Episode 1355 - Sam Quinones
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what the fuck stirs i say that twice what's happening how's it going where are we at are you good let me ask you a question let me and i'm gonna i'm gonna maybe i've discussed this before but i'm gonna put it right to you
Marc:Are you having negative thoughts about yourself, other people, or the world?
Marc:Are you feeling hopelessness about the future?
Marc:Do you have memory problems, including not remembering important aspects of events in your life, like yesterday?
Marc:Difficulty maintaining close relationships?
Marc:Are you feeling detached from family and friends?
Marc:Do you have lack of interest in activities you once enjoyed?
Marc:Do you have difficulty experiencing positive emotions?
Marc:Are you feeling emotionally numb?
Marc:I'm just asking these in a general way.
Marc:I'm just I'm just checking in because these are the symptoms of PTSD.
Marc:Welcome.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:You know where you get PTSD from looking at your phone too much.
Marc:OK, I'm exaggerating.
Marc:But, you know, I mean, seriously, seriously, how many of those feelings do you have?
Marc:It blows me away.
Marc:I think I talked about this before, but I'm talking about it again because we've got a heavy episode ahead of us.
Marc:You know, and here there's some other ones.
Marc:Obviously, you know, PTSD is real, but it's my contention that post pandemic or whatever part of the pandemic we're in, the trickling pandemic, the ongoing sort of mild version of the pandemic, post and ongoing, you know, Trump problems and very real threats of fascism and climate disaster every day.
Marc:And you just see this and the fact that you want to ignore it.
Marc:Out of powerlessness.
Marc:That's a symptom.
Marc:I mean, I'm just taking care of me.
Marc:You mean you can't handle what's happening?
Marc:Well, who can?
Marc:Jesus Christ.
Marc:Can I just have a nice sandwich?
Marc:Being easily startled or frightened.
Marc:Hey!
Marc:Always being on guard for danger.
Marc:What's that?
Marc:Self-destructive behavior, such as drinking too much or living too fast or masturbating for seven hours to porn.
Marc:It's not terrible, but it's not a great way to spend a day.
Marc:Or eating, eating, eating.
Marc:Trouble sweeping, trouble concentrating.
Marc:Trouble concentrating.
Marc:Trouble sweeping.
Marc:Trouble concentrating.
Marc:What?
Marc:Irritability, angry outbursts or aggressive behavior.
Marc:Go fuck yourself, Connie.
Marc:Overwhelming guilt or shame.
Marc:I'm sorry I said that.
Marc:Jesus, I'm sorry.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:I feel terrible.
Marc:I don't.
Marc:I don't.
Marc:So, look, today on the show, I'm talking to Sam Quinones.
Marc:OK, he's a journalist.
Marc:And in 2016, he was on to talk about his book, Dreamland, True Tales of America's Opiate Epidemic.
Marc:You can actually go back and listen to that talk now.
Marc:It's available for free on all podcast apps now.
Marc:Scroll down to episode 757 from November of 2016.
Marc:So I had him back.
Marc:He wasn't pitched.
Marc:You know, it didn't have to happen.
Marc:But I read the new book called The Least of Us, True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth.
Marc:And I had him back on.
Marc:I just needed to talk to him because there were revelations in that book that reframed the way that I looked at some of the cultural problems we're having that have to do with the unhoused.
Marc:Or if you want to be belligerent and are unwilling to change the homeless.
Marc:If making the leap to unhoused is too much for you,
Marc:And you just sort of like, why does everything have to change?
Marc:You're not homeless anymore?
Marc:No, that's not the point.
Marc:You can change the language, man.
Marc:There's nothing woke about shifting a description in order to sort of be respectful or deal with the perception of the problem in a different way.
Marc:Again, they're fucking homeless.
Marc:No.
Marc:What the fuck is wrong with people?
Marc:Listen, a few weeks ago, we had Michael Mann on the show.
Marc:Great talk.
Marc:If you haven't heard it, you can check it out anytime you want, right there in the podcast feed, Michael Mann.
Marc:The episode date is July 18th.
Marc:We talked a bit about his new novel, Heat 2, and it comes out tomorrow.
Marc:So just to give you a little reminder about that, here's a clip of me and Michael Mann talking about Heat 2.
Guest:The novel begins one day after the end of the movie.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And Christian Hurlis is wounded.
Guest:He's the last survivor.
Guest:He's half delirious on drugs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Nate John Boyd's trying to get him out.
Guest:And he becomes aware that Charlene betrayed him and that Neil's dead.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's got to get out of L.A.
Guest:And then it jumps back to 1988 when Neil's alive, obviously, and the Val Kilmer character and that whole crew...
Guest:are going to burglarize a bank vault at night.
Guest:Hannah happens to be a cop in a quasi-corrupt Chicago police department chasing a home invader.
Guest:And so all these stories begin in 88.
Guest:And then it moves back and moves from there.
Guest:It takes some things that happen in Mexicali.
Marc:So it sounds almost like that this was, you couldn't do it the same way in a movie.
Marc:This is a book, but it's also going to be a very large movie.
Marc:It's going to be a large movie.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:Is that already underway?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:That's exciting.
Guest:I can't talk about it, but yes.
Marc:Okay, because I was wondering if it was in place of...
Guest:No.
Guest:I always wanted to do this book.
Guest:I always wanted to explore the early life of these guys and then also to project, to find a way to bring the past into the present and the present being about 2002, seven years after the events of Heat the Movie.
Marc:So how do you cast that if you're going to do a film?
Guest:Very, very large ways.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You got to listen to that whole thing.
Marc:It's fucking awesome.
Marc:You can get Heat 2 tomorrow in stores or whatever online seller you use to get books.
Marc:Can you dig it?
Marc:Can you dig it?
Marc:Listen to that little chachi.
Guest:What's he doing?
Yeah.
Guest:I shouldn't have brought him in.
Guest:It was my bad.
Guest:No, it's okay.
Guest:Don't freak out.
Guest:Come here.
Guest:Come here, Chachi.
Guest:What's the matter, Jimmy?
Guest:What's the matter, Timmy?
Guest:What?
Guest:What?
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:What else?
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Are you a Charlie?
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:How about Charlie?
Guest:I like Charlie.
Guest:You like Charlie?
Guest:How's Charlie?
Guest:What do you think?
Guest:Charlie?
Guest:Huh?
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Go back in the hat.
Guest:Yeah, I'll be in a second.
Marc:I think I'm going to keep that kitten.
Marc:Doesn't it sound like I'm going to keep that kitten?
Marc:I'm in trouble.
Marc:So strap in.
Marc:This is a heavy, honest conversation with a journalist who wrote two great books.
Marc:And just it's important information to know what's really going on.
Marc:You know why?
Marc:What causes the profound addiction to fentanyl and meth?
Marc:What are these new drugs, these synthetic drugs?
Marc:How did they piggyback on the opioid crisis and the black tar heroin crisis?
Marc:What has happened both for horrible, for bad, and also for some sort of kind of bits of light
Marc:How do you track it all back?
Marc:How do you make it an exciting narrative so people learn?
Marc:What it showed me about the current unhoused situation, especially since people make so much fun of the unhoused.
Marc:You know, just relentlessly bullying.
Marc:It's the purest punching down.
Marc:Look, I've done it myself, but I'm aware.
Marc:I'm aware.
Marc:But there's information that you will hear about fentanyl, about methamphetamine that's going to make you look at your family differently.
Marc:It's going to make you look at the culture differently.
Marc:It's going to make you look at the problem we're up against differently.
Marc:And it's certainly going to make you look at the desperate people in the streets of your city differently.
Marc:And it's going to make you wonder.
Marc:How can you help if you're that kind of person?
Marc:Or it's gonna put you further into some sort of PTSD.
Marc:But Sam is a top-notch journalist.
Marc:It's all in this new book, The Least of Us, True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth.
Marc:It's available now wherever you get books.
Marc:And it comes out in paperback November 1st.
Marc:This is me talking to Sam Quinones.
guitar solo
Marc:So, not unlike the last book, Sam, I guess, I don't know if I'm late to the party, but it's been out for a little while, right?
Guest:Nine months?
Marc:That's not much.
Marc:Takes me a while to read things.
Marc:Yeah, of course.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:But not unlike the last one, I read this, and there's elements of it that were mind-blowing on a lot of levels, but something...
Marc:Specifically, that really grabbed me that that will get to.
Marc:But like before I try to unfold it, because I don't always do conversations like this, which I think on some level work as a public service.
Marc:Mm hmm.
Marc:announcement as some guy who's sober a long time.
Marc:It's interesting, not unlike Dreamland, the true tales of America's opiate epidemic, you land in a place that is relatively hopeful.
Marc:You know, somewhat, I wouldn't say optimistic, but a call to action that requires a community and patience and empathy.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:You know, and I think what's interesting about both of these books is that you don't, like I finished it this morning and I thought like, well, I better finish it before it comes in.
Marc:It's not like there's a spoiler.
Marc:It's not like you're going to get here and I'm going to be like, does everything work out at the end?
Marc:Right, right, right, right.
Marc:But I guess in approaching this one, I have to assume that the least of us true tales of America and hope in the time of fentanyl and meth.
Marc:Was this after you finished Dreamland?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You must you must have seen this happening already.
Guest:Well, what happened was with Dreamland.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Something happened that I could never have predicted.
