Julian Dorey Podcast - #434 - “Zombieland!” - Dark Web Deals, Fentanyl INC. & Rapper P*do Cult COVERUP | Ben Westhoff

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

SPONSORS: 1) MARS MEN: For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off FOR LIFE, Free Shipping, AND 3 Free Gifts at Mars Men at https://Mengotomars.com JOIN PATREON FOR EARLY UNCENSORED EPISODE RELEASES: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey CLIPPERS DISCORD: https://discord.gg/8QmWEKJ3BT (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Ben Westhoff is an investigative journalist and one of the most respected experts on the fentanyl crisis in America. His 2019 book, Fentanyl, Inc. exposed the entire fentanyl market problem to the mainstream FOLLOW BEN: IG: https://www.instagram.com/ben.westhoff/?hl=en BOOK: https://a.co/d/03cARvfi DOC: https://www.antagonistfilm.com/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY YT: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://x.com/juliandorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Fentanyl Inc., Rave Deaths, China Labs 08:50 - Undercover in China, Suspicious Lab Visit, CCP Rebates 22:51 - Capitol Hill Testimony, Fentanyl Analogs, India Precursors 29:55 - Naltrexone, Vivitrol, Addiction Treatment, Methadone Business 39:49 - Psychedelics, Capitalism, Naltrexone Documentary, Dark Web Dealers 49:29 - Fent-Laced Coke, Antagonist, Percy Menzies, Vivitrol Trials 58:18 - AA, Opioids, Alcohol, Compulsive Behaviors, Naltrexone Critics 01:10:32 - Addictive Personalities, Purdue Pharma, Suboxone Pill Mills 01:11:10 - Standard American Diet, Veganism, Factory Farming, New Holocaust 01:23:43 - Factory Farming, Forks Over Knives, Subsidies, Protein Obsession 01:39:29 - McDonald’s Subsidies, Vegan Costs, Grocery Prices, Sports Gambling 01:48:14 - Silk Road, Bitcoin, Gold, Dark Web Dealers 01:58:45 - Online Drug Markets, Snowden, FISA, Hip Hop Journalism 02:08:08 - Eazy-E, Cancel Culture, Substack, NuWaubians, MF DOOM 02:21:05 - Afrika Bambaataa, Music Journalism, Kanye, Narratives 02:29:01 - Streaming, West Coast Hip Hop, Jimmy Iovine, Tupac 02:40:53 - Interscope Records Scandals CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 434 - Ben Westhoff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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so many times over the years on this podcast. It's great to actually finally have you here as well. So thank you so much for fitting this in. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Of course, of course. So you've done a lot in your career. We'll talk about it today. You're in town for a documentary that you're in as well. So I'm sure we're going to get into that. But you had gotten on my radar back when you did the podcast with Joe Rogan in 2019 about your book, Fentanyl, that was probably the first time. Like I had heard a fentanyl, people had talked about in the background. It was less known then, like how widespread it was.

That was probably the first time I was like, holy shit, this is like a full-blown disaster. But if I remember correctly, you fell into that whole story basically accidentally, right? Yeah, well, I had a friend die from fentanyl back in 2010, but it was actually from the fentanyl patches. is. So people would steal those from pharmacies or hospitals and sell them on the black market. And you know, they're for cancer patients, but people would take them like my friend kind of recreationally. And he died when he like smothered himself in his pillow just because he couldn't breathe. He'd been drinking and had these patches on. But, you know, the fentanyl crisis got to be about the powder,

you know, coming from Mexico and China. So that's a whole. different thing. But at the time, yeah, I didn't know anything about it. And I kind of wanted to do a deep dive. So your friend passes away in 2010. So it was at least on your radar. But then if I remember correctly, you were working on some total separate story, right? And then there was like a source who mentioned something about fentanyl and you asked them more about it. And then it turned into this whole odyssey. Yeah, exactly. So I was the music editor at LA Weekly. And we were investigating why so many people were dying at raves. So I used to be kind of a rave guy myself back in the day.

And, you know, people would take ecstasy, LSD all the time. And you never heard about anyone dying. But all of a sudden, at these raves in L.A., there was like every time there was a big rave, there would be one person died, two people died, three people died. And it would always be blamed on ecstasy. And so to me, this kind of didn't add up. And so I started kind of going down the rabbit hole and found out that what was being purportedly sold as ecstasy had no MDMA in it a lot of the time. So it was fake ecstasy with all these new chemicals.

And these new chemicals, they all came from China. They were all synthetic. And it turns out that fentanyl was the most deadly of all of them. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. Now, I mean, we've had forever, unfortunately, a crisis with heroin and related drugs to that. But what's crazy about fentanyl is how much more potent it is, even than that. And so what I, to this day, what I still don't understand is if you're talking about something

that can in some cases be like 50 to 100 times more potent. how anyone even lives when they take this once. I mean, obviously there's a, there's people who take it once and don't even know it and die. And that happens all the time and that's an issue. But like, you know, there's other people who are addicted to it and function on it for years sometimes before they die. But like, how's that even possible? Well, it's highly adulterated by the time it gets to the street. So in DEA seizures, you know, from fentanyl coming from Mexico, it's like 10% pure, you know, 11% pure, and usually a lot less than that. So when people take hospital-grade fentanyl, you know, you need like an anesthesiologist

to administer that properly or you will die. And it's the same exact drug, whether it's in a hospital or on the streets. But the difference is that on the streets it's full of all sorts of crap. And that's the difference between living and dying often is like, are you getting a super powerful dose or are you getting like a really watered down dose? Right. So would you say that to this day now in 2026 because now a lot of people listening are completely aware that there's a serious issue out there. Thanks in part to your reporting. But like would you say a lot of it still is coming from China or is it just kind of rampant all over? the place now. Well, China supplies it, for the same reason, China supplies everything, you know, because they do it cheap. And so anyone could make fentanyl. The Mexican cartels can make fentanyl, for example. But I don't know if you've seen pictures of these like backwoods cartel labs,

you know, they don't really know what they're doing. They can buy it in China for just a fraction of the price where they have these, you know. really fancy modern labs doing it in bulk. And so that's why China originally was in the game, and that's why China still is in the game to this day. Is this what you're talking about up here where we see one? Deep just pulled it up from the Times. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Yeah, I mean, if you compare this to a Chinese lab where they look super modern, you know, you can just tell that they're not maximizing their profits in these labs. Yeah.

Now, when you started working on that rave story, though, and obviously like, well, this isn't ecstasy. I've been around that stuff before. Like, it wouldn't be killing as many people like that. What was like the aha moment in your investigation where you're like, oh, my God, they're lacing this drug with something else? Yeah, I saw these lab results and started hearing about all these chemicals

that were in the ecstasy. And I talked with this guy, his name was Adam Octor, from a company called the Bunk Police, which tests people's drugs, makes all these test kids. And, you know, he was talking to me about the different adulterants,

these different synthetic drugs. And then he mentioned fentanyl. And he said, well, actually, though, fentanyl is worse than all these others combined. And, you know, this was 2016. and I barely heard of fentanyl and I was like, really? And then that's kind of the light bulb moment for me that made me dig deeper. And this was to be an article when you were first writing it for...

You know, this was an original draft of my book. My book, fentanyl, Inc. was originally supposed to be about ecstasy. It was going to be a history of ecstasy. But then I started realizing there is no real ecstasy around here. So the book shifted. And then how long did it take to write the book? years? Yeah, it's probably another three years. So what always amazed me is that you literally, like, as a journalist, decided to get on a plane and fly to China and say, well, let's just

see how easy this would be to buy it undercover. You didn't have any, like, law enforcement backing doing that? You just went up and did that on your own? That's correct. Yeah, pretty stupid. I mean, like, what's that like? Are you thinking, like, oh, my God. I I had, what if I, what if these guys are on to me or something? Will they just kill me there in a foreign country? Is that going to be? Yeah, well, when it comes to these drug dealers, these traffickers making fentanyl, making fentanyl precursors, you know, I started looking pictures of them online. And it wasn't like the Mexican cartels, you know.

