True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 240: The Fenty Fainties
Aired: 2022-07-20
Duration: 01:19:45


=== Oatly Parody (02:41) ===

[00:00:00]  Liz, what's that you're drinking?
[00:00:02]  Don't, Eva.
[00:00:03]  I'm drinking water.
[00:00:05]  This is water.
[00:00:06]  I would say that was true, except for the yellow and white, off-milky quality to it.
[00:00:13]  The fact that it's a giant container that says oats.
[00:00:16]  You're lying because I also am drinking kombucha.
[00:00:20]  You have some sort of, I don't know what that is, carbonated tonic.
[00:00:24]  It's a beer.
[00:00:25]  No, it's not.
[00:00:26]  What is it?
[00:00:27]  Is it patche?
[00:00:28]  This is like, yeah, some kind of hipster soda.
[00:00:30]  It's not.
[00:00:31]  I'm trying to do it.
[00:00:32]  Startup soda.
[00:00:32]  Valentine's startup soda.
[00:00:35]  No, no, no, Senorita.
[00:00:37]  It's Mexican.
[00:00:39]  Okay.
[00:00:40]  Well, the reason that Brace said that was because I was doing this thing when we were in the Vodega where I was playing a game with myself.
[00:00:49]  And I told Brace, I said, Brace, I'm going to play a game with myself and see if I can say Oatly the same way every time.
[00:00:54]  And I think I do.
[00:00:55]  It goes like this.
[00:00:56]  Oatly Oatly Oatly This is crazy because this is a game that no one wins.
[00:01:06]  This is how I entertain myself.
[00:01:07]  It's you do this.
[00:01:08]  Is this a mistake?
[00:01:09]  This was literally one time I was with my friend and I was just reading shit I saw on the street.
[00:01:15]  Oh, yeah.
[00:01:15]  And then I just said, well, you know, I like talking.
[00:01:18]  Yeah, that's true.
[00:01:19]  So, makes sense to me.
[00:01:20]  Oatly.
[00:01:22]  Oatly.
[00:01:22]  She is neurodivergent.
[00:01:23]  Oh, I think I fucked up there.
[00:01:24]  Yeah.
[00:01:25]  Wait.
[00:01:51]  So Liz, my advice for you is if you do want to say at the same time, I think there's a factor that's kind of weighing down your top lip and that is the giant oat milk mustard.
[00:02:00]  Oatly.
[00:02:01]  That's crazy that you just drink this shit.
[00:02:03]  I don't drink it.
[00:02:03]  What are you doing about it?
[00:02:04]  Yeah, you do.
[00:02:05]  You drink it like a newborn baby.
[00:02:06]  Oatly.
[00:02:07]  No, I don't.
[00:02:08]  Yeah, you do.
[00:02:09]  Totally.
[00:02:09]  That's not true.
[00:02:10]  You have those bra inserts that women put in.
[00:02:12]  Oh, my God.
[00:02:13]  You poke a hole through them, and then you put a paper straw there, and then you fill that with, you put your finger on the top of it and fill it with oat milk.
[00:02:20]  Is there some sort of like pervert sky mall where you could buy something like that?
[00:02:24]  100% there is.
[00:02:25]  No, remember that fucking Prostasia Foundation guy that we found?
[00:02:28]  Oh, yeah.
[00:02:28]  With all his fucked up.
[00:02:29]  You had that funny shaped head.
[00:02:32]  Yeah, I guess he looked like Dark Eno.
[00:02:35]  Yeah, totally.
[00:02:36]  Or like Eno, but as one of those.
[00:02:38]  Do you know the like squiggly balloon guys that they put outside of?

=== Added Shows Confirmed (06:17) ===

[00:02:41]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:02:42]  Motherfuckers?
[00:02:43]  Yeah.
[00:02:43]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:02:43]  The Bendy guys outside of the car dealerships.
[00:02:46]  He was like that.
[00:02:47]  If they made a Brian Eno pedophile version of that.
[00:02:50]  It's crazy because Brian Eno, the way Brian Eno work looks, that works for Brian Eno.
[00:02:54]  But if you look like Brian Eno, you are the ugliest human being on the planet.
[00:02:58]  Like, it's crazy.
[00:02:59]  It's cool to like copyright a look.
[00:03:01]  Yeah.
[00:03:02]  I mean, he did essentially by being like, if you resemble me, you will be reviled by society.
[00:03:08]  Hello, everyone.
[00:03:09]  Hi.
[00:03:09]  I'm Liz.
[00:03:10]  My name is Brian Eno, writer of the song, Another, the parody song, Another Dick in My Balls.
[00:03:20]  A parody of Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall.
[00:03:23]  And we are, of course, joined by the producer of that track.
[00:03:27]  And of its sister track made by Liz, Another Pig in the Stall.
[00:03:32]  That's my idea.
[00:03:32]  I said, Another Pig in the Stall, and that you could see that in like a Fixar movie about pigs.
[00:03:38]  Fix our movie about pigs.
[00:03:40]  Interesting.
[00:03:41]  Hello, everyone.
[00:03:42]  This is Tronan.
[00:03:43]  Hi.
[00:03:44]  We're talking.
[00:03:45]  No, we're not talking anything yet because.
[00:03:48]  Oh, fuck.
[00:03:48]  No, you know what?
[00:03:49]  We're talking about the new podcast saying housekeeping.
[00:03:51]  We're talking about some housekeeping.
[00:03:53]  I don't know what the ding, ding, ding.
[00:03:54]  Oh, yeah, that's the housekeeper going.
[00:03:56]  Let me in, let me in.
[00:03:57]  Ding, ding, ding.
[00:03:58]  No, every time I'm in there, every time I'm in there, me and my homies in the hotel room doing shit with each other, fucking housekeeping always just comes in and surprises me.
[00:04:08]  You got to put the thing on the door outside that says, nope, don't come in.
[00:04:11]  No, I don't do that, first of all, because I think that's rude to housekeepers.
[00:04:14]  I get the least popular friend that I have, male friend that I have.
[00:04:17]  Oh, yeah, I make him stand there holding one hand with, like, holding his hands kind of clasped in front of him, wearing sunglasses.
[00:04:25]  Yeah, totally.
[00:04:25]  And he'll ask the housekeeper for ID.
[00:04:28]  And if she actually can furnish hotel ID, he's like, you can go in and clean, but don't mind the mess.
[00:04:34]  That's what I do.
[00:04:35]  Okay, let's talk about what we need to talk about, which is that we mentioned last show.
[00:04:40]  We're going on tour.
[00:04:42]  So I have bad news for all of our listeners in Chicago.
[00:04:47]  It's sold out.
[00:04:48]  It's sold out.
[00:04:49]  It does appear that you could purchase $230.
[00:04:53]  Please don't do that.
[00:04:54]  I don't know what that is.
[00:04:55]  Balcony seats?
[00:04:56]  Yeah, we need to talk to the venue and get out of here.
[00:04:57]  I'll be honest with that shit.
[00:04:58]  We are going to try to get them to not be able to sell those.
[00:05:01]  If you do buy those, I'm not joking.
[00:05:04]  I'm going to think you're there to assassinate us, and I'm going to take your fucking ass.
[00:05:08]  Yeah, no booth immediately.
[00:05:10]  No one can booth it up.
[00:05:11]  Exactly.
[00:05:12]  John Wilkes.
[00:05:13]  That's what I'm saying.
[00:05:14]  Exactly.
[00:05:14]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:05:15]  And also the strict Truanon no-seating at shows rule will be no doubt broken by the people in there.
[00:05:20]  Sure.
[00:05:21]  And so we're going to make you just stand in the back.
[00:05:24]  Anyway, that sold out.
[00:05:26]  Yeah, that sold out.
[00:05:28]  A couple other shows sold out, but we have some news, which is that we added shows to appease some of our.
[00:05:37]  This is how we're doing this?
[00:05:39]  I don't know.
[00:05:39]  I don't want to spend 20 minutes of you reading the fucking cities, giving an update.
[00:05:44]  We don't need to do that.
[00:05:45]  The only thing we need to say is we've announced two new shows.
[00:05:48]  We're going to do a third night in New York City at our old stomping grounds, the Bell House.
[00:05:53]  The Bell House.
[00:05:54]  Out in Gowanus.
[00:05:56]  Uh-huh.
[00:05:56]  Beautiful Gowanus.
[00:05:58]  Um, and that day is first of all, believe it in front of you.
[00:06:03]  Yeah, I know, but I also, I think we did announce that last show, anyways.
[00:06:06]  That that show is all the both the other New York shows are sold out.
[00:06:10]  So, if you want to go see Truanon in New York's fucking city, uh, to quote John Lennon, you can come to Gowanus at the Bellhouse on the hold on 8th of November.
[00:06:23]  Oh, my God.
[00:06:24]  It's really small time.
[00:06:25]  It's so weird.
[00:06:26]  Every time we are, we are playing at the Bellhouse with live music by Young Chomsky, who's going to be playing an original song called Now You've Already Just Made It Weird.
[00:06:35]  Just say, We're playing at the Bellhouse November 8th.
[00:06:37]  Be there, Be Square.
[00:06:39]  Yeah.
[00:06:39]  Done.
[00:06:39]  Okay.
[00:06:40]  Next new show.
[00:06:41]  We're doing a second show at Los Angeles because the first show is sold out.
[00:06:46]  Yeah, so the normal way to do this.
[00:06:48]  Yeah, it's nice.
[00:06:49]  The second show is on 1-1/slash 1-6.
[00:06:56]  Slash 2-0-2-2.
[00:06:59]  So that is November 16th, 2022.
[00:07:02]  We are playing at the Terrogram.
[00:07:04]  And I'm going to terrorize your family if you don't buy a fucking ticket to our second show there.
[00:07:11]  Believe me, we're going to have special guests there.
[00:07:13]  We are going to have Chris Delia.
[00:07:18]  I'm trying to think of other guys like that.
[00:07:19]  Hank Azaria.
[00:07:21]  What?
[00:07:22]  Isn't that a person?
[00:07:22]  Is the fucking Indian dude?
[00:07:25]  No, he played the Indie Guy, but wasn't Indian, which was a thing.
[00:07:29]  Problematic.
[00:07:29]  That was problematic.
[00:07:30]  Gotcha.
[00:07:30]  But much later on.
[00:07:32]  Oh, I'm thinking of Aziz Anasari.
[00:07:34]  Aziz Anasari is going to be there sitting at the fucking door.
[00:07:37]  Any woman comes in, he's putting his whole fucking fist in your mouth.
[00:07:42]  It's crazy.
[00:07:43]  No red wine.
[00:07:44]  No red wine.
[00:07:44]  No, no red wine at that motherfucker.
[00:07:47]  And any journalist from, what was that?
[00:07:49]  Bitch magazine?
[00:07:50]  Oh, yeah.
[00:07:51]  They get front row.
[00:07:52]  Front row.
[00:07:53]  You're in for free if you write for bitch.
[00:07:55]  Because I know if you write for a magazine called Bitch, you're doing a story on your mom.
[00:08:02]  Wow.
[00:08:03]  Okay.
[00:08:03]  Well, you know that she's dead.
[00:08:06]  Seattle, we are still have tickets available.
[00:08:10]  Portland is the first show is sold out.
[00:08:13]  But guess what, Liz?
[00:08:14]  Oh my God, what?
[00:08:16]  Just like the original Mississippi will rise again in a reconstituted Confederate States of America.
[00:08:23]  We have a second show at Mississippi Studios.
[00:08:26]  Yeah.
[00:08:27]  M-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I.
[00:08:30]  You know, I gotta be honest, I feel like we announced this last week, too.
[00:08:33]  Anyways, that's on the 22nd of November.
[00:08:36]  I don't know.
[00:08:38]  San Francisco is almost sold out.
[00:08:41]  It's getting to be there.
[00:08:42]  And I gotta be honest with you, by the time this podcast comes out, it might be sold out.
[00:08:46]  So best of luck.
[00:08:48]  And if you're one of the thousands of people we send this to early, secretly, then you can get a ticket.
[00:08:56]  But if you're one of the many people who's just on the regular list.

