1:

Larry Moran, everyone.

Speaker 2:

I'll be back when Joe's on spring break.

Speaker 1:

I'd like to thank you for listening to another episode of All Better To find us on allbetterfm or listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcast Stitcher, iHeartRadio and Alexa, Thanks to our producer, John Edwards, and engineering company 570 Drone. Please like or subscribe to us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter and, if you're not, on social media you're awesome. Looking forward to seeing you again and remember, just because you're sober doesn't mean you're right.