Brett Knight: From Gavel to Grace, Rethinking Addiction Treatment, Justice, and Recovery

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Brett is an attorney from Tennessee, former prosecutor, and a uh currently you have your own private practice. That’s correct.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Is that right? That’s correct. I have a uh a private practice where I focus almost entirely on criminal defense work. I’m also a municipal judge uh in Tennessee.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Oh, you didn’t tell me that part ahead. So he’s a judge. Right. So we have a judge and a lawyer in the house today, and you’re not in recovery. That’s my understanding. That’s correct. I I think that’s interesting because your uh assistant or uh one of your people, Donna, is that right? That’s correct. Reached out to me and said, Hey, do you want a copy of Brett’s book? I’m just trying to put it out there, right? And so I said, Well, I would like if he would just bring it to me and do the show. Why not? Didn’t know who you are, still don’t. We’re getting ready to find out though. So what’s interesting, what you just told me before uh we started, was that you’re not in recovery, but because of your experience in law and being a prosecutor, that something changed you. Something happened and changed the way you view people in recovery. That’s right. So I’d like to just get into a little bit of uh kind of what we talked about over there a minute ago. If you’d like, you can tell us uh you can plug your book, tell us the name of the book, the purpose behind it, and how how you landed right here today. Sure, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Well, I I wrote a book that was published, came out at the end of May. So it’s just been out three months uh at the time that we’re sitting here recording it. And and the whole purpose of the book, I never had aspirations of being an author. That wasn’t really the goal. But I knew I had information and I had experiences that people literally were dying for, communities were dying for, families were dying for, that this experience of having walked with people uh through programs, through their recovery, uh in the court systems, uh, in the jail cells. And uh I had these experiences that people were needing this information. And there’s only so many people that can sit in your living room couch or sit in your conference room at your law office that you can share this information with. And I knew that if I could capture this and the stories of so many people uh that I could share that with people who I’ll never meet. I’ll never be able to meet, but they’ll be able to have access to this information, know that there’s a hope for them, that there’s something better for them ahead, and that there’s answers to their questions, and to inspire and to light a little bit of a fire under people to get involved. You know, we have to get involved as a community, uh, in the in the faith community, in the secular, you know, community as far as clubs and organizations and the elected officials as well, those of us in the judicial system, to get involved and start being part of the solution, not just observers or people who are impacted, but part of the solution going forward. So that’s the whole reason that I wrote the book was to be able to share this information in a way broader and to people who I would never have physical contact with.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

I’m glad to hear you say that secular part because uh, you know, when I checked into the homeless shelter in 2013, I didn’t want to hear anything about religion. I didn’t want to hear anything about spirituality. I was mad, to be honest with you. And you don’t know my story, so I’ll tell you there’s uh I actually had the founder on yesterday, Jay Davidson, in here, uh founder of the Healing Place, downtown Louisville. They have over 700 beds in Kentucky that are all free.

SPEAKER_02 3:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

It’s all free. So it’s a it’s a non-medical detox. You go in there and sweat it out, right, you know, for a week or whatever. And uh it’s good to hear you say that because uh I had to go through some process. I had to be detoxed. My mind had to be clear before I could start wrapping my mind around what a higher power was, sure, what does it mean, what’s the function behind it? I just didn’t want to hear it. I remember walking to a guy while we were in the program, there was a guy that would wake up every morning and kneel down and he would pray so hard. He was like rocking back and forth. He’d have his head down in a pillow and he was talking to somebody and this and that. And I grabbed a guy, I said, We have a problem. I’m not gonna do that. I don’t know what that means. And uh he said, Well, you don’t have to right now. He’s like, right now, all you have to do is not drink and we’ll figure the rest out.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Right. So right, you know, there’s a there’s an old saying, and I I found it to be very appropriate, that nobody cares what you know until they know that you care. And and that’s what you’re saying. You you had to get to the part of understanding you probably didn’t want to hear from anybody who you hadn’t determined that they cared about you and that they that they weren’t uh, you know, just out there spouting something. That what they what they said had significance and truth in your life and that that they cared about you. They weren’t trying to, you know, get an angle. And a lot of people who I work with um who are who are maybe are not even yet seeking an answer, or maybe seeking an answer but don’t know where the answer is, they’re so angry, they’re so untrusting that in the beginning, my first goal is one, are you physically okay? You know, let’s make sure you’re gonna live for tomorrow. Let’s I mean, I work in the trenches front lines of uh in in our communities, and a lot of time it is literally let’s make sure that you’re gonna survive, let’s make sure you’re physically okay, and then let’s start working on that trust. Let’s start working on that, you know, what am I here? What am I trying to get out of it? And we’re gonna advance to these conversations of of higher power and and and God and things of that nature. We’re gonna advance to that, but I want to first, I mean, you’ve got to be taken care of. You’ve got to be in a position where you’re actually gonna hear what I have to say. You know, it’s uh it’s similar conversations that we see, and they can sound crazy sometimes when you listen to them. It’s similar conversations we see in the community when we talk about things like um um, you know, medication that that helps people that are overdosing, for example. Um, you know, some people are like, well, that’s enabling, for example. I’m like, yeah, it’s enabling you to breathe. Yeah, that’s that’s what it’s doing. You gotta stay alive. How about we keep them alive and then we work on you know the next steps first?

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Yeah, that goes back to all that you see the post that say, why is Narcan free and insulin cost money? And I was like, well, somebody donated the Narcan at the end of the day. That’s all it comes down to. So you know, but the the point you’re talking about right now, there’s a part in the I’m an AA guy, right? So there’s a part in the big book Alcoholics Anonymous that says uh the ex-problem drinker who has found the solution and is properly armed with the facts about themselves can generally win the confidence of another alcoholic within an hour or so. It says until such understanding can be reached, little or nothing can be accomplished. That’s right. Right. So that’s where people from like you’re good. We appreciate people that are not in recovery. That like some of the staff you just met up front, yeah, not in recovery. They just made it their life’s work to do this. So but you know, we you you pull in the people that are in recovery, then you find somebody that’s properly armed with the facts about themselves. They can get the confidence of that person in detox. That’s how I work down there in the healing place. I love it. I love that. So it’s it’s kind of rare, no offense to anybody out there, but it’s kind of rare to find a judge and a lawyer, a former prosecutor, uh that’s on our side a little more. Right. Right? It’s not all punitive with you. And I to be totally clear, I know police officers, judges, and lawyers that are not all punitive. They will hand out my business cards and brochures in a heartbeat because same thing you said, they keep seeing the same people over and over. Yeah. Right. So tell me what that’s like. Uh first of all, you said you per prosecuted mostly drug and alcohol cases. What was that like?

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Well, when I was in law school, and and and law was a second career for me, uh, my background-wise, I had been in a career in the IT industry where I was the manager over IT for a large aircraft manufacturer, third largest in the world. And so I was working in this very high-caliber IT field. Um, and and so I had this enormous amount of technology background. And when I went on to law school, that was more of a, you know, punching a card is something I’ve dreamed of doing when I was younger, but I had children, so I had to go to work and make money. Uh and and as my children got older, I then pursued the the law degree. Uh, but so as I was coming through law school, I had this uh enormous amount of technology background. The elected DA in the district where uh I live at in Tennessee, he spotted that opportunity because he also had a task force that was to be made up of Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agents and undercover agents and local resources, and he needed a prosecutor to lead that, but one that understood technology because it was going to be all complex cases, wiretaps, pole cameras, cell phone data, things of that nature that were more cutting edge at the time. And so here he sees this law school student coming through Belmont Law School that has this background. And so he nabbed me. And so from the very beginning, I was put into much more advanced cases than most new prosecutors were. And so that’s what I worked in. I worked in this around these this drug task force mentality and this idea of building large cases. And so, yes, um, a large portion of my uh experience as a prosecutor uh revolved around um drug cases.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

So that’s interesting. You’re talking about wiretaps and you’re talking it sounds like some a big deal. Can we talk about some of that? Tell me what what kind of cases were you prosecuting? And also, what was your attitude towards prosecuting? Were these all villains at one time? Like we got to throw them under the jail.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

Fair enough. Um and and yes, uh, you know, they were they were larger cases, and they were not the, hey, somebody uh has drugs on them, let’s go arrest them. These were cases that would go on six months, nine months, more than a year sometimes, where you would begin to begin get evidence based on undercover buys, and then based on that, I would write a warrant and a you know a titled warrant to get a wiretap on that person once you had enough buys and enough evidence. And then all of a sudden you’re on their phone, listening to their phone conversations. Well, from that, then you get more information on more people, and the next thing you know, you’re on five phones, six phones. And so we’d have this large room that would be filled with, you know, maybe we’re on five different phones at one time. Maybe in addition to that, outside of each of their homes, we had warrants for cameras that would be up on their electrical poles and we were watching what was going on outside of their home. So we called those poll cams. So we’d have poll cameras up at the locations, we’d have cell phones up at the locations, we’d have undercover agents who were, who were, you know, buying and getting information. We were undercover agents who would track people that came to the home that we could hear on the phones that they were buying. So we were, there were a lot of moving parts and a lot of uh people involved. And then typically the the strategy is, and it’s not any one particular case, but the strategy overall is that you let that build up for about six, seven, eight months, nine months, and then all of a sudden you’ve got 15, 16, 20 different people that are at a high level, and you just go in and you just break the wire. You just go in and arrest everybody on that day. And because once you begin to make arrests, the wire goes dead because people figure out and they throw their phones away and things. So you build up, build up, build up, build up these cases. During that time, there are legal requirements for making reports to judges and things of that nature to keep things going, showing that there’s reasons to keep things going. And and yeah, you’re you’re looking to get as high up on the uh food chain as you possibly can. You’re trying to see where is it coming in from, where’s it coming in out of state from, where is it originating from? And and that’s the the strategy you know behind.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

So when you say coming in out of state and originating from, what’s the highest up the chain you got?

SPEAKER_01 11:12

Well, we would often see things in in Tennessee and Middle Tennessee, we were seeing the vast majority of things coming in either from California or from Atlanta. Atlanta was a main artery coming into them where we were at, middle Tennessee.