Guest:In fact, even by the last time we spoke, it really was not happening as much as it later did.
Marc:This is what the fentanyl thing.
Guest:The awareness began to grow of this opioid epidemic.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was not there when I wrote it.
Guest:When I wrote Dreamland, it was like an echo chamber.
Guest:No one was talking about this.
Guest:After Dreamland comes out, I began to get all these invitations to come speak.
Guest:It was unbelievable, the numbers.
Guest:And every year was more.
Guest:And so 2016, it was like, the last time we spoke was like, yeah, some.
Guest:And then 2017 and 18 and 19.
Guest:And then with COVID, it all kind of went away.
Guest:But what happened was I began to see the meth and the fentanyl
Guest:developing in real time as I was traveling.
Guest:Everywhere I would go, they would go.
Guest:Some places, I remember they started saying, we don't really even have any heroin anymore.
Guest:It's all fentanyl.
Guest:Nobody's got heroin for sale.
Marc:When you go to speak, you'd written a few books before Dreamland.
Marc:Now, Dreamland, obviously...
Marc:you know, gave names and a face and a history and a structure to our drug problem that, I mean, deepened it.
Marc:I imagine for anybody who read the book and for families, you know, that there was a broader place to put the blame and also a systemic... And a bigger story.
Guest:The Dreamline kind of tied all these threads together, I think.
Marc:Now, when you get asked to speak, I mean, as a journalist, you know, what are you feeling?
Marc:Do you feel like you're some sort of emissary?
Marc:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:A few things.
Guest:Of awareness?
Guest:Yes, right.
Guest:Sure, that's a big part of it.
Guest:I also felt as time went on, I didn't realize it when I first started doing it, I began meeting people in every speech I gave.
Guest:And this could be conferences, professional conferences, judges, public health, whatever, addiction counselors, but also a lot of small towns.
Guest:I was...
Guest:hugging people like almost every speech.
Guest:Because the truth is people come up with, to me, almost every speech, two or three at every speech would be like, yeah, my brother died.
Guest:My dad died.
Guest:My kids died.
Guest:And you try to say something that means something to people who are in that kind of grief.
Yeah.
Guest:And the truth is, after a while, I mean, I would say things to them, but basically I just hug them.
Guest:Because as time went on, I began to realize this was grief that was shared all across the country.
Guest:And I needed to have some response.
Guest:I realized that this wasn't coming upon me and have some response.
Guest:And I began to understand that, you know, I would hold her hand.
Guest:Sometimes you just got to be there, stand there.
Guest:Yes, right.
Guest:Witness.
Guest:Exactly, precisely.
Guest:And I began to think, and also I began to tell stories that I thought made them understand or allowed them to understand they weren't alone.
Guest:That this was too often this problem festered and spread because people believed they were just, there wasn't anybody in a 10-mile radius of me that has this problem.
Guest:My kid, my husband, my wife, whatever, is addicted to this crap.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And shame, right?
Guest:And also the shame.
Guest:Nobody wanted to talk about it.
Guest:The reason it had spread so completely, in my opinion, was that the people who could best tell the stories about it, where the families were ashamed, were embarrassed.
Guest:You mean to tell the stories of personal crisis?
Guest:As a journalist, and you have this kind of thing, the most personal stories are the most impactful.
Guest:And if you don't have those people,
Guest:you're missing a gaping... There's a big gaping hole.
Guest:And as a result, politicians really weren't paying attention to it.
Guest:The media was covering it, kind of scattershot.
Guest:Some places were doing a good job.
Guest:This was the opioids.
Guest:This was the opioid epidemic.
Guest:But then along the way, after Dreamland comes out, I began to do these speeches.
Guest:And I began to see... As I traveled the country, I did...
Guest:I did, in four and a half years, I did 265 speeches.
Guest:It was just insane.
Marc:And you're going to these places that were profoundly affected, which is almost everywhere, by the opioid epidemic, and people wanted at least some window, some hope, some explanation.
Guest:Exactly, and I think the more you tell a story, the stories are, in my opinion, the best way of, first of all, breaking down the shame and the stigma.
Guest:The human stories, putting the human face on the crisis.
Guest:And how they fit.
Guest:how their boy or how their wife or whatever fits into this larger thing so they can kind of have some sense to it.
Marc:So that's how you presented it?
Guest:I think so, yeah.
Guest:And it became a very, very cathartic thing for me every time I spoke.
Guest:It did not get old.
Guest:I gave...
Guest:similar speeches frequently.
Guest:And it was very, very powerful.
Guest:I'm saying that not out of immodesty, but I mean, most of the time I was getting standing ovations.
Guest:It was like a very powerful thing.
Guest:And then afterwards I would sign books and meet people and people would come up, you know, hugging.
Marc:It's service in a way.
Guest:Yeah, it was that.
Guest:And I began to realize that the awareness now was spreading across the country, that people were now aware that this was
Guest:A national problem.
Guest:They were not all alone.
Guest:It was not one person every 10 miles.
Marc:So not unlike Dreamland where you kind of followed a lead that opened up this entire world to you, which was black tar heroin arrests in Appalachia, right?
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:And so now you're out on the road.
Marc:And now I have to assume that on some level, you know, in in getting into the new book, you have the sort of context.
Marc:You have the infrastructure of this book.
Guest:And also connections that I didn't have before.
Marc:And but you have a specific approach to to how you're going to tell these stories, because you're not only the personal stories go all the way up the ladder, the corporate ladder, the criminal criminal ladder, drug dealers, whatever.
Marc:But so what sparks it?
Marc:I mean, you're just hearing about that.
Guest:At first, what I really wanted to do was, and this was initially like 2000, my publisher was saying, you got to do another book.
Guest:And I was like, okay, I'll try to figure out what it is.
Guest:As Tom went on, initially what I really wanted to do was write books.
Guest:the half of the book that talks about the stories of community repair.
Guest:That's a recovery.
Guest:Bird in Muncie, Indiana.
Guest:Yeah, and that's in this book.
Guest:In this book, yeah.
Guest:And so I began to do these stories of people involved in community repair, not necessarily helping addicts, but just finding ways of bringing people together, sustaining a community that was in stress in some way.
Guest:And I began to develop these stories.
Guest:And then along the way, I began to realize, holy shit,
Guest:Fentanyl is taking over everything.
Guest:And that was first in the Midwest.
Guest:And then it goes east and west after that goes later.
Marc:You were hyper attuned to the deaths.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:But also people would like I would meet it, you know, narcotics agents and people who were ER docs.
Guest:These guys you knew from the first book.
Guest:No, well, sometimes, but mostly it would be people I would just meet on the way.
Guest:Really?
Guest:I'd sit them down for like sometimes it'd be just as short as five minutes.
Guest:What's going on in your area?
Guest:Were you recording?
Guest:Not initially.
Guest:It was more like I'm just trying to understand what's going on.
Guest:And I began to realize that the fentanyl story, which began very small and I thought was going to be inconsequential, turns out to be the story and it begins to crowd out heroin.
Guest:When did you think it was small and inconsequential?
Guest:When I was writing Dreamland, I thought, okay, part of it was my brain was... But you heard about fentanyl.
Guest:Oh, I had heard about it, sure, yeah.
Guest:But I just thought, okay, I don't have any more room in my little brain or in my book to put in fentanyl.
Guest:So I'm going to leave that for another time if I have to cover it at all.
Guest:And then as I hit the road and as I began to speak more often, I began to see, oh, shit, man, this is really...
Guest:taken over everything and it's crowding so there's no more heroin in these areas no after a while takes about a year and pretty soon it's just all so what did that tell you did that tell you that like somehow the the people that were involved in the franchising of heroin had to be involved no no the opposite that that there was now such an enormous market that had gone
Guest:Way beyond the small time groups that I was writing about in Dreamland.
Guest:And now it was like a global market almost.
Marc:So your question at that point was where the fuck is this coming from?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And at first the answer was in small packages from Chinese chemical companies.
Guest:That people could get like on the black net.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And on the dark web and all that stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What do you call it?
Guest:Right, yeah.
Guest:And they would get it, and it would come to dealers.
Guest:These guys were viewing fentanyl as their lottery ticket.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:I get like a quarter pound of fentanyl.
Guest:I make millions.
Guest:That's what they were thinking.
Marc:So it was decentralized completely.
Marc:In Dreamland, it was decentralized, but still active.
Marc:There were people in control in Mexico.
Marc:There was an organic foundation.
Marc:It had to be grown, and then it had to be distributed, and there was a business model in place.
Marc:So what's interesting about the fentanyl thing is any idiot could get a brick of fentanyl, not knowing what they had, chop it like it's coke.
Guest:Mix it right and cut it like it's coke and kill people.
Guest:Yes, that's good And that's what began to happen because the the this was a lottery ticket Yes, the problem was for a lot of these cats on the street That lottery ticket was connected to the idea that they now had to mix at the first time in the history of drug use in America where you have widespread drug that you but you can't just sell you got to mix it it's way too pure and
Guest:And it's a few little grains of salt worth of fentanyl will get you high.
Guest:A couple more will kill you.
Guest:But either way, you can't sell that stuff.
Guest:You can't sell a few grains.
Guest:So you have to mix it.
Guest:And that's where you begin to see the magic bullet blender being used in these idiots' basements.
Marc:And you go through very... You spend time...
Marc:in the book with proper chemical breakdown and also proper ways to sort of what it would take to mix this properly.