=== San Francisco Sold Out? (03:57) ===

[00:08:59]  Oh, no.
[00:09:00]  Then, first of all, I'm sorry, but you will be killed at some point.
[00:09:05]  All right, I'm sick of doing this.
[00:09:07]  We're not good at it.
[00:09:08]  I love you.
[00:09:10]  Let's get on with the actual episode.
[00:09:12]  You're not going to say it back?
[00:09:15]  So, Liz, today we were talking about.
[00:09:19]  Today, we're talking about.
[00:09:20]  You keep doing this bit.
[00:09:21]  It's not going to work.
[00:09:22]  Can you describe it to them while I do it?
[00:09:24]  So it's kind of like a oh, I can see a little twitch in the left leg, like right leg, my other left.
[00:09:30]  Now it's his left.
[00:09:31]  Oh, nodding off, falling down, but putting, trying to smoke.
[00:09:38]  Oh, no, ow, ow, ow.
[00:09:41]  What was that part?
[00:09:42]  That's so when you're when you're catching, when you're nodding off, you are smoking a cigarette, and then you take it drops and you're drop and you burn your shit.
[00:09:51]  Yeah, plastic.
[00:09:52]  Another one, I'm going to show you the special one.
[00:09:54]  A lot, you actually see these guys around the street a lot.
[00:09:57]  Oh, no, don't drop the mic.
[00:09:59]  Oh, yeah, that's the heroin lean, the lean over, bend over.
[00:10:03]  That's the heroin yogi pose.
[00:10:05]  It's crazy because you see a lot of, I'll tell you, when I was in the tenderloin, I saw a lot of fucking who's that little man who lived in Notre Dame, but like what was his name?
[00:10:13]  Quasimodo looking at fucking guys.
[00:10:16]  And you're like, damn, what is what the fuck are these dudes?
[00:10:19]  What happened with Quasimodo?
[00:10:21]  Fentanyl.
[00:10:23]  Did he get to fuck that chick?
[00:10:26]  That'd be crazy.
[00:10:27]  Does he fuck her at the end?
[00:10:29]  That's crazy if Quasimoto gets to hit.
[00:10:32]  I got to tell you.
[00:10:34]  Being in Brooklyn, I see a lot of Quasimoto's getting to hit out here, too.
[00:10:38]  Let me tell you.
[00:10:39]  All right, all right, all right.
[00:10:40]  Let's get to it.
[00:10:53]  Oh, what?
[00:10:55]  What?
[00:10:56]  Hey, man.
[00:10:59]  Hey, we have with us today.
[00:11:01]  Zachary's.
[00:11:02]  Okay, that's not going to work.
[00:11:03]  It's not going to work.
[00:11:04]  No.
[00:11:04]  Nodding at it, it's such a physical thing.
[00:11:06]  It's like, which I will say to the listener, I will give testimony right now, be witness.
[00:11:13]  Great physical work you're doing.
[00:11:14]  I'm doing really good physical work.
[00:11:15]  Yeah.
[00:11:16]  But yeah, the audio stuff isn't working out.
[00:11:18]  It's not working out.
[00:11:18]  Well, let's cut to our third host.
[00:11:23]  This is Dr. Fentanyl speaking.
[00:11:26]  Now, a lot of you out there might hear the F word, and you might be like, Whoa, buddy, we don't say that in polite company.
[00:11:34]  Fentanyl?
[00:11:35]  Isn't that stuff just for drug addicts or people who have cancer?
[00:11:39]  I'm here to tell you, not so.
[00:11:42]  Fentanyl is for everybody.
[00:11:44]  It's sort of like zinc or vitamin C, like a condom, or really, for some of us, it's like air.
[00:11:52]  And so we've brought on our show today, Dr. Fentanyl's Medicine Magic Hour.
[00:11:58]  Zachary Siegel, a freelance journalist who covers so-called drug policy and so-called public health.
[00:12:06]  Now, we've brought Mr. Siegel here on to have a little crossfire type debate.
[00:12:15]  My thing is, is fentanyl is actually, it comes from the earth, which is true because technically all chemicals are natural.
[00:12:23]  Oh my God.
[00:12:24]  He's arguing that maybe it doesn't.
[00:12:28]  So we've given him 500 milligrams of fentanyl in a hot shot.
[00:12:34]  Oh, God.
[00:12:34]  He is currently nodding off.
[00:12:36]  We are hitting him with some naloxone right now.
[00:12:38]  Zachary Siegel, welcome to Truanon.
[00:12:41]  How are you doing?
[00:12:42]  I'm overdosing, Brace.
[00:12:44]  You're overdosing on Truanon.
[00:12:46]  I am.
[00:12:47]  Please.
[00:12:48]  Brace was my father's name.
[00:12:49]  Please call me Dr. Fentanyl.
[00:12:53]  Zachary, thank you so much for coming on.