SPEAKER_00 11:23

Did you go any further beyond that and find out how it got to Atlanta? We wouldn’t have to be out there.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

But oftentimes it would then be somebody in Georgia or California that would law enforcement that would take over based on our information and begin to go up. And and so we knew almost everything was coming in across the Mexican border. Nobody was making, we we were there in the transition when nobody was making it anymore at home or locally, they were all getting it coming across the Mexican border.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

When you say making it, making what? Uh methamphetamine terms.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

Mainly methamphetamine? That’s that’s primarily what we had. Uh, you know, prior to this time we’d have what we call shake and bake, which were people that were making small amounts in two-liter bottles, and they were making it themselves. And then they know a couple of those guys. Yeah, and they were selling it locally, small amounts, and that’s primarily what you would see is that, or you’d see smaller labs um in in different locations. And then all of a sudden, those labs just disappeared because you couldn’t compete with one, the quality or the low price of what was coming in. So everybody just kind of went out of that business and it just became a distribution.

SPEAKER_00 12:22

So this might seem like a silly question, but so you say Atlanta’s up. How are they getting it there? I see all the stuff on TV. You say across the border. Is that tunnels? Are we talking about planes?

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Every every way in the world, you you see, you know, crazy things. I remember seeing, and again, these were not cases that I was involved in, but we were seeing it coming across where they were manufacturing uh large agricultural equipment, tractors, big, huge tractors, and they would come across the border after being manufactured, and they found inside of the tires were filled with methamphetamine. You know, they were just packing these tires full of, and and you’d see that you see it coming in inside of a frozen meat coming across. You you would see it coming in in all different creative ways where it was being you know brought across the border.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

Does that help at all putting it inside a frozen? Is that to throw a dog off or something?

SPEAKER_01 13:10

Or well, I think it was just trying to get it through customs that there was a legitimate reason for these this manufacturer who sells lots and lots of tractors that you know this is a regular business for them. And I think routine causes us to be sometimes be lax. So if you see that every week, you know, 18 of these are coming across, you don’t think much of the one that’s too busy doing something.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

And it’s like that’s a normal shipment, just let it be.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

And there’s all kinds of ways to try to throw scent off, you know, packing it in different materials that that would throw a dog’s scent off. But now they use a lot of x-ray devices, so they’re actually seeing through the the metal. You know, it used to be where things got hidden inside of panels, but now the x-ray machines just see right through that and can see the packaging.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

Dude, you gotta be ballsy to take big packs of meth and pack it in a car and drive it across the border. I I would be I I would be sweating bullets. I’d be the most obvious. I swear. I would have a panic attack.

SPEAKER_01 14:08

They would be looking at my bald head and saying, why is why is air conditioned inside of that car? Why is he sweating?

SPEAKER_00 14:12

Any, what’s the biggest? Do you know the biggest guy you ever got, types of volume or what type of thing?

SPEAKER_01 14:16

You know, we saw lots of of large amounts and pounds and things of that nature. Um, it was usually further up the chain that you saw you know hundreds of pounds. Sometimes you would see something like that in Nashville, but primarily, again, Atlanta would be those places and they would break up and and ship apart from there. And, you know, and we we found you know indoor grow facilities for marijuana um that were extremely complex. In Tennessee. Yeah, that were local in our and even in our district or close to our district, where you’d you’d go out into the country and you’d be on five acres in this beautiful, you know, little log cabin looks like an Airbnb facility and the the the Ten Commandments and the Constitution setting on the front porch, literally, American flag flame, you know, waving off the front porch. And you open up the front door and there’s not a wall inside of the house. They’ve gutted the entire house. There’s not even a wall up. Everything is wall-to-wall growing facilities with lighting systems over the top. They’ve hijacked the electricity coming into the house to the main line so that it doesn’t show the electricity. I was gonna say that was gonna be my next question. They had an above-ground pool system that they were using to put the chemicals and to water the plants. It was an above-ground pool, but it was really just a watering system that was built in. The engineering uh that went into these facilities was phenomenal. And we uh I remember on one particular one we caught the guy there, and and the information that he gave us was that they were specialists and they just traveled around, and that’s what they did. They worked for these large cartels and they would travel around from facility to facility, and all they did was they were the brains. They would set up these locations and then they would leave and other people would come in and maintain them. But they were the ones who are the electrical geniuses and the the ones who could set up uh and make all of this work.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

So that you say you caught a guy at a facility doing just that with active plants there and growing going. Okay, so he was in trouble regardless. But they come in ahead of time, yeah, they tear down all the walls, yeah, put in all the growth systems, hijack the electricity, yeah, and then use the the swimming pool. Yeah. It’s just the that’s above ground giant swimming pool. But you don’t want to swim in it because all the whatever, whatever chemicals are in that pool.

SPEAKER_01 16:19

And there would be a pipe coming out of it instead of the pipe going to the filtration system like you normally have in a pool, the pipe would come into the house, and that would be the watering system for the overhead and and drip irrigation systems that they would have for these these plants. That’s insane. And they’re again the amount of brain power that went behind these facilities. I I’ve, you know, working in the justice system, I’ve always been uh fascinated by the uh the amount of wisdom and ingenuity that people can have, even inside of the jail cell. I I remember at uh one of the local jails, they that they were moving items around from floor to floor, from like a second floor to a first floor or third floor to a second, and they were moving them around from cell to cell. I’m like, how in the world do you even do that? And they had figured a way to tap off and shut off the plumbing, the drain systems, to where water wasn’t coming into them temporarily, and they would be able, they would fish with lines through the plumbing system, and it would land and the guy underneath them sink and they would pull it out, and then they would hook everything back up and then let the plumbing go again. It’s like that kind of ingenuity. I’m like, I need we need to put you to work because you you you’ve got some brain power going on. Yeah, and a lot of free time on their hands, I guess. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 17:27

So that uh that particular operation where you found the the I’m in so I watch all the shows about people smuggling through tunnels and this and that. It never crossed my mind to use a swimming pool as a watering system because you have to hide it somehow, right? Yeah, exactly. So they hid it in plain.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

So you fly over that house, all you see is this beautiful, looks like an Airbnb log cabin, three-bedroom, you know, kind of a log cabin out in the middle of the of the woods, and you think, well, that’s a beautiful home. Somebody’s got some seclusion. Look at that little that above-ground pool that they’ve got and everything else, but it was entirely made uh just uh to to grow.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

It was a hydroponic system.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

It was a hydroponic system that was sitting in there. And and it was, and the one guy that was there, I mean, we caught him totally by surprise, but he there was not even a bedroom for him to sleep in. Every s every square inch was being used for growing. He was just sleeping on a sleeping bag on the floor.

SPEAKER_00 18:15

And he was the logistics guy, he was there or maintenance.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Yeah, that’s what that’s what we found out is that was the case. Of course, when we first got there, he, you know, couldn’t speak any English and didn’t understand anything we say. And and then I remember on that particular guy um thinking about him, he couldn’t understand anything. So, of course, we couldn’t ask him any questions in the beginning. And uh, and he was just sitting there watching as we were dragging stuff out, and and I was helping, you know, even though I’m the prosecutor here, I’m I’m not one to sit and watch other people work. And I was helping and and I was sweating and they were giving me a little bit of a hard time about it. The the officers were, and I was, of course, in you know, casual clothes. And uh I said, This isn’t why I went to law school. And he started laughing. I’m like, wait a minute, you understand my jokes, right? Right. But you but somehow you don’t understand my language. I think uh I think you’re playing a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

I guess I didn’t understand that whenever you do something like that, the prosecutor is there. Not typically.

SPEAKER_01 19:06

No, not typically thing. I I just happened to be there on that one. And so when that search warrant was issued, I issued the search warrant. Um, I went with them because I was available to. We were anticipating that we might find other things that would require an additional search warrant because the search warrant was, for example, when this one was just for the house, there might be other things that required additional search warrants. Maybe there was a safe inside the house that required an additional search warrant. So you were there. Or maybe there would be a vehicle or something outside of the home that might require an additional one. I could then pull my laptop out, type up based on the new information, another warrant, and then take that straight in. You could get that to a judge pretty quick and get it signed while you’re standing there pretty much. You know, and and get that get that to happen quickly before you know anything else changed in case in case there was some time-sensitive information that was obtained there.

SPEAKER_00 19:56

So this guy you found there, he’s a cartel member of some sort that’s operating here. Sure. Yeah. And they have a whole team of operators that that is their job is maintenance on the setting up the pools. Creating maintenance and and did you ever go down that rabbit hole? Did he give you it?

SPEAKER_01 20:09

Did you know I’m I’m sure the agents did. It wasn’t something that I was involved in beyond that. Um it was an all-day, all-night uh event, but beyond that, um, I was again assisting the task force in that. That wasn’t my primary assignment, so I was just assisting them with that one. So once I assisted with the the legal side of it, they didn’t need a prosecutor you know there anymore.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

Okay. And did you end up prosecuting that guy?

SPEAKER_01 20:31

No, he was no, I did not, I was not the one. And and typically that would be the case if I were working the case uh something like that, I wouldn’t be the prosecutor because I was involved in the investigation side of it.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

Yeah, you can see it.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

And sometimes on the wiretaps it was it’s different because I was able to maintain enough distance that I could prosecute those, but sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes I was the one who was leading that, but then somebody else might prosecute it to maintain some level of in case I had to answer any questions about the all the details that were going on during the wiretap. Were was everybody trained properly? Did everybody understand what not to disclose and what we call minimization? Did they understand all of that? Um, and so I might have to answer questions during it. So there would always be, you know, sometimes be another prosecutor that would handle that.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

Okay, it makes sense. Uh conflict of interest kind of thing. So that is that the craziest one you found?

SPEAKER_01 21:23

Uh there was there was a lot of crazy ones, and there was uh some of them are just funny stories, but they’re uh I remember I’ll I’ll give you the very short version of this. There was a Valentine’s Day. Take your time, man. We’re good. There was a Valentine’s Day where we were we were up on a wire and we were three quarters in. So that means we were heavy in on this on this case. It means we had multiple phones up, multiple cameras up, everything else. And there was a um main the main target, he was talking with a a female on the phone. She called, and and there’s a lot of code talk that goes on, you know, where you have to learn what the code is with these particular groups, and every group’s a little different. And so we’d have a whiteboard with certain code talk, you know, this. Means this kind of a thing, and she called and very suspicious. And and uh she said, Hey, I’ve got some money and I need some tires. And our main guy’s like, Okay, I can take care of that. And he’s like, Come over tonight, six o’clock-ish, or whatever. Um, people that one thing I did find working these cases, people who are in this drug world and drug business, they don’t keep good time. So six o’clock might mean nine o’clock, or it might mean ten, or it might mean the next day.

