Chapo Trap House - 690 - Recovery Side Quest feat. TrueAnon (12/19/22)

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

Our good friends Liz and Brace of TrueAnon stop by to help us send off The Year of the Smile. We discuss their mini-series on Synanon, a substance rehabilitation program turned violent cult, and how it relates to all sorts of American phenomenon: from 1950’s acid tests to the modern Troubled Teen Industry. We also discuss the state of our collapsing tech/media infrastructure, the Epstein case, and why the government should begin issuing quests to citizens. Check out TrueAnon’s excellent miniseries The Game starting here: https://soundcloud.com/trueanonpod/the-game-part-1-dopefiend, and the rest on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TrueAnonPod Tickets for the Hell on Earth launch show/party @ Littlefield in NYC 1/20/23 here: https://littlefieldnyc.com/event/?wfea_eb_id=479703214227

Okay, greetings friends. It's Monday, December 19th. Will, Matt, and Felix as usual, joined by Brace, but also, Descent of a Woman, Liz. It's a chappo truanan. We're talking, we're talking Pacino, we're talking Sensible Woman. It's Brace's favorite movie. He got up and left. He just left. That was his setup. Oh my god. Okay. All right.

I have no choice but to do the newscaster, True Crime Guy, talking about the World Cup. Did you guys watch the World Cup? No. What? Oh, I watched it. I'm not going to pretend like I'm into that. The World Cup. I thought it was some of the best sports I've ever seen.

That was like the highest level of sports I've seen since. People are going to get mad at me and I don't care. I'm going to say it. 2017 NBA Finals. Yeah. I don't know. There's something dishonest about people watching the only one soccer game every four years and it's the World Cup and they're like, I always knew Argentina had it. I just don't agree with that. People messy the goat for real. He is the goat.

My favorite, my favorite element of this World Cup final or at least like the Francis whole run to the World Cup is Macron's shameless, shameless and gratiating of himself to the French national team where he was like going in the locker room after the games and you know, trying to cheer him up and be like, don't worry, Mbappe, you're still the goat to me. He loves being around athletes. So gross. Is it wrong for a president to groom his star soccer player if he was groomed himself?

Well, Macron called Mbappe to get him to stay at PSG. That was the whole thing because Mbappe was going to leave and then in the last World Cup, the camera kept cutting to Macron like sitting up there and he was acting like he was like coaching the team. Yeah. Like he was like conducting the pitch and everything. It was so, God, I hate Macron so much. He's like, these are the last blacks were letting in here. Yeah.

Yeah. He was like, he was like Drake at a Raptors game. Yes. Totally. It's like, you're the president and stop it. With the Qataris, his buddies came down to the locker room during halftime and he was like, gentlemen, this is the strategy for the second half of the game. More, two more goals and ideally a third one on top of that.

We need, all the nation of France is relying on you. What else are you really getting out of being president? Everyone yells at you and is mad at you all the time. You can't really do anything and change anything that's going to happen anyway. Getting to hang out with cool celebs and sports stars. That's it. That's the value. That is the brass ring of power.

I mean, I think he changed a lot. I think France is a startup nation like he said it would be. Absolutely. Everyone loved France's comeback in that game, but I got to say, the first half rocked. Watching a bunch of Frenchmen having no confidence is very cool. Watching the French just feel like shit is very, I enjoyed that very much. I got to say. I spent that morning dissolute in a Chinese opium den in sort of near Dime Square.

When I came outside to the cheers of all of the Frenchmen around the Lower East Side turning to streams of tears, it was really disorienting for me that my cat might explain soccer to me. Well, before we get started, we were talking about it briefly before we started recording, but I got to ask, Brace, what is your favorite way for a woman to scent? What is your favorite thing about scent of a woman and just women in general? I got to tell you, for me, I mean, this has beaten a dead horse at this point, but I really appreciated the blind Al Pacino's love of legs because I felt like that was something

he could really, that's like a good contour thing for his fingies to do, to run them up and down a woman's leg. Liz, I don't appreciate you making that face. I don't like when you say fingies. Well, it's a blind man's fingies, running up a woman's leg, and... That is tough saying that. They're very important to blind guys. It's a tactile.

Lady fingies. Well, it's a male fingies, lady leg. I would say I like the nice musk after a hot yoga session and then briefly spraying yourself with water that you purchased for a lot of money on Etsy that you're told has magical powers on it. So sort of like a lavender thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Like a woman who smells like a nice sort of like cucumber-y water. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's my thing. Yeah. Well, it's probably the closest thing to a pussy for a blind man.

A lot of people have told me this. Yeah. A lot of my site-challenged friends have told me this. Yeah. Yeah. That's what they like so much. Yeah. Liz, welcome to the Guys Hour.

We're talking boobs, babes, ankles, fingies. Fingies. Blind guys must be the only leg men left in the world because otherwise, all those guys, they're gone. That's an extinct species. They've migrated up and down to either the feet or the butts. Yeah. Well, you know.

Once miniskirts showed up, the leg lost its mystery. So you had to find somewhere else. Leg guy is a classical guy. Yeah. Very rare. Well, now, yeah, because now women are wearing Lululemon and I can basically see their legs. Yeah. Yeah.

That's no more mystery. Yeah. And so now, this is why there's so many toe guys because women still wearing shoes. Exactly. These are still a thing and so feet can be imagined. Oh, what's in there? What do you got? What do you got in those keds?

I'm also top of the head guy. Yeah. Women still have hair. So a bald woman, the erotic official of that. Exactly. Which is, of course, my famous conversion to Judaism to get a bald wife. It's been tough. I have been in trouble for some wig snatching that I've done in Williamsburg.

But I think I'll be able to harangue one of these ladies into marrying me sooner or later. I like how all the ultra orthodox wigs, they just like took the hair of the guys who were in the monkeys. It's like the hairstyle. That's a good look, though. Yeah. The page was sick. Yeah.

I guess. I guess like, yeah, that's like the most desirable way for a woman to look, ultimately. Like Mickey Dolens. Yeah. Yeah. But what are their ankles like? But you know, you got to figure for a blind guy, the wrists and the ankles are the real tell if you've got a firecracker or not, because otherwise, what are you, what are the criteria

are you judging on? Well, probably the crook of the arm is you're grabbing them and being led into somewhere. You know what I mean? Yeah. This, can you help me onto the subway? The hem of the dress that I, of course, you know, I often see men sort of being dragged along by hulking nine foot tall women sort of cruising along sled like that way. And I would say betwixt the web toes of a mutant is often where blind men like to sort

of make their nests. I think it would probably be like, if you were a woman and like a blind guy who's like amazing at feeling things, similar to Pacino's character and sensible woman. If he like felt the hem of your dress, as you said, and he like picked what brand it is, he's like, oh, Reformation, huh? I think you'd probably be instantly in as a blind guy. Yeah. Oh, they have to remake son of a woman.

Yeah. For today. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Pacino is like, I mean, I guess like Navy Reserve. Yeah. To reflect today's part time soldier.