=== Police Officers and Viral Videos (16:06) ===

[00:12:56]  You had a piece this, I think it was this past weekend, wasn't it?
[00:13:01]  In the New York Times magazine, which is like the Cool Kids New York Times.
[00:13:07]  I'd say it's the magazine version of the New York Times newspaper.
[00:13:09]  Yeah.
[00:13:09]  Well, it's called What's Really Going On in Those Police Fentanyl Exposure Videos, question mark.
[00:13:18]  I always love a headline with question mark.
[00:13:20]  And you go into kind of a little investigation and a little rumination on this phenomenon, this viral phenomenon of police officers, either body camera video or, I don't know, cell phone video.
[00:13:34]  The cell phone video, there's fucking overhead camera video.
[00:13:37]  Basically, any kind of camera that you get, a cop is surely overdosing on fentanyl that he touched.
[00:13:44]  Yeah, it shows cops just sort of like grazing fentanyl, like either they like on a body, they'll find it, or there's one that you and I, Brace, we watched today, of a cop like sorting evidence drugs or whatever in an evidence law.
[00:13:59]  It's a big job on the forest, by the way.
[00:14:02]  And just poof, immediately like starts fainting or I don't know, going into cardiac arrest.
[00:14:08]  And so your piece kind of investigates a little bit trying to make sense of this kind of viral phenomenon, which I think for the most part, no one can really make sense of.
[00:14:21]  It's viral in all kinds of different senses and meanings of that word.
[00:14:27]  And that, first off, these videos always go viral in that they rack up millions of views.
[00:14:34]  And almost always it's the police body cam footage being sent to local news organizations that then verbatim, dutifully, credulously repeat exactly what the police tell them is happening, which is that our brave police officer during a drug bust or raid or what have you came into contact with this substance.
[00:15:03]  And they always call it an exposure, that our officer was exposed.
[00:15:08]  And then in passive language, a officer involved exposure incident.
[00:15:15]  Yes.
[00:15:15]  Yes.
[00:15:15]  Yes, yes.
[00:15:16]  Totally.
[00:15:18]  And so viral in the other sense is that like there is a contagion, like a sort of, I would say, like impenetrable bubble of information that police officers imbibe and that kind of shapes their world and their worldview and their place in it.
[00:15:40]  And they are told from the federal government to the local precinct level that basically microscopic fentanyl particles are dangerous.
[00:15:55]  These things are in the air.
[00:15:57]  These things could get on your uniform.
[00:16:00]  You could accidentally touch it and rapidly overdose.
[00:16:05]  And like that is really the kind of what's happening on its face is that, and in the video I wrote about for the, for my piece in the Times, the officer was wearing disposable gloves.
[00:16:18]  Yes.
[00:16:20]  And still five minutes later is splayed out on the ground overdosing.
[00:16:28]  So looking at all this, it's and so like right off the bat, I'll just say like I have my own history of drug use and addiction.
[00:16:35]  Like I've used opioids.
[00:16:38]  I've used pharmaceutical grade fentanyl.
[00:16:41]  And all the way back in 2016, 2017, when I first started seeing this on its face, I'm like, this is fake.
[00:16:49]  This isn't happening.
[00:16:52]  I was like, no, you are not overdosing.
[00:16:56]  Yeah.
[00:16:56]  Anyone who's ever used drugs knows that this just isn't how it works.
[00:17:01]  Why would we go through all the trouble of spreading this on tinfoil and injecting it and snorting it if I could just rub some on it, rub some on myself and get this surging rush of an opioid high?
[00:17:15]  Like none of it makes sense.
[00:17:17]  So that's fascinating to me as like a writer of this topic.
[00:17:22]  Yeah, totally.
[00:17:23]  And I think like another angle of it not being, I mean, first beyond the just physical limitations of that even working, not being able to get in your bloodstream just via skin contact in that way, is that the cops are in these videos are almost always, at least in the ones that I've seen, which are definitely more than I would like to see.
[00:17:46]  Almost always like hyperventilating or going into kind of like they're, they're like kind of speeding up their breathing, what clearly looks like a panic attack, a kind of like um, you know, like a panic attack, especially that that San Diego sheriff's video yeah, totally.
[00:18:01]  Um, which is the exact opposite of what any kind of reaction to um, an opioid, let alone fentanyl, would be.
[00:18:11]  For anyone who knows and you write about in your piece, about how you know, when people do overdose on fentanyl which happens uh, extremely often in this country, which we'll talk about they slowly just stop breathing.
[00:18:25]  It is what's known as a central nervous system depressant, not exactly, and I gotta tell you when I first started getting high, I was cleaning my house like a little busybody doing everybody's dishes that I, my heart rate was not racing during that, like it.
[00:18:41]  It an overdose.
[00:18:42]  Anybody who's seen an overdose which is not a pretty sight to to view and i've, you know, i've experienced it myself, although mine was also in combination with other drugs um, it is.
[00:18:55]  Yeah, that's just not.
[00:18:56]  You don't like pass out after like two seconds after touching something and then just like go into con not convulsions you start going, oh no, I don't feel good.
[00:19:06]  So I mean you know you you you, you broach a lot of stuff there and there's a there's kind of a lot to, as they say, unpack here.
[00:19:14]  And I think number one we need to make unequivocally clear, which I do think that most sort of like hip and I don't mean hip like Vice 2008 or whatever, I mean like hip like people who understand even just basic reality of how drugs work unequivocally, you cannot ingest fentanyl or really, as far as I understand, any powdered drug through just touching it.
[00:19:38]  It's not like the scene in Slc Punk where, like it gets wet and the lsd gets wet in the guy's, you know, pocket and dress him insane.
[00:19:46]  You cannot.
[00:19:46]  That doesn't.
[00:19:47]  It is scientifically impossible for that to happen.
[00:19:53]  And I think one thing that like we do talk about, why the fuck do any cops think this in the first place?
[00:20:00]  Yeah, like I had mentioned.
[00:20:02]  So I have been watching this phenomenon unfold in the news for years now.
[00:20:10]  And I was actually part of a research paper that came out in like a drug policy journal where they applied all this very fancy kind of analytical, I guess, content analysis type of research methods.
[00:20:26]  Yes.
[00:20:26]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:27]  And so we basically, using this method, traced it back to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
[00:20:36]  And they do these things called roll call videos, where they kind of like, if you ever see one of these, they're kind of like, there's some production quality, like there's editing, like there's the DEA logo, there's, there's, I guess, like PowerPoint level transitions between cuts.
[00:20:55]  And so they did one of these and it featured, I believe, two cops, maybe detectives from New Jersey.
[00:21:05]  And they are telling the camera, you know, straight on interview talking head style about the time that they almost overdosed after like some, again, minor, like low-level drug bust.
[00:21:23]  And so this type of video was then paired with authorities, like drug enforcement administration officials, who then kind of give are giving the message out to the thousands of law enforcement agencies in America saying that microscopic amounts of fentanyl are lethal, that even touching it can be lethal.
[00:21:50]  And so it's like this builds up the, I guess, kind of priming aspect where like police are trained to fear for their lives and they kind of occupy this untenable contradiction where they are serving the community, they are protecting the community, and simultaneously, this community wants to kill them.
[00:22:17]  And the people that they are serving and protecting are dangerous.
[00:22:21]  And so this kind of slides right into that, I think, irreconcilable worldview that gets instilled through training, through these videos, through all the basically just the milieu that they occupy.
[00:22:40]  I think at one point in your piece, you referred to it.
[00:22:43]  And maybe you're quoting another psychologist, but you kind of refer to it as like a mass psychogenic illness.
[00:22:50]  Because it's one thing to kind of have the DEA putting this kind of propaganda out there.
[00:22:55]  Okay, fine, right?
[00:22:56]  But I don't think it's enough to then say, it's not like every one of these videos, the cops are just like acting, right?
[00:23:03]  Like there is something going on where they really are like having these panic attack reactions.
[00:23:11]  And I think there's a lot of, you know, dynamics going on here.
[00:23:14]  There is the, of course, they're kind of primed and ready, like you're saying, right?
[00:23:17]  From this sort of like top-down authority, like that sort of, that gives the framework, right?
[00:23:24]  And then you're saying they're going out in these neighborhoods, they occupy this untenable place.
[00:23:27]  I mean, fentanyl, and again, we're going to get into this, is this kind of silent sleeping villain within millions of neighborhoods in the United States and is like a, is an enemy that is very difficult to fight for a whole number of reasons, but particularly if you're a cop, right?
[00:23:49]  So there's that kind of fear.
[00:23:51]  And then on top of that, and I think this is something that we kind of talked about with the TikTok episode, which is like something that we're just sort of like very fascinated by, is this kind of mimetic quality to all this stuff, right?
[00:24:03]  Like I was thinking about this, Brace and I were talking about it before we kind of hopped on to talk to you.
[00:24:08]  It's like there's this interesting phenomenon with cops and the proliferation of body cams, I think, where like you inject the body cam, which cops are obviously acutely aware of all the time and will make its way to YouTube no matter what, or cell phone videos or whatever, right?
[00:24:29]  And your behavior changes when you realize you're in front of a camera in a way that is like very complicated to work through.
[00:24:37]  And then you want to add on top of it this kind of, I don't know, like Havana syndrome effect of like everyone kind of catching this invisible thing, plus the social aspects of it, plus the kind of, you know, cops, like you said, cops feeling like they're under attack or that they're in this untenable position.
[00:24:58]  And it's kind of created this like fascinating, perfect, I don't know if we're still in postmodern or what, but like some kind of, I don't, I don't know, it's this like new, I don't even know what to, how to describe it.
[00:25:10]  It's like, it's like, it's, to me, it's like the police, I mean, it does change the way they act.
[00:25:15]  And I think a lot of people, there's a very liberal sense that like, oh, they won't beat people up or they won't whatever if they wear body cam.
[00:25:21]  No, they'll just be like, are you threatening me?
[00:25:23]  Or like, what are you reaching for?
[00:25:26]  Or something like that.
[00:25:27]  But it's, but that itself is acting, right?
[00:25:30]  That's like, yeah, if you're in front of a camera, you're in an action force.
[00:25:32]  Whether they think of it that way or not, I don't think they necessarily do.
[00:25:35]  Cops are not necessarily known as being the most artistic people in the world.
[00:25:39]  But like, yeah, I mean, it seems like it's like this, it's a Havana syndrome type quality where like they might be functionally in their heads overdosing.
[00:25:49]  Well, it's not functionally overdosing because they're not actually, it's not actually the symptoms of overdosing, but it's like in their heads they are overdosing.
[00:25:55]  But it's also in a way that I don't even know if they necessarily understand.
[00:25:58]  They're playing this out for the cameras and thus for the audience at home who they also they hate who hates them, but they claim to love and protect, but don't feel any sympathy from.
[00:26:09]  It's a very like Freudian, I think.
[00:26:11]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:12]  So, so much to say there.
[00:26:14]  And like, I personally have been Freud-pilled over the last several months thinking about this particular issue and just like psychoanalysis and drug use in general.
[00:26:28]  And like, I'll try not to be jargony and like dog.
[00:26:33]  Oh, we love jargon here.
[00:26:34]  Dogmatic Freudian about it, but like, this is such a concrete example of like basically this word has a lot of negative connotations now, but we're going to use it hysteria, hysterics, people breaking out into a hysterical state.
[00:26:52]  And I read and really admire Patrick Blanchfield, who does like amazing psychoanalytic work of contemporary law enforcement.
[00:27:05]  And so like there's something about this that he pointed out.
[00:27:10]  And body camera footage plays such a critical role in this.
[00:27:14]  In that, let's go back to 2020, like the most insane year.
[00:27:19]  We all literally lost our minds.
[00:27:23]  COVID lockdown, sheltering in place, we're so afraid.
[00:27:27]  And then George Floyd dies.
[00:27:29]  And the last words on camera are, I can't breathe.
[00:27:35]  And that slogan became the rallying cry for all of these protests around the country.
[00:27:45]  And then here we are a few years after that.
[00:27:49]  And now it's the cops who can't breathe.
[00:27:52]  And it's such like a chilling parallel and such a chilling observation that this is something like that Patrick Blanchfield goes into and what he says about this stuff is that like the symptoms expressed by these in these hysterical states they are symbolically relevant.
[00:28:15]  They have political meaning, cultural meaning.
[00:28:20]  And it's like there's something that these symptoms, and the number one being, like we said, hyperventilation and seizing up and choking up and gasping for air.
[00:28:33]  And it's like that symptom, like I, how could that be a coincidence?
[00:28:39]  Right.
[00:28:40]  This is the symptom that they're all feeling.
[00:28:43]  And it's the same rallying cry that is used by protesters against police brutality to indict their profession.
[00:28:55]  Like, how, like, there's just, there's no way that I think that this is coincidental, that that's the symptom they feel.