These guys didn't have, when I arrived at these labs, they didn't have AK-47s guarding the doors. they were more like nerdy scientists you know these were guys with like phd and chemistry who had just gone bad and were selling these chemicals so you know the good thing about china is they don't really have a lot of guns in the whole country so i wasn't really i mean i was honestly very worried in the moment about you know this guy picked me up at the train station and we'd been in touch over Skype and uh and uh He spent like half a day grilling me. He had this lab outside Shanghai.

How'd you get in touch with him? Just over Skype, he advertised right on the internet, the clear web. And he had a LinkedIn page. You know, this stuff that he was selling at the time was legal in China. So he really didn't feel scared to advertise. I got in touch with them. I said, you know, I asked him all these questions. I said, if I come to China, would you show me your lab?

and he said, sure. You know, I made up this whole story about I wasn't actually a drug dealer myself, but my friend was. He was going to make this big order. And if I, you know, he, since I was in China, he asked me to scope out the lab to see that it met his quality standards. And I would report back to him and would make a big order if we liked it, if I liked it. So, but once I got there, this guy was really suspicious of me.

He kept asking me if I was a journalist, like straight up. What'd you say? I kept saying, no. Not me. You know, I'm not a trained actor. I really had to like do improvisation to try to. Put on new voice. I didn't put on, I didn't try to fake that part of it.

I didn't try to dress like a drug dealer. I just tried to, but the problem was that he was uncovering my lies in real time. Like, he's like, where are you staying? And I didn't want to tell him. I was actually staying at this youth hostel in Shanghai. I didn't want to tell him that. So I made up. So I had barely spent any time in Shanghai at all.

I'd never been to mainland China. And the only thing I knew about Shanghai was that there was this neighborhood called the Bund district. The Bund district. That's all, yeah, all I knew is B-U-N-D, the Bund district. So he's like, what hotel are you staying at? I said, the Bund Hotel. And he's like, oh. And it turns out that actually is a real hotel.

So I got lucky. And this is where he ended up dropping me off at the end of the day. But I had to make up these lies. I finally convinced him that I was not a journalist. So he agreed to take me to the lab. He called up his driver, which is this big, like, muscle-bound guy who, I don't know. If there was going to be some violence against me, I figured this was the guy who would do it. But the worst part was we started driving out to the lab and American cell phones don't work in China.

So I had to rent one. I had to, they had to scan my passport. It's like monitored by the government. This is just leading to my paranoia even more. And then when we got on the road, you know, the GPS doesn't work at all. I had a translator named Jada who I was working with there who was kind of my point of contact. and she was going to keep track of me if things went horribly off the rails.

But she's not with you when he's first questioning you? No, she came with me to the train station where I met the guy. But then she kind of lurked in the background. She was going to follow us on foot. I thought we were going to walk somewhere to his office, but instead he put me in this car, so I was separated from her.

You know, I'm texting her. She's like, where are you? and I'm like, oh, we're on a Chinese interstate. I can't read the signs. I think we're going south. You know, that's when it started to get really dicey feeling. But when we got to the lab, it was just like in an old, and like actually new construction office park.

And so you could still smell the concrete that had been poured. There was like, you know, the mechanical arm letting us into the parking lot. We went upstairs. We saw a sales floor. are. Is this still in Shanghai proper? This is kind of on the outskirts of Shanghai. Yeah. And there was the sale, you know, some salespeople. And then the lab itself, there were, it was a pretty small lab. There were maybe five different rooms. And it just reminded me of high school chemistry class, really, you know, with the black, the black tables and the beakers and the glassware.

And they had these drying racks for the chemistry. chemicals that look like a subway bread being baked. You know, they have those ovens and subways. It looked just like that. And the sketchy part, though, was the smell. The smell was really strong. And no one was there was wearing respirators or anything. The windows were open.

That was how they like dissipated the smell, I guess. But the guy. What does it smell like? The lab owner. I mean, it's, you know, I don't have the greatest sense of smell, but just a strong chemical smell that just feels off, you know, when you smell it. Yeah. And so he just pulled his shirt over his nose, the lab owner. I'm like, this isn't very professional. And so it was the middle of winter and they had all the windows open. But you've heard me talk about my dad before and how low tea

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different. Locked in. Loyal, invested. They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music. They feel seen by it, like it belongs to them. So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to. And you're right next to artists like me, Lizzo. So, are you ready to talk to fans? Spotify advertising. You're among fans. You know, I had my, phone, I didn't take any video, but I had my phone recording in my pocket. And so I just sort of said my observations out loud, you know, as a way of taking notes. And I'd be like, oh, you've got a giant round flask glassware with an orange liquid inside being stirred. Hello, fellow drug dealer. You were worried that they were going to check the phone. Well, I mean,

I just, it was concealed. It was just on record. So I wasn't speaking into it. I was just speaking. Yeah. I was just speaking into the air. And I worried that I sounded crazy, but the language barrier was such that, you know,

he was like, what? And it was actually, this guy kind of trusted me, but his colleague, the other owner of the lab, was kind of suspicious of me, I think, from the start. He was kind of looking at me weird. But at the end, we sort of sat in a conference room and he said, so what do you,

do you want to make an order, you know, for your friend? And then I was like, I'm thinking maybe like, you know, five kilos of this dysentanyl analog that you showed me. And he was like, well, five kilos, that's a ton of work that will take like nine months. I was like, oh, did I say five kilos? I meant like five milligrams. You know, it's just like lie upon lie upon lie.

How are you not shit? I would have been shitting myself. I think I was just maintaining on keeping my cool, really. Are you wearing something like this or are you like dressed apart a little bit? No, I just look like my regular like middle class American self. I think that's this is probably part of the reason. you got away with it, there's, they're like, the effort on this is so low that it can't be something different. Yeah, exactly. So how long, before you go into the conference room, though, how long are you

looking at the five tables and what they're doing and, you know, getting the information into your phone of the observations? I don't know. It's hard, you know, it's hard to tell when time is, stops in a moment like that, but maybe 20, 25 minutes, I'd guess. Did it strike you while you're in there that like did you have the thought of holy shit this is the mother load this is exactly how it's happening i don't know the full supply chain yet but i know this is somehow working its way to mexico and that's how it's getting on our streets yeah exactly i mean on one of those tables they had just a mound of these chemicals drying out and so it wasn't just fentanyl products but it was also k2 and spice you know that stuff the synthetic cannabinoids and it's and

They had like barrels full of this stuff like in baggies, one kilo baggies. And you know, when you think of what a tiny amount of this stuff it takes to get someone high to make them overdose and the fact that they had huge piles of it, I was like, this is, you know, and it's just the tip of the iceberg. This is a small lab. Like how many other labs are there like this in China? There's got to be hundreds. Right.

So it's just, it's kind of mind blowing. And it's also, you know, not to over generalize it, but you got to think. most or all of these labs are expressly allowed to operate by the government itself. They have their hands in everything. They have their hands in the billionaires over there. That was a big part of my investigation. I actually found out that the government was supporting these companies financially through something called a value-added tax rebate,

which is basically like a tax rebate for exports. So even for fentanyl, fentanyl precursors, You know, even some of these K2 in spice, these cannabinoids, these companies get a tax rebate for sending it to Mexico or America. Do you think it is a, like looking at everything that you personally uncovered, just as it relates to fentanyl, do you think that there's a sort of reverse opium war happening here? People ask that a lot, and I haven't found any direct evidence of that. It's possible that there's some Chinese generals, you know, I'm writing a piece on this,

now for this magazine called County Highway. And it's possible there's some Chinese generals right now like sitting in a room talking about, you know, different types of warfare with the United States and like poisoning them with fentanyl has come up. I have no way of knowing that. But what I really think it's about is just financial capitalism, really. It's like the government came up with these rebates and these tax incentives long before fentanyl was killing Americans. What they wanted to do was to make the Chinese pharmaceutical industry more profitable to bring it up. And so they're like, we're going to incentivize these companies to make these chemicals. You know, this will help drive more jobs, more revenue. And that's what happened. The problem was they, this was for hospitals, hospitals,

fentanyl. You know, this was all supposed to be for legit reasons for fentanyl. But they had nobody checking when this fentanyl was just sent straight to the cartels. And so that's where the whole thing went off the rails. When you go into the conference room with them once you've looked at everything and you go to say, I'll take five kilos, but then have to change it up. Was it like a happy meal? They just put it in the bag for it and you were good or how easy was the process? No, I never received any drugs. I never paid them any money. That's good. You know, I basically left it at, well, I'll talk to my friend and I'll get back to you. So they just let you out. Yeah, yeah, they did. I, that was when things got hairy. The

guy took me back to the Bund Hotel. Then I went to my youth hostel separately after that. But you know, the guy had good relations with me. I was saying like up until a few years ago, he would still send me like a birthday cake emoji on my birthday on Skype you know he was it was like we're buddies i guess he never read the book huh i guess not yeah that's that's a good point maybe it's stopped after the book came out i can't remember like three years later he's like i've been sending this motherfucker birthday messages and i'm the source that's crazy so you go alone and then you don't Did you have Jada in there with you when you were not for none of that? None of that.