SPEAKER_00 22:28

Or there could be a code. You add three hours or four or three hours to throw you off.

SPEAKER_01 22:32

And so we we determined we were at a stage where we needed to branch out a little bit, and we’re thinking this could be a whole different group. And so we mobilized the surveillance team, um, and surveillance team, you know, in the woods, surveillance team down the road, another location, you know, on the main road coming in so that we could track this person coming in, get, you know, license plates and things of that nature, do whatever, whatever we needed to do, people back in the headquarters monitoring. So everybody got called in. And this was this phone call came in about 4:30, 4 o’clock. And so I remember myself, I was just about to leave for the day, and I had reservations at a nice restaurant. It was Valentine’s Day. Take my wife out, you know, to go out to eat. And so I had to call her and say, hey, honey, sorry, we’re gonna have to cancel that reservation, and then you’re gonna have to stay home by yourself on Valentine’s Day. But she understood, she understood it was the job, and so we all had to do that with our wives and girlfriends and whatnot. Um, and so we’re all there, we’re all active, and it is cold. I mean, it is really cold. It’s spitting ice more than snow that day, but it was freezing, and every a lot of people were outside, you know, doing surveillance and things, and it went on for hours and hours and hours, and it’s like nine o’clock, and finally she shows up and she pulls in. And the first thing our main target did was he got his flashlight out, and he was always a little quirky about things. Um, and he lifted the hood up. Paranoid? Yeah, very much so. Yeah, and he uh got a flashlight out and began looking uh around the engine block and things, and we’re thinking of her car. Of her car. And of course, we’re watching.

SPEAKER_00 24:02

So he made her pop the hood and he started going around the engine.

SPEAKER_01 24:04

Yeah, and we’re watching it on a pole camera so we can see it all day. And so we’re watching it, and he’s like looking, looking, looking, and we’re like, okay, either he’s he’s doing one of two things, pay close attention. He’s either looking for a tracking device, or because he was looking underneath the car and everything else afterwards, or he’s looking for the best place to hide the meth. So he may find a place to hide it, and if we can see him hide it, it’s gonna make finding it a whole lot easier. And we pull her over here in a few minutes, she gets down the road. And so we’re watching, he does all that, and she goes in the house and he stays out there and he’s doing, you know, all these things with the flashlight and this and that. And we’re like, what is he doing? And he goes off into the barn for a little bit, and we’re like, okay, that’s where he’s keeping his stash, he’s keeping it hidden in the barn somewhere. Let’s see how long it takes him. That’ll give us an idea. Let’s watch the back of the barn, make sure he doesn’t leave and go somewhere else. If he stays within the barn, we’re gonna know that that’s where that’s where it at. So eventually we do a search warrant, we know where to look. And plus, that gives us probable cause to ride a warrant on the barn. And so we’re watching, and all of this happening. And then about 15 minutes later, he comes out of the barn rolling two tires, and he changes her tires, and then he changes the other two tires. And come to find out, tires mean tires. In that case, we spent the entire evening and night watching this guy, and all he was doing was really needed tires. And we had had this entire team watching on Valentine’s Day. We all canceled our plans. It was freezing cold outside, and tires really just meant tires. It meant tires. It just meant tires.

SPEAKER_00 25:35

But so this guy was suspected of dealing math or doing what ahead of time. So he was definitely doing that. You just got the bad luck.

SPEAKER_01 25:42

We just happened to get a friend of his where he was just helping some lady, you know, change her tires out. That’s amazing. And and so sometimes, you know, you you hit home runs and they’re fun, and sometimes you you strike out and it’s just funny.

SPEAKER_00 25:53

Yeah, yeah. Right. So y’all use the whole Valentine’s Day. Yeah, you know, I have a trick for that, by the way. Uh, I took my wife out years ago to on Valentine’s Day. It was packed. You can’t get a table nowhere. You stand outside in the cold, yeah. You finally make it inside the hallway there, then you wait, then you wait, then you sit down, and then your food takes forever and you wait and you wait. But everybody’s dressed real nice. Yeah. Everybody, you know, roses and stuff everywhere. And we had a long night. And then you go home, right? So take them out two days later and say, you know, we could just celebrate Valentine’s Day two days after Valentine’s Day and not have to wait in that line no more. Ever since then, when Valentine’s Day rolls around, she’ll look 48 hours out or so and say, Where are we going? Where are we going? You get reservations wherever you want. Any no line. Yeah, the food comes, everybody’s in a good mood. That’s Valentine’s Day. So I worked in a restaurant. I was telling you a minute ago, I worked in a restaurant. It’s haywire. Yeah. It’s a crabshoot, whether we’re going to get your food out on time or right for that matter. That’s good. And uh, you know, the reason that it doesn’t blow up, I think, is because it’s Valentine’s Day and everybody doesn’t want to be rude in front of their girlfriend or wife or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 26:55

They’re putting their best foot forward that you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. For sure.

SPEAKER_00 26:58

So that’s pretty wild. You all did that? Any anything, anybody else stand in mind, like a big one?

SPEAKER_01 27:03

No, I mean, there was just a a lot of just the regular stuff, but one thing that you asked earlier that um it is is worthy of an answer, and it’s it’s um, you know, it’s a it’s a bit of a confession on my part. I I had a good good friend of mine who was a who was a preacher, and he he used to say, Brett, confession’s good for the soul, but it’s hard on the reputation. And and he’s he’s right. Um, but there, you know, I think back because you you said, How did you feel about prosecuting these cases? You know, at the time, I truly believed, I could see the impact that that the drug epidemic was having in our community. Um, in the state of Tennessee, uh, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation put out statistics that 80% of people who are incarcerated are there in some way related to drugs and alcohol. 80%. And so we were seeing a massive impact that was happening in our community. But my belief at the time was if you just hit them hard enough, long enough, they’ll change their behavior and quit doing this. And and I I truly, I mean, I know looking back now, I see how how much of an idiot I was. But at the time, I truly believe that if you just hit people hard enough, but what I found out after doing this, and then later going into private practice and working on criminal cases, all I was really doing was promoting people. I would arrest the drug dealer, but then all that would happen is that a drug user would get promoted and take their spot. That’s all that I was doing. At best, I was just simply changing the names on the jerseys. And and so it at that time, as a prosecutor, I really, for most of my time as a prosecutor, that’s what I truly believed until I ran into a man who worked in recovery, worked in long-term recovery, and he began to have conversations with me. Uh, and it was bold and it was brave of him because he was trying to get people into programs and he needed my assistance to do it. But yet he he confronted me and said, Um, you know, General Knight and in Tennessee, it’s a district attorney general and often called General, he said, General Knight, he said, Um, you don’t understand recovery very well, do you? And I remember him saying that. And I thought to myself, well, are we gonna argue? You know, that’s okay. I get paid to argue. That’s what I do. I do that for a living. And I said, I don’t know, what do you mean by that? He said, he said, I’m not trying to be offensive. He said, uh, I’m just making an assumption though. He said, have you gone through have are you have you ever gone through recovery? And I said, No. He said, I would wager that nobody in your family has. And I said, No, they haven’t. He said, Can I just tell you? He said, I watch you. He said, You’ll give almost anybody a chance. But once they mess up that first time, you just hit them with a hammer. And I said, Yeah, that’s pretty much true, because I feel like I’ve given you a shot and now you’ve shown me who you are or what you what you want to do and what you don’t want to do. And he said, You’ve raised children, right? And I said, Five of them. And he said, When you when your children first began walking and they fell, did you just go over and say, That’s it, I gave you a shot, I’m done with you. I said, Well, no, of course not. He said, It’s a little bit like that. He says, Sometimes we have to pick them back up and they have to learn what boundaries are, and they have to learn that, but that’s part of the process. It’s part of the process. And just that little conversation in my mind began changing the way that because I had already observed that we weren’t making the impact in the justice system. And so now I began to get an answer of maybe why we weren’t not getting an impact the way that we wanted to have, that we wanted to positively influence our community, but we didn’t seem to be. And at least for me personally, that began to change how I saw addiction in my community. But more importantly, I began to look beyond the case and I began to see the person. I began to see the trauma that they had endured earlier in life that was oftentimes causing this. And I saw the families. I saw the mother who would tell me, I would be up to one o’clock in the morning every morning praying that my son gets arrested, because then at least I would know he’s alive. And and so I began to have contact with these family members, the wives that would say, Is that is my husband even in there anymore? And so over the course of the next few years, I began to transform greatly. I often will tell people when they’ll ask the question, Are you in recovery? And my my answer is no, I’m I’ve I’m not. Um, my my story is one of being so close to so many people in that situation that it changed my heart for them and it changed my eyes for the situation. It proximity, uh, and I talk about that a lot in in more detail of other things, but proximity is often the answer. And I say that with family members, people in the community who want to help. The answer oftentimes is proximity. You’ve gone, you’re gonna have to get close. You’re gonna have to get close to people, you’re gonna have to be there, give time. Um, and so you know that that story changed from where I was as a prosecutor to where I am today, drastically changed. But it at that time of being a prosecutor, I really thought you could punish pain away. I really did.

SPEAKER_00 32:06

Let me ask you this then. So you were a prosecutor, now you’re a defense attorney, right? Do you still believe in consequences?

SPEAKER_01 32:11

Yes, absolutely. Good.