But yeah, he'll he'll he'll feel her dress and he'll be like, oh, Reformation, did you pay for it on Klarna? And she'll be like, well, how did you know you're blind? And he's like, just because I'm blind doesn't mean I can't feel a dress. Yeah. He's head to toe arcterics. Yeah. And yeah, he can like, he can like use an iPad to have sex with her in some way.

Yeah. He has neural ink and can fully see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's just feeling her all the time. Yeah. Yeah.

He's like, oh, sometimes the Wi-Fi is not so good, honey. The Bluetooth connection on this iPad don't work so good. And that's his voice. Horrible Pacino. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that sounds exactly like Pacino. It's like Pacino's the easiest voice to do, and that's the worst one I've heard.

You know what? Then do it, Liz. No. I don't think, yeah. Well, I think I sounded like Pacino. I'm reminded of the verse of the man in the arena just now. Richard Kipling, he also loved the way women smelled. Couldn't get enough of it.

Yeah. Big sniffer. That guy could not stop feeling women Kipling. Really? No. He was gay. I gotta be honest. If someone I know showed up and like, was this, this is my friend Rudyard, I'd be like,

I don't know about, I think you should have cleared this was maybe a text before bringing him over. Rudyard? Someone brought Rudyard to the kickback. They're not getting invited back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad, you know, people always talk about how like names are disappearing. I think like Kevin was disappearing from England or something like that. That's one of those names. Rupert or something like that. I gotta say, a lot of these let them fall by the wayside.

Men should just be named Gretchen. Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan. She's bringing it back. They're calling her Guilf Gretchen. Jesus Christ. All right. Enough of this dude, broism, true and non. Welcome back to the show.

We wanted to sort of, you know, close out the year and just check in with, check in with you guys about, you know, the ongoing year of the smile and some of the, some of the best smiles that, that, that you guys have had this year, beginning with, and, you know, I wanted to, I want to talk to you guys about the, the, the Synanon miniseries that you did this year, which Matt and I provided our, our vocal talents to, but like, you know, this is a, it's, it's a really fascinating story that touches on like, basically like the birth of the multi-billion dollar rehab industry in America, these bad teen camps and like the, the Monarch school, which you attended brace and I just want to get your

perspective like I was, I was a good teen. So I went to good teen summer camp where, you know, we would water ski, I got my boner felt for the first time, but what, what was bad teen camp like and bad, bad teen school? And how did this like inform the, the, the genesis for this miniseries that you guys did? Well, I was, I was kind of a bit, I thought at the time, so many people told me that I was a bad teen that I kind of just was like, oh yeah, I guess it must be. But then I realized later that like many of my friends were significantly worse teens

than I was. And so my, my perspective on that has shifted a little bit, but I got in some legal trouble. I was on probation entering high school. I was kicked out of my first high school I went to on the first day for refusing to take off a sleeveless Gigi Allen shirt that, that expressed his ideals of drink, fight and fuck, very few of those things had actually done. So I was, I was, I was troubled in a sense that like I got in some trouble, but I wasn't like some, you know, crazy fucking kid or nothing.

Anyways, I got kidnapped in the middle and I got taken to this fucking, what's called a wilderness program, which is I think the most common sort of like interaction that a lot of people have with the, what's called the TTI troubled teen industry, which is sort of a, you know, all encompassing word for, for, for what it is. And that I spent about two and a half months out in the Oregon dals in the middle of winter. And being from the Bay, I had never experienced really snow in intense, that intensive formats before. And so it was kind of outward bound, but more extreme.

It was actually two fucked up conditions for us to like hike or anything. So we just marched up and down a road every day for many hours. And then I got sent to a school in Montana, the Monarch school, where I was supposed to be for about a year and a half, maybe a little more, maybe two years, like two, it's a little hazy on when you actually get out of there. And that was a working farm where we had a very, very, very small amount of school work, a good amount of farm work, and then a shit ton of experimental therapy. I would say that we were subjected to, but it was really performed on us.

And I escaped from there after about a year. And it's been, it's remained a huge part of my life. But that was sort of the genesis. Once I got older, and I was actually intimately familiar with the rehab industry, and I started to put together a few different things. And I realized that what I had actually been to was a direct outgrowth of something called Synanon, which was a fairly well known rehab turned cult that existed throughout the 1950s to about 1980s in California.

But yeah, the troubled teen industry is something that I've been fascinated with for a long time because it's just one of these things that like, when you describe it, and I found your descriptions of it in Antruanon to be quite harrowing, but like, yeah, parents will pay people to come kidnap their kids and take them to rural areas and essentially break down their ego because they, I don't know, are talking back or breaking curfew or have been caught with drugs or something like that. I mean, Dr. Phil was a big proponent of this, but basically this is just like the legalized torture and imprisonment of kids for who haven't even committed crimes.

I mean, that's what was sort of extraordinary about it for me is that like, I was a basically, I mean, and all these other kids too, you know, are basically sentenced to what amounts to, you know, like a minimum security prison for, you know, a year, sometimes several years. So you actually sort of have less rights than you would have if you were in juvenile hall. You can't appeal your sentence. All your communications are even more strictly monitored than they would be in a jail. And actually you can get arrested if you leave these things. So you essentially are jailed.

And that I think even, you know, in addition to all of the other sort of like, what essentially amounts to like experimental, psychological techniques they used on us, I think that underlying guilt of like having been declared guilty without a trial, without really even a crime assigned to you necessarily, sort of just this like general, you know, sort of wide-ranging accusation of being a troubled teen. You know, as I got older and realized that I actually, I have a lot of issues that I struggle with revolving around guilt, that all, a lot of it seemed to have its seed, its sort of genesis in getting sent away to this place.

And yeah, and so it's there, they're pretty, it's pretty extraordinary that they're allowed to be allowed to operate, but they often operate sort of on the peripheral of like, you know, Montana, I don't know if that's, I wouldn't call that periphery, I guess, but you know, like in Montana and Idaho, Utah and places like this with very lax oversight and oftentimes the schools are the biggest jobs programs in town and they, you know, they pay fairly well, or at least better than surrounding, you know, whatever industry that'll be in that town. And so they wield a actual, a pretty hefty amount of political power.

I would just add too that they're, it's not just that they're, you know, minimum security prisons for kids, but that they're private for-profit minimum security prisons. And that, I mean, you mentioned, well, like parents sending their kids away and it's, I think one thing that was difficult for me in talking to Brace about this and as we were kind of moving through the series and doing research for it and talking about it and just talking about his personal experience in general, is trying to put yourself in the position of parents, right? Because it's almost unthinkable, like making that phone call, right?