Whoa. You got some balls on you. That's crazy. I mean, when I think back about it, it's like, how did I do that? Why did I do that? I had young kids, you know, so stupid. I don't know. Makes me feel like a bad parent sometimes.

Well, I think it was a very brave investigation to be able to go see it with your own eyes because it doesn't just help make a great book. and give it credibility, but it also brings awareness because you can come back here and be like, hey, guys, I went there, I saw it, they're doing this a thousand fold over again, and it's easy. They got a full process. It obviously has some sort of support of the government, so we should probably do something about this. You know, it definitely made an impression on me when you were talking about it. Yeah, well, I think it had impact because I was invited to give testimony on Capitol Hill. And then right when I did that, Trump started tweeting about it.

Immediately someone like tipped him off to my testimony. And he ended up, you know, kind of hammering Chinese President Xi on this issue. And, you know, Trump does a lot of bullshit. And, you know, I certainly didn't vote for the guy. But on this issue, I would say he's done a pretty good job. You know, the threat of tariffs, economically speaking, financial. financially speaking, I don't know if that was good or it's probably bad, but on this issue, he did kind of turn she's hand. And so first he got him to ban all the fentanyl analogs.

And so, yeah, basically these are drugs too. Have you ever heard of car fentanyl? It's like an elephant tranquilizer. An elephant tranquilizer. Right, that people use recreationally. This is like a hundred times stronger than fentanyl. You can imagine that. So these analogs are all types of fentanyl, but with the chemical structure just slightly tweaked. And that way, when the government bans fentanyl, they can say, no, no, this is slightly different than fentanyl. This is car fentanyl. And then that's legal. It's like a loophole. But finally, she agreed to ban all of these. analog so you couldn't have this loophole anymore. So that was the first thing that Trump kind of got him to do. And then the second was in his second term with the precursors. And the precursor,

the fentanyl precursors are actually the biggest issue right now. And so someone, I read an article, someone described these as kind of like the brownie mix for fentanyl. So if you have brownie mix, you're like 90% of the way there to make brownies, right? So the same thing. So the same thing, same thing with the fentanyl precursors. They're not drugs in themselves, but if you got those, you're like 90% of the way to making fentanyl. And so that's what China has been sending to Mexico in bulk for these last years. But recently, she kind of agreed to crack down on that and has been doing more for that. So that's definitely made a difference. So if that's getting cracked down on, Is that going to severely affect the current stem and flow of fentanyl into the United States?

Or has the car left the station, the train left the station at this point, and other sources are easily getting it in? I would say the answer is both because it has made a difference. In fact, the deaths from fentanyl have dropped a lot in the last couple years. That's maybe not saying a lot because it was at a historically high level. and now it's come down, you know, 20, 30%, but still, that's tens of thousands of lives have been saved. So that's good. And that's directly, there was this report in science, the journal Science, that said that was the reason because China stopped exporting so many precursors. At the same time, it's starting to migrate to places like India. You know, India is like China. They have a huge

pharmaceutical industry, huge chemical industry. really like intelligent trained workforce with advanced degrees. And they're kind of picking up the slack because the government in India is even more laxed than the government in China about this stuff, if you can believe that. Are we doing anything about that? Like, is that more something that you're trying to push his public knowledge? Because that's the first I'm hearing of that. Yeah, I have been trying to push.

I do have some contacts with federal law enforcement and stuff like that. And I'm definitely telling them to put that on their radar because it's like the Wild West in India. And you hear about like Mexican cartel members being caught in India, you know, Indian chemists like hanging out in Mexico being caught. And this is definitely coming in a big way. Yeah. Let's check. So let's check two things, Steve. Some of the statistics you just laid out on the drop in deaths.

That's at least a nice short-term trend. but then also if there's some stories, I imagine there are on India related to cartels with fentanyl. Because that's what I mean. Sometimes it feels like whackamol. Like you find one spot where it's like, oh, there's the culprit. And then they hit it. But then five others sprout up over here. And they all have economic power or underworld power, whatever you want to say. Yeah, that's 100% true.

You know, let's say we get India under control. then it'd probably go to like Russia. Yeah. You know, and God help us, we're not going to be able to have much impact there. Yeah. So a landmark study published in the Journal of Science confirms that a sudden historic drop in U.S. overdose deaths largely tied to a supply chalk of precursor chemicals originating in China. There it is.

Yeah. The decline in fatalities following a peak in 2023, U.S. synthetic opioid and overall overdose deaths dropped significantly by the end of 2024. Annual fentanyl involved. deaths had dropped by more than a third. Researchers found the drops in fentanyl overdose deaths correlated directly with decreases in street-level fentanyl purity and a 1900% spike in online discussions among drug users experiencing a market drought.

Yeah, like on Reddit and stuff of the Reddit fentanyl thread. I would imagine you've gone to some of these places like Kensington and I forget the name of the neighborhood in San Francisco. Yeah, the tenderline. Yeah. Those are kind of the two worst, like from an optics perspective, just people, the fentanyl fold. Have you heard about that? The fentanyl fold?

Yeah, just people bent over all the way and, you know, just open-air drug dealing everywhere. Yeah, that's my documentary is called antagonist. And we went there to the tenderloin, brought a camera crew, and it was pretty gnarly. Now, antagonists, I forget how to pronounce it, but it's about the naltrexone, which helps with alcoholism. Yeah, with opioid addiction and alcohol addiction. Yeah. Now, how does it do that? It's what's known as an opioid antagonist. That's from the name of the film. And basically, it's like a force field. It's kind of a wonder drug that if you take this 30-day shot, it will, seize onto the opioid receptors so that you could smoke all the fentanyl you want. You could shoot up all the heroin you want and it will just bounce right off. It's like you didn't take anything.

It's incredible. Wait, it bounces right off? Yeah. So, all right. So if I, if I'm a fentanyl addict and I take this drug, you said it's 30 days I take it for? It's called Vivitrol is the shot of Naltrexone. Okay, so I take the shot in Naltorexone for 30 days and then let's say I'm taking fentanyl and it bounces it off. Do I experience the same withdrawals as if I weren't taking it? Nope, it's like nothing happened. Yeah. To initiate on it, you have to be completely withdrawn. You have to have no opioids in your system. So initiating it is the hard part. But once you get on it, then yeah, you could take all the fentanyl you want and nothing would happen. Okay, so I take it from the premise of the documentary, as he sent me the trailer on this,

that this is being blocked and they don't want this mainstream. What's the story there? I mean, I have an idea on my head, but... Yeah, well, when you think about it, it's this wonder drug, and with alcohol, it's even more incredible. So the way it works is a little different with alcohol, but basically you don't have to stop drinking. Like, you take a Naltrex, let's say you're a raging alcoholic. like you drink like 13 drinks a night. That's like a slow night for you.