SPEAKER_00 32:13

I’ve had a couple people on the past week. Everybody seems to fall on the same thing. And I want to be careful whenever we’re talking about helping people in jails, helping. Uh, you know, we had the the founder of the prisoner’s hope in here the other day. He helped, you know, he uh helps people, mentors them for two years, the last two years of their sentence, and they have to do a lot of this stuff. I asked him the same question. He said, Yeah, man, look, unless something changes, there’s people in there that don’t need to get out. So that’s right. I think that’s important because we use, I use, I should say, consequences to my advantage. Absolutely. Right? Yeah whenever uh I’ll have somebody call me, codependent, mom or dad, my son won’t go. He won’t do what I say. He’s in the basement doing heroin. I was like, do you hear what you just said to me? This is a man child, a grown adult that’s in your basement doing heroin and you’re giving them what? Food, housing, uh, money, letting them drive your car, you’re paying for the insurance, it’s your roof. Why would they change? Right? Right. Their brain registers success. If you wake up and you do heroin in your parents’ house, or you go get a DUI and wreck their car and they come bail you out and pull you back in, they’re gonna their brain is gonna register success. They’re gonna say, Hey, everybody’s okay with what I’m doing. So I’ll be in the basement. I’m gonna go back to do that again. And breaking people of that recently within the last month, I had a mother I was working with, same situation, would not put her own son out of the base. I can’t do that to my baby, kind of thing, right? Get a phone call that says he plowed his car through a gas station, hit a pump, hit the front door, hint this and that, you know, drunk, right, all that. Now he’s going to jail. And it it’s amazing the willingness of the patient or the struggling person goes through the roof on that jail pay floor. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 33:53

I could tell you time and time again, and it sounds funny, I’m sure, to family members when they’re sitting in my conference room of a private defense attorney, and I say, do not, whatever happens, do not bail them out. In fact, I’ll make it a condition of me representing them. You do not bail them out. I’m not, it’s not always the case, but in some cases, you have to look, the justice system is great at interrupting things. And sometimes you need that, you need that interrupting thing. And and so, uh, and and as both as somebody who wants to see them get better and healed from this, but also their defense attorney. If they get out, they’re just gonna pick up more charges. They’re gonna possibly hurt themselves. Uh, and I’ve learned that I’ve learned that lesson the hard way and and through through issues. I’ve also learned things like when I have uh I’m helping somebody get into a recovery program in lieu of jail or prison, and they’ll say, Give me three days to get my affairs in order. And then in the beginning, I was naive and I’d say, okay. And then they’d go get high, get arrested, new charges, all of our deals would fall apart, and it’s like, okay, well, now I’ve learned. Uh, no, that the answer is no, you’re going in today, and and that’s that’s what it is. Uh, in fact, we are seeing more and more judges, and I get I get the opportunity to sit down with so many judges and talk about things like furlough programs, re-entry programs, uh, bond conditions, um, probation conditions that include uh treatment, and as as part of it. And they a lot of them have gotten to where they will say, I’m fine with all of this happening, but they need to stay in jail for 30 days. Yeah. You know, they’re they understand that there’s sometimes that this person doesn’t the threat of if you mess up, you’re going to jail, doesn’t mean anything to somebody who’s never been in jail. Sometimes if you sit there for a few weeks and you think, man, this could be my next few years, I don’t want that to happen. And then when you get to those tough days when you’re in a program, you get those tough days where you just want to go home. Then you remember, but I don’t want to go home that bad.

SPEAKER_00 35:54

Right. Yeah. Well, you know where that uh I run into problems with that. And it’s not just uh when whenever people are using Medicaid or some type of insurance benefit or whatever to go to a treatment center, if they sit for 30 days, those MCOs, those people at the insurance companies, look at it, that person’s sober now, just don’t use again. So they will deny their care.

SPEAKER_02 36:12

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 36:13

They will deny their care. And I’m like, I’ve had to tell judges and all of them saying, listen, if you want this person to go to treatment, you can’t hold them for 30 days and get them out of criteria. So they’ll do that, hold them for 30 days, let them out, and then we’re right back into the consequences again. They go get in trouble, and then maybe they can come or something. So it can backfire or it can’t.

SPEAKER_01 36:32

Yeah, there’s no there’s no fail-proof solution for sure. But accountability, for me, accountability and in the and the terminology I use is accountability and grace. They are not opposites, they are not against each other, they are balances on each side. If you don’t have accountability, you have enabling. But if you don’t have some level of grace, and what I mean by grace is that, hey, you’ve made mistakes in the past and those are real, but it doesn’t define who you are and where you’re going tomorrow. You have to let people get out of the of the situation, not hold it against them forever. Um, but those two things in conjunction with each other is very successful in what I have been able to do and work with people that, hey, we’re not acting like you didn’t do what you just did. You ran your car through the gas station, right? You hit two pumps, you’ve been doing this, you could have injured people. There’s consequences to that. But that’s not you the rest of your life. That doesn’t have to be who you are. That’s right. That doesn’t define your future. And that’s the gray side of it for me, which is there is something better for you. Let’s get working towards that. We’re not going to ignore what you’ve done. We’re not going to ignore real consequences that need to take place, but we’re not going to be cruel. We’re going to also say, but there’s a better solution for you in the future. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:45

And that’s the that’s the balance that I operate with. I like that. You know, I uh I tell people all the time, if you get caught, like I’m I’m for consequences. Like if you get caught using in a park somewhere or something, your consequences might be minimal in the justice system. They’re gonna send you to treatment or something of that nature. But I always tell them, like, dude, if you get caught with five kilos of heroin, you’re going to prison. Yeah, that’s it. I there’s nothing I can do about it. Not necessarily anything I think I would want to do about it. If you get caught with a truckload of heroin or something like that, you’re in big trouble. You’re gonna have to deal with it.

SPEAKER_01 38:15

Well, and and that in that concept, what you just said, is what got me more involved in the re-entry um system. The hey, you got caught with five kilos, you’re in prison for the next five years, six years, whatever it is. But when you get done, I’m not giving up on you. Right. So let’s talk about now that you’ve done that, and you said you had somebody on here earlier that, you know, the last two years, they begin to focus on that. And these programs are amazing and what they’re doing to stop recidivism. Um, let’s talk about you landing on your feet out here. Let’s talk about all the things that we want you to have. Let’s talk about your your circle of peers that you’re gonna be around, you know, the the five people who are gonna influence you the most. Who are they? Where are they? Are you in meetings? Are you going to meetings? Do you have a sponsor? Do you have somebody who’s gonna hold you accountable and that you’re gonna be accountable too? What about your family? Have we talked about family care for your wife and your two children? Um, let’s talk about all of that stuff and not just assume that, hey, because you serve time in prison, you come out, you’re never gonna do it again. Statistics show us that is not true. So let’s talk about that. And again, that’s the same concept, except that the consequences were just a little bit longer than the other scenarios we talked about. But there’s still room for that. There’s a future better than the one that you’re in.

SPEAKER_00 39:28

So you would like him. His name’s Daryl Davis. He’s a good friend of mine. Uh, he’s been out of prison for 15 years. He’s the founder of the prisonershope.life. I met him through a mutual friend, actually his niece. And uh he came in here the other day. I learned some new things about Daryl that I was not aware of, being that in 1988, he was running, doing drugs, this and that, with another person that was running doing drugs. They got into a fight where a knife was involved and he won. He came out with stab wounds, but he won. And the other guy died. So he uh went to prison in 1990 for murder, and he went in and did every vocational program he could get his hands on. He said he took it like a mission. You’d like to meet this guy. Yeah. And then he he took on all these programs and he had a change similar to what you had. He said he was sitting around watching these people that sat and watched TV or sat and cussed and got in fights or ran in a gang, and he was looking at it, going, he got a 35-year sentence. And he said, Dude, they’re offering you all all of these programs to get your life together and have something meaningful. And you all are doing gang activity and getting caught with drug or getting in more trouble while you’re in here. He’s like, What are you doing? So he started mentoring people in the prison. He got uh, I think he did 22 years of his 35 because he got so much knocked off of it. Right. And then he came out, he’s been out for 15 now, and he started the prisoner’s hope. So they go in, you they deal some of these people that they’re dealing with have been in there for 20 years, 25 years, right? Family, kids, and all that are grown and gone, you know, it’s a whole different ball game.

SPEAKER_01 41:01

But they’re probably they don’t even know they don’t they don’t know in the outside world things like cell phones. I mean, right if you if you’re in that long, you yeah, if you’re in that long, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 41:08

Social media, uh cell phones, things of that nature. And um, so my wife has a uh a company called Lane, or it’s uh Lane 13 Consulting’s her main business, but she started a nonprofit called Second Chance Strategies. It’s exactly what it sounds like, right? Yeah, and I got some people I need to introduce you to, by the way. So Scott Frazier, he was in here a couple weeks ago. He’s a music producer whose uh daughter he openly speaks about, I’m allowed to say it, his daughter struggled. It hit a little close to home for him, and he had the same kind of thing you did. He’s like, I gotta find a way to help. So he partnered with my wife and Scott Frazier, he founded people, um, he discovered Bailey Zimmerman. If you’ve ever heard of that, the country music singer. He had four number ones. So he’s in the music world, he’s high up. So our um, whenever it comes this year to Louisville, Kentucky, there’s Louder Than Life Festival and then Bourbon and Beyond, right? So we’ve actually got a second chance strategies boot there with QR codes where people that are out there, look, people are out there partying, drinking, whatever everybody knows somebody that needs help. But also, I’m sober and I go to concerts.

SPEAKER_02 42:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:10

There’s a sober place for you to walk over, just check in, say hi to people, get some swag, and just know that your people are there, that kind of thing. So I got some really good people. Yeah, that’s great.

SPEAKER_01 42:19

And it sounds like this is the uh the you know, the the prison, you know, ministry that you’re referring to, that’s right up my alley because I’m all about second chances. I’m all about um a lot of times because I am an ordained pastor, people say, Well, you’re you’re a recovery pastor. And I’ll and I always correct and say, No, I’m a redemption pastor. I believe in redemption, and I don’t care what you’re being redeemed from. We’ve all had, you know, there’s struggles in life, and and people are dealing with with drugs or alcohol, but there’s a lot of people dealing with other things in life, anger or they were abused, and there’s all kinds of things, but we all deserve a a second chance. And that has really just been the passion that has driven me for so many years is that watching people get second chances. It there’s no there’s nothing more exciting than watching that. There’s nothing more exciting that uh there was a a just here not that many months ago. Uh a lot of these these men and women who go through recovery long-term programs, 12 month programs, for example, that I would get them out of jail and and into, I get to walk with them through the whole 12 months. And so I get to know them very well during that time. I get to counsel with them, I get to talk with them, I get to talk them, you know, off the ledge when they’re having that bad day and they just want to quit. You know, like I don’t want to do this no more. Um, I get to be there. And then afterwards, we I don’t just leave. We be we stay close. Uh and so this young man who uh when I first met him, he he actually tried to uh escape out of a out of out of a courtroom. Uh he was he was in custody when he walked in custody in shackles in the orange suit. And he just decided he just panicked. He he’s very he was very nervous in the crowd and he was dealing with uh a lot of uh substance issues and and he just panicked and he just took off running down the aisle. Of course, he didn’t even make it out of the courtroom and they just kind of picked him up and brought him back. Um But that’s when I first met him, is when that occurred there in the courtroom. And then I began to help him and his, he had a fiance at the time and help his family. And we ended up getting him to a long-term program instead of a prison sentence. And so instead of going to jail, he was able to furlough out and go to this program. Did 12 months, changed his life, doing great, left there, great job. He’s a he’s a real man of the home. He takes, you know, the pro appropriate charge. What I mean by that is he understands his responsibility to be there, to be responsible, to hold down a job, to provide for his family. Well, uh, they were having their first child. And uh on the way to the hospital, his wife insisted to stop by my office and and to see me before they go into the hospital. Well, they go in and and my staff is there and I’m still in court. And she’s like, I just wanted, I just wanted Brett to pray over us before we go. And the whole point of that is you you become so close with these men and women who have overcome so much that they become part of my family. They become part of my circle of people. Um, and so for me to work with people getting second chances, it’s such a privilege. It’s a privilege to walk with them through this, to see them. Now, it’s not without heartbreak. Uh, you don’t work doing this for very long and you don’t have your share of scars and heartbreaks. Um, I’ve there there are some individuals who I represented them in the courtroom, got them into programs, walked with them through programs. They came out of the programs, got back into trouble, went back into jail, got back out of jail. Um, so I walked with them in the courtroom, I walked with them through the program. There’s one individual lady I’m thinking of, just can’t help but picture her face right now as I’m saying this. I baptized her. Um, I walked with her through the program, and then I preached her funeral because she overdosed and died. And and so you those things they don’t break you in the way that some people think breaking, they break you in the way that makes you more resolved. Because the truth is, if you’re working on these front lines with with what’s out there on the street today, if we’re not there, people die. And that just doubles down my effort to answer that phone call at two o’clock in the morning to go out there and to do those things. Because if we don’t do something, our communities fall apart, our families suffer, and people can die.