Guest:And these folks on the street don't have a clue.
Guest:And that's why you began to see, particularly in the first states that were affected, which were all the opioid states, like West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, places like that, you began to see clusters of overdoses, like 70 in a weekend in, I think, Cincinnati.
Guest:Deaths.
Guest:Well, a lot of them are deaths, but then there's also a lot of people revive because there's a lot of Narcan, the opioid antidote, overdose antidote.
Guest:And so what you begin to see is these guys mixing it really, really badly because they don't know what they're doing, nor do they probably care.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And when the narcs would bust their houses, they'd find five, six magic bullet blenders, all cruddy and dusty, you know.
Guest:But that was because you had guys at the lowest end thinking they'd won the lottery.
Guest:mixing this stuff in this way that they'd heard was the best way.
Guest:And I think the reason they thought it was a great way to do it is because I think earlier on, heroin had kind of been mixed that way too.
Guest:Coke?
Guest:Maybe, maybe.
Guest:Some kind of grinder.
Guest:But mostly, I think it had to do with the fact that it had that bubble.
Guest:The magic bullet is a plastic bubble, you know?
Guest:And so the idea was, no, you don't have to breathe the fumes, you know, because it's in a little...
Guest:Of course, the problem is the Magic Bullet blender is not the way you mix powder.
Guest:It's for liquids.
Guest:It's for smoothies.
Marc:And also, it's like not that small.
Marc:You're dealing with something highly lethal.
Marc:And it takes so little.
Marc:It's so little to kill people.
Marc:When I was reading that stuff, it was just horrifying.
Marc:Look, I've been sober.
Marc:It's going to be, I don't know, 23 years, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Next month.
Marc:And so this is all new to me.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But just knowing that kids are out there and this stuff is in everything now.
Guest:See, this is what happened.
Marc:They put it in the speed.
Marc:They put it in everything.
Marc:And one line, you're dead, man.
Guest:Yeah, and that's so we've reached...
Guest:like in our lifetimes, the emergence of the era of recreational drug use and the end now of risk-free recreation.
Guest:Like somebody just offers you a line at a party.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You can't take it.
Guest:You better test it.
Guest:You better test it.
Guest:And you better test the whole line because this part, if it doesn't have fentanyl, the next half of the line might have fentanyl.
Guest:And the pills now, what began to happen with fentanyl is that
Guest:The Mexicans finally figured out how to make it.
Guest:They had a couple chapters on the book.
Guest:This one underground chemist kind of introduces a similar drug.
Guest:Well, I love that.
Marc:So that whole part of it is like, you know, the way you kind of build things in this book.
Marc:When you're set out to construct a book, because it was the same in Dreamland, where you're integrating, you know, things that will give context, things that will show the hierarchy of things, but also things like, I mean, you spend a lot of time.
Guest:you know talking about brain chemistry yes and was this something from like when you finished dreamland and had time to reflect on it were there things in this book where you're like i gotta explain that now yes and it should have been in dreamland i just didn't have my brain is very limited and i didn't have space to put in the neurochemistry and the the uh the neuroscience of it all and i thought but it's even advanced since then though
Guest:Yes, sure, sure, sure.
Guest:But to me, you know, the beauty, the great joy that I get from journalism is that I get to not write about stuff I know about.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But rather find out about stuff I don't know anything.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So you're excited about it.
Guest:Oh, hell yeah.
Guest:And I was very lucky in some of these cases, for example, with the neuroscience to be able to talk to some brilliant, brilliant.
Guest:We are in the golden age of neuroscience research right now.
Guest:They're learning so much.
Marc:So what was the thing, the one thing out of all that that you were like, holy shit, this is a key?
Guest:Oh man, I mean, they're all, I guess the most amazing thing, the thing that I would repeat to my wife was, you know, they had that one experiment on rats.
Guest:uh where they would you know naloxone is a drug that you give to opioid uh people who are an over opioid over an overdose yeah to revive them and they immediately frequently they go into withdrawals when you revive them because they're all of a sudden they have had all their dope deprived oh they're taken away from their brain chemistry brain receptors and they're mad because all of a sudden they're you know they're they're frustrated or whatever
Guest:Well, they had this, Princeton Neuroscience Lab did this experiment where it addicted, it got dependent on sugar, a whole cage of rats.
Guest:And so it put, all these rats needed sugar.
Guest:They would hit the sugar water constantly.
Guest:They would never touch the non-sugar water at all, you know, bam, bam, bam.
Guest:And then they gave the rats...
Guest:Naloxone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like you would to a heroin overdose or a fentanyl overdose.
Guest:And all of a sudden these rats start displaying symptoms of withdrawals that the neuroscientists associate within a rat with withdrawals.
Guest:A lot of shaking, a lot of grooming and fidgeting and all that kind of stuff.
Guest:And see, that was early on made me think like...
Guest:damn, so we have all these things that are hitting our brains, not just heroin, sugar, all this stuff.
Guest:Your phone.
Guest:The phone could go on and on about that too.
Guest:And it's all hitting our brains in the same way heroin is maybe not as powerfully and with such intensity and certainly not with the intensity of fentanyl.
Guest:But nevertheless, it's hitting the same receptors.
Guest:It's creating that kind of response in us to crave.
Guest:And that's why- Is it the dopamine receptors?
Guest:Yes, exactly.
Guest:The opioid receptors that are then generate dopamine and you want, oh, that's good.
Guest:Keep doing that.
Guest:Keep doing that.
Guest:Keep doing that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you explain in the book, too, that the serotonin is the balance.
Guest:Serotonin is kind of satisfaction.
Guest:And dopamine is, I want more.
Guest:So you have normally in our bodies, we have a kind of a little bit of maybe a tug of war of these two chemicals in our brains.
Yeah.
Guest:A healthy life is when serotonin and dopamine are more or less balanced.
Guest:Right.
Guest:An addicted life is when the dopamine is really dominant.
Marc:And that could be, you know, by virtue of addiction or self-medicating a pre-existing problem.
Marc:But you don't find that out if you're strung out on dope.
Marc:But so those experiments, because I thought that was interesting and kind of run throughout the book, is that.
Marc:You know, that once that was sort of discovered, you realize that the entirety of our late stage capitalistic culture is fueled primarily on keeping people in this fucking dopamine state of like hitting those receptors constantly.
Guest:We have now.
Guest:I'm 63, so when I was in my high school, I was in the 70s.
Guest:We had nothing like this in the 80s even.
Guest:We had nothing like this where you have all these, not just illegal products, but now many, many legal products that very smart, very moneyed corporations- Right, you talk about the sugar construction of snacks.
Guest:Right, exactly.
Guest:And you're like, they're completely designed- Chicken nuggets.
Guest:Chicken nuggets were invented in a lab, Cornell University, by the way.
Guest:It's not like a recipe that some lady comes up with or there's some place on those farm or somewhere.
Guest:And so they are 60% fat and salt, which our brains evolved for millennium, eons, to crave because we've got very little of it.
Guest:And then you combine that with the dip that's got sugar in it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So you dip.
Guest:That's the trifecta.
Guest:That's sugar, fat and salt all in one thing.
Guest:And but the chicken nugget I often use.
Guest:It's like it's very much like crack.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, what is crack?
Guest:Well, with cocaine, coca leaf, you chew the coca leaf and it gets you mildly buzz.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Now you process it.
Guest:You strip away all those fibers that slow the absorption in the brain and you come with the cocaine.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And all of a sudden, bam, you're hit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:OK.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then.
Guest:They figured out, hey, if you cook cocaine or bake cocaine in a microwave with baking soda and water, it gets hard.
Guest:You could smoke it and then boom.
Guest:So it's really stripping away all those things that prevent the quick absorption into your brain of the cocaine.
Guest:And that's what chicken nuggets are.
Guest:Chicken nuggets are kind of like we're stripping away a lot of the nutrition, all the stuff that stops that.
Guest:And obviously, it's not exactly like crack.
Guest:The effect is very different.
Guest:The idea is you strip away the nutrition, you strip away the stuff that slows things down, and sugar's the same way.
Marc:You're probably not going to lose your house strung out on nuggets.
Guest:No, no, strung out on chicken nuggets, it's unlikely.
Marc:But I think what you're talking about, and I think you hint at it throughout the book, if not explicitly, but certainly subtly, is that almost all of our culture is operating at this frequency.
Guest:that's where i was going we have we have transformed in the last i would say last 20 certainly last 30 years yeah into mass marketing of highly addictive legal shit phones but even discourse dude even semantics even on the phone i mean you spend 10 minutes on your phone in the morning you blow your brains out dude yeah you blow your fucking brains out on clickbait on tick tock on instagram it's just my wife had a very interesting thing to say about this uh she's my best editor
Guest:And she said, you know, it used to be that we had to work hard to develop an opinion.
Guest:You have to read people who knew more than you about topic X. And many people, you have to really work hard.
Guest:Now, opinions are like fast food.
Guest:We're getting forced fed them on Twitter.
Marc:on Instagram memes yeah whatever feels good exactly and you're getting it for and pretty soon you don't have to work anymore you just adopt it well yeah but you should still work but there was an interest I think there was a sentence in there that I may have underlined towards the end about about the nature of that specifically because you bring up you know QAnon and tribalism you bring up
Marc:You know, the idea that social media was supposed to create this great community, but instead it created virulent tribalism.
Guest:Remember the Egypt spring and all that?