Like putting yourself in that position is really difficult for me. And I think one thing that we really tried to emphasize a bit in the series is like, you know, it is a multi-billion dollar, part of a multi-billion dollar industry, right? And because of that, it has like an attending cottage industry of supporting consulting firms and complexes, networks and complexes of, you know, supporting industry. Like, and a lot of that includes counselors that are paid for and get like big contracts to schools to advise parents on what to do and they get kickbacks from institutions from troubled teen schools or from, you know, vans that are van companies that are hired to transport

kids to troubled teen schools. There's all of these kind of layers to this, right? And I think that part of what, you know, a lot of, I think a lot of people have started looking at the troubled teen industry recently because of the Paris Hilton documentary that came out, which was fantastic and shed a lot of light on, you know, some of the really just horrific practices in these places, less so has been paid attention to the kind of, you know, complexes of these consultants, of these, you know, wilderness programs, of the kind of transportation programs and a lot of the kind of interrelated components

that really look at, I mean, parents in a lot of cases with these kids end up being victims of this system as well. How would you describe the, for people who aren't familiar with the games here is, which everyone, if they haven't already listened to should, how would you describe like the clinical roots of this kind of like tough love troubled teen industry? Because it seems to have popped up in like, I'd say the last 40 or 50 years, this thing that's sort of like adjacent to the rehab industry complex, but goes in a much more extreme direction where basically you have to teach a treat a tough troubled teen like

a Navy SEAL for them to like, make it out of their delinquency. I mean, there's a, there's a couple of different facets of this that I think, I mean, like a lot of things, you know, it has a, it has a sort of a wide ranging lineage. Many parents here, you know, one of them is Synanon, which was really the first rehab. I mean, the thing is the troubled teen industry actually came out of adult rehab programs. Synanon, like I was saying, saying this sort of rehab during Colt was very famous and partially shut down because they had a practice of essentially kidnapping children and then subjecting them to these things, you know, these boot camps, you know, they had a, I think it was a punk

squad, they called it, which is a lot less cool than it might sound. And really all of the troubled teen industry comes out of a few key players from that. And you know, there was, there was some people who worked at Synanon, this guy, Bill Lane, this other guy, Mel Wasserman, who didn't work there, but was a big proponent of it, started up all these Synanon copycat schools specifically for teens called CEDU, which is what's never really been really confirmed, but it's all but confirmed stood for Charles Eddrick University, Charles Eddrick was the megalomaniacal founder of Synanon, who was of course later famously arrested for attempted murder, and of course relapsed.

But all of it comes out of this like adult rehab thing and tough love. And actually like that, that's something that, that is, was a little almost too wide ranging for us to fully get into in the series, like the sort of like the lineage of like the tough love movement in America, but that can be traced back to really a specific few parenting books and really like a trend of parenting that I believe started in like the early 1980s. You know, America kind of goes through these, these cycles of like really worrying about juvenile delinquency. You know, it's not just America, I think it's pretty much every country and, and in

one of those cycles in like the 1980s, tough love became like a huge, I mean, it's existed in many forms throughout, you know, many different cycles. But, but like that cycle in the 1980s, was that a conscious like reaction against the, was it like the Dr. Spock parenting book that was very, that was a big, I believe Richard Nixon complained about the counterculture being, or being the result of the Spock marked generation of kids, but it's like, you know, the Dr. Spock book is like, yeah, tells parents like, Hey, your kids need attention. Yeah.

Yeah. But funnily enough, a lot of this stuff also has its lineage in a lot of the sort of like touchy feely new age stuff. I mean, Liz, you know, we, we, we, you and I have, Liz and I are both very interested in, in both from California, but you know, there's a lot of weird shit that's gone down in California. And sort of all of the tough, like the, not the tough, excuse me, the, the, the teen industry stuff kind of arose out of the same swamp that like Est and Esalen and all of these like

experimental communities were coming out of too, which of course also took place alongside a lot of the like, you know, of the acid tests or kind of came out of the acid tests and a lot of this, you know, basically like MK ultra stuff. Yeah. Everyone was getting weird and experimental in California in the sixties, right? Yeah. Including the US military. It seems to have, it seems to have like a very, like a very different outgrowth than

this, but it seems to have like popped up alongside like the sort of like goofy human development movement around the same time, like the same, the same type of like stupid thinking. Of like, oh, we're going to hack your consciousness. No, I mean, as human potential movement, I mean Liz, Liz knows a lot about this, played a huge actual role in, in Synanon, like that specifically, Maslow. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people are probably familiar with that name Abraham Maslow because of Maslow's

hierarchy, right? And that's the idea that there are, there's like a hierarchy of needs, you know, legs, dress, hems, yeah, the nape of the neck. Oh my God. No, it's like, you know, you have like the lower ones, like the more base needs. And then as you get higher up the, you know, the pyramid, you get up to the higher ones, which are, you know, things like self actualization. Yeah.

Well, that's the, yes, that's the road up to fulfilling these higher needs. That's what's, you know, that's the path, self actualization in order to reach those higher levels, you need to kind of actualize or peak, which if you're listening and you're like, damn, that sounds kind of like doing acid, ding, ding, ding, there's a connection there because Abraham Maslow, you know, in that, you know, he's looking for, this is in the time of like, you know, the late fifties, early sixties, he's looking for these, you know, kind of subjects that he thinks are, you know, like visions for like a new democratic society, right?

These are people who have, you know, have moved up this, this hierarchy of needs are achieving these like higher highs of human consciousness or are peaking. And he saw that one way that some of these people are doing it was through acid, right? And so there's a lot of kind of mirrors at play here in terms of, let's say, you know, doctors looking at, you know, acid experiments and seeing, okay, subjects are reaching these higher levels. And we maybe like induce this so that we could, you know, get, get more and more people, you know, to achieve higher consciousness.

I mean, it's a, it's a topic that is, you know, it's perfect for, for true and non, but you know, the sort of psychic epicenter of California in America as like the breeding as, as, as what like sort of gave birth to all of this stuff, because you had at this time, you know, the beginnings of the counterculture and like you said, like LSD and like revolutions and sex and being and consciousness. But at the exact same moment, just as, just as if not more interested in these same experiments, you have the defense industry, the intelligence community, and then like a variety of no across type with barons and oligarchs in California, all of whom sort of coalesced around this

idea that through psychology that people could be reformed into, I don't know, sort of smoother functioning nodes and capable of self-government and democracy out of the horrors of World War II. Well, I mean, it's funny because Synanon itself, which is like really in so many ways like this, the genesis of all of the, I've said genesis like a hundred fucking times, but there's a lot of genesis going on in this, that's where all this came from. I mean, that was originally the idea of this guy named Charles E. Diedrich, who actually had worked in the defense industry himself, not as like an executive or anything like

worked at plants. But you know, this guy is an alcoholic, you know, he was born in the early 20th century, I think like 1911, you know, like a lot of people, he saw the rise of AA and started going to Alcoholics Anonymous in the early 1950s. But meanwhile, you know, it's early 1950s, that's also when really the first acid tests are being done, like down at UCLA. And in fact, the same acid tests that the founder of AA, Bill Wilson, participated in. This guy, Charles Diedrich, drops acid and sees like, has like a Philip K. Dickie experience,

which, you know, Philip K. Dick took acid one time, blew his fucking mind, same with this guy. It flipped his fucking shit around. He sees like everything, he's one of those guys who acid opens a door for him and he walks right through as opposed, which is not generally actually a good idea to do. But you know, he realizes that like, actually you need to really remold a person completely in a way that like Alcoholics Anonymous was he thought incapable of. So he sort of starts this offshoot and starts this, you know, really the first modern rehab.