SPEAKER_00 46:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:26

You know, and and and so it’s you you you have these enormous highs when people have have these victories and you get to watch that and it’s so powerful. But then you also recognize that you know it’s hard.

SPEAKER_00 46:37

I don’t know if you ended up like me. It is hard. Um, so I went through the healing place here in Louisville, Kentucky. There’s you know, 700 beds now. I don’t know how many was when I went there, it was in the hundreds, right? And you start to build this new community of people. I’m talking about new friends on social, because you’re not allowed to have a phone while you’re in there, right? But when you check out all the people that are standing around you, you start friend request them and this and that. And what I noticed is like some of the people that I really looked up to, I was like, oh man, this guy’s a great speaker. He understands the material, this and that. And I found out later it was all it was all theater, you know, and uh not that they intentionally made theater, but some of them, yes, intentionally. But I watched some people that I really looked up to die and this and that. And I tell you what, with a recovery community the size of the one it is in Louisville, Kentucky, where these facilities there’s a lot of treatment centers in Kentucky cranking out, you know, ideally sober people at the time. When we were, my wife and I were just a few years sober, it got so bad when fentanyl hit. Okay, every week somebody died. Yeah. And every week, because you’re part of that bigger community, uh, you’re getting invited to a funeral. And I have to tell you, I had to put my foot down, I had to make a stance, and I had to say, listen, man, I can’t use every weekend to go to your funeral. I can’t do it. Right. Like, go get like try to help, but it gives you the resolve where you want to help, you want to work more, you want to do all this and that. But I tell you what, man, that it was happening so often that I became desensitized to it. Yeah. I hear that now, it doesn’t hit me like it used to. So-and-so died from an overdose. Yeah. I go right back to work. That might seem heartless, but you can’t let it tear me up. I have to protect my peace.

SPEAKER_01 48:18

You have to focus your efforts and energy on the places where you can make an impact in a change. And not trying to sound crash or cruel or anything else, but once they’re gone, there’s nothing we can do to help at that point. But we can help others. So I understand exactly what with how you’re saying. And for people who’ve never walked this road, never stood in those ditches, never went into that trap house, never been there with the people who are struggling, they may hear that and think, well, how can you how can you be callous like that? It’s not callous, it’s realistic. And and it should should make us all understand just how serious this situation is. Is that when people are veterans of being around this, that is something that they experience. Uh, it’s like wartime veterans. Exactly. Wartime veterans, they they see loss differently because they’ve encountered it so often.

SPEAKER_00 49:10

And you know, uh, one thing I’m trying to do, I’ve always tried to do this on my page. Maybe I’ll get better about it on this podcast right here is uh a lot of times it there’s so many things that go into getting somebody the other side. There’s their emotions, there’s their whatever their we call them outside issues, right? Uh uh manic depressed. There’s all these different things. And then there’s their willingness. Where is that at? Always, I’ll tell you what, Dr. Burns Brady, he’s past now, but I was fortunate enough to have him several days a week for a year as a mentor. Um, a founder of Kentucky Medical Board, you know, uh running the healing place down there. He always told us when we came in, he said, Man, if you remember anything, remember that you’re a court low. And we said, Okay, he says, you are a court low on dopamine in your brain, which causes restless, irritable, and discontent, much like a war veteran. Okay, you can go over and have trauma and see things, and then your body will lower your dopamine on its own. It’s it’s like a survival skill. Sure. And he would say, Do you want to be in a foxhole with somebody that’s laid back and chilled or the dude that keeps peeking around every corner? I’ll take the guy that’s peeking around every corner. Yeah, right? Yeah. Because he’s low on dopamine, he’s paranoid, you know. And he said, if you remember anything, remember that you’re a quart low on dopamine in your brain. And I had to process that and learn what it means so that makes this a uh physiological difference between my brain and what we would call a normal brain. Yes. Okay. Yes. And all drugs of reward spike dopamine. Yeah. That’s heroin, meth, painkillers, alcohol, smoking marijuana, everything except for benzodiazepine Xanax that does something a little different. But all these reward drugs do one thing is spike dopamine. So when I wake up in the morning, even to this day, I have a process I use, but I’m a little foggy. I’m a I’m an alcoholic. You know, I have to have a process in place and I remind myself I’m a quart low on dopamine. I have to get up 30 minutes earlier than I think I need to. I have to pray, I have to meditate, I have to have my coffee, I have to set my brain up for the day. Yeah. Where some people can take up and just walk, just go on with their day, right? Probably you. You drink coffee and you go to your office. I don’t know. I’m sure you pray and all that. Don’t get me wrong.

SPEAKER_01 51:14

If I don’t, we have trouble because of my low dopamine and that is that is a I had never heard that before, and that’s brilliant. That is absolutely brilliant because that is a such a good description. So many of the conversations I have with family members that their loved ones are in legal trouble and and and they’re in active addiction, and and that’s why they have a legal trouble, and that’s why I where I’m encountering them. We have these conversations, and the the families so often do not understand what is going on. They’re not some are enabling and some are in denial, and there’s all of those things that go on and can go on. Yes, so many things. And sometimes they can go on by themselves someday in conjunction with this, but there’s also a lack of information, especially if they have never gone through recovery themselves. And so you have the I just, I mean, I have uh, you know, conversations like this. I’ve had uh, you know, dozens and dozens of them, where the mom says, he came over at Thanksgiving dinner and just completely ruined the holiday. I don’t know why he did that to me. Is it something that I did? Is he trying to get back at me? And I have to say, he’s not even thinking of you. You’re you’re seeing this completely wrong. Yeah. But to be able to use that, you know, to say he’s a quart low on dopamine, and and that’s why they’re things are a little different. Things are moving a little bit slower in the process, how those cognitive, you know, decision-making things get get rewired, and all of that goes on. People have to begin to understand that, to begin to understand what it is. That it’s not, it’s not like he’s sitting at home going, I’m gonna get back at my mother for grounding me, and I’m gonna do that. That is not what’s going on.

SPEAKER_00 52:46

It’s neuroplasticity, right? Like you’ve got these damaged areas of synapses in your brain. And Daryl talked about this. You’re gonna love Daryl, but he uh, where the prefrontal cortex is not communicating with the rest of your brain, right? Yeah. And Burns used to even tell us, he’d say, if you look at a brain scan of someone that’s drunk or on methadones, a box on heroin, any of them name it, right? It looks like Swiss cheese from all these areas of inactivity. Okay. And that once they stop, now I’m talking about abstinence, right? We’re abstinence across the board here, right? We use taper medication to get people off, but we believe you need to go back to abstinence. He said, as soon as you take them off of the drugs and alcohol and get it out of their body, that brain scan will start to go back to normal. It’ll start firing. And then it takes two to five years for it to fully repair itself, along with a lot of prayer, meditation, neurofeedback, any kind of things you can do along the way.

SPEAKER_01 53:38

And not doing anything along the way that reverts it.

SPEAKER_00 53:40

Yeah, you know. Well, the speaking, you like the low dopamine thing so much, I’ll tell you. So, right? Um, dopamine is this thing that and I that I wake up uh, or you know, normal people go throughout their life, they see their kids, instantly they smile. They see their mother or something, instantly they smile. Okay. Not low dopamine people. No, we wake up and kind of go, hmm, I don’t feel right. It’s called restless, irritable, and discontent. Okay. And speaking of information and education, I write restless is an inability to rest or relax due to anxiety or boredom. Okay. My people that are watching this know what I’m talking about. I’m this. Okay. Now, imagine getting a paycheck on a Friday and having nobody to hang out with. Yeah. I’m this. I’m restless. I have an inability to rest or relax due to anxiety or boredom. So you can promise yourself every week when I get paid Friday, I’m not doing that again. I’m not gonna have to go see Brett. I’m not gonna be in his courtroom or whatever, right? And then as soon as you get paid, this starts. Okay. Irritable is easily angered or annoyed. So this is all caused by low dopamine. So restless, irritable, easily angered or annoyed. The example I use is my ex-girlfriend, poor, poor girl. Um, I would come home, let’s say, and uh the the Doritos would be sitting there with no chip clip on them. Oh, we got a problem now. I paid for those Doritos. It was $1.89. That was mine. I want fresh Doritos when I come home, not this stale shit that you’ve sat. Why did you do this to me? And now we have a fight going. Or how about this? Somebody cutting me off in traffic that doesn’t even know they did it. Yep. They cut me off. I flip them off, honk the horn, and I’m thinking my whole track, I’m easily angered or annoyed. That’s not a moral failing. I’m low on dopamine. The feel I’m a core low, remember? The feel-good fluid in your brain that makes you somebody cut you off and they don’t know it, and you go, whatever. Yeah, might be upset, but you know, it’s not the end of your day. Oh no. Now we got to fight. And discontent, this is a big one for people that I teach inside of the recovery centers, is a restless yearning for better circumstances. So when you’re out there getting high, you know, running your life into the ground, you get arrested, you end up in Brett’s court or whatever. You will pass a lie detector test from the jail phone. When you go, hey, mom, I promise I’ll never drink again. They will pass a lie detector test in that moment because the consequences have now dropped, and they mean it. Okay. Yeah. Then you bail them out, get them out, they come out, start to feel a little bit better, and when the uh when the body heals, the liar returns. Okay. So discontent, the restless, or I’m sorry, the uh yeah, restless yearning for better circumstances. They go to the recovery center, okay? Maybe a few days sober, fresh out of jail, and you start sitting around all of a sudden, it’s not your mom, your dad, the people in your life. It’s these four walls around you that are the problem. My case manager said this to me. The therapist didn’t do what I asked him to do over here. I don’t like the way that nurse just did that over here. And I tell people, I’m like, you have a restless yearning for better circumstances right now. You want to get out of this room, and you’re blaming the therapist, the case manager, probably your mom or somebody. If I took you out of this room right now and put you in an apartment with a car and said, here you go, you’re gonna start blaming your neighbors, the person that won’t hire you because low dopamine, man, we are restless, irritable, and discontent by nature.