Guest:It was supposed to be this community forum.
Marc:Right, right, right here.
Marc:Remember when social media was going to be great technological connective tissue, bringing people together, inaugurating a new era of understanding?
Marc:Instead, it midwifed an era of virulent tribalism.
Marc:The opioid epidemic began with legal drugs, irresponsibly marketed and prescribed.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:But yeah, so it's like this is because I've been talking about on stage a little bit, but not with that kind of clarity is that, you know, we're now learning just how soft the brain is and how much you need to be vigilant about what you let in there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And how much, frankly, it seems to me one of the things I had a heart attack five years ago and since I've been doing a lot more exercise and that kind of thing and how much.
Guest:And I think for addiction recovery, this is extraordinarily important as well.
Guest:How much nutrition and exercise, they are the best medicine.
Guest:More than pills, more than whatever else.
Marc:You talk about that towards the end of the book, too, about how people have grown to rely on, what do I got to take to fix this?
Guest:I think that's kind of the problem that grew up since the 60s, basically.
Marc:I think that's the birth of Big Pharma, really.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And also then Big Pharma understands that, understands that we prize convenience, understands our lives are sedentary and very fast moving, and they begin to market to that.
Marc:So alongside of talking about the neuroscience, you're talking about the history of synthetic painkillers.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And obviously, if you want to talk, you know, if you want to if people who are listening want to really get into the opioids, you can read the other book.
Marc:But you put enough of it in here to get the hang of it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But that, you know, the nature of some of those, you know, that was even higher science than than the fentanyl and everything else.
Marc:And that once these recipes, you know, I mean, who's the guy you track it to?
Marc:That one guy who invented fentanyl and they started to.
Marc:Right.
Marc:They started to fuck with the molecules just to see what else they can come up with.
Marc:And there's a lot of ways to synthesize this powerful painkiller or ones like it.
Guest:Ones like it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Paul Jansen is an interesting guy because, I mean, he's been dead a good number of years now.
Guest:But, I mean, he was really a brilliant, brilliant scientist, one of the great scientists 20th century.
Guest:And fentanyl, he invented understanding what it would do, completely understanding that it would hit the brain much quicker.
Guest:It would be great for anesthesia.
Guest:And it brings you in because it brings you in and out very quickly.
Guest:So before that, it was morphine.
Guest:They'd also have to take you down to death.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it's very dangerous.
Guest:And fentanyl is in and out.
Guest:And frankly, most of the people listening to this, many of the people listening to this will have had fentanyl in an operation.
Guest:It's a magnificent drug.
Guest:It revolutionized surgery.
Guest:And in the hands of an anesthesiologist and a surgeon, it is fantastic.
Guest:And they gave it to me when I was having my heart attack surgery.
Guest:But that was the idea, that it takes you in and out, very quick entry to the brain.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then very easy to get it out of there as well with naloxone.
Guest:And so it really transformed surgery.
Guest:The problem is, of course, it's extraordinarily potent.
Guest:That's part of its value as a real drug in a surgical setting.
Guest:And in the hands of the wrong people,
Guest:So they begin to figure out that early on, for several decades in fentanyl's life, you get these really kind of rogue chemists off and one-off types.
Guest:Like he made up three pounds of fentanyl and people start dying and then they disappear.
Marc:You never know who really did it.
Marc:So these guys were sort of challenging themselves to see if they could do it.
Guest:Yeah, and some of them were kind of anti-government types.
Guest:But the big thing that really happened was in 2006 when one underground chemist, Ricardo Valdes Torres, talk about him in the book, is hired by the Sinaloa drug cartel.
Guest:He's from Mexico, but he's lived most of his life in San Diego and learned how to cook it there and cook fentanyl.
Guest:But they hire him to make ephedrine because ephedrine is the precursor to one of the most important ways of making methamphetamine.
Guest:The old-style.
Guest:Old-school meth.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, right.
Guest:And they are thinking, we're going to run out of ephedrine if we don't watch it.
Guest:Government's cracking down.
Marc:Oh, because they were getting it from China.
Guest:They were getting it from all variety of places, but it was being curtailed by the Mexican government.
Guest:Because of the speed.
Guest:Yeah, they want to make meth.
Guest:Exactly right.
Guest:And they say, we want you to make meth.
Guest:But he, like very ballsy, says to himself, yeah, okay, they don't know what they're talking about.
Guest:I'm going to make fentanyl because that's what I really want to make.
Guest:And they get mad.
Guest:But he sits them down and says, look, man.
Guest:This you don't know what you're talking about.
Guest:This is the most powerful, profitable drug you will ever see.
Guest:This will take a 50 to one cut.
Guest:And they don't believe that because on the street, you don't cut anything 50 times and have it worth selling.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But sure enough, you could do it with the shit that he's he's selling.
Guest:They begin.
Guest:So there's wiretaps of him, of these guys selling it up in Chicago and up in Detroit.
Guest:Oh, my.
Guest:And calling back down to Mexico.
Guest:Oh, my God, it's working.
Guest:You know, people love it like that kind of thing.
Guest:And, and, but that's the first time you see a mass death associated with, associated with seven, 2006 and seven, right.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:He's busted in 2006, but he had just sold 10 kilos into the market.
Guest:And so that has to spend many months killing people.
Guest:And it really heads to, you know, it's like Chicago, St.
Guest:Louis, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, places like that.
Guest:Is this where it starts to replace the opioids?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, but it is where the Sinaloa drug cartel, the light goes on, that there is now a synthetic form of heroin.
Guest:We don't have to wait for poppies.
Guest:We don't have to grow poppies and hire farmers to make it for us.
Guest:We could just make it in a lab.
Guest:Oh my God.
Guest:And then he's arrested.
Guest:He spends 15 years in prison and stuff like that.
Guest:He's not accessible to them.
Guest:But meanwhile, the
Guest:the chinese begin to figure this out and figure out that hey there's all these opioid addicts in america but also elsewhere in the world they begin to sell it and so you begin to see these two forces the mexicans and the chinese chemical company the mexican cartel groups and the chinese chemical companies kind of separately but then more like connected and and and alongside of this the methamphetamine business is also shifting
Guest:Well, the meth business out of Mexico, yes, right, exactly.
Guest:Except for the meth business was well-known and well-practiced down in Mexico.
Guest:They had industrialized the methamphetamine made with this chemical known as ephedrine, which you find in Sudafed pills and all that stuff.
Guest:They knew how to make that.
Guest:Very, very easy to make meth with that.
Guest:But then...
Guest:The Mexican government, as I said, begins to crack down.
Guest:Out of pressure, global pressure, or United States pressure, probably.
Guest:Yes, and there's some political considerations internally and all that kind of.
Guest:But what ends up happening is they really reduce significantly the importations of ephedrine.
Guest:So the traffickers have been 20 years doing this.
Guest:Well, yeah, about 20 years doing it by then.
Guest:And they're like, all of a sudden, we don't have our main chemical.
Guest:What do we do?
Guest:And so they shift dramatically.
Guest:to this other form of making methamphetamine that is old but new to them.
Guest:The P2P method.
Guest:P2P stuff.
Guest:Old how?
Guest:Was that the original way the bikers made it and stuff?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And you've got this poster of Gimme Shelter, the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, which I've seen a couple of times.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:it's a big rolling stones fan yeah um that is really at that at that concert is really where you see the first um expression in american culture of p2p methamphetamine on those bikers yeah those bikers you watch you remember they're going through with their harleys and and beating up people because they're touching their bikes in the middle of a crowd of 100 000 or whatever and up front you know it's it's bedlam it's i remember watching that movie when i was in high school and then much many years later and
Guest:What I didn't understand, what I now understand was this was the first time you really saw in public on film and all that P2P method at work.
Marc:See, this was the thing I was talking about at the beginning that really sort of made me feel like we needed to talk about it specifically in relation to the current homeless situation.
Marc:Because I'm a guy, okay, COVID happened and the economy took a hit, but I'm driving around.
Marc:And you see this homeless situation, the tents and the shanty towns and whatever, and you see the weird hoarding of artifacts.
Marc:But my brain still bends around this sort of 80s sense of like, well, these were, you know, when Reagan shut down, put all the mentally ill on the streets.
Marc:that you had this problem of these poor, tragic people that couldn't get help, and it was terrible.
Marc:And so my brain and mindset, not just, it was around class and around mental illness, but what your book posits, and I think you support it well, is that this new way of making meth
Guest:is creating new homeless people and also creating you know profound mental illness that happens very quickly and that's that was the see the initially my story was the p2p meth allows them to make methamphetamine many different ways
Guest:You can make P2P.
Guest:It's known as phenyl-2-propanone as the precursor chemical.
Guest:You can make it many different ways.
Guest:So if the government cracks down on these three chemicals, you need to make P2P.
Guest:You shift over here to these other chemicals.
Guest:What are the ones that you have to have?
Guest:Well, no, you can make it with many different combinations, like 15 or 20, maybe even more than that.
Guest:And they're all legal.
Guest:They're all widely available chemicals used in a variety of industries.
Guest:They're all toxic.
Guest:And so it makes it very difficult for the government to crack down as they did on ephedrine.
Guest:And so now if they crack down on one thing, you make it another way.
Guest:And here's the crucial thing.
Guest:The trafficking world by now...
Guest:controls the major shipping ports on the western side of Mexico, Pacific coast of Mexico.