You take the naltrexone before you go out. You'll have one drink, maybe two, and then you're done. You're just, you don't feel that need to go any further. It just relaxes you, calms down your system. If you look at a chart of people's drinks per week or whatever, they go from like 80, 60, 40, 20, and then it just levels off. They become like just normal. normal drinkers who have no problem.

But unlike with fentanyl where you said it literally is an anti-receptor that pushes it off with alcohol, you still get a BAC level drinking, right? That's a, you probably would, right? But the point is that you don't want to. It's not like, it's not bouncing off. It just, it takes away the desire. So the way it works with alcohol is different. It's pretty crazy.

Whoa. Dave just pulled up a chart. called a year of naltrexone. So it says the y-axis is number of drinks, 12 ounces, at 42%, and the x-axis is a date from, I guess, December to December. And we see it starting over 20, and then going down to the highest spike towards the other end is about six or seven. So is this one person right here? Is that what I'm looking at? Or is this? This looks like a number of people. Yeah, like a percentage average.

Basically, we see the chart going like this, which is what it's I mean, to me, yeah, it's crazy that more people don't know about this because I never heard of it. If someone, you know, if someone has a problem with drinking, what do we tell them? Go to AA.

You know, that's like the one thing. Even doctors say that. Doctor, what should I do? I've got a drinking problem. Go to A. Well, the problem with AA is that, you know, AA has helped out millions of people, and it's a great thing for so many people. But their motto is that you can't have even one drink or you're off the wagon. The 2006 Chevrolet Equinox awarded the most dependable compact SUV in the U.S. by J.D. Power is designed for your everyday. And with available all-wheel drive, you can handle your to-do list with total confidence. Start your bill at Chevrolet.ca.com.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. The point is you have to never have another drink again is sort of the philosophy. But for most people, that's a bridge too far. Most people can't do that. In fact, the vast majority of people fail when they try to go cold turkey. And that's where an Ltrechtone comes in because you don't have to quit.

In fact, you're encouraged to still just keep your normal habits. Just take it way down to a manageable level. What are the effects? Like I look at something like this and I go, there's got to be some sort of catch. What's the catch? You know, that's the crazy thing. You know, for some people they might have like an upset stomach or they might have a little insomnia, something like that. But that's really why it's called a wonder drug because people really don't feel anything.

Like I talked to some doctors who want to put it in the drinking water. Like it's that sort of safe. that you could do that. When was it discovered? It was discovered in the 50s and 60s, this crazy federal prison where they tested it on prisoners and stuff. I talk about that in the documentary. They were doing a few of those tests in the 50s, 60s on prisoners.

Yeah. Can think of some others. Yeah. See, this was before Tuskegee. So that was before this entire practice was discredited. but they tested nitrachshone there. They also tested methadone. So are you familiar with methadone?

Yes. Who the hell was like Big Dan back in episode 93 was told me about that. He was addicted to that. Right. And so methadone is considered the gold standard of opioid addiction treatment right now. So if you ever see a bunch of people lined up on the street at 6 a.m. in the morning and busy urban areas. It's not often a methadone clinic because it's so addictive, you know,

you have to go back every day to get it. And it's like a, it's like half the effect, supposedly? Yeah, it, the good thing about methadone is that it will supply your opioid craving, but it won't send you into overdose, you know, most likely. I forget. There's like a cap, it's called. Is suboxin a type of methadone? No, but it's, uh, the same.

kind of drug. It's called an opioid agonist. So as opposed to the antagonist that repels the molecules, the agonists, it binds to the opioid receptors. So Suboxone and methadone are both agonists. And like, you know, Suboxone has been amazing for so many people. It changed so many people's lives. And so is methadone. But the problem is that they're addicting in themselves. And so for a lot of people, you might have to be on it the rest of your life. And so the idea of like going to a methadone clinic every day, you know, for the rest of your life is not appealing to a lot of people. Now why did this because what we're talking about here, how do you say it again? Naltrexone. Naltrexone. Why did this go so, well, it's still under the radar. Why has this

been so under the radar since those 50s to 60s prison experiments? Well, the federal government got really behind methadone actually from the Nixon administration and so they put all this money into methadone establishing these clinics and so when naltrexone came on the scene there was all this sort of misinformation and sort of like big money interest to to stop it and so there was it when it came out it had this black box warning on the label that it would cause liver damage which was from this kind of junk science. But, you know, the problem is that people with opioid problems and people with alcohol problems, almost a lot of them have liver problems. And so this warning on the packaging for Naltrexone said, if you have liver problems, you know, this could give you liver, you know,

liver damage. What is it due to the liver that could potentially cause it? Nothing. It turns out this was all wrong. It was all a mistake. It was bad science. It was taken off the package. And then the other problem was that the methadone clinics is actually like a huge business. And so that's worth billions of dollars a year. And when you think about it, it's kind of like the perfect product, right? Like imagine selling something that your patients have to come back every single day. Yeah. Yeah, they have no choice.

No unsubscribing. And so I interview in the film this salesman who, who was trying to sell naltrexone for DuPont pharmaceuticals. So the DuPont company that makes plastics and all that, they actually had a small pharmaceutical division that was trying to sell Naltrexone. And he said everywhere he went, this salesman, this guy named Percy Menzies,

they were like swearing at him, trying to kick him out of there. They said, you know, this causes liver damage. We like methadone better. But basically, when it all comes down to it, now TREXone doesn't make money. You know what I mean? Like you take this shot, the 30-day shot,

you take it a few times, and then basically you're done. You're not coming back for your daily dose every day, and that's the issue. I see this again and again, and the context has come up in a few different ways on my podcast in the past is with psychedelics. So I have a lot of friends who were in tier one,

type military guys who special forces who you know needed treatments after years in in combat and they'd have to go to foreign countries and spend money out of pocket just to get it and it would change their life and now there was at least some legislation I saw Trump an ibegain you're talking about yeah yeah I see Joe Rogan pushed that with him and was able to get that through which is cool so it's a start but I also my friend John Costison back in episode 109 and he was he was someone who became an alcoholic when he was like 13, an older friend, his older brother's friend, like gave him alcohol and he loved it. And he's like, I knew right away. I had a problem. And so for years, like he told, he was open with his parents and his doctor like, hey, I really

shouldn't be doing this. And they would try everything. Rehab, AA, all of it. And it was always like he was volunteering to do it because he was self-aware of it, but nothing would work. And then he was a part of one of the first NYU trials on civil. psilocybin specifically to fix this problem back in 2014 he did it three times never touched alcohol again wow incredible yeah and he it's like amazing in fact he he said it's so effective that he was at a yankee game maybe like five six years ago and his he ordered like ginger ale or something and his buddy ordered a whiskey sour and his buddy accidentally handed him the whiskey sour he took a big gulp but he was like oh get it away like he has no

need or attachment to it like he used to. And, you know, he lobbies for this down in D.C., but it's the same kind of argument where he's saying, unfortunately, if you're looking at it from the money perspective, this is not a subscription model. It's something that can work at a very high rate for people, and then there's no more money going into it. So they don't want it to be true. And it makes me so sad that something like the well-being of your average American or anyone in the world. that could be helped with an affliction that, you know, they lose control over. People are like, no, we've got to make money on that. So we're not going to help you.