SPEAKER_01 57:05

Does that make sense? Absolutely, absolutely. And um, that’s something that I believe every family member needs to understand. And I’m sure they do here. I’m sure that uh because I know you have a whole program to assist family members, but that’s what people need to understand so that they when they see the you know, the hands bouncing or anything and then followed immediately by I’m I’m out of here. I just can’t, I just can’t be here anymore. That then that earlier to understand that what’s happening is physiological. It’s not just something that they’re getting revenge on you for because you grounded them at one point or because you did something, it’s physiological what’s going on. That’s uh good stuff.

SPEAKER_00 57:43

And think about this too. If I’m low on dopamine, let’s just go, Brett’s dopamine is normal, mine’s down here. Okay. When Brett has a drink at the football game, your dopamine goes up a little bit. You feel good. No problem with that, right? And then your dopamine drops right back down to normal, and then you go on, run your law practice, pay your bills, do whatever you’re supposed to do, right? I’m low on dopamine, meaning my brain and my body has trouble producing it in the first place. Okay. So here’s you, here’s me. When I drink or use or smoke weed or something, I get a high. I shoot up, restless, irritable discontent goes away momentarily. I feel like everything is okay with the world. I’m gonna be successful. I’m getting reward chemical right now. You just did something good. Yeah. Okay, here’s the problem. Over the next 24 hours or so, if I stop, my dopamine doesn’t come back down to here. It goes, it goes to the floor because my body can’t replenish it fast enough. Yeah. So you wake up the next day and we call this guilt, shame, remorse. You wake up the next day, I don’t remember what I said to my girlfriend last night. I sent those evil text messages while I was blackout, drunk. Now you have guilt, shame, remorse, and you’re already a court low on dopamine to start your day. Yeah. With no prayer, no meditation, anything to start with. What’s the only way that I have trained myself to lift my dopamine so I can have a reward chemical and feel like I did something good today? That’s where you crack a Budweiser at eight o’clock in the morning.

SPEAKER_02 59:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 59:07

Or whatever, or whatever. No offense to Budweiser. I’m just saying. Right. Or you take a shot at eight o’clock in the morning, or you’ll see it. Uh, when I was on a landscaping crew, we would always grab beer at lunch and the boss didn’t care. You know what I mean? So, understanding that process, the dopamine process in that cycle, when you do this, when your dopamine shoots way up, then it drops down here. I’m always I always tell people that like, that’s when your shit will come up missing, and I’ll help you look for it. Right? Because I’ll take it to the pawn shop. Yeah, I’ll help you look for it. I’ll help you look for it. That’s called the phenomenon of craving in the bid book. Yeah. And it takes time for that very low dopamine to travel back up to where? All people always say normal. I go, no, red’s normal. We go to here, we go to low. You get to keep that for the rest of your life and remember that you’re low, right? Yeah. So during that process of coming back out of that dip and coming back up to low, that’s where we keep trying to artificially push ourselves up. Call it everybody’s different seven to ten days to get you back to here. How long is detox whenever you go to one of these places? Seven to ten days? Yeah. I didn’t do that to just be a jerk to you. Right. I’ve got to get you out of what’s called the phenomenon of craving and get you back to low right here. Then we try to teach that. Don’t get me wrong, the time is limited and there’s a lot of other factors going on. But uh, once I get you back to low, okay, and we’re abstinent, we’re clean now. What are you gonna do to get these shots up? Naturally. Yeah. Okay. Exercise, proper diet. The biggest one that I do, and you’ll understand this the 12th step of Alcoholics Anonymous uh basically uh says to help another person. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we try to carry this message to alcoholics and care uh practice these principles in all of our affairs. So helping another person. And when I’m when I’m teaching this at the family groups and this and that, I say, have you ever bought somebody a meal that couldn’t afford one? You have? Have you ever bought somebody a pair of shoes that couldn’t afford them? How did you feel right after that? They go, amazing. I’m like, that’s dopamine. That’s a reward chemical. Yeah, you did something good. So by X by using the 12 steps every day and using number 12, that’s how you get that natural dopamine spike, no drugs or alcohol required, to get you from low up here closer to Brett in normal. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:20

So that and that is so, I have found that to be so true. Um, I often I have uh people who who are around me a lot and they hear me speak a lot, they they would recognize the the physical. And if you’re just listening to this, I’ll describe to you what I’m doing is I’m putting one hand up and one hand down, but I always tell them, I just do this motion and I say, that’s what success looks like. One hand down, helping somebody who’s in a situation that I might have previously been in that I’ve made it out of. And that’s helping people. Because I I have I have found that the people who are helping and giving back, just like you said, they their ability to be successful is so much higher. And the other one is I’m reaching up to somebody who can speak into my life in a way that I’ll listen to them, somebody who can hold me accountable, some accountability, whether it’s a sponsor, meetings, or individual person, uh a religious leader, whatever that is, there should be always be somebody who can speak into your life, and there should always be somebody who you’re speaking into their life.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:13

That person up here you’re pointing at is the one we just I described earlier. It’s the a person that is properly armed with the facts about themselves. Yes, right? Yeah, if you they say if you’re the smartest guy in the group, you need to get a new group. That’s right. You know what I’m saying? You need to you need a mentor and you need to pull somebody else along. That’s a that’s how we try to teach that to the best of our abilities. But as you know, family codependence, a lot of different things can go on during that process. Yes, absolutely. That hardens you a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:37

Absolutely, absolutely. Um, that’s but that’s good stuff.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:40

So tell me, uh, is there anything particular you want to uh any message you want to deliver about your book? Well, I’ll tell you what.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:47

Um I mean one thing that I would like uh I I guess I have a question for you because I one of the things I get to do after having come out with a book is I I’ve had the opportunity to go and to speak with lots of people at lots of different organizations. And part of it is to glean from them what they’re doing great, to also glean from them what they say, hey, we tried that, it didn’t work, so that I can advise people in other organizations and and sometimes faith-based organizations, sometimes civic organizations, sometimes in the courtrooms to say, hey, in this situation, I met these people up in Kentucky, and wow, do they have this down pat? Let me tell you what how they’re doing it or what they’re doing. But one thing that I am always looking to try to do, and I know you have a private organization here, and I’m a pastor at the same time. I am always trying to activate the faith-based community and getting them to become equipped to understand so that they can better assist people that are that are going through this. If you were talking with, if if there was such a thing as the faith-based community as a person and you were talking to them, what would you be saying to them that, hey, get better at this or or invest in this or spend more time understanding this, because this is what we would really need. Um, and I know it again, it’s uh it’s two different worlds, but what would you say?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:05

It’s two different worlds. That’s an excellent question. And I’ll I’ll I’ll preface it with this. Um not in all cases, okay, but in enough, where we’ve reached out or we started working with a faith-based group, be it a church or something like that. And we’re going to develop this partnership, okay? And we’re here for you if you need us. You can send referrals this way. Let us know what we can help with you. What I have found, sadly, is uh the ego can play a role in this from all sides. And I’m talking about some mega churches that I know there’s people in those rooms struggling, and not having, in my opinion, the humility to be like, we need outside help. We need to talk to someone that understands the physiology behind this. There’s a reason we have these doctors and clinicians and people that are not in recovery working around. Maybe uh you have to humble down a little bit. What I’ve noticed, I’ve seen a number of people die because everybody was praying over them.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:01

Prayer without works is dead. You know what I mean? I would suggest partnering and listening to the experts in this space, right? Right. Uh now that’s not everybody. Don’t get me wrong. We have churches and and and religious leaders that reach out to us and say, hey, tell me what to do, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:16

You’re not preaching a language that I don’t understand and haven’t heard before. Um, I can tell you. So am I hitting on something? You’re exactly right. That’s uh that is seems to be universal. The unity portion of the recovery community, we seem to have developed camps along the way where certain camps don’t want to play with other camps. And and one of those camps is uh the faith-based community to say, we only want to talk faith-based topics and work.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:45

That’s gonna be my next one. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:46