Guest:What year is this?
Guest:This would be 2000.
Guest:By the 90s, really, they control a lot of that stuff.
Guest:But by the 2000s, for sure.
Guest:And now, without a doubt.
Guest:And so they get access to the entire world's chemical market.
Guest:So they can bring in this stuff in container loads.
Marc:So you're saying that now Mexico can make tons.
Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I was on a conversation.
Guest:I was just reminded of this earlier today.
Guest:I've had a number of conversations with a man who's used to manage, kind of a mid-level manager of a meth operation for the Sinaloa drug cartel down in Mexico.
Guest:He's still in Mexico.
Guest:Speaks perfect English.
Guest:Grew up here.
Guest:Grew up in Artesia someplace.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he said his operation alone, this is just his group of workers and stuff, was making five tons a month.
Guest:And doing the... P2P.
Guest:Yeah, and laundering 15 to 20 million a month, dollars a month.
Guest:So initially, that was my story.
Guest:Initially, I was like...
Guest:We have reached a period where they have been able to cover the entire country, not just cover the entire United States, but at the same time drop the price for meth to the point where it's by 80%, roughly.
Marc:And what evolves in the book is that whatever drug you were on, why not do this one?
Guest:Yes, and it begins to take over.
Guest:So you begin to see people who are on opioids now switch to meth.
Guest:Then along the way, as I'm about to finish the book,
Guest:I have this conversation with this guy who I just saw earlier today, as a matter of fact.
Guest:Eric Barrera, wonderful fellow.
Guest:Former meth user, former Marine, who tells... And I meet him by chance, and he's now a homeless outreach worker.
Guest:And he's telling me...
Guest:In 2009, he said, 2009, immediately my brain goes, yeah, because 2008 is when the Mexican government cracked down an ephedrine.
Guest:2009 is when this shift begins towards this other form of making methamphetamine.
Guest:He tells me, I've been using it for eight years, and it was like a euphoric drug.
Guest:I was, as he said, the...
Guest:Phrase always sticks in my mind.
Guest:I was everybody's best friend.
Guest:I was yacking away.
Guest:On the old speed.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And all of a sudden, I take it, and I turn into this raging, paranoid maniac stabbing the walls because my girlfriend's got a man hidden on the wall or in the mattress, all that shit.
Guest:And he says, for the next several years, when I was strung out on the stuff, I never felt euphoria again.
Guest:I was always consumed with pornography.
Guest:I'm alone with my pornography, consumed with paranoia, all this kind of stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this hit me right then.
Guest:I'm like, holy shit.
Guest:Now, if this supply, this form of making methamphetamine, as I'm sure it is, is now coast to coast, then maybe, and these symptoms are what this guy, maybe these symptoms are also...
Guest:Coast to coast.
Guest:This was during the middle of the first pandemic year, like 2020, summer 2020.
Guest:So I'm sitting there at a Pasadena pizzeria with this guy, and he's explaining to me this major story that I had never considered.
Guest:And I begin to call.
Guest:So I begin to say, I've got to check this somehow.
Guest:So I begin to call all these people, ER folks, treatment folks, any recovering meth users I can find, not too many of them, frankly.
Guest:And as I begin, I call all over the country, Southern Indiana, Portland, Albuquerque, Vegas, Skid Row, numerous police people down there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:West Virginia, Virginia, et cetera, et cetera.
Guest:I just call and call and call.
Guest:And at every place I'm calling, they're telling me exactly the same story.
Guest:2009.
Guest:Yeah, it was remarkable.
Guest:I was like, holy, I was walking around.
Guest:In fact, one of the first guys I called was a meth researcher I've known for a long time at the University of West Virginia.
Guest:Now, he used to be out here in UCLA doing meth experiments.
Guest:And I know he's got this long history of researching meth and all that.
Guest:And he said, man, I had never thought of it that way, but I bet you that's why.
Guest:Because exactly what you're saying, here's what we're seeing.
Guest:I got here in 2016.
Guest:This meth arrived in 2017 in West Virginia.
Guest:Hadn't been there before.
Guest:He says almost immediately you find people descending into very scary symptoms of schizophrenia mental illness paranoia and then very quickly Homelessness and then encampments and all that kind of stuff, too And so I once he told me that I got had Eric's story out here in Pasadena And then this guy was Virginia telling me the exact same story exactly when this thing starts showing up in large quantities You begin to see this and since then
Guest:I think I mean, I was extraordinarily convinced of from my reporting of this story when I published the book.
Guest:And since the book, I've done people have come out of the woodwork.
Guest:You know, I just spoke with a very high official in the county substance abuse official.
Guest:And he was telling it's clear that the myth is very different and it's creating all these issues quickly.
Guest:And that's the thing.
Guest:It's not like you take three months to develop this stuff.
Guest:It's more like hours, sometimes a few days.
Guest:And all of a sudden, everybody is a threat.
Guest:Every black car that passes is an FBI agent after you.
Guest:And every fire alarm attached in your apartment is the CIA bugging your... That kind of thing.
Guest:It's wild paranoia and very intense.
Marc:So the...
Marc:And the thing that I think that blew my mind is that once the shift, once it became so cheap and the market was so glutted that any idiot could sell a pound and you could get it for a nickel.
Marc:So all that was on the streets after the tar went away and after the opioid thing tapped out was fentanyl and this meth.
Marc:Both synthetics.
Guest:No plant involved.
Guest:Yeah, so there's no end to the supply.
Guest:Right, exactly right.
Guest:And it's cheap.
Guest:And it's made with impunity down in Mexico.
Guest:Very important to understand that.
Guest:The traffickers face no scrutiny, almost no scrutiny from law enforcement.
Marc:So the game of anybody who gets involved in this world, who gets strung out on, you know, even for a minute, I think the move of all drug addiction to these two primary substances, you know, that are usually done in tandem with each other or as a reaction to each other, right?
Marc:That, you know, that people were doing the meth because they didn't want to OD on fentanyl.
Marc:And then, you know, the fentanyl people were probably doing the meth to kind of get a speedball thing going.
Guest:Or you use the meth because you're afraid of fentanyl, or you use the meth because you're now homeless, and this meth does an exceptionally fine job of divorcing you from reality, and so you're really not aware, or it keeps you up a lot, too.
Marc:It even explains the hoarding.
Marc:You see these encampments with just mountains of garbage.
Guest:And bicycle parts everywhere, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This is a remarkable thing, but meth, this meth in particular, not the ephedrine meth so much, but this meth is really connected to...
Guest:an obsessive behavior and one of the obsessions that people seem to have.
Guest:I first heard about this in West Virginia, not in LA, but is obsession with bicycles and bicycle parts and taking apart a bicycle, stealing bicycles right around late at night because you're up all night and you're up for days, you know.
Guest:And then I begin driving around LA and I begin to realize, holy shit, I see bicycle parts, big bicycle, what they call bicycle stores, like in Skid Row and stuff like that.
Guest:Bicycles are huge.
Guest:And what's amazing to me too, Marcus, is this, I think.
Guest:I've been doing this a long time.
Guest:Used to be that with drugs, you had regional stories.
Guest:People would use this drug here and 500 miles away, they wouldn't even know what that drug was.
Guest:It was a real heterogeneous kind of drug mosaic all across the country.
Guest:Right now what you're finding, this is a stunning...
Guest:development it feels to me is that the stories are all the same you could talk to people in Reno talk to people in southern Indiana the story is going to be almost exactly the same fentanyl meth people dying of fentanyl people out of their mind on on on meth living in encampments and also both these drugs are
Guest:You don't see the effect of it so much in California and Los Angeles, but you do in the Midwest.
Guest:And both these drugs do an exceptionally fine job of convincing you that this is the only place you should be.
Guest:And so tent won't leave tent encampments.
Guest:Even when the weather drops to, like, lethal temperatures, people freeze to death rather than leave.
Guest:And that's just an expression of the remarkable, powerful kind of brainwashing that
Marc:Well, isn't that interesting, though, that this is happening with information as well?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:See, that's the thing.
Guest:You've got all this stuff that's out there now that is taking over our unprepared brain chemistry for a lot of people anyway, it seems to me.
Guest:And, yeah, you've got a lot of people who are very smart in corporations, a lot of money, a lot of research capability, constantly tinkering.
Guest:Yeah, constantly tinkering with how do we make this a little bit better?
Guest:And then, of course, the marketing.
Guest:Americans are nothing if not the greatest marketers in the history of the planet.
Guest:We know how to market that shit.
Guest:You know, why do fast food places never change their logos?
Guest:Because those logos are...
Guest:are triggers.
Guest:They're just as much a trigger as chopping up a line of cocaine, and we hear that chop, chop, chop, all of a sudden you want to use it.
Marc:Well, I mean, yeah, and also I think the sort of idea of impunity that you're very, sort of throughout this book, because I think it happened after you wrote the last book, was the sort of comeuppance for the Sackler family.
Marc:Or for Purdue Pharmaceuticals.
Marc:But ultimately, you characterize this family as treating it as a PR problem and not admitting to any responsibility for what they did.
Marc:And ultimately, that corporation, the corporate structure of that and how they sold pharmaceuticals.
Marc:And you were clear later in the book to say they weren't the only ones, actually.
Marc:There were others.
Guest:Oh, no, no.
Guest:They weren't even the biggest ones by quite a bit.
Guest:They were others for sure.