Yeah, it's, you know, like capitalism has brought us a lot of amazing things in this world. But this is where the system doesn't really work a lot of times with human health and stuff like that. Yeah. How do we fix that? Well, there, you know, government intervention is probably the only way that it's going to happen. the like you said in Texas I was heartened by this legislation to get iBogaine going where I live in Missouri too there's kind of some tentative movement towards that but they're really when the private sector isn't going to ante up you know these drugs have to be developed too they've got to to get the

dosing right they've got to figure out how it's going to be administered to people and this stuff takes time and to get the FDA on board, it takes a long time. It's really got to be done through the government. I just don't see any other way. The problem with that, the 500 pound elephant in the room, is that a lot of these companies are paying the very people who go into the government. And that's the part, and we see this with a million different industries and groups and stuff like that. That's the part. It's like, well, you'd have to get the money out of politics to start, but no one in politics is incentivized to get the money out of politics. Yeah, it's weird, you know, but everything is weird nowadays. You know what I mean? Like if you told me

10 years ago that it would be a bunch of Republicans and in Texas that we're pushing for this psychedelic treatment, you know, Missouri is a super red state too. I just would have never believed it. It's crazy. It's almost there's weird cultural things going on. Like people always talked about how politics will shift over time and one will become the other and then they'll go back to becoming the other again. And like I feel like sometimes in certain ways, mostly bad, but in this case, like this one's fine. Like they're trying to help with something. We're seeing that boomerang effect to where guys who 10 years ago, like you said, wouldn't even listen to something like this. Like, oh, let's do it. You know? Yeah. You know, and you've got marijuana legalization

everywhere. And now there's like a backlash to that. Studies are starting to come out about long-term effects of wheat. Now they're saying that alcohol is actually dangerous, even having one drink a day. They used to say that had health benefits. Now new research is showing alcohol causes cancer, all these issues. It's almost like we don't really know what's going to, what's happening. Like our whole society is basically a bunch of guinea pigs. And maybe a hundred years from now, we'll know what's actually good for us in bad

for us, but right now it's kind of a crazy free-for-all. It is a crazy free-for-all. But back to your documentary on I wrote it down, Neltrexone. So I got this right. How did this come together and you get involved with this? In fentanyl, Inc. I mostly focus on supply chain issues, like the fentanyl coming from China to Mexico to the U.S. Talk to a lot of drug dealers, a lot of dark web dealers, things like that.

Just a little side story since we've got ours. I mentioned this car fentanyl 100 times stronger than fentanyl. And I talked to a dark web dealer dealing with that stuff in Germany. And he said, I said, so tell me about how do you package this stuff up. It's so crazy potent. You probably need gloves, right? And he said, no, no, I just use it with my bare hands. Oh, my goodness.

I was like, what? And so then fast forward to, I heard about all these cops who, were overdosing when there was fentanyl in the room or they just touched the stuff and they were overdosing and I thought well that doesn't sound right I mean this dark web dealer could be lying of course but I don't think he had really any incentive any reason to lie and so it turns out they did a study on this and actually these cops it wasn't because they were touching the fentanyl it was because it was like a psychosomatic reaction in their brain. Like they had, there was this DEA sent around a video to law enforcement all over the

country a few years back. And it said, don't touch this stuff. Don't breathe this stuff. Even the most incidental contact will make you overdose. And so these law enforcement officials had seen this video. They got it in their mind. And so then when they accidentally touched the fentanyl, their brain like mimicked a real overdose.

These guys, they weren't making it up. They really thought they were passed out. But when they did analyze their blood and stuff, they had no fentanyl in their system. There was no reason that they should have done it. So that's like a reverse placebo effect kind of deal. Yeah, yeah. Wow.

Yeah. So that's because I've heard stories like that before, not just with cots, but like people will get a little bit or whatever. scary because you'd hear about weed and like there'd be a little bit of fentanyl and some laced in some weed and people would overdose and stuff and it scares me because like I'm not a parent yet but like when I have kids and they're older in high school they're probably going to fucking smoke weed or something like that and now it's like where the fuck are you even getting it from well this is what I'll say about that fentanyl can is cut into any powder and any pill so meth cocaine

heroin and these, especially these fake pills that look just like a Xanax or a percocet, talked to so many parents. I can't even tell you how many parents I've talked to whose kid thought they were just taking a percocet from someone's medicine cabinet and it killed them. But with marijuana, it's different because first of all, drug dealers don't have a financial incentive to mix fentanyl with marijuana. The financial incentive with these other. other drugs is fentanyl so much cheaper so they use it as an adulterant. With marijuana, there's not that incentive. So that makes me skeptical for one thing. Another thing is that fentanyl and marijuana burn at different temperatures. So if you're just sprinkling a little fentanyl on your marijuana,

it's not going to work. They don't burn the same. That's good. I'm not like a chemist, but I had this explained to me. There is a way to properly mix THC. and fentanyl, if you like do all this, you know, put it in a liquid form and do all this stuff, that's generally not happening. In general, I would say if you've got buds, they look like normal buds, they smell like normal buds, especially if you got them in the dispensary, like, you're going to be fine. A lot of times these overdoses supposedly with fentanyl tainted marijuana, it's because the person had smoked marijuana at a different time. It's still in their system.

They use fentanyl. So the toxicology report shows both. I'm not saying it's impossible for fentanyl to take marijuana. But it's just not very likely. Got it. It's not something I would worry about myself too much. That's actually decent news. Yeah, I would have thought the dispensary stuff is fine.

You just worry about any black market stuff, which obviously it floats around all the time. to the stay. Yeah, but even that, I think if it passed the eye test, it passes the smell test, it doesn't seem like it's got a bunch of chemicals on it. You're probably all right. But if you're buying pills or even maybe Coke or something like that, there could be something in there. And we've heard a million. These are the stories you usually hear. I remember there was a kid I went to college with. He was still in college when I was out. It's maybe back in 2017. And same thing. He thought, I think he thought he got an Adderall or something. And it was

literally full-blown fentanyl and he died right there and you just want all it takes is once and like you said you talked to a lot of these parents i would imagine you were starting to have those conversations obviously when you're writing the book you know what what even say to someone like that yeah now i'm putting together another book for a non-profit just based on uh portraits profiles of people who overdosed and died on fentanyl. So all these parents, we're putting together a big coffee table book with tons of pictures to present it to world leaders, both in the U.S. and China, to say, you know, you've heard all the statistics, but these are the pictures. This is real life and trying to make a difference that way. But presented to the world leaders of China, too.

Yeah. So it's this nonprofit called Pax Sapiens. and it was founded by this billionaire who actually lost his own son to fentanyl. And he's focused on trying to talk to the people that really matter, like the Chinese government officials who might not always listen to U.S. officials, but if there's like a third party facilitating it, they're more likely to listen to it. So, but yeah, you asked, sorry, I got derailed how I got to. into this project Antagonist, my film.

And I'll just do a quick plug if you're more interested. It's just antagonistfilm.com. But when I wrote Fentanylink, like I said, it was focused on supply chains. And I really didn't talk a lot about treatment and recovery. But the part that I did talk about, I just used the same language

that everyone else was using. You know, the gold standard. I said methadone, Suboxone, these are the gold. standard and then I left it at that I didn't barely barely mention Naltrexone at all in the whole film so I'm I'm going around doing my book tour you know feeling like a big shot people are coming up to me at these readings and they want my autographed they want to take my picture you know it's a lot of fun but then this guy in St. Louis comes up to me and I said do you want your book sign you said no actually I think

you're like totally full of crap when it comes to everything you said about addiction treatment. I was like, well, nice to meet you too. Thanks. And I was this older Indian guy and his name was Percy Menzies. And, you know, it was really annoying because he he said, well, have you heard of my clinic? It's called ARCA, the assisted recovery centers of America. And I said, yeah, I've heard about it. it and he said well if you really cared about addiction you would have come come see my clinic we treat thousands of patients a month you know it's basically trying to make me feel like a jerk and uh then anyway he said well he gave me his card he said well come by and i said all right yeah sure and so i just ignored him i didn't think about him for about six months or or longer but then all of a sudden he

he had been talking about now trekstone and then i started being like well this guy is kind of kind of cranked but maybe he's onto something. And so I started looking it up. I started realizing that all the press that was written on it was bad. No one had anything good to say about this stuff at all. There were there are all these articles. There's this website called Filter. Have you heard about filter magazine? It's focused on drugs and tobacco and stuff. They had like every week they would write something about how Naltrexone was the worst. The Vivitrol shot was terrible. And so that got my curiosity. up and so that made me want to really pursue this subject whoa so and what year was that approximately that was probably like 2023 all right so all these years because the book came out in what

2019 yeah or maybe a little earlier than that and the film really got going in 2023 so this was probably a couple years before that okay so obviously percy got involved in the film with you and making this and what was well i guess let's start at the top What would you find about the covering of the tracks of this drug besides the obvious that a lot of places like methadone clinics were obviously making a lot of money and just didn't want to look at it? But there has to be some sort of red tape in other places too that's preventing this from going mainstream, no? Yeah, well, you know, I'm a journalist so I can say this.