=== Police Suicides And PTSD Rates (06:40) ===

[00:29:03]  I mean, it's, you know, it's funny is when you said that, I was like, fuck, we're going to have to be like, correct him and be like, that actually wasn't like, I don't, because I didn't remember that being George Floyd.
[00:29:11]  But that was Eric Garner.
[00:29:13]  No, that was not only George Floyd, but that, yeah, it was and several other people too.
[00:29:17]  And I remember the Eric Garner thing because there was a, you know, those famous pictures of those cops sort of standing around wearing sweatshirts that said, I can breathe in Comic Sands.
[00:29:27]  Well, it's like, looks like you can't anymore, brother.
[00:29:30]  You know, you got defeated by a little bit of white powder, which, by the way, that's not even that much fentanyl that these guys are talking about, even if it was ingested through the skin.
[00:29:39]  But like, it is, it is really astounding.
[00:29:42]  It's like that, it gets flipped.
[00:29:43]  And it's like the whole thing becomes like they can't breathe.
[00:29:46]  Like they, like, the police like are sort of suffocating from this, like, you know, this noose of fentanyl tied around their neck and trying to protect these communities, which, you know, that's, I mean, ostensibly trying to protect a lot of these communities.
[00:29:58]  The funny thing too about Floyd, actually, is that like, there's been a big, I mean, it's, it's really died down now a lot, along with basically everything associated with that.
[00:30:07]  But like, I don't know if you, if you remember, but there was a big sort of push to be like, well, actually, he, he just coincidentally died of a fentanyl overdose at the same exact time.
[00:30:17]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:30:18]  Which is like, what the, I mean, yeah, he was on a CNS depressant and a guy was like kneeling on his neck.
[00:30:24]  I was just going to say, friend of the show, Tucker Carlson, that was his line about this, is that this wasn't a police brutality case.
[00:30:33]  This wasn't murder.
[00:30:33]  This was a fentanyl overdose.
[00:30:35]  And that was the actual defense in a court of law that they like hired forensic toxicologists and physicians to argue on behalf of the defense.
[00:30:47]  One thing I was going to mention is that we're talking about symptoms expressing themselves.
[00:30:51]  It's interesting when you bring up the Eric Garner thing and the, you know, I vividly remember the police wearing those shirts and how fucking sadistic and cruel it was to see that kind of expression of just complete like, yeah, like sadism.
[00:31:06]  Like in cruelty.
[00:31:07]  Like, I just don't know like what else it is.
[00:31:09]  Proud sadism.
[00:31:10]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:31:11]  And now in that short time, it feels, although it's not been that short of time between Eric Garner's murder and George Floyd's murder, how that symptom and the way that it expresses itself has changed, right?
[00:31:25]  And how the expression of the cops has now, in that short time, you know, flipped so much and how much that mirrors, I think, the difficult relationship.
[00:31:35]  I don't know, how do you say tenuous, like strained, tense?
[00:31:40]  I don't know how, I mean, horrific relationship that local cops have with the communities that they're tasked with policing.
[00:31:48]  Yeah.
[00:31:49]  And like one thing I'll say, and I did say this in the piece, is like the symptoms are not fake.
[00:31:57]  And saying that something is psychogenic does not mean it's, okay, let's dismiss this as this is all in your head.
[00:32:06]  It's like, no, these people really are having a distress response and a fear response.
[00:32:15]  And I've had panic attacks.
[00:32:18]  They are not fun.
[00:32:20]  It's no picnic to really think you are dying and gasping for air and that you can't breathe.
[00:32:27]  And that's really what's happening to them.
[00:32:30]  And like part of what I do all the time is just, I live in Chicago.
[00:32:33]  And so I read all these local news, you know, ABC or WGN or whatever.
[00:32:40]  And it is alarming how often I see headlines about Chicago police officers killing themselves with their own gun.
[00:32:50]  Yeah.
[00:32:50]  And that there is something truly traumatic and horrific, just from like a labor perspective of the rank and file beat cop right now, I think.
[00:33:05]  And there's like the mental illness is through the roof, the domestic violence is through the roof.
[00:33:11]  Oh, yeah, it's insane.
[00:33:12]  And in terms of drug use, like I think maybe the drug of choice that they can use legally is alcohol, just drinking themselves into a blood.
[00:33:20]  Yeah, totally.
[00:33:21]  And so like, you know, not to like both sides this and oh, like the cops are suffering too, but that is certainly part and in the mix here.
[00:33:32]  Like it has to be.
[00:33:34]  Well, I mean, I know, I think that's actually a perfectly like salient thing to bring up because, I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that like, yes, judging from like collating kind of all of those different factors, right?
[00:33:47]  Like the huge suicide rates, the rates of PTSD, the rates of just like mental illness, depression.
[00:33:54]  Yeah, the huge amounts of domestic violence.
[00:33:59]  It's like we have a deeply damaged and fucked up group of people that are supposed to be sort of keeping, I mean, ostensibly, again, tasked with keeping the peace.
[00:34:09]  And it's like, these are, these are some broken motherfucking human beings.
[00:34:13]  And so it's like, it's really no wonder that like relationships have gotten to this point.
[00:34:20]  You know what I mean?
[00:34:21]  Because it's like you have essentially a lot of functionally insane people that are making life and death decisions for other people that they may even, whether they want to or not, despise or have this like fear of.
[00:34:40]  I mean, especially when it comes to drug users.
[00:34:42]  Yeah, I mean, also, you know, we all understand what role the like the police, meaning like in an abstract way, has for the state.
[00:34:51]  Right.
[00:34:52]  And so if that like form of, or that body of the state is expressing these kinds of like, I mean, just like total breakdown, right?
[00:35:06]  What you're saying, domestic violence, suicide rates through the roof, like alcohol, drug abuse, like, you know, all of these like classic symptoms of decline and distress in any kind of sociological or like, you know, it's expressing a rot within the social relations that govern society underneath it and the state itself.