And that eventually, you know, turns into just like converging all these interests like excellent S that, you know, all these defense, you know, thinkers ran corporation, all these people realizing that you actually have to have to create a more manageable human being, like remold a person entirely. And so Synanon goes from being like actually a pretty, you know, a pretty revolutionary, you know, rehabilitation concept to being a utopian community, sort of in Tamales Bay and throughout California, that, you know, is modeled on these like really sort of SO, not semi esoteric lines, but has an almost military structure.

And so it's funny to see that like all of these kind of different, you know, on surface level might be like disparate groups, you know, like these sort of like these hippies, these new age people, but also these fucking like, you know, pencil neck geeks and these fucking squat headed generals or whatever, they all kind of come to the same conclusion around the same time in the same place that you really have to have to, you know, basically blow a man up and then completely reconstitute him in order to make him a governable force. And you know, part of that process are these like, you know, you mentioned encounter sessions or as you know, then the development of the game, I just like just broadly speaking like

what is it an encounter session and how does it work? Like, like if you were to encounter me and give me up with a session. Well, well, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to do that here, but so what I encounter when I was 13 years old, my first exposure to anything like this was we had these things that they called group at Monarch and Monarch, of course, actually was a descendant of Sidhu, which of course is a descendant of Synanon. And so this is a direct lineage from the game as these groups were called at Synanon, they all have cute little nicknames wherever they pop up.

And I would basically sit down across from you, well, there'd probably be a large group of people sometimes as a small group of people, but you know, in my experience, it was always like, you know, like around 30 people or something like that, you know, some 15 to 30. But you can do it with any amount of people, I guess, and I would sit down across from you and I would see, I would try to pinpoint all of the things that would essentially break you down, right? Like I would, I would, and I would just insult you, essentially. I mean, you know, you might gussied up with some psychiatric talk, but that's really what

I'd be doing is I'd try to insult you in so personal a way and try to needle you about things that I knew would probably bother you or that maybe you don't like about yourself in order to get some sort of like break out of you, right? You know, for instance, if you are, if you can't stop, like, you know, if you're, you're addicted to video games or something, like I would, you know, I would sit down across from you and, you know, I would tell you how much you've wasted your life, how much of a failure you are. Like basically, I would try to think of all of this self, self doubt and the self hatred

and the self loathing that you yourself might have in your head. And I would try to give voice to that in the affirmative in order for you to have what amounts to essentially a public mental breakdown. And at that point, that's where the reconstitution would really begin. But this isn't just something that you do once, this isn't like, you know, you go one time. I mean, at some of these facilities, they do this every single day. And you know, at certain points, et cetera, people were in these groups all day, every

day. It really, it becomes, I mean, I've seen people, I've seen a lot of people in my life have mental breakdowns in front of me from various places for various reasons. And people in these groups would really like, I mean, I have vivid memory. I have a very bad memory. I have vivid memories of the way that people would like, you know, really truly break under the pressure. And the thing is, you can break somebody that actually has never really been a problem,

I think in psychology, it's actually pretty not very difficult to break somebody. It's the reconstitution part that's very difficult. And I got to say, from my personal experience, from all of the things that I've learned about all these other schools, from interviews I've done with people, it seems to not work. And so all of the programs at these places, I mean, there are offshoots of this stuff that get even more psychedelic and out there. But the basic core building block of all these programs is some version of the game, of these encounter sessions, of these anarchic and really vicious group therapy sessions that

can last for hours and hours and hours. You probably don't want the same people doing the breaking down and the building up, different skill sets you'd imagine, you know? Yeah, we should say too that what Chuck saw in the game when he was developing it and the kind of high highs that he was trying to reach in these encounter sessions were emerging out of his own experience with acid, right? And that also mirrors what Maslow saw at Synanon. He visited Synanon quite a few times.

He was invited to speak there. He saw it as a kind of utopian community and what they were doing there as basically living out his vision for these kind of peak individuals and what they were doing, which was a complete and total mental breakdown. Like how do you inculcate the same sense of disassociation from your own identity and kind of ego death in another person without chemical inducement, right? Exactly. Yeah.

I mean, from my own experience, the circumstances around my escape from this place is I was actually supposed to go home. I'd been there for about a year and I was supposed to go home for, I think, three days. And in that period of time, if any of my friends were to contact me for any reason, I would have to tell them I'm a different person, that I can't have any contact with them at that point or in the future, I would have to get rid of my musical, I was like a little punk kid, but I mean, again, I was like barely fucking 13 or whatever when I got sent away. So I had to get rid of two misfit CDs or something like that because a huge thing that they imprinted

on us over and over and over and over again is that you have to annihilate your self-image, that that's like the first barrier you have to break through to breaking down the rest of you. And the way they would reinforce that is they would make us do these exercises where we would have to talk about our interests or music we liked or something like that. And then we would have to come up with reasons or our peers would have to come up with reasons why that would or that could and now that eventually will lead to our actual literal physical deaths, right?

And so I was told as like a little guy who like, you know, I like like the New York Dolls and the Ramones and stuff. And they were like... Talk about a personality crisis. Exactly. Yeah. They were like, this is going to kill you. The Ramones are going to kill me.

It's like children's music. Jesus Christ. One of the more like, you know, harrowing aspects of listening to your, relate your experiences to this as you talk about how if you were ever trying to like hold something back or hide something, the people who did this were so skilled at like sussing out like the hesitance or defense mechanisms that they could just like dismantle you. Yeah. So like what the person who was reconstituted after submitting yourself to this is not a

human being who is more honest of themselves than others, but in fact is actually turns you into a really accomplished liar and makes you excellent at deceiving other people and yourself. Yeah. I mean, for me, it's like, it was when I first showed up to this school, I was sort of like when I was in wilderness, like all the kids there were kind of like, this is fucking stupid. Like I can't wait to go back and smoke some salvia.

You know, but like when I got to, when I got to Monarch, you know, they sort of had these kids had been there for a while, sort of like showing me around my first day. And I remember like when we were alone, I mean, there was two other kids and me, I was like, I mean, you guys don't really believe in this shit, do you? And they were like, yeah, we do. We absolutely do. And like sort of gave me these like, these really like, I don't know, horrifically earnest eyes.

And what I learned though, and I was like, oh my God, this brainwashing works so well, like, holy fuck, if it can work on them, it can work on me. What I learned though, is it's a very flawed process. And it doesn't actually work, you know, I'm in touch with a lot of alum, alumnus from my school. I have spoken to a lot of people. I am, I am one of very few people who actually did not go through the whole program. I was, I think the second, first or second person to ever successfully escape.