Marc:But they sort of broke open the brains of everybody.
Marc:And also on the back of that, you got the new sort of heroin franchising model.
Marc:But what's sort of disturbing about what's going on now outside of people dying and outside of the mental health issues that happen almost immediately on the streets is one, the lack of understanding, and two, that there's no end.
Marc:That the supply, that the idea, at least, you know, something used to be seasonal.
Marc:At least you had to store something, you know what I mean?
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:There's no seasons.
Guest:There's no seasons with synthetic drugs.
Guest:You can make them in the middle of winter just as easily as in the middle of summer.
Guest:And, of course, if you control the supply of chemical ingredients, you can make them in quantities that we're seeing now.
Guest:This is only possible, I think, because it's Mexico doing it.
Guest:China had to the chemical companies in China had to mail it through the through the mail.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Pounds at a time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You could never cover the entire country with not one but two of these extraordinarily powerful drugs.
Guest:with packs coming in from the mail.
Guest:It's not logistically feasible.
Guest:They may have wanted to do that, but they just can't do it.
Guest:With Mexico, it's a whole other thing.
Guest:There's 2,000 miles of border, free trade.
Guest:We don't have the capacity to check even.
Guest:I don't know what the figure is, but it's a minuscule amount of the trucks coming over.
Guest:People think of immigrants taking it over.
Guest:The immigrant issue is a complicated one, but the truth is the drugs come in trucks.
Guest:You don't cover the entire country and drop the price by 80% by packing stuff around people's waist and having them walk it across or walk it through the canyon or whatever.
Guest:That just doesn't happen.
Guest:I'm sorry.
Guest:It's a truckload of shit at a time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And many, many of these all day long, all year long, constantly, because you're making too much.
Guest:Part of the story was it was a remarkable thing.
Guest:I talked to this gang member source I've had for a long time.
Guest:He's been a wonderful guy, really, really great.
Guest:And he told me, I call him Timmy in the book.
Guest:He told me that he at one point started to, he was using meth, he was clean for a lot of years, his life was going great, and then like an idiot starts using again, begins to believe that he can be some major kingpin of trafficking meth.
Guest:Goes down to Mexicali, Mexicali,
Guest:And there he hooks up.
Guest:He says, the truth was you walk into any tire shop, any auto shop, any mechanics, and those are kind of notorious for being vectors of drug trafficking, certainly in Mexico, I think here too.
Guest:But you've got... I'm just...
Guest:Anybody you talk to within 10 minutes can put you in touch with 20 pounds of meth.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But that's because the supplies, it was like store.
Guest:There was just too much of the shit.
Guest:They were making too much of it.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And so after a while, he doesn't do very well of it.
Guest:He gets out of it.
Guest:Long story.
Guest:But eventually, after a while, he's out of it.
Guest:And they still keep calling him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because he's a white guy with a car register in his own name, and they're calling him, please come down to Mexicali, we'll fill your car, you can take my... Because the supply, the point I'm making is the supplies were just staggering.
Marc:Yeah, and also it's interesting that in Dreamland, you really were focusing on Appalachia and dead industrial towns.
Marc:like the Rust Belt and all these great industrial cities.
Marc:There's a lot of that in this book, but what happens in this book, especially when you talk about meth, which was really specifically a white person's drug, is that eventually because of availability and because of persistence,
Marc:That it entered the black community, entered the Mexican community.
Guest:It was just, you know, everywhere.
Guest:When the traffickers got into, when the Mexican traffickers got into meth, that's when it began to consume like the Latino here.
Guest:You begin to see this in gangs, Latino gangs a lot, really bad people.
Guest:Gangs certainly don't need to be more psychotic.
Guest:No, they don't, but they became so.
Guest:And I've interviewed many guys who, in the 90s, that really took over in the early 2000s, absolutely, for sure.
Guest:However, I could say that in 35 years as a reporter, a lot of those covering crime and issues related to that, I had never once, not once, seen a black person buy, use, sell, or even know what methamphetamine was.
Guest:I mean, it just was...
Guest:They were all about the drug users in the African-American community were all about cocaine.
Guest:That was their drug of choice.
Guest:And so now all of a sudden comes this staggering supplies and relentless, not just one wave of it, but endless waves.
Guest:And easy to get.
Guest:It's so easy to get.
Guest:And all of a sudden you begin to see the black community start selling it.
Guest:And that's why I wrote the story of Rashad Martin.
Guest:That's a great story.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Who is now doing a lot of years for this, but became kind of the first black meth dealer in the Columbus, Ohio area and very interesting fellow.
Guest:But I wanted to talk to him because I'm like, I've never seen this before.
Guest:What happened?
Guest:Well, I got out of prison, couldn't find work.
Guest:Pretty soon someone holds up a baggie of this.
Guest:I think it's crack at first because it's white powder.
Guest:And they go, no, this is meth.
Guest:I go, I don't know what the fuck meth is.
Guest:He had never really even heard of it.
Marc:And pretty soon it just- I think you could smoke it, couldn't you?
Guest:Oh, yeah, sure.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But he never did drugs.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Nor did he ever.
Guest:He told me- I'm just thinking about the shift from crack.
Guest:Well, what ends up happening with him is he begins to turn all his drug-dealing buddies, because he's been in prison, just got out of prison for being part of this major crack rank, and he begins to turn all those guys on to it, and they begin to make more, as they told him, he said,
Guest:I made more money in a month than I made like a year selling crack by selling methamphetamine.
Guest:And he becomes like Mr. Kingpin.
Marc:But also you go to talk about how they wanted to give back to the community.
Guest:There was that sort of... The benefit to methamphetamine, if you want to call it that, in the black community was that nobody did it at that time.
Guest:And so the money that was coming in...
Guest:wasn't being squandered on like crack, the way crack would.
Guest:You do it on crack.
Guest:And so it was really about buying diapers, buying formula for babies, taking kids to the water park, that kind of thing.
Guest:There was no drug use of meth.
Guest:Yeah.
Right.
Guest:Up to that point.
Guest:Now, I think that's changed.
Marc:So now where are we at?
Marc:The meth is still there, the crazy-making meth, and now the fentanyl is primarily... It's everywhere.
Guest:No, all of these are... Yes, because the trafficking...
Guest:world down to Mexico was making so much, and they could see that the dealers up here were idiots, didn't know how to mix it, didn't know what to do.
Guest:And they began to say, why don't we- And they're killing people.
Guest:They didn't want that, I'm assuming?
Guest:Well, probably.
Guest:I don't think they care so much about killing people.
Guest:They just want the headlines that go with killing people.
Guest:But also, they began to see a value-added play, in a sense.
Guest:If we sell-
Guest:It won't be wasted.
Guest:Kilos of fentanyl, boom.
Guest:That's okay.
Guest:That's something.
Guest:But if we turn those kilos into 200,000 pills apiece or whatever it happens, I can't even remember what the breakdown would be.
Guest:And we could sell those pills, each of them for, you know, that's a big... So that's what begins to happen.
Guest:2017 is when you first begin to see those pills being produced, counterfeit, attempts to make counterfeit
Guest:pharmaceutical pills.
Guest:And they do pretty well.
Guest:And then they keep doing it.
Guest:Now they've, I mean, Xanax, fake Xanax, fake Percocet, fake Tylenol, even fake illegal drugs like ecstasy and stuff like that, because the supplies of fentanyl down there are so huge, they have to look for new products for which to administer them.
Marc:So it's interesting.
Marc:So that's really it.
Marc:It's obviously it's insidious across the board.
Marc:But the reason fentanyl is in everything is because there's so much fentanyl.
Guest:Yes, it's not possible.
Guest:If they had limited fentanyl, it was more expensive.
Guest:They would not be just sprinkling it like salt on food.
Marc:Right, because I couldn't quite figure out, like, why are these people buying blow with fentanyl in it?
Marc:Like, what is to be gained from the dealer in doing that?
Guest:Because you get a fentanyl addict in exchange for an occasional cocaine customer.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Buying from you, like, once, twice a week.
Marc:So it's the same.
Marc:It's the old first time is always free thing.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Something like that.
Guest:And then after you've survived your fentanyl exposure, now you're gradually getting addicted.
Guest:Now it's every day.
Guest:And that's the thing about fentanyl.
Guest:It's a magnificent anesthetic because it takes you in and out of anesthesia very quickly.
Guest:But that's what makes it a torment for you.
Guest:users because you have to be using several times a day fentanyl several times a day because it doesn't last long it doesn't keep the withdrawal sickness at bay for more than a few hours you're never in peace on that's why this is as i said in the book this is all about supply creating demand nobody's even the most hardened heroin addict would never want
Guest:fentanyl instead of heroin.
Guest:Fentanyl, you have to shoot up several times, use in whatever form, several times a day.
Guest:With heroin, you can get away, most people can get away for two, maybe three times a day.
Guest:If they're strung out.
Guest:Yeah, but it's always, you never get that piece away from the withdrawals for very long.
Guest:It's always right there because of the nature of the drugs.
Marc:So that's sort of the guts of of of the problem is that is that that that compulsion is so hungry and so dangerous.
Guest:And it and they understand they began to understand that in Mexico, that this was also the most addicting.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And the most, you know, the withdrawals, as it turns out, are the worst.
Marc:So between that, that compulsion, that need for the fentanyl and then the sort of surrendering to a complete detachment from reality with the meth.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I mean, that that problem and the death, it's like it seems insurmountable.