=== Fentanyl's Double Edged Sword (15:21) ===

[00:35:43]  You have a quote here from the piece that I just wanted to read because I think it was just so fantastic.
[00:35:50]  And we'll link to the piece in the show notes as we always, which we're way better at remembering.
[00:35:55]  Maybe we remember to do that now.
[00:35:56]  Yeah.
[00:35:57]  You write, three or four decades ago, the American media found itself producing plenty of readily identifiable villains in the nation's war on drugs.
[00:36:06]  Police officers on the front lines of today's drug war confront a very different landscape.
[00:36:11]  The human misery of today's overdose crisis is largely hidden from view and is certainly not centered on the police.
[00:36:18]  It is squarely borne by drug users and their loved ones.
[00:36:22]  Today's astonishing overdose death toll comes not from the gang violence turf or turf wars, but from a ubiquitous market of cheap and potent synthetic drugs.
[00:36:32]  And so it is in the drugs themselves that police officers now see grave danger, including to themselves.
[00:36:39]  And I think that was just such a, I mean, because we do, we should really talk about fentanyl.
[00:36:43]  We've been, you know, teasing it for a while, but I do think, you know, there is something, I feel like it's like wrong to call it poetic.
[00:36:53]  I mean, it's just like it makes it, it seems sort of like, I don't know.
[00:36:56]  Synthetic.
[00:36:57]  Like, or it's like inappropriate to kind of like gaze at it.
[00:37:03]  Oh, good.
[00:37:03]  You've done fentanyl, right, Zach?
[00:37:05]  Yeah, I don't think I've ever done like the street, like furanylfentanol, acetylfentanol.
[00:37:12]  Yeah, the fast fashion fentanyl.
[00:37:15]  Yeah, the fast fashion terminator killer fentanyl.
[00:37:18]  I did like pharmaceutical grade fentanyl that came in patches and such.
[00:37:22]  Well, I've I've done the street fentanyl.
[00:37:25]  So we have every kind of fentanyl here.
[00:37:26]  You know what?
[00:37:27]  I've never done anything.
[00:37:28]  You got permission to call proetic.
[00:37:30]  No, but if we're talking about these sort of like, you know, drugs and the relation with cops and, and, you know, and working people and, you know, and the state and all of these things, right?
[00:37:41]  As the kind of expressions of the disorders in, you know, our social relations, like fentanyl is a fucking expression of that, right?
[00:37:53]  And I think it's important to kind of talk about a little of like how fentanyl is out there so much, like what it is, because it is a unique drug in the kind of panoply of even just opioids and how it's kind of like really affecting pretty much fucking everyone in America.
[00:38:12]  Yeah.
[00:38:13]  Yeah.
[00:38:13]  The pharmacology of fentanyl itself.
[00:38:17]  So it is sort of like you said, unique and it's also uniquely terrible for it to be a street drug to be used in unmonitored settings where you don't know the dose, you don't know the purity, you don't even probably know which offshoot of fentanyl is in your little five, $10 baggie of mystery powder.
[00:38:42]  So in this way, it is uniquely deadly and lethal.
[00:38:46]  But on the flip side, I have a friend who is an anesthesiologist.
[00:38:51]  She's a certified nurse, anesthetist, and her job for a living is shooting people up with fentanyl every single day in a hospital.
[00:38:59]  And in this way, like fentanyl is a miracle drug.
[00:39:03]  It is so perfect for sedation and for anesthesia.
[00:39:09]  And it is used safely by patients in severe pain and in hospitals every day.
[00:39:15]  End of life.
[00:39:15]  End of life too.
[00:39:16]  I know it's really extra dreams.
[00:39:18]  Yeah.
[00:39:19]  Right.
[00:39:19]  Yeah, it's basically essential for any kind of human end of life care.
[00:39:24]  And so like, I think we're all smart enough here to see that like two things can be true at the same time, even though they are like diametrically opposite of each other, where this drug is on the one hand, critical for healthcare, super effective, super safe, and also awful when on the street and used in the unregulated world of drug use.
[00:39:51]  And it's like of all the recreational opioids out there, like heroin and oxycodone, like the old school opioids at this point now, like those are so much more tolerable.
[00:40:05]  They last so much longer.
[00:40:06]  Like the horrific part about fentanyl, when I talk to users now on the street, is a bag of heroin used to last then like most of the day.
[00:40:16]  Yeah.
[00:40:17]  Not, and and now with fentanyl they need to re-up and reuse every couple hours.
[00:40:23]  They can't even sleep through the night because they wake up in withdrawals.
[00:40:27]  And so it sort of became like the crack cocaine of opioids in a way where like, you get this rush, and the rush isn't even really euphoric in the sense of like a heroin high, it is just you are ready to be intubated, like you are knocked the out.
[00:40:44]  Yeah, you're not, like you like you're immediately nodding yeah, and and so the reason I think people have used heroin on the street for so long is to kind of cope with like all kinds of existential malaise and physical pain and mental health and depression, and that's certainly part of why I used it.
[00:41:04]  But I think fentanyl isn't even really helping people cope with that anymore, because there isn't that um, kind of warm, uh embrace from the opioid, it is just pure knockout.
[00:41:21]  There's no velvet underground, for you're not at the, you're not in the pleasure Domes of Kubicon.
[00:41:25]  No no no, um.
[00:41:27]  So just the whole situation is uh, a tragedy and it it's uh as you know we've said a million times like it is just causing so many, so many overdose deaths.
[00:41:42]  So I mean something that that that I was thinking about earlier is is.
[00:41:45]  It's so I don't want to say poetic.
[00:41:49]  Again, I feel like we shouldn't describe fentanyl as poetic, because poet I mean, I gotta say fentany really isn't compared to heroin.
[00:41:55]  You could actually make a strong case for heroin being being poetic, romantic at least.
[00:41:59]  Yeah yes, romantic certainly.
[00:42:01]  I felt very romantic doing it for the first year or two um, like first three months, but uh, that romance quickly wears off.
[00:42:10]  Fentanyl, it's funny, like it, it.
[00:42:13]  You know we had the.
[00:42:14]  We had this sort of synthetic opiate or opioid craze right, you know, with Oxycontin, you know the the the, obviously you know well-trod path now in in media, I mean countless like tv shows and documentaries and such about that.
[00:42:28]  Then, of course, when that sort of uh, when they changed the formula and, you know, made it diet oxycontin uh, everyone switched to heroin, myself included.
[00:42:38]  And now it's like I mean, i've read article after article about how you can't even find heroin in like Philadelphia or fucking Vancouver, like two of the most heroin cities.
[00:42:50]  Yeah, if it's not there, where is it?
[00:42:52]  Exactly.
[00:42:53]  And it's like, it's all just fentanyl now.
[00:42:55]  And so it's like, you had this synthetic opioid.
[00:42:58]  I guess all opioids are synthetic, right?
[00:43:01]  Yes.
[00:43:02]  It's complicated.
[00:43:03]  Like oxycodone is semi-synthetic.
[00:43:05]  So like you still need the poppy.
[00:43:07]  Like you still need to extract the alkaloids from the poppy.
[00:43:13]  So synthetic fentanyl, it's just pure laboratory produced.
[00:43:18]  Like you don't need farmers anymore.
[00:43:19]  You don't need sunlight.
[00:43:20]  You don't need acres of arable land.
[00:43:23]  All you need is a lab.
[00:43:24]  It's not a metaphor.
[00:43:25]  It's the fucking bug man dope.
[00:43:28]  And you're right.
[00:43:29]  Like, I mean, again, I only did when I, I mean, I, I, I quit doing junk in 2014.
[00:43:35]  And that was really before fentanyl was, was much more than a myth to a lot of people.
[00:43:40]  I did it one single time in the bathroom of Sears in downtown Oakland, which is no longer there.
[00:43:47]  But I remember, you know, it was sort of similar to me as like shooting Dilotted, where it was like, it was a different kind of, it was more deadening than euphoric, like you said there.
[00:43:59]  And like, in, and it was very, like Dilotted, very short lasting.
[00:44:02]  If Dilotted only lasts about four hours, if I can, I didn't really like, I never, I try not to shoot pills, but the, uh, it's so, you know, you're right.
[00:44:11]  Like, I think a lot of people maybe don't really understand.
[00:44:15]  Like there are a lot of really inherent dangers to having to redose constantly.
[00:44:19]  Number one is that like there's half-life to a lot of these drugs, right?
[00:44:23]  I mean, obviously, like the immediate effects of fentanyl might wear off pretty quickly, but like it's still in your system.
[00:44:28]  And like constantly redosing every time an addict doses is an opportunity to overdose.
[00:44:34]  And especially if you're just adding on top and on top of, I mean, that's how I've, that's a, that's happened to me.
[00:44:41]  And so I think today it's, I think what's, what's, what's really sort of getting a lot of attention is because, okay, this isn't even confined to junkies anymore.
[00:44:51]  Like this stuff is now making the hop into, I mean, you know, I read that it's being pressed into fucking Adderall pills.
[00:44:59]  Yeah.
[00:44:59]  Fake Adderall pills.
[00:45:00]  Fake, well, fake Adderall pills, exactly.
[00:45:02]  Which for those who don't know, there's like a lot of people out there, a lot of people out there.
[00:45:07]  There are pill presses out there.
[00:45:08]  So you can buy like, I know there was fake Xanax going around in San Francisco for a while.
[00:45:12]  It was just fent.
[00:45:14]  I mean, what do you, what do you, I guess it's a pretty broad question, but like, what do you make of that?
[00:45:18]  Of just like the explosion, the hegemony of fentanyl really over all other drugs now?
[00:45:25]  Yeah, I think there's a really helpful framing for this that comes out of drug policy research.
[00:45:32]  And it's called the Iron Law of Prohibition.
[00:45:35]  And so like the classic example of this is alcohol during the prohibition era.
[00:45:41]  So it meant it was much more economical and lucrative for smugglers to traffic in high potency alcohol because you could get way more people drunk off of like a barrel of Everclear versus like a case of beer.
[00:46:00]  Right.
[00:46:01]  And so during prohibition, the purity of alcohol kind of went through the roof.
[00:46:06]  And what's happening now and the analogy goes, so it was oxycodone in 1999 to about 2010.
[00:46:16]  They reformulated it, like you said, and everybody made the jump to heroin.
[00:46:22]  And then as all kinds of controls and law enforcement steps in and there's this awareness of the quote unquote opioid epidemic,
[00:46:35]  as the law enforcement ramps up, there's another switch to fentanyl, which is a much, much more potent substance that can more easily evade detection because you need to traffic so little of it to extend the supply.
[00:46:56]  And so as law enforcement ramps up, the drugs become physically smaller and more potent.
[00:47:05]  And so that's kind of one thing going on here with the emergence of fentanyl.
[00:47:09]  And then there's also just like the labor aspect.
[00:47:12]  Like we're witnessing the death of agricultural drug production.
[00:47:15]  Yeah.
[00:47:16]  Where, like I said, you don't need farmers and land and sunlight and you don't have to like go through the seasons and find the perfect climate to grow poppy all year round.
[00:47:28]  Who needs Afghanistan, right?
[00:47:30]  Well, no, that's brand new America.
[00:47:32]  It was funny.
[00:47:32]  I remember when the Afghanistan pullout was happening, there was sort of all these people making these like references to heroin smuggling out of there.
[00:47:39]  And it's like, dude, what year is it?
[00:47:42]  You're wrong year, brother.
[00:47:43]  Like there is literally almost zero reason to actually have to smuggle heroin out of Afghanistan and into, first of all, most of America's heroin didn't actually come from Afghanistan or hasn't for a really long time.
[00:47:56]  But it's like fentanyl is the wave of the future because you don't have to wait on crop, like rotate, you know, like crop cycles.
[00:48:03]  You don't actually have to go through the process of harvesting the poppies or, you know, cutting them open, all that kind of stuff.
[00:48:10]  It's like, no, you literally just have some fucking revolution in dexter in a lab, whip that shit up, and then bam, super small.
[00:48:20]  And I think, I think what you're saying, What you mentioned too about smuggling it too.
[00:48:25]  I mean, from what I understand, and again, I am not an expert on this stuff, is a lot of the cross-contamination comes in that process or like after it, right?
[00:48:35]  Like, where it's, I mean, I'm talking about cross-contamination with like Coke, not necessarily being pressed into like Adderall pills.
[00:48:41]  Um, that is where a lot of that cross-contamination comes from, as far as I understand it, right?
[00:48:48]  Right.
[00:48:49]  So, it's almost impossible to really investigate the illicit drug supply because it's such a black box, right?
[00:48:57]  Yeah, like if, if, if there were, you know, some bottles of Advil that had some contaminant, all the Advil would just be taken off the shelf and be replenished and fixed, and that problem would go away.
[00:49:12]  Like, there is no recourse for that in a criminalized, illicit market.
[00:49:17]  And so, where the contamination is happening, like, I have theories, and I think it's happening kind of in the mid-level of the supply chain where you have people bagging fentanyl over there in that corner, people bagging cocaine over there in that corner, and people classic organic versus conventional issue.
[00:49:38]  Yeah, yeah, like, like, I think that there's a lot of people now overdosing like naive, opioid naive people, which means they have no tolerance and they're kind of the cocaine users, the weekend warriors.
[00:49:52]  They take a little bump at the bar on the weekend, whatever.
[00:49:55]  Like, that used to not be that risky of a venture, used to not be so deadly.
[00:50:01]  But now, all recreational drug use has this incredibly lethal risk.
[00:50:10]  So, there's just something so unique about what's happening where you have a 15-year-old in high school, somebody gave this kid a Percocet or a Xanax or an Adderall, and then they take it and never wake up again because it turned out actually that pill was fentanyl.
[00:50:30]  And so, there's the counterfeit pill market, which I think makes sense in the in the in like I think it's like it's like uh commodity preference.
[00:50:40]  People prefer pills versus you know, bags of mystery powder.
[00:50:45]  Like, if you're in high school, like you know what an Adderall is and that's what you want, or you know what a Xanax is and that's what you want.
[00:50:52]  And so, there's like a market for the counterfeit pills.
[00:50:56]  Um, and but like it doesn't make sense to me to like intentionally mix cocaine with fentanyl.