And it'd been around for. Papillon over here. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, before me, before I got there, rather. And you know, it doesn't really work. It does, you know, it makes you, you know, the practices that they do here at these

programs, and this is, you know, ever from my school to Synanon proper, it makes you a good member of that community. But it does not prepare you at all for any, any actual interaction with life itself, right? So like, you know, I could, I could get out of there feeling very confident that I'm honest, that I'm, you know, blah, blah, blah, but what I really learned actually how to do is how to actually like hide the complexities and nuances of being a human being, right? They try to make you into a one dimensional subject. And, and I mean, that, that we saw that with, with Synanon itself, I mean, literally at

one point in Synanon in the, in the 1970s, everyone just started drinking again and they justified that to themselves and to the outside using these therapeutic terms they learned. And I think that many listeners here, whether they have any, any, you know, actual contact with therapy or the fucking, you know, insane, many, I mean, if we're talking about therapy writ large, bajillion dollar industry in America, you will have encountered, you know, the prevalence of therapeutic terms that are used just in society. And I'm sure that everybody listening to this can think of, of instances where they, where they've actually seen people use these like, you know, gasoline or whatever these therapeutic

terms in a manipulative way. And what these schools teach you to do is they teach you how to do that specifically with like this way of, of unloading yourself. And it's funny because when I was there, I got really good at never saying anything. And like, it actually like, I got good at being at group because I figured out a way to be completely in the middle and essentially invisible. I never talked too much. I never talked too little.

I just did the absolute minimum because I knew after a year I was going to escape. And I, you know, it's funny because I've seen guys who did really bad there. I've seen guys who done really good there and the outcomes. I mean, the first, the first sort of alumnus that I ran into, you know, this is like five years ago, I ran into him at a meeting and he had was like a really like star, you know, like game player. Like he was, he was really into the program. I mean, he was a good guy.

He was just like, he did the program really well, you know, I run into him and he'd been an alcoholic for many years and then he killed himself a few months later. And it's like these programs, absolutely 100% unequivocally do not prepare you how to be a human being in society whatsoever. Well, I guess it was like a question I had after, after listening to the series is, you know, based on the research you've done and your own personal experiences, you mentioned that, you know, rehab is now a $42 billion industry in America. It's a private privately run industry that is rife with all kinds of fraud and physical

and sexual abuse. And it is like sort of like a, like especially the troubled team program, like a parallel carceral system for people who haven't even been convicted of crimes. But at the same time, like drug and alcohol addiction remain big problems for a lot of people. Do you have any better sense of what rehab treatment or programs that to deal with addiction, what a system that like is better than the current one? Or is there anything that does work that like you would imagine like, what would be like

a better looking form of therapy and help for all many people who need it? It's an interesting question. It's hard for me to say. I mean, it's with addiction, I think, you know, I was a heroin addict for a number of years and methamphetamine addict as well. I've been clean now for about a little over eight years. And I experienced a sort of not a wide range, but a decent range of treatment, you know, ranging from decent to from good to bad when I was trying to get clean, which was itself

a long process. You know, I genuinely don't know and I wish I did. You know, I think that I think that it's probably in general a two pronged approach. You know, I think that there's a reason that so many people seek out drugs, specific, especially now when the dangers of overdose, even on drugs that used to not really overdose on, you know, like fentanyl and coke and all that shit is high. I think there's a reason that people seek those out at the levels that they do now. But I also think there's a reason that people really don't want to stop.

And for me, like, I had to get just so desperate that I would do anything that looked like it would work, right? Like, I had to really want to stop. And that's the problem with a lot of addiction is it's such an individualized issue and it requires a certain amount of commitment from the addict themselves that you can't actually imprint on somebody. I mean, if you could imprint how bad drugs and alcohol were on people, then dare would have worked, right?

But it's something that like, and this is what makes it such a difficult thing. It's something that you really have to come through yourself. And for me, I mean, I, you know, I, you know, I go to a certain program now, but I don't really like, it's funny, like rehab for me was just a place for me to get some distance from dope and the actual programs they had in any of these places, because now Synanon's influence has waned a little bit, a lot, a bit in rehab and they're all, you know, all kinds of different scams and shit going on. But I think the general utility for a lot of people is to get a little bit of distance.

And I think that distance, and then also giving somebody some purpose afterwards is really important. You know, I know a lot of addicts that I lived in a lot of halfway houses, people just like kind of languish on the couch all day, they don't have any money, they don't have a job. And giving somebody some sort of purpose and a future, you know, and something, and something to, to actually kind of like light the path for them, I think is really important. And for me, I'm really lucky. I've sort of always had these like intense longings and dreams and stuff that, that,

that personally helped me get, get through a lot of this. But for a lot of other people, I know that has not been the case. And that's, I guess, I know it's sort of, sort of a roundabout answer, but the truth is I don't know, you know, I don't know what works for people. I know it doesn't work, which is a lot of, a lot of the industry as it stands now. There is a lot of debate over, you know, the, the more like permanent, abstinent based recovery, like we see in America, that seems to be the majority of treatment programs in America are centered around like sort of the 12 step, you know, once you're done, you're done sort

of thing. There are arguments for and against that. I mean, I think some people are certainly better served by never touching anything ever again, whereas others maybe that isn't so helpful because with some people, they will relapse after treatment or after a period of sobriety and think like, Oh, well, fuck it. You know, I'm off to the races. This is just, just as bad as going down to my deepest depth. So might as well get there, but something you said that is interesting that I think

is very true is that, you know, whether it's permanent abstinence or a period of sobriety and trying to rebuild your life, you do need a sense of purpose. If you're going to replace this thing that was like the central focus of your life, this thing that you did every day, like figuring out how to obtain whatever substance. Because like any, a life of purpose for like anyone in America gets more difficult. I think recovery for is just immeasurably more difficult. It's probably harder than ever to get people off of drugs or drinking or anything. Like what if you, if you don't have like some type of like life mission or passion or something

like maybe family money or some project that you can take on. If you are like a heroin addict or a meth addict or an alcoholic and you get sober for like two months, okay, now what? You work at a fucking Amazon Pullman Center, you know, you fucking look at your phone all day. It's tough. Yeah. I mean, especially then, like, I mean, I know for me, like I was like, there was like

a week where I was like, fuck yeah, like I'm fucking, I don't have withdrawals anymore. Like I'm not feeling crazy. Like I'm sober. I was like, oh, I live in a halfway house, really far from anywhere I know, but also everyone I know won't talk to me and I don't have any money and I fucking have to like, I'm still like literally picking up cigs off the fucking ground that haven't been smoked that much to smoke them. And like, yeah, yeah, I mean, I fully agree.

I mean, I also agree that like, you know, to me, like I know what works for me. I know that I'm too crazy to fucking, I'm too nuts to, I can't drink, you know, I can't, I can't do any of this stuff. For some people, that's like not the case, I know guys that just quit doing dope and are like, they have like a glass of Chianti every now and then. Well, I don't know. I don't really even know what Chianti is to be totally honest with you guys. But it's, yeah, it's difficult, you know, and sort of the depths of desperation that

I both felt myself and then witnessed from my peers, you know, sometimes some of these places I've lived or, you know, these people I spent a lot of time with, especially in early sobriety, it's really fucking, it's really similar to being a junkie, right? Like you have, except with a junkie, you have a mission because, you know, you got to go score dope every day. You got to go do, you know, you got to go fucking bit the car, you know, rip somebody off or whatever every day to fucking to get your, your, your dope. But you no longer have that.

