Eric Spofford
speaker
102 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Eric Spofford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I guess what I'm saying is that the people that have the greatest personal brands are the people that have mastered being able to be authentically them and totally okay with creating a division. If you're authentically you, at some level, you're going to be polarizing to people. There are going to be people that don't fuck with you at all and people that love with you.
But people become so scared of what people think and the rejection of the people that don't fuck with you that they try to placate everybody in that nobody loves them.
My charity comes is my purpose, like my God-given mission here is to help people with addiction and alcoholism. That's very clear. And so everything I do in a charitable sense is around that. And so it's very frequently helping people get into treatment, finding resources for people that can't afford it, helping families, et cetera. That's my main area of focus.
I think all these other things are great, but this is my thing.
I don't know if I've ever thought about it in the context of what percentage, right? I have thought about it in how is it managed. And so I have an estate plan that's set up for my kids that has taken the core issues that I think that my wealth could cause harm to them and tried to...
tried to deliver that and manage that from the grave after I'm gone the same way that I would here in real life while I'm still on planet Earth. And so some of those things are in my estate plan, my kids don't get a fucking dime. I mean, I will let them starve on the street if they can't pass a drug test. And so they're getting, I think it's like twice a year hair tests that go back six months.
Like if you're using drugs, you're on your fucking own, homie. They have to be full-time enrolled in school or employed full-time. And so there's no sitting around, you know, spending dad's money. Right. And they have to have, and that's at the discretion of, um, the person that'll be in charge of my estate. If they want to go out, pursue the entrepreneurial journey. Cool.
But you have to be doing it at a full time. You have to be productive. It can't be just a charade and smoke shirt. Like you have to be gainfully like doing something. Um, And even then, there were a lot of mechanisms where they never get access to all the money.
Like, one of the most underrated, I should say, one of the most underrated attributes of a human being that I have, to a painful extent, is hunger. And so I don't want to spoil them and give them everything. I don't do that now. I've never done that since they're children, and I'm not going to do it later in life from the grave.
I think it gets more attention because people can't make sense of it because they don't really understand addiction, right? If you come from a nice family and mom and dad are still together and there's lots of money and a nice home and fancy cars and all this stuff, people look at that and go, why would you ever do drugs? Why would you destroy this?
But when they look at different socioeconomic classes, they can reconcile it. They're like, oh, well, they're from a bad neighborhood. Their parents were divorced. It makes sense. The truth is this, is that addiction falls squarely across all people, regardless of economic status, race, neighborhood, et cetera. It's inexplainable.
And so it happens in the neighborhood like this one with $20 million homes, $50 million homes, and it happens in Section 8 housing projects and middle-class America and everything in between. And so addiction is just a disease that doesn't discriminate. It does not respect that you come from a good family. It doesn't respect that you come from a high net worth status.
It doesn't give a shit about any of that.
It's somewhat of a brutal conversation and a little bit morbid, but you have to think about it in the context of this because this is the reality. If you understand addiction, it ends in only a couple different places. The person ends up in recovery or they end up in jails, institutions, and death.
And the thing you need to consider is what are you going to regret if the worst case situation happens? And that is the tool, the mechanism that you need to overcome your anxiety and your fear on confronting your loved one that has alcoholism and has addiction.
Because let me tell you something, I have consoled hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of grieving moms and dads and loved ones of people with addiction.
And the amount of regret of the, I wish I had, I wish I hadn't enabled them, I wish I'd said it, I wish I'd thrown them out of the house, I wish I'd had, that I've heard at funerals and in deep grief post losing their loved one, it is some of the most painful shit that I've ever seen anyone go through in my entire life.
You know, I nor any other person in recovery or the addiction treatment industry can guarantee that your loved one will find recovery. But what I can guarantee is that if you do the right things, no matter what the outcome, as painful as that might be, you will not have the excruciating pain of regret. And so it's something that you have to do.
A lot of people die and lose their life in vain, in addiction, and there are co-conspirators, there are co-defendants to that situation, and they are the loved ones of that person that love them to death, literally. You see that addiction lives off of codependency, right? If addiction is a fire, codependency and enablement is the oxygen that keeps it going.
Without enablement of some sort, addiction itself as a fire is arrested and extinguished. And so a lot of these lies and hiding between, well, I'm not the one doing the drugs and it's not me and it's their decision and they have to make their own decision.
Showing 81–100 of 102 · page 5 of 6
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