=== Ketamine and the Death Drive (13:46) ===

[00:51:05]  Like, if you're killing off your customer base, like what good is that?
[00:51:11]  Like, if you're I mean, do you think they're thinking that far?
[00:51:14]  I mean, I don't know if it's like really if they're thinking that deep into like as an entrepreneur or something, you know what I'm saying?
[00:51:22]  You have some darker theories about that too.
[00:51:24]  It's just cutting costs.
[00:51:26]  Yeah, yes.
[00:51:27]  I mean, right?
[00:51:28]  Like, it's just easier to cut costs at the top and then worry about the bottom when it goes down through so many rings and it or levels and it moves so much that, you know, you really just.
[00:51:39]  Well, from what I've understood about hanging out with, you know, rock and rollers for a long time is that, you know, actually, you can just sell someone bad Coke that has like the most stepped on bullshit in the world.
[00:51:51]  And I'll tell you what, they're going to call you back in two hours and get some more.
[00:51:55]  Like it's cokey, cocaine.
[00:51:58]  I've done zero research into this, but I've done cocaine, well, good cocaine one single time in my life.
[00:52:02]  And I was like, oh, this is what it's like in the 80s.
[00:52:05]  Every other time I was like, this is, I just have diarrhea at a bar with no, my most hated drug.
[00:52:13]  But what I'm saying is like, I think that like it's, it's, it's, I, you know, I think I can't actually remember if I said this before we started recording or after, but like, I, I'll be honest, I kind of wrote it off as a myth, like the cross-contamination stuff because exactly, because it's, uh, you know, it's one of those things where it's like, I was like, oh, I'm sure it's happened a few times, but like, you know, all of these sort of like people being like, be careful, there's fentanyl in the coke.
[00:52:40]  It's like, well, I mean, why would, again, why would any dealer do that?
[00:52:44]  But like, it's become very clear that like, yeah, there's some fentanyl in the coke.
[00:52:47]  Yeah, yeah, there absolutely is.
[00:52:48]  And I think you're right.
[00:52:49]  Like, I, I, too, sort of was like, show me the evidence of this.
[00:52:53]  Like, the only way you can prove it is with analyzing a sample.
[00:52:58]  And so I think there was like a lot of, I guess, talk on Twitter or other platforms of people being like, beware, you know, bad batch of Coke in, you know, Brooklyn or whatever.
[00:53:12]  It's always like it could take out the whole time.
[00:53:13]  Yeah.
[00:53:14]  And so I think what was really happening was we, it was sort of like there would be this kind of scattershot or these like kind of one-off cases where like that was a fluke.
[00:53:28]  Whoa, that like that shouldn't be happening.
[00:53:31]  And now I think it's much more systemic or just the leak is just so much wider now.
[00:53:38]  And I, and I think it partially just has to do with just the abundance of fentanyl period where all you need is like a chemist with some basic know-how and some precursors from China.
[00:53:52]  And now you have like a Walter White breaking bad super lab, basically.
[00:53:58]  And you can just crank so much of this out.
[00:54:01]  And I always see these headlines of like, oh, law enforcement seizes 1 million counterfeit fentanyl pills.
[00:54:09]  And what they never talk about is the denominator.
[00:54:12]  Like how many tens of millions of pills just go undetected.
[00:54:16]  Yeah.
[00:54:17]  Yeah.
[00:54:17]  Oh, absolutely.
[00:54:18]  I mean, that's, that's, it's, it's, what's crazy is that like it's, it's taken me a long time to really kind of get my head around how drug usage has really changed since I've stopped using drugs.
[00:54:34]  You know, I've been, I've been off, I've been off, you know, whatever, clean and sober for about eight, almost exactly eight years.
[00:54:41]  And, you know, now I see the big drugs, at least in urban environments, among people I know, really, like people I've known for my whole life in some cases.
[00:54:51]  It's ketamine is the big one, which makes you basically shuts down your fucking brain.
[00:54:58]  And then fentanyl, whether they know it or not, right?
[00:55:02]  Like it's a lot of people doing that.
[00:55:04]  Like that's really the two things that like, people didn't do a lot of ketamine when I was younger.
[00:55:08]  And nobody did fentanyl.
[00:55:10]  I mean, again, a lot of people aren't purposely doing fentanyl now, but like even the junkies that I, that I, that I know that are still somehow still cranking at it, you know, they're doing fent now, whether they want to or not.
[00:55:21]  And it's like, it's, it's, it's like we've entered sort of a, you know, obviously drugs, there's, there's, there's trends in drugs and, you know, popularity and stuff like that.
[00:55:30]  But it does seem like sort of darkly significant that these are two of the really very popular drugs that are around right now.
[00:55:38]  Yeah, I mean, we're talking a lot about psychological expressions of like social disorders.
[00:55:43]  And I think it's only, I mean, drugs are absolutely expressions of that.
[00:55:47]  I mean, it's sad.
[00:55:48]  Mark Fisher was so good at tracking a lot of those trends, particularly with drug use, like over time and really just talking so beautifully, writing so beautifully about those types of expressions, how they express in music as well as with drugs.
[00:56:03]  And it's a shame.
[00:56:04]  Like we're, you know, it's a, you know, it's a shame that he's not here to help us make sense of all of this.
[00:56:12]  I've always thought of ketamine as, you know, people desiring to dissociate reminds me so much of them just trying to mimic the like digital life, basically.
[00:56:23]  It's like you're so used to seeing yourself reflected back to you that you can only feel sane when you're doing that, even in a social setting like a party, which is sort of a really upsetting thing to think about.
[00:56:35]  Fentanyl, I mean, there's just no other way to look at it other than just like complete and total death drug.
[00:56:41]  Like it feels like the throat, like the death rattle of society.
[00:56:45]  Like it's just such a like, it's literally an end-of-life drug, right?
[00:56:50]  That's what it's used for primarily.
[00:56:51]  It's fentanyl is to manage like, you know, people's pain.
[00:56:56]  Pain, you know, as they're, as they're dying.
[00:57:00]  And so to then want that In a in a totally different scenario, just recreationally, something that would drive you to, that would basically, you know, kind of carry you into death and make it that much more, that much more manageable recreationally is like something really fucking crazy to wrap your head around.
[00:57:25]  Like that isn't, that isn't its 60s acid, let's all expand our minds and fucking, you know, trip and think about what the world could be.
[00:57:34]  What can the world show me?
[00:57:36]  This is like, I need someone to fucking help me die.
[00:57:42]  Yeah, this is not the summer of love.
[00:57:43]  This is the summer of death drive, baby.
[00:57:46]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:57:48]  And, and, with, with, with ketamine, I think you're right.
[00:57:51]  Like, it's basically like giving yourself a break from yourself, like kind of just like checking out and dissociating.
[00:58:00]  And then when, when it comes to fentanyl, like covering this for a while, in the very beginning, I was like, who wants this?
[00:58:08]  Like, who really asked for this?
[00:58:11]  This doesn't really feel that good, right?
[00:58:15]  And then over time, and this, I guess, speaks to sort of the lack of agency among drug users right now, especially if you're like on the street.
[00:58:24]  Oh, yeah.
[00:58:25]  And it is basically supply induced demand where once you're wired to fentanyl, heroin doesn't cut it anymore.
[00:58:36]  Like you, like you can't transition to a softer, mellower opioid after that.
[00:58:42]  You're kind of just on the hook with fentanyl now.
[00:58:47]  And then in places like Vancouver and like you said, Philly, it's not just fentanyl in the supply anymore.
[00:58:53]  It's xylosine and fentanyl.
[00:58:55]  And xylazine is a veterinary tranquilizer, literally not designed for human consumption.
[00:59:01]  And then there's also trancdope, which is basically like- What's it called?
[00:59:06]  Say that again?
[00:59:07]  Trank dope, tranquilizer dope.
[00:59:10]  And so that's the xylosine stuff.
[00:59:12]  And then there's benzodope, which is basically weird analogs of Xanax that are mixed in with the heroin.
[00:59:22]  And so now there's benzodope.
[00:59:24]  And so you have people, you have people wired to two different substances.
[00:59:30]  And it's sort of almost like a fix in a way where it's like the fentanyl doesn't last long enough.
[00:59:37]  So they started putting in other substances to kind of counteract that and extend it a little bit.
[00:59:44]  But just in terms of like trying to get into some form of recovery, trying to stop this, like you can't just go to like a few days of detox and take methadone or Suboxone.
[00:59:57]  Like you need a full hospital Care to get off the opioid, to get off the tranquilizer, to get off the benzo.
[01:00:08]  And people are mixing this stuff with methamphetamine and stimulants to counteract the straight down no consciousness effect of this stuff.
[01:00:19]  So, what we're in the middle of, like that's why when I said earlier, quote unquote opioid epidemic, because that's just a complete misnomer.
[01:00:26]  We're in just like a death cocktail epidemic.
[01:00:30]  Like, it is not just one substance in the supply anymore.
[01:00:35]  That's, that's, yeah.
[01:00:36]  I had, you know, I'll be honest with you.
[01:00:38]  I had no idea that that was, I mean, my God, that was, it's funny because when I, when I was doing dope, it was the one thing, it's like, don't take Xanax when you're on this because that will kill you.
[01:00:49]  Like, you really do not.
[01:00:51]  If you're listening to this and you are opiate naive, but maybe beginning to experiment, first of all, bad idea and you should stop.
[01:00:58]  But if you do Xanax and heroin, like that was, I was like, that's a death sentence.
[01:01:03]  You will die from that.
[01:01:04]  Your fucking body will shut down.
[01:01:07]  And not to mention the withdrawals from Xanax almost mimic alcohols and how bad they are.
[01:01:12]  I mean, you can kill yourself with that.
[01:01:14]  Absurd seizures.
[01:01:15]  Yeah.
[01:01:15]  Like getting off benzos is a horrible process for a lot of people.
[01:01:19]  Yeah.
[01:01:20]  I mean, fucking Jordan Peterson put his ass in a coma for two months, made himself brain damage from it.
[01:01:25]  He was like, I'm going to Russia to eat only meat.
[01:01:27]  Exactly.
[01:01:27]  I mean, well, that's exactly.
[01:01:29]  And he had sex with his own daughter.
[01:01:30]  But it's like, to me, it is crazy because it's like, it's fully just this like weird synthetic death drive.
[01:01:38]  I mean, heroin, I've thought a lot about this over the years, including when I was using it.
[01:01:44]  It's like, obviously, there is a certain kind of death drive, or at least a drive towards obliteration when you use opiates or traditional opiates, right?
[01:01:52]  But what you mentioned is true.
[01:01:54]  There is a sense of euphoria.
[01:01:55]  And for me, like, you know, to speak plainly, when I first started using opiates, there was a sense of euphoria that I had never experienced in my life.
[01:02:03]  Like, I was like, oh, so this is what it means to be happy or like to feel okay in my own skin.
[01:02:10]  Obviously, it was, that was not, that was not a real feeling, right?
[01:02:14]  Like it, and it soon bit me in the ass and I felt worse than I've ever felt in any other context whatsoever for years, even when I was on it.
[01:02:24]  But, you know, there was that initial sort of like, you know, it's, that's sort of the classic tale.
[01:02:30]  That's how they get you.
[01:02:31]  Like, you know, you feel good at first and then you're hooked and you, you have to just do it to stop, you know, what they say, getting well so that you don't feel bad, not even feel good.
[01:02:40]  Where this stuff, it's like, I mean, if you do fentanyl, your tolerance is through the fucking roof, right?
[01:02:47]  Like you literally can't go back to heroin because you have, you'd have to do like $500 a day and then you're not even getting high anymore.
[01:02:55]  And it's just, it's, it's so like what you say is right.
[01:03:00]  It's like, this is like the summer of the death cocktail.
[01:03:03]  It's like all of these are not only just like overdose, like perfectly formulated to make you die literally from an overdose.
[01:03:11]  It's like they aren't even making you feel it like good, even that fake good that you felt when you were on heroin.
[01:03:17]  And it's like, yeah, it's astounding to me.
[01:03:21]  Yeah, Brace, that is exactly my experience too.
[01:03:24]  If you give like a neurotic, anxious Jewish kid an opiate at the wrong time in their development, we're fucked.
[01:03:31]  Totally fucked.
[01:03:32]  Totally.
[01:03:34]  I did not stand a chance.
[01:03:36]  Like in looking back, it just felt predetermined.
[01:03:40]  Like I was going to find something that made me feel not just like high and euphoric, but just like that I could go to class and not sweat through my shorts, basically.
[01:03:53]  Just like something to calm the cacophonous internal screaming match in my head.
[01:04:02]  And that's what the opiate did.
[01:04:04]  It was just like a little turn down the volume on that.
[01:04:07]  Yeah.
[01:04:07]  Yeah.
[01:04:07]  And I think like that to me just gets totally lost in how do we fix this problem?
[01:04:15]  What do we do about this?
[01:04:16]  And, and it's like, you can't just like take away the one thing someone has in their life that is a life preserver that is keeping them afloat and makes them feel okay and move through the world, even if it's very tortured in some ways and it's really difficult to manage addiction.
[01:04:37]  Like there's just a complete lack of like the kind of human desire for this substance and why it's basically this desire has been with us for millennia.