And I think that like, it's funny because, you know, sitting on all these places, try to give these people a purpose, they did, you know, the purpose unfortunately was trying to kill a guy with a rattlesnake and all that kind of shit. But, but I think that's in general, like, I think, I think there's a reason that, that like, you see in so many places like where there is like, where there's a sort of like general, I guess, malaise or lack of purpose, you see the proliferation of drugs and alcohol, this huge, I mean, like, you know, rural Russia, rural America, you know, in the Middle East and rural areas, you know, it's, it's very like, I mean, also in cities and all these

places as well, but, you know, it's, it's, it's, I think that like, a lot of people, frankly, have, have nothing that to live, to live for, essentially. And I think that is like the, the, the underlying thing of all this is like, there's this hole in everybody that everybody wants to kind of fucking fill, but a lot of people literally have no way of knowing that even that they have that hole, or they wouldn't know what to fill it with. And I think that, that gets people, including myself, really locked in this fucking, this cycle.

And for people living in like extremely desperate circumstances, they are like partly filling it with the chemical sensation of their high, but it seems more so that they're filling it with like the sense of purpose and excitement and relief they get out of like being a junkie. They actually, they get, yeah, they get to go on this like fucking quest every day that you don't necessarily like get to do in normal life anywhere else. Yeah, yeah, they should, they should, they should give quests to, to people because it's true. Like you really do.

I mean, I would be like buying methadone from a guy named frog and shit and like this SRO and I'd be like, I have to get up to the SRO to step over a bunch of people and I'd have to fucking step over the Puerto Rican tweaker, smoke a Methodist, how it's like, you know, this is, this is quest like in this, there's potions and things like that. Healing powder of morphine, you know, it's, it's very, it's, it's, it's very Elden Ring. Like a lot of people die. Yeah. You respawn.

But yeah, no, I mean, I, I, it's so funny because it's, there's that like conservative thing like, you know, like back in the fucking 1940s, men were men, like, but like, yeah, but back then like, this is why I think, oh, don't get me started on the draft, but I'm like, they got to bring back the draft. Not because I want people to join the army because I think that will eventually take down America. But, but yeah, I think, I think at the end of the day, I think it's a really like a lack of purpose a lot of people feel and I think that's not even just like drug addicts or

anything like that. I think it's just in general, a lot of people and how they fill that void, whatever they, they fill that with, you know, some people, it's, it's, it's dope. Some people, it's speed, you know, some people, it's, you know, whatever their hobby is that, that maybe isn't so good for them. Yeah. It's, it's fucking. So that means the solution is government issued quests.

Yeah. Well, that's what, yeah, that's what rehab should be. It should be like the start of Elden Ring. No, they should just mail to random people. Like you turn 18, congratulations. You open your mailbox and boom, there's a letter from the government saying, you have to acquire this gem. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. You have to steal the Mona Lisa or are you going to go to prison for the rest of your life? Yeah. I would.

Oh my God. The Elden Draft. Yes. I would love to work as an NPC in the government issued RPG. Yeah. Wayward young men fetch quests. I'd love to be a shopkeep that would just sell you things, buy things for so little money.

I'd be like, yeah, I'll give you, I'll give you a dollar for that sword, bro. It's nothing more than that. I was going to say, speaking of speed, another thought I had listening through the series was the extent to which, what are your thoughts on how prescribed Adderall or prescription and Fetamines basically for, originally for kids, but now I think for basically a huge category of adults who just take them to do their job. How much, now there's a nationwide Adderall shortage, to what extent do you see legal prescribed drugs like Adderall to be up, and then antidepressants to make you kind of okay

with the shitty conditions of your life and having to take Fetamines to do an email job? How do you think things like Adderall have replaced the sort of, I don't know, the tough love or disciplining of kids? Well, I got to tell you, I've done a lot of speed, right? I mean, methamphetamine is different than amphetamine, but there is prescription methamphetamine, but... Amphetamine. Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, and the fucking, and the patches.

But I got to tell you, I don't think it's a great idea for this many Americans to be on speed. I know that it's some people, I know that for some people it really helps them and does the opposite of what speed usually does to people, but almost everybody I know that takes Adderall takes it like you would take speed, like, yeah, it just makes me, it helps me clean my room. Like, yeah, that's, guess what I used to do when I was on meth? I took apart like fucking hinges on my bathroom door and shit like that and like cleaned them.

Did you ever write YA novels though? No, no, no. And I think that, I mean, here's my thing with it. Amphetamine fucks with like your emotional regulatory capacity really badly. And like, I know that like, it can make you fucking like fly off the handle like that. And it's like, you know, I'm not a psychologist or nothing, I don't know about people's, you know, I don't know about the way chemicals work and all this kind of stuff. I will say, and like, you know, I'm on, I'm on a medication, I, in fact, I take, I take

its medication to sleep. That gives me nightmares, but, but I, you know, so, you know, I'm not like anti medication or anything like that by any means, but I do think that like, for a lot of people, like, it's not, I mean, I just encounter in my life, you know, I'm not saying this as a prescription for everybody, anything like that. Like in my life, I think a lot of people will view, will view getting on a medication and as maybe a way to like, like, oh fuck, that this is going to solve everything. And then when it doesn't, things actually get worse, you know, like when that, when

that, you know, that SSRI doesn't work or whatever the, the, the, the amphetamine doesn't make you better at work. Like you, you sort of like, it's the sense of like hopelessness that I know people have on, but also like, you know, as a, you know, again, it's, it really depends on the person. I do think though, like, I'm like, I'm like, really not the, I think a few too many people are amphetamine. I don't think there should be an amphetamine shortage in America. That seems to me a little bit, a little bit crazy, but we're also getting really good

at gaming. So it's like a, it's like a trade-off there and Bitcoin, I think we've got a lot of Bitcoin, I think partially due to, due to that. I mean, actually, like we're talking about, you know, amphetamine induced psychosis. This, this is a good segue into, you know, crypto, which I know you guys have been, have been great on. And look, I don't want to, I don't want to talk, I can't talk anymore about Elon Musk and Twitter.

Like the guy just keeps messing up, like it's, it's been beaten into the ground by, by, by this point. But I, but I would, I would suggest that like this is part of a larger story, which is the sort of increasingly rickety nature of media and tech infrastructure. You know, you've got Netflix or it's like hemorrhaging users, HBO is deleting shows after they've been acquired and produced media lay, layoffs is just like, there's this sense that the media tech and information sphere that has been dominated by these few massive corporations, but what, what happens when they start to fail and there's nothing left

or there's not, there doesn't seem, there's anything to replace it. Like there's nothing that it's going to replace Twitter, but like, you know, as, as money dries up and these tech companies begin to flounder, I mean, what is, what is your guys like going, going into 2023, do you have any thoughts on like the, the state of our increasingly shabby tech monopolies? I would say everything's going to get slower, crappier and kind of like jankier. It's I think a lot of people are coming to the realization that a lot of their personality depended on low interest rates.

