Matt Waltz
speaker
40 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Matt Waltz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Dr. Drew said the best way to quit drinking is by going cold turkey, and he's a doctor, so why would you question doctors?
So great to be with you, Dr. Drew.
So the history of New Freedom, a banking contact of mine about six years ago said, hey, I've got three guys you should meet with. They've got a really unique idea. So these three guys came to my office, sat down. These three are my partners in New Freedom today. So one of them was serving a life sentence in prison.
And he got sick of seeing these young guys just come back over and over, leave for two months, come back, leave for four months, come back. He became aware there were some federal funds available for recidivism programs. He applied for those funds, got them, and started teaching a class inside the prison, basically how to not come back to prison.
There were two guys in the addiction recovery world who heard about this. They started writing letters, supporting the guys in the program, started to have tremendous success. At the same time, a partner who was serving a life sentence was working on his appeal. Much to his surprise, he won his appeal and got released.
So these three guys then said, hey, let's take this program and let's scale it up. Let's find a way to do a lot more good, help a lot more people. So they wrote a fantastic business plan, went to some banks. The banks said, great idea, great business plan. No fucking way am I giving an ex-convict and two ex-addicts any money. And about the fifth banker said, no, but I know a guy you should meet.
So they came to my office, they presented this plan. It was a fantastic business plan. They figured the funding out and I just couldn't understand why it hadn't been done already. So we decided to push forward with this idea at the same time, try to answer the question, why didn't this exist already? And I think what we found talking to ESG funds and family offices is
people don't love the idea of helping ex-convicts. And so when I learned that meeting with these fund managers and family offices, I became even more encouraged because I think that was the answer to why new freedom didn't already exist.
You ever heard of this thing called the coronavirus? So when we would look for a space, the coronavirus lockdown happened the day before. So we walked into a 250 room conference hotel that was empty. The owners basically begged us to buy it. They sold it to us for an incredible price. In order to get licensed, the city had a special use permit hearing.
No one attended because it was in the dark of COVID. So we got approved. It came together faster than anything I've ever been involved with before. It was incredible.
So the way New Freedom works, it's a combination of clinical staff, you know, licensed clinical professionals, also peer support. So we have over 220 employees today. 85% of them are formerly incarcerated, formerly addicted. what this population believes. If you haven't been through what I've been through, I don't want to hear it. I want some college students to learn this in a book.
I want to talk to people that know what I've been through. So in our facility, we have guys, men and women, who used to be shot callers in the prison gangs. I mean, truly terrifying human beings. who are now generous, successful, charismatic, capable people.
And so when someone comes walking through our doors and they see this man who used to be an absolute terror, and he gives them a hug and says, hey, man, you can have a different life, it sparks this hope that's just incredible to see.
Yeah, so the big picture of how New Freedom works is we're trying to reprogram a formerly incarcerated person's day so it matches a successful professional. So the day starts off with exercise first thing, then breakfast, then about six to seven hours of clinical programming.
group therapy, individual therapy, you know, dealing with the traumatic events that probably caused someone to have this incredibly self-destructive behavior, right? After that, dinner, then the night shift. And the night shift consists of secondary education, the same way a young professional would be improving themselves after hours.
We have vocational job training programs, GED, commercial driver's licenses. So we're really training people to use what they already have. A lot of people have these skills already, but to address what the root of the problem is that causes self-destructive behavior, give you tools to deal with that, and then give you a real future, training you for not just a job, but a career.
You know, we've thought about that. We've talked about it. It's a really unique population set that's just that's formerly recently incarcerated. You know, it could be possible that people that haven't been incarcerated, they just they wouldn't have the same needs. They wouldn't have the same challenges.
And I mean, good news or bad news for us in Arizona, there's 40,000 people who are incarcerated over 18,000 coming out of prison every year. And we're helping about 15% of people coming out of Arizona prisons. So there's still so much more work to do.
I'm so glad you asked that question. Yeah, both Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Dr. Oz, who's gonna be in charge of Medicaid in the incoming administration. The majority of our funding in Arizona comes from Medicaid. And there's so much talk in today's world about government waste and inefficiencies and all these things. And what I'd like them to do is,
This is one of the successful programs that uses government funding. So they should know. There are amazing things happening at New Freedom. In fact, we have some outside consultants coming in to analyze our funding. For every $1 of government funding New Freedom gets, we return $10 to the citizens of Arizona in value. Almost $200 million a year back to the citizens of Arizona.
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