=== Uplifting End (05:23) ===

[01:04:52]  Like if you go back to the earliest civilizations, there is evidence of them crushing up poppies and doing stuff with it.
[01:05:00]  Like, and so this drug has been with us forever.
[01:05:05]  And it's only now through technology and through economics and through the market that it's morphed into this really scary thing.
[01:05:18]  And I think it's really telling us something about our society where it's like we're all digitally plugged in, like fentanyls, it's like the Amazon Prime video of opioids.
[01:05:29]  It's just like there's just these warehouses cranking it out.
[01:05:34]  And frankly, I don't know how where it goes from here.
[01:05:42]  The only drug I think we've ever successfully eradicated were quail lubes.
[01:05:47]  Like those are just gongs.
[01:05:48]  Which is just talking about quail medicine.
[01:05:50]  Literally medicine.
[01:05:52]  You know why they made them illegal?
[01:05:53]  They made girls too horny.
[01:05:55]  What is it?
[01:05:57]  Baby.
[01:05:58]  I thought it was talking about South Africa.
[01:06:02]  I got some South Africa, and I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but I'll give you some.
[01:06:06]  No, I don't want to.
[01:06:07]  I take Kwalud's almost every day.
[01:06:08]  Oh my God.
[01:06:10]  But no, you're right.
[01:06:11]  Kwaluds are the only thing that is actually, which is crazy because everyone loves Kwaluds.
[01:06:17]  You know why?
[01:06:17]  It's because they killed a lot of housewives.
[01:06:20]  That's from what I understand.
[01:06:24]  But yeah, it's, it's, I mean, I can't think of, I guess, laudenum.
[01:06:28]  We've never, but we've also never seen something on this scale.
[01:06:31]  The scale of production is just like what you're saying, you know, they're just cranking this shit out.
[01:06:36]  It's like the Amazon Prime of Drugs.
[01:06:38]  And not just that, but you brought up the super quick high, right?
[01:06:42]  So these, so everyone's got to re-up so often that it mimics the same kind of like mass production scale that we see in everything else, right?
[01:06:50]  It's this kind of like the fast fashion, like we're saying, of drugs or the shit that has like the shortest shelf life, you know, is it mimics so many other things.
[01:06:58]  And so the question is like, where does it go from here?
[01:07:01]  God forbid it just speeds up and grows larger.
[01:07:04]  You know, what's the fentanyl of fentanyl?
[01:07:05]  I fucking pray we never see it, you know?
[01:07:10]  I have no idea.
[01:07:11]  There will be.
[01:07:12]  Absolutely no idea.
[01:07:14]  I can assure you of this, though.
[01:07:16]  I think in 10, 20 years, there will be a new, I mean, maybe less than that.
[01:07:21]  I don't know.
[01:07:22]  But I mean, the prevalence of research, or what was, I don't know if they're still called that, but you know, a lot of synthetic fentanyl would have just been called a research chemical.
[01:07:32]  Yeah.
[01:07:33]  I guess back when I was using drugs.
[01:07:35]  The prevalence of that stuff analogs to so much of these like, you know, popular drugs that we know and love, like methamphetamine, cocaine, fentanyl, or hair and all this stuff.
[01:07:45]  Exactly.
[01:07:45]  The sort of like lab-created versions of that.
[01:07:48]  I honestly don't think there is going to be an end to that.
[01:07:51]  I mean, there is an infinite, I mean, I don't know, infinite, but there is a, there is, you know, science that dictates the ceiling to that, right?
[01:08:01]  And if fentanyls anything, it's that like, there wasn't exactly like organic consumer demand for fentanyl.
[01:08:08]  It's just, it's that the whims of the, of the black market, sort of.
[01:08:12]  Like, I don't think, I mean.
[01:08:13]  Well, the production fucking factories, too.
[01:08:16]  They're like, we can make this cheap.
[01:08:17]  So this is what you're going to get now.
[01:08:20]  Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
[01:08:21]  It's fucking tragedy.
[01:08:22]  Fucking fucking tragedy.
[01:08:24]  It's like all these like stupid Hulu documentaries.
[01:08:26]  Like nobody asked for these, but now that we have them, we just watch them.
[01:08:30]  Yeah.
[01:08:31]  Like, yeah, yeah.
[01:08:32]  Like, this chick had a company and she did something a little crazy.
[01:08:38]  But we'll keep drinking that garbage anyway.
[01:08:40]  Yeah.
[01:08:40]  God, there's always a fucking Trump tweet for everything.
[01:08:43]  Well.
[01:08:45]  Damn, I was hoping we could end this like somewhere like uplifting, but I don't know how to do that.
[01:08:51]  It is just dark and depressing up and down.
[01:08:54]  I don't get invited to parties anymore.
[01:08:56]  I mean, just like if someone's like, hey, hey, Zach, what do you write about?
[01:08:59]  I'm like, you don't want to know.
[01:09:00]  Yeah.
[01:09:01]  Just don't even.
[01:09:02]  Fentanyl.
[01:09:03]  I will say here's an uplifting thing to end it on is that your writing on this has been fantastic.
[01:09:09]  And you've been covering a lot of the, I mean, a lot of the proliferation of this stuff and how it is seeping into, I don't know, corners of society where I think a lot of people aren't looking.
[01:09:22]  So for that, that's a good thing to end on.
[01:09:25]  Yes, because we didn't mention this before, but in fact, Liz doesn't get to be the subscriber to the rare substack this time.
[01:09:32]  Race does.
[01:09:34]  You write for a substack called Substance, which is not at substance.substack, but is in fact at tanag, t-a-n-a-g.substack.com.
[01:09:45]  That is Tana, my co-writer.
[01:09:48]  I know, I can't pronounce her last name, though.
[01:09:50]  Or I mean, I probably could, but I don't want to try too many times because I feel like that's somehow racist.
[01:09:55]  I don't even know what race she is, but I feel like it would be interpreted as such.
[01:09:59]  But she's actually done very, I've read her stuff about chase it and stuff.
[01:10:03]  She's amazing.
[01:10:05]  But yeah, we'll link to that as well.
[01:10:08]  Zach, thank you.
[01:10:09]  And oh, you know what?
[01:10:11]  I actually had something uplifting to end us on.
[01:10:13]  Yes, please.