And now that that doesn't, now that we are not in a Zerp regime and there isn't just like fund money sloshing around everywhere, funding, whatever, stuff is going to kind of creak a little bit louder and, you know, in stranger ways. I think, well, actually I don't, I don't even know. I just think it's all going to break. I think that everything's kind of becoming LinkedIn. There's like just two apps. There's like LinkedIn and then there's like TikTok Instagram, like the video picture ones

and like they're all kind of becoming like, you either got the writing ones are all LinkedIn and then the video ones are all, are TikTok Instagram. And so it's like, that's just like those, that's any of the other stuff. I got to tell you, Elon Musk was right to ban anybody who posted their Mastodon account. Yeah. That's like, to me, to me, it's someone's like, I got a Mastodon account. Like, all right. That's like having a septum piercing.

I get it. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I get what your whole deal is. Okay. I resent like that there's so many characters and dots. It's like, I don't want to see this is ugly. It's confusing.

What is that? A dot onion? What is it? If you use Mastodon as like a replacement good for Twitter, you are hopelessly addicted. Yeah. Yeah. You need to look in the mirror. It's so shitty.

Yeah. That should be your, that should be your like on the ground, trying to like hoover off Coke Flex from the fucking Shag carpeting moment. Be like, look at what you're doing. Yeah. Trying to turn this into that experience. Yeah. There needs to just be a new app that functions worse than all of the other ones, but that

everyone has to use. That's I'm saying people always like nationalize Twitter or something like that. I'm like, no, the government needs to come up with its own app that functions essentially like trying to like do one of the healthcare exchanges. So like your password never works, your account gets locked immediately for anything. It's fully like there's just like bubble things. I'm telling you, and they should ban all the other apps. It's just like one new one that's trying to get an appointment at the DMV, but you can

somehow, you can comment on other people's appointments and stuff like that. You have to post a picture yourself. And that, that I believe should be. Yeah. Yeah. It should be a government run forum that like runs exactly the same. It's run exactly the same by probably the same people as the something awful forums. Like search never works.

You have to pay $10 to like get an avi. You can have a signature, but you have to be in a certain tax bracket. And that'll, that'll be good if it's shitty because it'll get more people to spend more time on their government issued quests. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So when you created the whole in your life it would be, Oh, you know, this, this map is incomplete. You know, and I don't, I don't get these references. I can go on the, the government forum and talk to other people who have sort of similar requests. And then I can take that information and actually do something with it as opposed to just sit

there curating it like a personality that interacts with no other human being. Well, this is kind of like, and that's how I used to use Twitter, like back like, you or whatever, I'd always be like, does anyone have a gun in fucking Oakland right now that I really need to use it? Or like, can I stay at your house tonight? I'm in Berkeley, can I please stay over? And it's just, you know, it's making requests.

And I think that, I basically think that people should just start using Craigslist again. The thing is, what we're all describing horrifyingly, just blowing everyone's mind, is next door, by the way. Yeah. That is literally what we're all describing, which, oops, takes you back seas, no one wants that. Well, and I think too, whenever I see people being like,

look at this crazy post I found on next door, I'm like, you're also insane. You're using that. Nobody, I have lived in neighborhoods since the day I was born. And never in my life have I had to be like, wow. I've been staying in neighborhoods. Exactly.

Look at that. I don't need to talk to them. Attention, attention, Oakland questers. I do kind of think that sometimes when people are like, oh, we need like locally owned and operated run social media sites, and I'm like, isn't that next door? I'm the fucking 500 block mod. All the people who post those next door screenshots,

it is like, guys, look at this funny ass post I found on the small dick forum. Yeah, exactly. On the sub forum that you have to be registered and have a thousand posts to be a part of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's crazy because I do post my funky little penis on next door constantly, and no one ever screenshots it.

So, interesting. Yeah, it's more trusting when people use their real names. Exactly. My real names and address. The government has just announced that they are unlocking a smithing stone level four if you let Brace and Liz stay in your house for a week. Actually, please, please, please, any chapel listeners,

please never let me stay in your house. Never. I have a very pathetic like Craigslist thing to confess. When I was like 17 and very hungry, I would like go to the Chicago Miss Connections to see if like a girl talked about seeing me on the train. How do you think you would be described? I was just wondering what keywords you were looking for.

Felix, I think that's really cute. I think it was like, like, large? Chicago, that's tough. That is tough. That is a tough one in Chicago. I don't know why I thought that would like, I don't know why someone would see like a 17-year-old and be like, where was he going?

Like a hot woman. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A 16-year-old boy. You senior in high school, it's worth it. That's, I think that's great. You were carrying the Battlefield 19, or the Battlefield 3 expansion pack. Yeah, yeah, clutching it to your chest

as if it was the Bible and you were a Mormon. Yeah, I just thought, I guess I thought that was like the most, like that would be the easiest way for me to have sex and it would be like on a battlefield I was most familiar with, the computer. I was like, I'm at home here. It's funny to, I actually, I'm agreeing with Liz, I think this is cute because I think it's cute

that you were so horny that the way you thought you could have sex was on the misconnections part and not the actual horny like hookup part of Craigslist. Yeah, because it's from me and that's not just like horny. That's actually romantic. Yeah, Felix was not interested in a casual encounter. He was interested in a missed connection. Yeah, true love.

He's still on the Chicago L. The Craigslist offices used to be in the sunset in San Francisco in like literally a basement like, which there aren't a lot of like basement level like shop fronts in San Francisco. Famously. Yeah, exactly. And so you, well, there's not a lot of basements. And so you'd walk past it and be like,

that's where they're doing that from. But you know what it fits too. It fits. It should be underground. Yeah. Or rat people. One last question I got for you guys to round out this year's smiles. You know, this was your main beat to start out with. It's now been about a year since Jolaine Maxwell

was sentenced in the Epstein case. Just like with the benefit of hindsight, I mean, Brace and Liz, do you have any thoughts about like, what the state of the Epstein case is? Or just like, it's not the case, but like it's broader implications in American politics and society. Well, I would say it's funny

because Jolaine, there's been recently some like more murmurs coming kind of out of her camp. I know she gave an interview a couple of months ago. She's probably as the years go by going to give some more. But also do not go to the Jocelyn Maxwell camp. Don't send your kids there for the love of God. Don't do that. No, no, no. Really bad question.

Well, that is, I believe, a minimum security federal prison in Florida. So that is not, I mean, there's probably, you know, I could make a case for some young people I know getting sent there, but they're all adults. But yeah, it's funny because it became, especially around the Golan Maxwell, time of the Golan Maxwell trial,

like, you know, the Epstein case sort of like, was really big when it first happened. And then like, you know, there would be occasional like moments and flurries of like interest in it. You know, maybe something got unsealed. Maybe, you know, someone makes a new accusation or something like that.