Yeah, is is is that we only want to talk that. And and don’t get me wrong, I’m a faith based guy. But I’m but but I’m also I also go to my doctor, and I if if I have a high cholesterol and my doctor’s. I mean you want to pray about it, but you don’t want to stop that. And then I also thank God that He gave me uh gave us intelligent people who understand these issues in ways that I never will, and that that oftentimes is the answer that’s gonna best uh alleviate somebody out of suffering and into the purpose of life that they were meant to be. And so we do that in other areas of our life. We um we pray that our car is gonna run, but if it doesn’t, we take it to an auto mechanic. You know, and and so somewhere along the way that these camps sometimes don’t want to work together, and and it works vice versa. And I’ll tell you the other one that’s interesting, and and I don’t know it doesn’t really involve the faith-based community so much, but I have seen some um communities that they don’t want to work with people on the outside who are not in recovery. They’ll say, Man, I wish those churches were more open and friendly and welcoming to people. And then somebody will come in from the community, uh, a judge, um uh somebody who’s working in in counseling, uh, somebody who maybe is a somebody who can help with employment. And they’re like, Have you been through recovery? And if the answer is no, they’re like, Well, then you just wouldn’t understand. Okay, well, maybe I don’t understand the road that you’ve been on, but I’m coming from another road and we’ve ended up in the same place. You know, and so I I’ve I’ve seen those three camps oftentimes not include each other into that and and you know, unity of of all of us beginning to work together, because a lot of times I will say to people, correct me if I’m wrong, when people leave the bubble for lack of a better phrase, and they are going back out into the community, whether it’s coming from prison or it’s coming from a program or whatever it’s coming from. And would we all agree that three of the top issues, if not the three top issues, that we’d say is we want safe and sober housing for that person, we want them to have good employment, because without good employment, you’re gonna struggle, you know, struggle with things along the way. Uh, and you want them to be surrounded by people who are healthy to them, a circle of friends and peers and and such that are healthy to them. And then I’ll often say those three things cannot occur unless we involve people outside of the recovery community. Yeah, 100%. Housing and employment and and all that. And and so, you know, I just look at that and I’m like, how do we all how do we all get working together better? And I tell you that I think the answer is things like this. We’re doing it now. We’re doing it right now. I think when we begin to sit down and say, Do we come from the same road? No, we don’t. We come from different paths. We got to the same destination and we both have a heart to want to help people, but we got here differently, different ways of getting there. I can’t, I can’t exclude you from my conversation just because you took a different road to get here. And and so I think that that’s so important that we just begin to have dialogues and have conversations and to include each other in what we’re doing, and that to go back to what you just said, 100% in agreement. And that means church is opening up the door to people who are who are experts in the field, people who understand the physiological side of things that that can help get people healthy. You and I began our conversation talking about how we both believe and know from experience that you have to get somebody healthy and into a position before they’ll even hear you. Yes. Well, guess what? That’s part of it, church. You know, you got to get people to a place where they can hear what you’re saying on the sermon on Sunday before they’re ever gonna really absorb that. And truth is, I can preach to you all day long, but if I’m not walking the walk, nobody cares that I’m talking the talk. And walking the walk means I love you, I care for you, I’m there for you, and I believe there’s something better in your future for you. We got to start walking that. And that means getting people help when they need it.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:58

And I I agree with you 100%. And some of my experiences, like, let me give it to you like this in Kentucky and multiple states, anyway, where we’re at, if you call me today, I don’t care if you’re at a church, a hospital, your house, whatever, even if they can’t come to my center for whatever reason, we will have somebody on their way to pick you up within the hour. Period. We have partners in the community, faith-based organizations in the community, whatever. Somebody will be on their way to pick you up. I would take advantage of that, right? So you name any church or any uh faith-based program that wanted to reach out right now, not even a program, just a church and say, hey, you know what? If somebody walks in that door and they’re struggling with this, how do I get a hold of an expert? I would tell them it’s one phone call. Yeah, we’ll have somebody on the phone or on the way. You saw the people on the other side of the school. Yeah, it’s a good thing. One phone call.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:45

And that’s all you have to do. And some of the stuff we that that I noticed that we ran into was like, maybe the, I’m not trying to pick on anyone, but maybe the pastor, whoever’s running that organization, they want to be the savior. No, no, no, no. You’re not gonna do it. That’s me. Yeah, right? And we’re gonna handle this ourselves internally, right? Right? So that’s why I said maybe a little humility. Yeah, and that’s not widespread or anything, but you know, I I will tell you this to answer your question just a little further. Uh there’s a faith-based organization in, well, first of all, a faith-based organization. Okay, God is inside of me, not inside of a building.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:22

100%.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:23

If I don’t go to church uh for whatever reason on one day or whatever, did that change something? Right. Okay. If I walk into one of my medical detox beds up here and get off of hair, which is in a secular place, we have a pastor, no problem. But if you are not in that mood right now, no problem. Right. Okay. So if I go to one of my beds up here, secular or in nature, or I go to the faith-based medical detox bed down the road, is that one gonna be better, you guaranteeing me? Because it’s faith-based, right? Not necessarily, okay. And I I look at it like I went to uh a faith-based organization here in Kentucky, who I love, by the way, and uh they asked me to speak. And when I went in, the group before me, the gentleman was up there speaking, very smart, very articulate, talking about scripture. Okay. And I loved what the guy said, don’t get me wrong. But when I gave the speech, I have a whole whiteboard that I do the dopamine thing with. I was describing to you here, where I was talking about low dopamine, restless, irritable discontent, all of the things that come along with that phys physiologically, right? When I walked out of there, I’m not two moaner, I’m just saying those guys stopped me and said, dude, my mind is blown. You just described me every morning, yeah, you know, waking up and I tell a story. Uh, this this will make sense to you. It’s uh what I’m getting at to answer your question is a little more education. And I’m not saying take anything faith away from it. You have to dig into that education piece about what’s going on in their brain, the biology behind it. And the way I learned that, though I learned everything the hard way that I do. Um so I finished the recovery program in at the healing place. I was probably a couple years sober, maybe two babies or one was on the way. My daughters were born a year and six days apart. And I’m at my apartment. My wife goes to work, she was waiting tables at a Fish’s. We either she went, I think she went there pregnant and dropped our firstborn off at the daycare. And I woke up restless, irritable, discontent, and I didn’t have a process in place for my. I was told it, I didn’t have it in place. So here’s what happened: I woke up, I didn’t feel right, low on dopamine, restless, irritable, discontent, and I made a decision in that moment. I was like, I’m not going to work. I called them and lied. I said, I’m sick, I can’t come out. They were like, Oh, drink some cranberry juice and come in. I was like, I can’t do it, I’m sick, I’m gonna get somebody else sick. Bye. Okay. 30 minutes went by. I started to wake up a little bit. Okay. Now there was a Louisville game that night I really wanted to go to. I had to be careful going to the Louisville game because I just lied about being sick. I’m gonna see somebody from my work, big restaurant, and that Louisville game or be seen on TV. I can’t post any photos today and I’m not making money. I was pissed. Whose fault is that? Yeah, right? Who made that decision? Okay. Yeah, right? I was low on dopamine. I woke up and I let that early, that beginning of the morning, that low dopamine feeling run my decision making. Instead of waking up 30 minutes earlier, like I was telling you, than I need to, doing my prayer, my meditation, and making a gratitude list. If I would, I tell you what, if that day if I had prayed and meditated and then wrote down, I’m grateful that both of my my pregnant wife is healthy, my other daughter is healthy, and we have a roof over our head, and I have a job to go to today. I’m grateful for these things. I never would have called in or lied. Right. Right? You would have been there. Right. So there’s nothing wrong with scripture or being real. I was raised Catholic, okay? I’m not I won’t knock anybody’s religion, but I would just be curious whenever it’s faith-based, okay, is the educational piece about how the body works coming out of that. I don’t know. Yeah, I mean better than me.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:55

Absolutely. And I think the answer is sometimes, sometimes, yes, and sometimes not. The same on our side. Sometimes and sometimes not. Sometimes and sometimes not. Um, it you know, you you can look at the faith-based label does not make it a good program. Amen. You know, it just doesn’t. I mean, it’s not like I can take a really crappy program that they don’t really care and that they’re rushing things through and they don’t have a process and they don’t understand how this works, and then I throw a faith-based label on it, and all of a sudden it works. No different than I can take a Jesus fish sticker, put on the back of my car, and then drive like an idiot and put people’s lives in danger, and it made a difference in who I am as a person. Exactly. Uh, you know, so I think you have to, and that is something that I cover in my book about my personal preferences. I talk about how if somebody is going to get help, uh, you have to investigate that. You have to look into it. Because not all, you know, this, not all places are equal. No, you know, and and some of them are a lot less than others. And some uh in the court system I have to deal with, some are not approved by judges, some don’t have certain criteria that the judges require. And so you have to be very, very careful when you’re dealing with justice-involved people in recovery programs because I’ve seen programs not do a good job of communicating, oftentimes because they don’t have enough staff. And they did not do a good job of communicating. And the judge become upset that it’s been three months and I’ve not seen a progress report from my, you know, person that I furlough to that program. And them yanked the person out of the program and interrupt the entire process because nothing to do with what the person was doing, nothing to do with how well they were doing, that they were really, really working the program. It’s because the the program itself didn’t understand, they didn’t understand the assignment.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:49

What that judge needed.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:50

What that judge needed and what the requirements were. And that’s just one small example. And and so I think looking at the physiological things that occur is the same way. That’s part of the assignment to understand how you how does decision making work, you know, as you’re as you’re you know, coming out of the fog. What is what about waking up in the morning to yourself? Why do you think we, you know, you don’t get to make major decisions right now because you’re not there yet. You know, you don’t need to be making major decisions yet. You don’t need to be, you need somebody helping you walk through that process so that those decisions are healthy um in and for your future. So no, I I absolutely know no. I don’t, it’s not even a guess. I know that there is a difference between um programs out there. And uh, and I think we have to embrace um greatness. We have to embrace, I mean, I’m a I’m a fan of business, love business. I always have. From a young man, I just absorbed being in business, came straight out of college, was a management consultant, traveled all over the U.S. I love decision making, group decision making, leadership, all of that kind of thing. But getting from good to great can be difficult because the little things matter. And and I think that is the same way in our programs. You can’t slap a faith-based sticker on it and it takes you from bad to great.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:06

And I’ve had uh recently, I’ve had a phone call from a family. They really want to go somewhere. Mine’s an option. If not, that’s okay. But that man, I really want faith-based. I said, okay, let me do some digging uh based on what you’re asking me for, what level of care they need to be at, and all that. And it just so turns out where this person was located, where they wanted to be located, and this and that. I was like, I can’t, I don’t have anything I can recommend for you right now. You’re gonna have and then you understand when you’re dealing with Medicaid, right? If you have Kentucky Medicaid, it only works in Kentucky, right? Right? You can’t, I can’t say I know this great place in Tennessee, and then you take your Medicaid and go there. Yeah, look, there’s wonderful places in Kentucky. I’m not saying that, but the way this family was approaching it was like, listen to you, listen to what I’m telling you. God lives inside your family, inside your son or whoever was coming right now, and I’m trying to get him off of heroin. Okay. You’re telling me that I need to show you a cross right now and slap a faith-based label on it, then you’re okay. You can’t make that decision based on that label you’re talking about. And I’m watching, I watched not a bunch, but I watched a family do it the other day. The program that they found, I was like, I would not send an enemy there. They’re like, okay, and they sent them there. It was faith-based.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:14