=== Fentanyl In The Mix (04:13) ===

[01:10:16]  Zach, you and I are both users of a substance much less dangerous than fentanyl.
[01:10:22]  In fact, the substance I would go so far as to say is benign and in fact good for you.
[01:10:27]  Oh my God, I know where this is going.
[01:10:30]  You and I, you might be hearing listeners, maybe an inhaling sound, like somebody breathing in the air from heaven.
[01:10:38]  Young Chomsy's shaking his head right now, but you know what?
[01:10:41]  Leave this in.
[01:10:45]  That's right.
[01:10:45]  You and I both jewel and they recently, the pigs in Washington recently tried to make Jew illegal because it was too good for you.
[01:10:57]  I got to be honest with you.
[01:10:58]  Why did they just target Jewel?
[01:11:00]  How come like the fake like stickers?
[01:11:02]  That's the whole FDA lobbying thing.
[01:11:05]  Jewel like fucked up and didn't pay somebody.
[01:11:08]  I blame my own representative, Senator Dick Durbin on this.
[01:11:13]  Oh, you're a Durbin man.
[01:11:15]  He, I'm a Durbin man.
[01:11:18]  He, along with Michael Bloomberg, we also have Michael Bloomberg to thank for this.
[01:11:23]  Like just this like well of anti-tobacco money and this whole bureaucracy that's like truth, get kids off tobacco.
[01:11:33]  So that was really successful, actually.
[01:11:36]  Like very few kids do like cigarettes these days, but they did find nicotine and they did find vaping.
[01:11:43]  So that whole anti-tobacco apparatus just latched right on to the vape thing.
[01:11:49]  And like, you know, the FDA is slow as fuck, but like it was the quote-unquote jeweling epidemic among the youth many years ago.
[01:11:59]  Yeah.
[01:11:59]  Now the kids are all doing the disposable vape because of course what the fuck is that?
[01:12:05]  Baby, imagine if I heard of voodoo.
[01:12:09]  Imagine if in like the sewers of Shanghai, like an organ grinder and his monkey assembled out of spit, piss, and poison a bar of vape that made you die when you smoked it and also tasted like cotton candy mango.
[01:12:29]  Yeah.
[01:12:29]  That is a puff bar.
[01:12:30]  And you can also, it's disposable.
[01:12:32]  Wait, but you're allowed to have flavor with that one, but not with Jewel.
[01:12:35]  Right, right.
[01:12:36]  Exactly.
[01:12:36]  No, they just haven't captured it yet.
[01:12:38]  Yeah.
[01:12:39]  So Jewel is for the adult responsible vapor because you can't lose this thing.
[01:12:44]  Otherwise, you need to buy a new one.
[01:12:45]  I was about to say, you definitely can lose one.
[01:12:47]  Liz, Liz, earlier today.
[01:12:52]  You could not follow a single one and I was like, you know what?
[01:12:54]  I found it on the floor.
[01:12:56]  Yeah, of course.
[01:12:57]  But the disposable ones, you just rip through it, throw it out, and you buy a new one.
[01:13:04]  Oh, man.
[01:13:05]  So they're just playing regulatory whack-a-mole.
[01:13:07]  You know what that means?
[01:13:08]  We're about to witness then.
[01:13:10]  If the FDA and the Truth Squad is focusing on all you little jewels, maybe we'll get a return of Joe Campbell.
[01:13:18]  A little classical.
[01:13:19]  Oh, yeah.
[01:13:20]  Because now kids wouldn't think that was cool.
[01:13:22]  They'd be like, what is they'd be like, is that really what a Campbell looks like?
[01:13:25]  I don't know.
[01:13:25]  I am.
[01:13:26]  No, I've been on snuff.
[01:13:28]  What's that?
[01:13:28]  You know what snuff is?
[01:13:29]  You know what snuffs?
[01:13:32]  Snooze or snuff?
[01:13:33]  Snooze.
[01:13:33]  No.
[01:13:34]  Snuff.
[01:13:35]  I think that's a gay dating app.
[01:13:37]  First of all, I am.
[01:13:38]  Isn't that like you like you put it in your nose?
[01:13:42]  Is that right?
[01:13:43]  That is right.
[01:13:44]  You put tobacco in your nose.
[01:13:46]  I've been railing lines of snuff all fucking day, baby.
[01:13:49]  Oh, my God.
[01:13:50]  Why do you think I go to the bathroom every five minutes and go?
[01:13:55]  That's because I'm getting a little good old menthol hit of tobacco.
[01:13:58]  Oh, my God.
[01:13:59]  That's very image.
[01:14:01]  That's very Brad Pitt Inglorious Bastards of you.
[01:14:04]  That's crazy because I've had hella women say that same shit to me, except without the Inglorious Bastards part.
[01:14:11]  And usually after they see my face and shit, so they're like, that's hello, Brad Pitt of you to look like that.
[01:14:17]  But that is true.
[01:14:19]  And thank you also for not comparing me to other characters from Glorious Absolute, like Adolf Hitler, which is also a comparison that comes up a lot because of my speaking style.
[01:14:28]  Oh my God.

=== Brain Stimulation Confessions (02:45) ===

[01:14:29]  It's not the bear Jew.
[01:14:33]  No, I have been.
[01:14:34]  Well, I fuck around.
[01:14:35]  Like Liz was saying, like, I meet a lot of bears on snuff, the app, but like, it's not, most of them are, judging by the circumcision, most of them are not Jewish.
[01:14:48]  We should wrap this up.
[01:14:49]  Is the look that Liz is giving me?
[01:14:52]  So we are, ladies and gentlemen, there's fentanyl in the jewel, there's fentanyl in the weed, there's fentanyl in the podcasts.
[01:14:58]  There's no fentanyl here, fentanyl-free.
[01:15:00]  The entire episode was about fentanyl, but you know what I mean.
[01:15:04]  Yeah, don't listen to her, dude.
[01:15:06]  There is fentanyl in this shit.
[01:15:08]  Oh my god.
[01:15:09]  Come back for more in four hours.
[01:15:11]  Um, Zach, thank you so much.
[01:15:14]  Is there anything you want to plug before you get out of here?
[01:15:16]  I feel like we plug uh yeah, you plugged the sub stack, which is uh always got a crazy substack.
[01:15:23]  Yeah, very grateful for that.
[01:15:25]  And and no, I'm just doing my thing.
[01:15:27]  I'm gonna be freelance writing.
[01:15:30]  I have a piece coming out in Harper soon that I'm really excited about.
[01:15:34]  Oh, fantastic.
[01:15:36]  The New Yorker.
[01:15:38]  What's up?
[01:15:38]  The New York Times magazine.
[01:15:40]  Can you spoil what it's about?
[01:15:42]  It is about deep brain stimulation.
[01:15:46]  Fantastic.
[01:15:47]  You know, I've been told by a lot of women that I give them deep brain stimulation.
[01:15:53]  It was right there.
[01:15:54]  But it's crazy because a lot of the guys I meet on snuff tell me that I give them deep brain stimulation, but they say in a different tone of voice.
[01:16:00]  So I don't even know what it means at this point.
[01:16:02]  Oh my God.
[01:16:03]  Well, I love that.
[01:16:04]  I cannot wait to read.
[01:16:05]  Yeah.
[01:16:05]  Maybe we'll have you back on for that piece.
[01:16:07]  Thank you so much.
[01:16:09]  Thank you both so much.
[01:16:10]  This was a true delight.
[01:16:12]  And as this all came about, because this is the only podcast I said I would go on to talk about this.
[01:16:19]  And you know what?
[01:16:20]  This is the first, and I'll say this only time that an unsolicited I'll go on your podcast has been honored because it was such a good article.
[01:16:29]  World record.
[01:16:30]  Absolutely.
[01:16:31]  And I got to be totally honest with you.
[01:16:33]  Anybody out there, you get zero ideas from that because you will be denied.
[01:16:39]  But Zach's a kindred spirit and we love him.
[01:16:42]  thank you so much well I'm glad I don't do drugs Yeah, me too.
[01:17:01]  Oh my God, I got a little tear in my eye when you said it's almost eight years to the day.
[01:17:05]  It is almost eight years.
[01:17:06]  That's fucking fantastic, dude.
[01:17:07]  No, I was fucking, it's been eight years of not being cool.
[01:17:12]  No, you've managed to stay cool.

=== Fucking Fantastic, Dude (02:30) ===

[01:17:15]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:17:16]  Yeah, I have stayed cool.
[01:17:18]  I got to tell you, it would not be one of, I would immediately die if I was on heroin still.
[01:17:24]  Yeah.
[01:17:24]  It's, I can't, I mean, anyone who's doing that's navigating, you're navigating a minefield with this fentanyl stuff.
[01:17:29]  Yeah.
[01:17:30]  Back in my day.
[01:17:33]  Um, yeah, it's crazy.
[01:17:36]  Now I just have to drink 15 kombuchas to get even a little bit drunk.
[01:17:40]  The old Lindsay Lohan trick.
[01:17:41]  She really said that.
[01:17:43]  She says a lot of things.
[01:17:45]  Remember when she was like just kind of like a hooking in the peninsula?
[01:17:51]  I don't know.
[01:17:52]  The Arabian Peninsula?
[01:17:53]  Remember her little dance?
[01:17:54]  Remember her with Erdogan?
[01:17:57]  That's a great photo.
[01:17:58]  And she was with fucking t-shirts.
[01:18:00]  Bana Olibet.
[01:18:01]  We should, yeah, we got to do a yeah.
[01:18:03]  Bana Olibed.
[01:18:05]  That is a name I haven't heard of.
[01:18:07]  Dude, she's actually, yeah, she's doing climate protesting.
[01:18:10]  It's crazy.
[01:18:11]  Yeah.
[01:18:11]  I wonder if she is.
[01:18:12]  Dude, hooking Baina up with Greta.
[01:18:15]  Bro.
[01:18:17]  If we got something in the same room, that's a Zoomer squad right there.
[01:18:21]  Political child soldier.
[01:18:24]  Like pet captain planet situation.
[01:18:27]  Yeah, well, I prefer non-political child soldiers, just kind of guys who are down to fucking one off whenever they feel like it.
[01:18:34]  You know what I mean?
[01:18:35]  It's called gangs.
[01:18:36]  Yeah, well, speaking of gangs, check this out.
[01:18:41]  Fuck, I didn't think of one before I said check this out, so I'm really struggling now.
[01:18:44]  Speaking of gangs, gangs for listening, everybody.
[01:18:50]  Oh, gangs.
[01:18:51]  Gangs for listening.
[01:18:52]  Gangs for listening.
[01:18:52]  That's awful.
[01:18:53]  Well, on that note, I'm Liz.
[01:18:55]  My name.
[01:18:58]  Okay, can't think of any gang guys.
[01:19:01]  Gang of New York guy.
[01:19:04]  Leonardo DiCaprio.
[01:19:05]  My name is Deleonardo DiCaprio.
[01:19:07]  And we have with us as our producer the old Irishman from that movie, Young Chomsky.
[01:19:15]  And the podcast is called the Truan.
[01:19:20]  Colon.
[01:19:22]  Gangs of New York.
[01:19:24]  And we'll see you next time.
[01:19:26]  Bye-bye.
[01:19:34]  Jeffrey Lexter Johnson Jeffrey Lexter Jesus got your money, Jeffrey Lexter.