Guest:You know, I know that at times it has felt that way to me.
Guest:First of all, I think one of the things we need to recognize, and we are reluctant sometimes in this country to talk about the culpability of other countries, but I do believe that there is nothing normal about what's happening right now.
Guest:This is all because Mexico has really done nothing
Guest:to staunch this problem, to pay attention to this problem.
Guest:Yeah, because you're clear in the book that if you take it away, people have to adapt.
Guest:And also, the traffickers have really painted themselves into a corner.
Guest:As much as they're making now and as powerful as they seem, they still now are reliant for these massive profits.
Guest:They are still now reliant on about, I would say, 10 to 15 shipping ports.
Guest:First of all, the ports on the Pacific coast.
Guest:There were several, but there's two principal ones, about two days drive south of Arizona.
Guest:And then also some of the airports.
Guest:So really, they are allowing you, they're saying, if you want to, you could shut this entire thing down very easily.
Guest:You don't have a huge manpower looking for fields of poppies all over northern Mexico, which is just so vast.
Guest:You just have to focus on these areas.
Guest:But because they haven't, you see these bizarre results.
Guest:So in Culiacan, Sinaloa.
Guest:Culiacan is the capital city of the state of Sinaloa, and it's quite an amazing town.
Guest:It's been there many times.
Guest:It's a weird place.
Guest:It's an agricultural hub.
Guest:Sinaloa is really one of the main agricultural producers.
Guest:So tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber, stuff like that.
Guest:Now what you have in Culiacan is you have dozens, maybe hundreds, of chemical brokers in Culiacan.
Guest:It's not an industrial town.
Guest:There's no legitimate reason to have all these chemical brokers dealing with foreign chemical shipments.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They're there because of the meth and the fentanyl.
Guest:And then the fentanyl is also coming in through the airports, various ones.
Guest:But what that means is that it would not be that hard with a sustained, collaborative, binational approach to this.
Guest:It would not be that hard to really drop that supply down.
Guest:And to me, the supply is the story.
Guest:This is what I've come to understand.
Guest:I used to think before I'd really started studying the stuff that, well, this is all about demand.
Guest:Look, the opioid epidemic starts...
Guest:Because pharmaceutical companies and convinced doctors to prescribe these pills like they're going out of style.
Guest:And pretty soon you have an unprecedented amount of opioids nationwide.
Guest:Supply provided by the drug companies and the doctors convinced to do this.
Guest:But the same thing is true now.
Guest:You see, you know, the drug supply has just shifted.
Guest:It's just now out of Culiacan.
Guest:It's out of various times, Nayarit, Michoacan, places like that.
Guest:And you have all this stuff, but it's still a, you know, a supply story.
Guest:And it's supply creating demand.
Guest:And so I would say in one of the major ways that kind of the, you're asking earlier, this aha moment or something, this revelation, is when I began to understand that this was not about demand.
Guest:They're not really about them.
Guest:Now, there's issues connected to our own isolation, connected to our own trauma, connected to our own massive marketing of other legally.
Marc:And the pathways that have been put in place by creating needs of all kinds.
Guest:Precisely.
Guest:And you've got all this stuff that makes us maybe especially vulnerable.
Guest:I think community isolation is really a big one.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that makes us especially vulnerable as a culture.
Guest:But to me, it's really still about the supply.
Guest:And I would say that there's actually, you know, a lot that can be done.
Guest:That's why I focused on the book.
Guest:We've been talking about meth and fentanyl, but most of the book is really about these stories of these people who are doing in smallest, smallest, unnoticed, unsexy ways, trying to...
Guest:help a community stick together or rebound or help one person.
Guest:They're all great stories.
Guest:All of this stuff is to me, that was to me the heart and soul of the book because it got to where I think as a culture and as a country we need to...
Guest:We need to be about finding those ways of moving away from the idea, first of all, that we can all be alone in our houses and on our screens.
Guest:And also, we need to move away from the idea that there is this one big magic bullet answer to all our problems, like with pain pills for all American pain, that kind of stuff.
Guest:That stuff is so damaging.
Guest:And so I wanted to tell stories of people whose – the lesson of their stories is really people are showing up daily.
Guest:They're just doing it.
Guest:They're not waiting to be applauded, nor do they think they're saving the world in some noble, virtuous sense.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:All of this is really kind of part of where –
Marc:i think my best take i guess you might say is where do we go this is where we go and i wanted to tell stories of those people that nobody knew right and they all have you know unique experiences some of them criminal mostly addicted yeah that have that have kind of come through the other side and and focus on different methods of service like in in dreamland you talk about the new drug courts
Marc:You know, you talk about that here too, but you also talk about, you know, community stepping up.
Marc:But I think that the interesting thing is like, because I'm hearing people, I'm hearing comics, you know, just blatantly and shamelessly, you know, make fun of the type of homelessness that's happening now because there is, you know, something zombie-like and weird, but, you know, they don't know what that is.
Marc:Or they could just say it's like drugs or whatever, a mental illness.
Marc:But it bothers me always.
Marc:Yes, me too.
Marc:But talking to you, what I tap into is that no one wants to apply the sensitivity that empathy requires anymore.
Marc:They just sort of like, it ain't me, it's not my problem.
Marc:And then on the other side of that, when you talk about these addicts who have committed, sometimes consciously, to living in an alternative reality because the real one is too difficult, that they're also doubling down and that there is no bottom anymore.
Marc:So the idea of recovery- Well, bottom is death.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:I thought that was a good observation in the book that used to be like, you know, that people in those lives would get to a point where they've had enough because, you know, they remember what real life is.
Marc:But but that doesn't exist anymore.
Guest:And what you find now in a lot of the encampments, as I said, is that people are freezing to death rather than rather than being when they're offered.
Guest:housing warming shelter something they're free or they're getting frostbite because why because they will not leave the dope now they like to present it as well i don't want to leave my friends and the the community that i have and i'm like yeah but these are people who are going to rip you off you know they're going to rip you off yeah and the way you talk about the you know the the prostitution and the pimping and the dependency that happens in fucking tents
Marc:Like, you know, what kind of person is going to get a blowjob in a fucking homeless tent?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But look, figure it out.
Guest:I mean, I think I think this is the this I've been spending a lot of time on Skid Row lately.
Guest:And of course, Skid Row is where all of this starts.
Guest:That's the amazing thing.
Guest:That's an amazing understanding of that.
Guest:Probably would have put in a book had I known better about Skid Row.
Guest:But this this.
Guest:form of homelessness.
Guest:You remember, I don't know, you probably remember in the 80s and 90s, early 2000s, a homeless guy was a shopping cart.
Guest:And a box.
Guest:Yes, right, exactly.
Guest:And then there were these court cases that allowed first...
Guest:The city of Los Angeles ended up fighting, but then settled all these court cases and creating what we have now on the streets, which is first they settled with a lawsuit saying you can't enforce.
Guest:You can have laws on the book governing sitting, lying and sleeping on the street, but you can't enforce them.
Guest:between these hours right and then it was a next suit was a few years later was uh now police can't seize personal property like backpacks and small stuff and then it became and i think this was crucial police can't seize bulky property so chairs and and tables and beds and all this kind of stuff and pretty soon you know this went all the way to the ninth circuit court of appeal and everybody began to but
Marc:But the idea was it was progressive policy around a housing shortage or housing crisis.
Guest:The idea was that housing is the cause of homelessness.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And there may have been a time when that might have been true.
Guest:The problem is those policies are then superseded or surpassed or undermined or whatever by the drugs on the street change.
Guest:And that's the story of this book.
Guest:Basically, it's within the last eight to 10 years that we have seen
Guest:first meth and then fentanyl, just take over the entire country.
Guest:And now you get to a point where people are not willing to leave the encampment.
Guest:They're there because they know that they don't have to.
Guest:They're not going to be moved.
Guest:They're not going to be, you know, and cops are going to like, okay, I can't do anything.
Guest:And so they stay with the dope.
Guest:In my opinion, I have to say, I know there's this feeling like, well, these are their homes.
Guest:This is community.
Guest:My feeling is honestly...
Guest:That every time you talk to a person, a person in the middle of winter, would you like to get housing?
Guest:No, no, no, no.
Guest:I want to stay here.
Guest:That is so clearly the dope talking, that there is no free will here.
Guest:There's no rational choice.
Guest:People are choosing to live in both filth and complete violence and exploitation and
Guest:risk death literally almost every single day.
Guest:Homelessness is extraordinarily complicated, I understand that.
Guest:You could be molested, domestic violence, emancipated from foster care, get out of prison, a rent hike, an eviction, a surgery, all these things can make you homeless.
Guest:And so can drug addiction in a very, very important way.
Guest:But the other thing that happens, though, is even once you're on the street, no matter the reason, it's also very true, I think, that these drugs, and I would say methamphetamine does an especially good job of this, keeps you homeless.
Guest:You know, you're so strung out, you're so lost, you're talking gibberish that there's no chance of you making any sense or making an irrational decision.
Guest:And at the same time, we don't have the police power to say, okay, we're going to take you, put you somewhere else for six months.
Guest:Dry out.
Guest:Yeah, we have like three-day mental illness hold and that's about it.
Marc:And that's all thinking.
Marc:That needs to evolve.
Guest:But the idea that took hold at the same time as these policies and then at the same time as the meth and then the fentanyl were spreading all across the country was that housing is the problem of homelessness and that all people need is a house.