Yeah. You know, and and you said earlier, and I was I was listening to you speak, and I didn’t quite know where we were going with the the question yet at that point. And you said, you know, I’ve got uh a private-based program over here, and then there was a faith-based program over here, and I’ve got a man in a bed here and a man in a bed there. And my first thought before you finished the question, my first thought was they’re both face-based faith-based to me. Aren’t they? Because isn’t God working in the life of the person studying in the bed of the I mean, to me, just just me being Bretton and how I see, you know, the involvement uh uh of God in people’s lives. I mean, I’m like, and so in my mind, I’m thinking, well, God’s active in both of these things. You you understand, yeah. You see what I’m saying.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:55

Yeah, exactly. That the the big book, Alcoholics Anonymous, says nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake. Yeah. Okay. And I I would want to say that to that person on the phone. You ended up on the phone with me for a reason. I have a solution to the problem that you’re looking for. Do you want like I’m not gonna lie to you and say, oh yeah, we go to church every day here, we’re faith-based. No, but it’s it’s tough. Like, I’m hardened to it. It’s tough to be on the phone and just like I’m trying to keep your kid from killing himself right now. Can we get you don’t want me to bring somebody in to detox on day one, and they’re gonna have uh medical detox, they’re gonna have a long week, right? They’re not gonna be violently ill. That’s gonna be a long week. They can pray, they can meditate all they want. Do you want me to start ramming scripture down their throat or do you want to start ramming education? Right. You see what I mean? Yeah. So if you’re telling me that that’s what’s important to you right now, I’d say the medical component’s the most important when we walk through that door. The rest of it we’ll figure out.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:50

Yeah. And and you know, again, and what people understand may be different than how I view it because they’re at a different place than I’m at. Like you said, this person’s sick. They’re having a rough week. You know, they may be at different levels of that, but they’re having a rough week no matter what. They’re probably not thinking things through theologically the same way that I am, right? That’s what I’m saying. We’re not sitting there theologically, you know, yeah, you said that much more eloquently. Um, that’s right. And and so me sitting over here looking at them, well, it’s it’s the same kind of conversation, and I’m not trying to compare the two, but it’s the same conversation that I would have with somebody who’s struggling with um the loss of a loved one. They’re in grief. Well, am I cramming theology down their throat or am I just loving on them?

SPEAKER_00 1:21:32

Right. We need to stop for a second.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:34

Let’s just let’s just care about this person because right now they’re in an emotional state that they’re not going to really receive intellectually, you know. So, how about, you know, Paul said in the Bible that I’m all things to all men. He understood that at different times he had to act different ways in order to be effectively communicating to other people. And and, you know, so Paul understood that. And he was a man who could step into a synagogue and and and talk to uh people in his Jewish community and then the next minute be over in a in a Greek community talking with people who had completely different worship structure and could could communicate with people from all different fashions of life because he understood I have to talk a little differently and I have to present things a little differently depending on who I’m talking with. The the way in which they approach logic, the way in which they their education level, the the you know, analogy that I might use uh would be a little different because they wouldn’t understand it, neither would they. But we have to sometimes be that way. And I say that when I say we, I criticize my own self and and and other people like me who are coming from a faith-based community that we have to be able to do the same thing. And that’s what you’re saying. You’re saying, look, I’m trying to, I mean, somebody’s coding out, you know, sometimes you gotta give compressions, you know, and and and that’s where where we are. That doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned my view of the component and the and the effect of God’s working in people’s lives. It’s just that he’s working in their lives right now without having a conversation. Yeah, exactly. And he sent you all to help them to get to a place where they can receive intellectually what we’re talking about. And he’s still working in their lives. He it just it’s not gonna come from Brett’s mouth.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:10

I’m almost right. I’ve almost uh I’ve almost come to the point of being like, I’m sorry, do you think uh your child’s gonna change religion in this 30 days while we go in here? Is that a thing? I I I don’t understand. It’s it’s codependency with a different label on it. There’s codependency in involved, but they’re they’re leaning into hey, how can I control this aspect?

SPEAKER_01 1:23:31

Well, you know, and it also goes back, I believe, I believe we’ve done some of this to ourselves. Uh when I say we, I mean men like me and you and women that that work here. That when I said earlier that we’ve created different camps, because sometimes we give the wrong message that, hey, if it’s not a faith-based place, it’s garbage. You know, you got people in the faith-based community communicating that, whether they mean it to or not. Now, they may believe that I want faith to be involved and I want a higher power to rep to be God. They may be saying that, but you you got to say it in a way that people don’t ever misinterpret it, that getting the physical and medical attention that this person needs is not required. And then uh it can be on the other side too. We could we could look both ways and say, you know, the even in the evidence-based community, you know, there’s a lot of, hey, look, if you’re faith-based, I don’t really want to even talk to you because you you’re like over there with this like voodoo science kind of a thing. And and it pushes us against each other. And then that spillover of us being against each other spills out onto people’s patients, people who need assistance to their families, and then they begin to feel like they’re not being loyal to their particular camp. If they if they’re and it’s the solution to all of that is us working together. That’s the solution to all of it. We’re doing it right now. Yeah, we’re doing it right now. That’s the solution to all of it. You know, so for people who who hear me and they know and they’ve they’ve followed me on social media for years and they know where I stand and and that I boldly stand on my beliefs. But to hear me say, you need help, you need help, and medical attention and medical assistance from experts who understand exactly what is going on in your brain is is needed. Yeah. It’s educating them to be able to do that. Educating them to understand that, to be able to understand because knowledge is power. If I know why I’m feeling this way, I know how to treat it, and it’s not unknown to me. It removes some of the anxiety and stress. If, you know, before I go to bed, I start like, man, my chest is is hurting. And then I go, oh yeah, because I ate those burritos and I know better than that. And I need to go take myself an antacid and it’s all gonna go away. I’m not stressed out about it because I’ve been educated and I understand the symptoms of what I’m going through. What you just described to waking up in the morning, there are gonna be people who hear that that maybe for the first time say, that’s exactly how.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:47

Dude, I’ve got thousands of comments on those videos. People are like, oh, well, thanks. You know, I’m like, come on, man, this is educating, that simple of an explanation right there. But I I tell you, man, uh things happen for a reason, uh, not behind mistake. And I don’t know if I mentioned this in the beginning or not, but I received a random email from Donna. Yeah, and she said, Hey, would you like Brett’s book? I said, sure, but why I won’t where’s Brett? Yeah, you know what I mean? I was just like, let’s not just send a book because I have one. I can just send you one right now. Yeah, let’s just exchange books, right? So uh I want to make it uh he showed up here with no, we did not know each other. Right. We’ve never met before. We never spoke a word before you walked into the school.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:29

I walked in and I was looking around like, oh, I don’t know, really know who I’m looking for. Right. Yeah, yeah. Luckily, your men outside pointed me. They they they must have recognized the lost look on my face and they they pointed me in the right direction.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:39

I emailed uh Donna and I said, Hey, if Brett gets here, the front door is a little hard to find, the reflective stuff out there. Let me know if you need anything. She didn’t answer back, and then you popped up. So uh I think uh you and I are doing what we described right now. I’m so glad I responded to that. I get a lot of emails. Yeah, I bet you do. We need to buy stuff or give them something. But yeah, when it was like, hey, I just want to give you a book, he speaks about recovery. He’s a you know, he’s a minister and this and that. I was like, well, that’s nice of you. Maybe this is worth a conversation, you know. And here we are, man.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:05

So and and I love the fact that two to the two of us both felt confident in where we stand, and we’re both so dedicated in the idea of helping people that we just both of us, you include, this is your platform, this is your audience and people that listen to you. You were like, I’m gonna let this guy just sit down and and no prep, no questions prepared ahead of time. We’re gonna have a conversation and we’ll just see where it goes. And uh, and for us to just be able to sit down and say, because I I believe so much in working together and and I’ve seen how effective that can be in people’s lives. It literally saves people’s lives that I enjoy these conversations because I find the common ground. Why people are not unified more, I don’t know, because I find common ground everywhere I go among people working. Uh, and it’s just it’s been great. I’ve uh I’ve appreciated getting to know you in these conversations. And and I think uh, like you said, nothing happens for without a reason. And uh I see lots of opportunities us doing stuff together in the future.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:02

I’ve got some people I want to introduce you to. Yeah, I would love for us to go figure out what whatever’s next for Brett, whatever’s next for me. And then I would love to have you back sometime and just follow up and find out what we learned since then. We need to share this information again. So do you want to tell everybody where they can find your book?

SPEAKER_01 1:28:18

Well, uh, the book is on Amazon. It’s on Amazon.com. Uh actually, it’s it’s been amazingly received. Uh, the first few weeks it actually became Amazon.com’s number one new release. Uh, so it’s been well received. It’s uh sold several thousand copies. Um it’s yeah, there’s the book. It’s in um 16 different jails right now. I never even thought about the idea of putting the book in jails until shares started contacting me saying, Hey, can you send me 20 copies? And I want to put it in our jails for people who are incarcerated to to read about this. So you can find it on Amazon. It’s uh the paperback, hardback, Kindle version, audio.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:55

Gavel to Grace if they can’t see it.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:56

Yeah, it’s called the From From the Gavel to Grace. My name’s Brett Knight. You just look up from the Gavel to Grace, um, it’s on there. If they had a carrier pigeon version, I would have done that one too. But uh, and then if if you do see it on there, one thing I will say, and this is just recently this week, if you see the From Gavel to Grace book on there, there’s also a study guide with the same name, and it’s my study guide as well. After releasing it, I had several programs that were using it to go through and they were creating their own study guides, and they said, Would you create a study guide? So I did. Uh so it’s also available, but it says clearly on it study guide and and such. But that’s it from the Gavel to Grace. And if you know, if you wanted to know more about it or if you want to download the study guide for free, uh, you can go to my website at Brett Knight.com, B-R-E-T-T-K-N-I-G-H-T, and there’s just a PDF download and it’s free. You can download the uh if you don’t want to pay the $7 for a study guide. Uh for me, I’d rather just let somebody else print it, but it’s available in PDF format there, and you’ll find some more information about the book there.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:56

Great, man. I hope everybody goes over and check it out, and then we got to catch up. I have a book that I’m getting ready to release. I’ll give you a uh I have a digital copy. I don’t know how to do any of that. Yeah. I don’t know how to write a book. I did it though, and I don’t know how to um publish it. I don’t know anything. So I’ll give you a copy of it. I’ll have you read mine, I’ll read yours, and we can go from there. Sounds good. Sounds good. Appreciate it, man. Thank you, brother. Hey, thank you.