But most journalists are just kind of like lazy. You know what I mean? Like if someone else, I've done this too, if everyone seems to be. agree on something, they just say the same thing. The other problem is that the company that makes the Vivitrol shot, the 30-day injection of naltrexone, is like kind of sleazy, and they're called alchermis. And basically, they, first of all, they conducted their clinical trial in Russia, so for FDA approval of the Vivitrol shot. And so the problem with Russia is that Methadone and Suboxone aren't even legal there.

And so the people said this study isn't right because you're depriving, you're not even giving people the chance to use these other drugs. The other thing that Alchromes does, the company that makes Vivitrol, is they really were heavily marketing to prison wardens and to judges. And what started happening was that judges would say, you can you know people come to court on a drug related crime they say you can get you can be free you can have probation but only if you take this shot only if you take the vivitrol shot so basically it was kind of like forcing people to take this shot and a lot of people had a big problem with that

and they said you know this company should not be requiring this they should not be influencing policy and I agree. I don't think someone should have to decide between putting a drug in their body and their freedom. I think people should use Vivitrol by their own choice. And in fact, it is good for people getting out of prison. And that's because you have to be, like I said, totally withdrawn. You can't have any opioids in your system. And so prisoners are perfect for that. The problem is when you get out of prison, you know, you're clean. most of the time you know you're totally clean but you get back to your old your old neighborhoods your old places people are using people their first night they come home they celebrate they're like i'm out i'm home they their tolerance now is like zero so they take a shot of fentanyl that's the same as they used to do back in the day only now it kills them and so that's why before they leave prison if they take this shot, the Vivitrol shot, then they'll have that protection. It's only one company, though, that makes it?

Yeah, I think it might be still, maybe the copyrights weren't off, but they're the main company anyway. It's been a while since I had the conversation about patents with drugs with people, but isn't there something like you have a five-year period to where only you can make it? And then after that, other people can, other companies can try to make it. Yeah, it might be a little longer, but yeah, something like that. So meaning they didn't do this trial you were talking about in Russia until recent years. Yeah, it was in the 2010s at some point. So how does that explain what we saw in the 50s and 60s?

It just totally got put on ice and no companies even looked at it or ever tried it? Well, there was the DuPont, remember, DuPont pharmaceuticals, but they just couldn't get any traction. And so people just came. canceled it. Part of the problem with the alcohol side is that our country is just so into this AA mythology. We don't even realize it because we have always had it. But in other countries, they don't just say go to AA. You know, it's not like I think people see it as glamorous kind of, you know, people sitting in the church basement, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, they've got their sponsors. They're all in it together. And this is just,

like this mythology has taken hold in America and I think that's the biggest reason that now Trekstone hasn't caught on. Yeah, we've talked about that with someone before, but like the history of AA, how far that goes back. You remember, I can't remember what podcast that was, but it was like it was who? Can we, can we Google that real quick while I'm thinking of it? It's basically like this, you know, someone, I think it was like religious. just in nature as far as like what the inspiration was and someone came up with it, oh, we're going to do this 12-step plan and then that's it. Yeah.

It's not, you know, it's been, I feel like it's been over 100 years. See if we got it. This episode is brought to you by Activia. You might already be eating yogurt, but not all yogurts are created equal. Activia contains over one billion probiotics per serving to survive and reach the gut alive. When it comes to gut health, Activia is. is the number one family doctor recommended probiotic yogurt brand. Choose Activia. Feel good from the inside out.

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please contact Connects Ontario at 1. 1866-531-260 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Yeah, 1930, so close. A's origin dated to a 1935 Ohio meeting between Bill Wilson and Bob Smith. Members often go by first name. You know that? Okay. Having met through the Christian Revivalist Oxford Group

that continued under this ages to fellowship with other alcoholics until forming what became AA. In 1939, the Fellowship introduced its 12 steps with the publication of Alcoholics Anonymous, the book, and formerly called The Big Book Later Editions amended the subtitle to thousands of men and women. The 12 steps are a suggested but not required ongoing self-improvement program to abstain from alcohol with the aid of a personally chosen higher power after, and then obviously goes to the whole thing we all know. But it was, you know, for lack of a better way of putting it, it's like pseudoscience, like kind of just, oh, it's manifested in a group, together kind of thing. And it's not like, I'm not saying it doesn't work for some people. Like,

obviously some people it works for, but you, you don't get an insane hit rate from this. And to your point, it becomes a whole just, I'm going to abstain. I'm going to abstain. I'm going to abstain my whole life rather than getting to that point of freedom where you're like, I don't need to abstain. I just don't want it. Yeah. Yeah. One of the doctors I interviewed for the film said, AA is great as like a support group. And you should be in it absolutely. But you should also have medication. There's a few different medications. There's an altructions. There's also one that makes you like throw up if you drink, makes you have these horrible, like violent reaction to it. That one has not been as popular. Suffice to say. That's a little bit of self-torture. But what was the,

you explained it earlier, how it's an anti-receptor. Is that the term? An antagonist. An antagonist. Can you just explain this a little more? Because we, You went through fentanyl and then alcohol was a little different and we got off it. So with fentanyl, maybe the best way to do this would be to explain how fentanyl attacks your system without naltrexone. Yeah. And then what naltrexone does like step by step. Yeah, well, basically you have opioid receptors in your central nervous system. So like your brain throughout your body.

And, you know, the body has natural opioids, right, that you feel they're called, endogenous opioids within your body. It makes you feel, feel great. And fentanyl and these others are exogenous opioids. So they're from outside the body. And so, but they bind with this, this same receptors in the body that, that give you pleasure. And so, um, the problem is, I think it was Sam Kynonis, the author who said, opioids are like the greatest pleasure possible that a human can experience and also the greatest misery that a human experience. That's what's so crazy about them. But when you overload with these super powerful opioids like fentanyl, basically it just, I don't know the exact, the science of it, but it tells your breathing rate, it convinces your

body that it just doesn't really need to breathe much anymore. And so you just shut down. And so you just, that's how people die. Their respiratory rate just completely falls off. And what Naltrexone does is these same opioid receptors it latches on instead of the fentanyl or whatever. So now, so Naltrexone is actually an opioid itself, which is the crazy thing, but it's one that doesn't cause an effect. It doesn't cause any effect at all.

How does that, how is that possible? That's why it's a miracle drug. It's called the antagonist because it latches on, but then it repels everything off. So it binds so tightly that when the fentanyl molecule tries to go on, it just bounces right off. And so when it comes to alcohol, though, again, I'm not a scientist. I don't know exactly how it works, but the way I've had it described to me is that it basically just cools you off, it cools your system, cools your system off. And so alcohol is a really dirty drug, this a dirty chemical, this scientist described to me.

It affects all different parts of the body. You know, it's not just hitting this one receptor. And so now trachshone works for alcoholism the same way it works for a bunch of other disorders. And so what's really interesting is they've started prescribing altrexone for things like sex addiction, gambling addiction. What? You know, smoking, all this stuff where you get so worked up that you kind of lose your mind and you do engage in compulsive behaviors. Ultimately, Naltrexone helps you reduce compulsive behaviors when, you know, overeating is another one. Well, all right. So, but it's, it's an opioid itself. It just doesn't, it has some sort of

miracle where it doesn't affect things. So if I take naltrexone, I could go drive a car. Absolutely. You can do anything. Did you not believe this when you first heard about this? It did seem too good to be true. And I think Katie Herzog, a journalist you might have heard of, she wrote a book about using naltrexone for her own drinking problem. Really? And she said her parents didn't believe her because they were like, oh yeah, you just take the magic pills and then you're fine. Sounds great. Yeah, sure. 30 days and we're good. You know, it takes some people a different, you know, links of time.