Guest:which I think has shown itself to be absolutely insane.
Guest:Take a person off of the street, this is the idea, put them in a house with services, with a case manager and all that kind of stuff.
Guest:And that person, no matter the state of mind of that person, that person will be better off and fine.
Guest:What ends up happening is, of course, they can't handle it.
Guest:They don't like it.
Guest:They begin to tear the place apart.
Guest:That's where we're finding in LA, I think a lot of landlords will not rent.
Guest:to because they bring the street into the house and they and they frequently just shred the house you know because they're not prepared it's not an idea that you can just go from the street to a perfectly nice house and have the mental wherewithal to and preparedness and to stop the drugs you got to stop the drugs exactly and that's i mean
Marc:I mean, that's the point of the last chapters of the book and also the story.
Marc:I never knew about the backpackers.
Marc:There's that one story about how he was observing how somebody had their stuff that they left the house with and then one suitcase went and then the next suitcase went and then just a backpack.
Marc:But this backpack culture and this bicycle culture.
Guest:Because on the street, nobody's really your friend.
Guest:There is no real.
Guest:I mean, there might be some, but by and large, it's a dog-eat-dog thing.
Guest:The crime that's committed in Skid Row is homeless against homeless.
Guest:And as you say, in that one story in Clerksburg, West Virginia, a small town, meth comes in, no homeless people, and then meth comes in, and boom, it's all over.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, that was the one story of a community coming together that I thought was great.
Marc:And then you go back to the original place of Dreamland.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:That is shifting.
Marc:And in the way you describe it in the book with what's going on there in terms of...
Marc:creating outlets and service and places where people can dry out and get trained for jobs and then recovering people, creating jobs.
Marc:You make it sound like it's big and it's really happening.
Marc:Is it big and really happening?
Guest:Look, no, I don't think it's big, but I think that's the point.
Guest:I think it's small.
Guest:And to me, this is how we work our way out of this, in the very local, small ways, community connections, certain personalities meeting up.
Guest:And from there, you find a scene.
Guest:I was very big into the punk rock scene back in the late 70s, early 80s.
Guest:And what you found is lots and lots of people coming together, same interests, lots of clubs starting up, all that kind of stuff.
Guest:You found these synergies of people coming.
Guest:And I think that is just such a beautiful thing.
Guest:It doesn't mean that it's magically solved or it's going to take tomorrow, next year, we'll be fine.
Marc:I think you characterize that well, is that there are people that keep trying and they fall off and they come back.
Marc:I mean, that's the nature of recovery in a lot of ways.
Guest:And I think it's absolutely that town is very much like a recovering addict.
Guest:It's like not sitting around going, oh, what was us saying?
Guest:No, I'm going to try and I'm going to fall and I'm going to keep going.
Guest:And it's going to take a lot of little people.
Guest:No big factories coming in with 500 jobs.
Guest:Those are all being robot jobs anyway.
Guest:It's like small businesses.
Marc:It's getting state governments and local governments to take the risk, allow it to happen, support it.
Marc:And then when you have radicalized sort of Christian government taking over, you really wonder what a government system that would make abortion illegal.
Marc:Are they just going to start shooting these guys?
Guest:No, I doubt it.
Guest:I think that these are...
Guest:Here's the thing.
Guest:When you get away from the social media headlines and you get down to the street level and the connectivity, connection level in Portsmouth, Ohio, the town we're talking about right now, you began to see how it's all bullshit.
Guest:All that stuff's bullshit.
Guest:No, this is about people just finding each other.
Guest:coming together, having ideas, one guy's idea sparks an idea, and another person, she has an idea, her idea sparks, you know, it's that kind of synergy that begins to happen.
Marc:And also finding people spiritual, like a lot of it is sort of reliant on spiritual community, you know, and church community and that kind of missionary outreach.
Guest:And that's why I called, it's weird because I'm not a Christian, but that's why I called it the least of us.
Guest:You know, I began to read the Bible.
Guest:I had read the Bible, but
Guest:I began to read again the Bible, the Gospels in particular, and I came upon the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus, understanding the profound truths, this guy, says, that what you do for the least of these, my brethren, you do for me.
Guest:He understands that without each other, we are lost.
Guest:Without that community thing, we have needed that to survive as a species since the caveman days.
Guest:And he understands that.
Guest:And so I began to...
Guest:play around with those ideas the least, this idea that we're only as strong as the most vulnerable in our communities.
Guest:We all of us have the brain chemistry to be that addict eating.
Guest:We all have the least of us within us.
Guest:And so to me, that became the way of conceiving of the book.
Guest:Again, the book talks a lot about fentanyl and methamphetamine, but to my mind, the real heart of it is these ideas of Americans
Guest:We've been away from this idea for so long of coming together, finding community, because, you know, it's tough.
Guest:It's sloppy.
Guest:It's messy.
Guest:You don't like other people.
Guest:You've got to pay more on taxes, maybe.
Guest:Tolerance.
Guest:I'm sorry?
Guest:You have to have tolerance.
Guest:Indeed.
Guest:And you have to be willing to just kind of work through the hard things.
Guest:The bullshit with some people, let's face it, but that's there.
Guest:But I mean, in the long run, I think that's where you find the defense.
Guest:That's where you find the bulwarks.
Guest:That's where you find the communities moving forward.
Guest:And I went back to Portsmouth.
Guest:Because at the end of Dreamland, I glimpsed some faintest little glimmer of recovery.
Guest:And I wrote 30 pages on it in the last book, in the Dreamland book.
Guest:And this time I go, okay, I want to see this in action.
Guest:So I begin calling people there.
Guest:And they say, well, you know what we're doing?
Guest:They were telling me a lot of things.
Guest:It was very interesting to listen to.
Guest:But then they said, you know, one of the things we're doing is we're setting up, it was right around Christmas, we're setting up a temporary ice skating rink that people can then come together and skate.
Guest:And the truth is, this is an area that probably at one time knew how to skate.
Guest:But the decline of the city, the decline of economics, the city used to spray water on this park and freeze in the winter and everyone would skate.
Guest:But now nobody knows how to skate anymore because that was the city government when they actually had jobs and lots of people.
Guest:So you're seeing all these people kind of flop around.
Guest:But it's beautiful.
Guest:Everyone's loving it.
Guest:The kids are loving it.
Guest:They made a rink.
Guest:Yes, they put together an entire rink in a vacant lot.
Guest:And I went there and I was like, this is what I'm fucking talking about, man.
Guest:This small stuff.
Guest:Is it saving the world?
Guest:Of course not.
Guest:Of course not.
Guest:That's the point, though.
Guest:It's this small thing where you're showing people, hey, man, this is how you move forward on this stuff.
Guest:And don't expect a miracle.
Guest:Don't expect that you're saving the world.
Guest:Don't expect that you will have sublime human connections of the kind that you cannot find on Twitter.
Guest:Right on.
Guest:Well, great book.
Guest:Thank you, Mark.
Guest:Really, once again, I appreciate your interest in my work, man.
Guest:It's so nice of you.
Guest:Nice to see you.
Guest:You too.
Marc:Okay, take it in.
Marc:It's heavy, but it's real.
Marc:The Least of Us is available wherever you get books and you can get it in paperback starting November 1st.
Marc:And you can go listen to that earlier episode with Sam.
Marc:If you have never heard it before, it's amazing.
Marc:It's available to all listeners in the free feed right now.
Marc:Episode 757.
Marc:And if you could, just hang out for a second.
Marc:OK, if you haven't subscribed to WTF Plus yet, we've been doing exclusive bonus content every week for the full Marin subscribers.
Marc:We've done episode reviews.
Marc:I talked with my dad.
Marc:We've played deleted material from recent episodes.
Marc:I answered listener questions.
Marc:And last week we went through my entire filmography.
Marc:You can check all of that out right now and check out the new stuff we put out every week by using the link in the episode description.
Marc:Just go to episode description on whatever app you're using and click on the link to WTF Plus.
Marc:You can also get that link at WTFPod.com.
Marc:We're doing the extra stuff for you, people.
Marc:Look, I'm at Largo in L.A., here in L.A.
Marc:this Wednesday, August 10th.
Marc:I'm in Lincoln, Nebraska at the Rococo Theater on August 18th.
Marc:Des Moines, Iowa at the Hoyt Sherman Place on August 19th.
Marc:And Iowa City, Iowa at the Englert Theater on August 20th.
Marc:I'm in Tucson, Arizona at the Rialto Theater on September 16th.
Marc:Phoenix, Arizona at Stand Up Live on September 16th.
Marc:Boulder, Colorado at the Boulder Theater on September 22nd.
Marc:Fort Collins, Colorado at the Lincoln Center on September 23rd.
Marc:And Toronto, Ontario, Canada at the Queen Elizabeth Theater on September 30th and October 1st.
Marc:London and Dublin, I'll be coming to you in October.
Marc:Go to wtfpod.com slash tour for all dates and ticket info.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Let's take it out.
Okay.
Guest:.
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Thank you.
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guitar solo
Thank you.
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Thank you.
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Monkey.
Marc:Lafonda.
Marc:Cationals everywhere.
Marc:Stay away from that fentanyl.
Marc:Stay away from that meth.
Marc:Stay sane.
Marc:Use whatever options you have at your disposal to maintain your sanity without hurting yourself or others.
you