But now it's sort of like, there's like the dribs and drabs that are sort of coming out about it. Like, you know, various people kind of getting connected to it, fucking, you know, Sarah Rantzone, her testimony just got unsealed, some previous testimony just got unsealed. I think that basically a lot of people

are kind of like wiping their foreheads. Cause even though they were named in like, either the black book or on the flight logs or something like that, nothing really happened to any of them. And that's something we've been talking about since really like the beginning is like, for most of these people,

we can all know that like somebody, you know, Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, one of these guys is like, he was on the island. He's with the girls, all this kind of stuff. And that knowledge, it like, it doesn't actually translate into any real world consequences for any of those people. Which I think like, if you know,

if you're in the, if you're a politically minded person, you will find familiar from various crimes that people commit. And yeah, I mean, I'm interested to see, you know, what's going to happen basically in the next year with this stuff, is she'll give more interviews. If more stuff will get unsealed,

what the appeal is going to look like. Although who knows how long that process is going to take to get started or to get really get going. But, but yeah, I mean, you know, it's funny because at the end of the day, like what do we get? Three people arrested, Epstein, Jean-Luc Brunel,

Ghislaine Maxwell, two of those killed themselves or died or were killed in prison. And then one of them is kind of on a funny farm in Florida. And well, not actually a funny farm, but- It could be. I mean, it could be a funny farm. I like Call in Place of the Funny Farm. Funny Farm and Nut House are two, I like Call in Place.

I like the Graybar Hotel. Graybar Hotel. Classic Academy is a good one I like. Yeah, oh, that's, yeah, it's a classic. The Nut House is more punitive. The Funny Farm is more like, you know, you did something whimsical and now you have to be kept away,

but you can come back. It's when he gave all his money to elves. It's when you've been captured in a butterfly net, then they send you to the Funny Farm. Yeah, the Funny Farm is like, that's like the purgatory in the government issued RPG. You have to fight your way out of the Funny Farm. A bunch of people, I guess, who think they're Napoleon.

Yeah. They're coming to take me away. Ha ha, they're coming to take me away. I think thinking back on the trial, you know, it's funny you bring that up. Well, I was thinking about it the other day. And when we left the, like after the, you know, verdict came down when we were leaving the courthouse,

like I felt this sense of like, I kind of still like anger and incompleteness, you know what I mean? And it was this very weird feeling. Like we had just gone through this whole thing and watched this happen and justice was served and all of this, you know, et cetera, et cetera, whatever. But it is that feeling of like knowing, like you said, okay, three people arrested, one in the Funny Farm, two dead.

And then the people implicated and named that we, that everyone is aware of and these networks like keep going, keep, you know, Elon Musk. Now the CEO of Twitter, perfect example. Like all of these people kind of continuing on and on in doing whatever they want to do. And obviously a lot of these networks still existing. And I was like talking to someone about that

right after the trial. And he was like, well, you know, I think for the victims that were here, like this really does mean something. And that alone like means something, right? And that was like something that I continued to like try to hold on to is to try to like, you know, remember that because it's tough.

It's tough when you're sort of faced with this sort of like overwhelming vastness it feels like or it's like, it's almost like too big to fail, it feels like, right? And so it's tough kind of trying to think through some of the implications of that and sit with it. I think that's been tough for us in following this entire story.

I remember that was something we talked about the first time you guys were on the show, when the Epstein and Rast was already new, when a lot of people were finding out about this whole network for the first time. Something that I think all of us said at one point or another was that if you are expecting this to like bring down a president or a senator

or even like, you know, a former president, like even like you're going to stop seeing Bill Clinton around, you're probably going to be disappointed. Yeah, yeah. Because yeah, the unfortunate thing is with American politics, and I think politics in general most of the time

is like, unfortunately people knowing something is off just isn't enough. People know something is off or people know the game is rigged or people know that people get, people in power get into all types of things. And that's not really enough, unfortunately. But it is, if there is one thing that happened

that disgusted me and that I didn't predict but maybe I should have, it would be sort of like the memification of it where the only cultural legacy of this like insane thing, these insane revelations and these like vast horrifying networks is like conservatives wearing like Epstein didn't kill himself ugly Christmas sweat.

Yeah. Like that's it. This car freshener didn't hang itself kind of bullshit. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That was the one thing I didn't really predict, but like, yeah, maybe we should have seen coming. Yeah.

Or I mean like, or also like the mutation of concern over victims into like the introduction of the concept of I don't know, like organized child abuse or pedophilia among American elites sort of, I don't know, being disseminated to the American public in ways that have become, if not a meme then certainly like acts of political propaganda like or hysteria.

Well, yeah, I mean, it's funny like, cause now I mean our podcast is named Truinon, obviously sort of a nod or like a take or whatever on QAnon, but it's like that like QAnon's basically, I mean, it's kind of like it morphed into some other shit like COVID, COVID really did a number on it, both in like killing many of its, you know, most poor scene proponents,

but also, you know, in sort of changing the focus of a lot of it. But it was, I mean, that was fucking insane. Like QAnon's whole shit, like thinking back, like that's crazy that like one of the biggest political movements to come out of like the Trump era was a huge group of people who spent all their time on fucking four-chan and eight-chan

convinced that Hillary Clinton ate a baby. I mean, a huge part of that was that, the frazzle drip video that Hillary Clinton, well, I guess she maybe, he might have been, I think, wore the baby. She wore the baby's face. Or the baby's face. She ate the baby that ate the face,

kind of a fat bastard situation. Yeah, exactly. And so it's a- It happens when you don't have government sponsored quests. Yeah, exactly. It happens when you don't give people quests, they will find their own quests. Yeah, and one of the-

It's a goon project. QAnon is like a goon project at the end of the day. Good God. Of course, the theory is that this is a government-issued quest and that the whole QAnon deal is an op to, but I mean, to some degree, who knows, but people want it and the internet exists now to allow all of your deepest desires and fears

and are actually desires to be reflected back to you and to give you, at every step, a yes and, down a road to destroying your brain. I am, I just, I really hate the reality that a bunch of Korean war veterans went on 8chan. Yeah, it's insane. It's really horrible. Well, we'll leave it there for today's show.

Brace and Liz, I wish you many smiles in the upcoming year. Anything to preview or plug for QAnon coming up soon? What a fantastic reminder for something that I know I forgot and I have a good feeling Liz did too. We are actually going on, the year of the smile tour is continuing into, well, the year of the smile is like the fiscal year,

so we're not telling you when it starts or when it ends, but we are going on tour in February and we're going to Boston and then Toronto and Quebec and then we're going to fucking Denver, Minneapolis and Austin, we'll post a link and, but tickets are on sale. It's gonna be our live show. Yeah, it'll be a lot of fun, hope to see you there.

Well, if you haven't seen a Truendon live show yet, get on that because you guys are coming with a lot of showmanship, a lot of stage presence and sets, music, they don't want to build you up too much, but check out Truendon live. Got the opportunity to already. We'll be issuing quests at all of our shows.

There are still some gems to discover in the new year, listeners. So yeah, that does it for today's show. Till next time, bye-bye. Bye-bye. It's off. Video. You