But that's been some people's reaction. Yeah, like this is too good to be true. This sounds like bullshit. I mean, it's not that it sounds like bullshit. It just sounds like, well, what's on the other end of it? If you don't get high off of it, you need to take it for at least, we'll say, a limited time, not in this maybe for alcohol. It's more than 30 days for some people, but either way, you're not taking it forever. It basically blocks, meaning if you try to break it, it blocks the effects

if we're talking about fentanyl. So you don't get even the effects of fentanyl as much of it as you may take. So it's like a goalie that never lets a puck through. Yeah, I like that metaphor. It's like. Well, I'll tell you some of the, you know, because we also talk to critics of it in the movie. Yeah, what they say. And so some of the problems is, like I said, you have to be completely withdrawn from all opioids to start it. So that's a bridge too far for many addicted users. You know what I mean? Going through withdrawal, it's like people say having the worst flu of your life.

You're throwing up, you know. And so, but that being said, most addicted users do go through it at some point. You know what I mean? If someone's been addicted for decades, they've gotten to that stage before. And that's when they should take it in. Another problem is that it can be expensive. It's like $1,000 for a shot. One shot.

For one shot of Vivitral. But nowadays, there's so much federal money, so much state money. If you go to places like Percy's Clinic in St. Louis, it's free. You know, there's like street people. What's his economics there to be able to do that for free? It's paid for by the state. state reimburse. So one person, if they do 30 shots, is it over 30 days, I guess if they're doing 30 shots? No, just one shot last 30 days. One shot last 30. Yeah. Oh, so they only have to do one

and then they may be done. Well, some people, you know, two, three, four, five, six, the more you do, the better you're off. But I've heard about people who did maybe three shots and then they're basically done forever. That helps. So that I misunderstood that at the beginning. It's my bet. So it the last 30 days for one shots, meaning like the goalies in the net for all 30 days, and then after that it would fade off and then you need it. What's the, maybe here's a better question. Of all the different individual cases you've looked at, what were the most number of shots someone needed to do?

I've heard about people taking, you know, 40, 50. They just do it the rest of their life. So that one would be more of a subscription model. Yeah, you know, that's not too common. but, you know, this clinic, they make money because they, you know, these are people off the street, but they're, they, they don't just have naltrexone as clinic. They have Suboxone and stuff like that. But, you know, the unfortunate thing is that the, so many addicted users, you know. What's the cost? So if I'm doing, let's compare one month of Suboxone, which I pretty much have to do every day or methadone. Although they do have a shot of Suboxone. Now too. That you take once for 30 days. That might be 30 days. There might even be a longer.

What's the cost on that? I don't know exactly what the cost is. All right. With methadone, did they have a shot now? No. Okay. So let's go with methadone. Keep it simple. If I have to take methadone every day for 30 days, do we know the economics on that? What that cost ballpark? The thing is about methadone, it's a generic drug now. So where the methadone clinics actually make money is from the other services. So when you go in there, you also have to see a counselor. So the clinics are billing the state for the counselor service, for example. Got it. So you don't have to do that with no trachshund. No, but, but you know, it's a good idea to see counseling. I mean, the main issue with people who are addicted opioids is not just the drug itself. It's that their lives

are super chaotic. You know, people are out of work. They're fighting with their family. They don't have anywhere to live. And so you really have to try to address all these problems at the same time. And there's lots of cases where someone gets a good job. Someone makes amends with their family. Maybe they find a higher power, a higher, you know. And then they just stop using opioids.

There's no explanation. They just stop because their lives are in a better place. Yeah, it's so hard, though. Like, I don't, thank God, I don't have personal experience myself with taking opioids ever. I would never try them. I have a lot of friends who have. And, you know, we all know people who have, many of us out there, at least know people who have died of it. You mentioned you had a friend who died of it as well.

And it's like, holy shit, the power that that can have over someone. I have the utmost empathy for it. Because it's like, once there, whatever happens to get them to where they try it and get addicted to it, that's one thing. There's all different stories with that. But once they are, it has total control over your life. Everything you do revolves around making sure you get that because your body, like you said, goes into full withdrawal the second you're not getting in on the same schedule. Yeah, I think a lot of times for people it's in their blood, it's in their genetics a little bit.

Luckily, I don't have that addictive personality either because I remember in my, I hope my dad doesn't listen to this, but yeah, I used to go through my parents' medicine cabinet. And my dad's a doctor, actually, and he was kind of sloppy with leaving these pill bottles. And there's oxycodone in my medicine cabinet. And I was like, oh, I've heard about this. Let's try this. So I started, you know, started taking some of those. How old were you?

Probably like 17. Jesus. And I just was like, what's the big deal? you know it didn't have that effect on me didn't really do anything so i'm lucky yeah i've had to take it i've had multiple surgeries shoulder surgeries risk surgeries and i've had to take it before and i'm the same way i don't really get it you know i'm like whatever that feeling is it's not there but nonetheless every single time i've done that i think it like the 72 hour mark it's been a while But I think they said the first three days and then you wean off it.

So wherever it's the first three days, the first 72 hours, I've always just gotten rid of it. Because I'm like, I don't even want this around. I don't want anyone accidentally taking this. If there's kids going through the drawers or something, like it's just not good. And then some of the old school practices with doctors with that was also crazy because I had a, I had a college doctor when I got my wrist surgery while I was in college. after like they give you the the the the the the vikin when you're done the surgery at the at the surgeon's office and then i went back to college and the guy wrote me a script for like four weeks worth of

of of oxycon and then i got and i didn't think anything about the time i got it i'm like what the fuck like there was like 60 pills or something so if i wanted to go crazy i could have and i probably would have ended up fully addicted and i wondered how many other people went through that because we knew less about it. This is like 2013, something like that. We knew less at the time than we did say by 2016, 2017, 2018. But like you hear that all the time. Someone gets back surgery. They get over prescribed. Yeah, even for dental procedures. You know, something where you could just take a few Advil and it would probably do the trick. It's crazy, man. And it's at least good that there's awareness on it. But the thing that pisses me off and a lot of people out there as well is the

fact that the drug company Purdue Pharma that was behind so much of this and the Sacklers who ran it. They were effectively a fully legalized lethal cartel and not one of them went to prison. They lost some money, but they're all still wealthy. I don't like to be cynical, but what the fuck? You know, the guy in charge of Suboxone actually did go to prison. and they paid billions in fines. This is my friend Emily Duffton has a new book out called Addiction Inc. And she broke this story that basically after Purdue Pharma, everything was wrapped up with that. The fines levied.

The company making Suboxone hired the same salespeople to run their operation. And they were like, you've heard of pill mills with oxycodone. with oxycodone, oxycontin. There are also pill mills for Suboxone, basically. You know, they're a little different, but there were doctors who, that's just all they did all day, it was just write Suboxone scripts.

And the only difference when they were finally prosecuted, Suboxone then used even the same lawyers as Purdue Pharma. It was just really cynical, really awful. The only difference was that the CEO, of Suboxone, the company making Suboxone, actually did some prison time. Can we pull that? Unlike the Purdue Pharma leaders. I wonder why he did prison time there.

I might have just been to finally set a precedent. What they did was super cynical because they were trying, this was what we were just talking about, trying to extend the patent. So the Suboxone patent for the, I believe, the pills was about to end. And so they said, how can we extend this? And so they developed what was known as a sublingal strip. I might be pronouncing that wrong. But it's just a strip that dissolves in your mouth.

And they said, we need to re-op the patent for this because it's the same drug, but it's actually safer for children. Because the children might think the pills are candy. They might just be popping them. Whereas this strip, you know, it's safer for kids. But what the research showed, though, was that actually the opposite was true, was that kids, when they took this, they would get stuck on their tongues, and then they, like, couldn't get it off, and they were more likely to overdose from these strips.

And so that was the basis of Suboxone getting all these fines and stuff. Oh, my God. All right, here we go. Deep got it. Sean Thaxter, the former CEO of Suboxone manufacturer in Vidiar PLC, was sentenced to six months. Ooh, a whopping six months in federal prison in October 2020. He also received one year of supervised release and was ordered to pay $100,000 fine alongside a $50,000 forfeiture or $500,000 forfeiture. His prison sentence resulted from pleading guilty to introducing a misbranded drug into interstate commerce.

Specifically, Thaxter admitted to his role in a scheme. where NVIDIA use misleading safety claims to persuade the Massachusetts Medicaid program to cover the Suboxone film by hiding data regarding accidental pediatric exposure. So he hid data about accidental overdoses of children and got six months in jail. Yeah. That's pretty insane when you think about it. That's borderline life in prison stuff. Like that's just so fucking crazy to me. And you know, you add this to then what we were saying,

would the Sacklers not even being prosecuted for it on an individual basis and no one's seeing justice? But they killed more people than the cartels. Yeah. You know, when you think about it, so I just want to stress again that Suboxone has really saved a lot of people's lives. Like it's a good drug. The problem is, just like I said, Now, Trachshone is a good drug. But the problem is these companies are just inherently sleazy. And so the way that I think we think about it is that, well, Purdue, they're run by sleazy people. You know, in Diviour, the company making Suboxone, this guy, Sean Thaxter, he's sleazy.

Right. But the way someone explained it to me is, no, this is just the way these companies are set up. These pharmaceutical companies are incentivized to be sleazy to, break the rules first and apologize later or whatever. You know what I mean? Like, it's all part of the cost of doing business. They, they purposefully run roughshod over the rules and regulations. They know they'll make their money. They'll pay these fines later. It's just inherent in the system. Yeah, you said something earlier that's, it's the age-old question I think about it all the time. Like when you look at economic systems, capitalism is the best system ever.

invented. I wholeheartedly believe that. Like every other system, though, it's imperfect. And it has flaws and it has things that can be used for loopholes. And so when I look at a system that I think is really broken in this country, which is health care, like let's look at it on one hand. You have to create financial incentives for doctors to want to come in and solve really, really hard problems. These are doctors who went to school for 12 years, probably took on all kinds of medical debt to become highly specialized. And we want to incentivize people to go into that field so they can make a good living and help people and save people. That's awesome. So if doctors are paid a lot by biopharma, by pharma companies to come in and create life-saving drugs that are actually life-saving drugs, great.

But when you do that, you create the opening for, you know, just stretching the limits a little bit. and then a little bit more and then a little bit more and then a little bit more and a little bit more until suddenly you also are incentivizing creating drugs where you don't need them and of course a common example everyone uses and i think correctly so would be like the whole SSRI industry to where they made all these drugs that yes maybe some people are having some mental afflictions that they need help with but they create these things that fuck up every receptor in your brain create a create a subscription model for life and have very strong similar to opioid type withdrawals, in some cases worse sometimes when people try to get off. And it's

like, how do you find that balance to where you can financially incentivize the best of the medical field to come in and solve real problems that can help people, but also not let in all the bad actors who come in for a lot of money to create new problems or put ivory towers around things that shouldn't have ivory towers? Yeah, yeah, you nailed it. I agree. And for me, diet is a big part of this too. Yes. And you know, the GLP-1s are great for a lot of people and they're discovering potential new benefits for the GLP-1s too. I don't know what all those are, but it's how people lose weight. That's great. But ultimately, like, if we're letting people think they can just continue on business as usual with this terrible diets, you know, I've heard.

it called the sad, the standard American diet. This is going to be what takes our longevity as a country down. And so I'm kind of an evangelist for veganism. I'm vegan and my family is. And we started about seven years ago. And I was had all these like I get sick all the time, all this weird stuff, but once I stopped eating animal products, I just started feeling better all the time. And now I like almost never get sick. I lost a bunch of weight. I'm running marathons. It just changed my life. And so this is one issue that I'm super passionate about. Yeah, it's also like even before I get into the veganism part, which I want to ask you about, it's also all the shit and all our food. You know, people talk about it all the time. When you go to

Europe, you can eat like a king and somehow you feel great because they have more restrictions on all these, some of the pesticides put on crops, number one and number two, the preservatives that aren't allowed in products, whereas like you walk down the street here, whether you go into a bodega, a grocery store, or a restaurant, there's something in there trying to kill you. Not trying to, like on purpose, but that's what it is. There's like McDonald's in a hospital somewhere in the Northeast. That's crazy. You know, when your kids go to the doctor or the dentist, they're like giving them candy and stuff.

It's absolutely everywhere. It's nuts. It's nuts. Real quick, Ben, I just have to go to the bathroom, but I want to talk about this because I completely agree the food systems and say we'll be right back. Sounds good. All right. We're back. So you had been saying before you switched up your diet like seven years ago with veganism.

And so what is it specifically about animal products that? was causing the biggest problems based on what you know now? You know, I never really knew. I just knew that. Like, one time my wife and I went to Atlanta, she had a conference, and all of a sudden I was just seized with the worst, like, gastrointestinal pain I've ever experienced and ended up having to go to a clinic and get these suppositories to, like, things that couldn't get on the plane.

I was, like, hurting so bad. So it's just a bunch of random things. I've been interested for a while from the animal welfare perspective, you know, seeing all these videos of factory farms, you know, with all the chickens and then the cow slaughterhouses and the pigs especially. Because like, you know, pigs are as smart as a dog. And so the idea that like, we love dogs and we take them into our house, but then we just slaughter pigs, you know, and keep them, it's not even the slaughtering. That's the worst part. It's like, the way they're raised in these tiny little cages so they can't even turn around and such a smart

animal, so all this stuff. But my wife was more into it for the health reasons. And her mom had a stroke. And so she went to see the doctor to see about her own stroke risk and found that her blood pressure was really high, you know, for someone who was not overweight. And she's like, why is this? And there's a genetic component. And so she started, she really went down the rabbit hole looking into this diet. And that's when she decided we were going to do it. And I could get on, I had no choice but to get on board. Executive decision. You didn't have a choice in the matter. Gotcha. Are your kids also doing that too? Yeah. In the house, we're all V and we don't have any animal products in the house. When they're out in the wild, they're eating cheese pizza and God knows what else. But

Yeah, I mean, so I'm personally like a meathead. Like I do eat a lot of meat. But I love pork. And a few years ago, like when I really found out about what they do with the pigs and everything and also found out about how smart pigs are as well, that does add a component to it. It's something that I have avoided ordering at restaurants just because it's like, I understand we have to have a food supply chain. and this that's that's how you feed a society and everything but we got to in some of these practices especially with the resources we have now if we're going to do it we got to be more humane about it you know it's not like they didn't have practices like this a thousand years ago when they were killing pigs

for dinner or something like that it was quick arrow to the heart that's it you know you're not raising them in this shitty dark place where they're all locked in forever and then you know just It's like an assembly line of just killing. Yeah, you know, I mean, it's like I heard a Holocaust survivor describing it as like the new Holocaust. And that might seem like, you know, strong words. But when you think about it, the scale is so much more extreme. Like there's billions and billions of these animals being held in this way, you know, over the course of the years and the decades. And so it's, you know, it's one of those things when we look back, you know, you look back about people on people who live during the time of slavery and you're like, how could you have let that go?

You know, you might not have had slaves yourself, but how could you not say anything about it? And I think that our society is going to be looked back on that same way, you know, in the future. They're going to be like all the torture of these animals was happening all the time. How could you not say anything about it? I think you might be right about that. I think it'll be more than that too. I think it'll be other things as well. But yeah, like some of these practices that are just taken for granted and like not not to defend them at all. But there's also, I'll speak for myself, there was a long time where I didn't know anything about that. I didn't, you know, you'd go to the food store. You'd get your food. It's in a package. You don't think about it. And then,

you know, you learn later, oh shit, this is how that happened. Then you feel bad about it. But a lot of people, they still don't have any idea, you know? Well, we raise kids to think that, like, the farm is like this beautiful place. You know, it's the farmer and his wife and their children getting up to milk the cows in the morning. But really, it's like agribusiness for the most part. It's not this peaceful ideal. Yeah, and they've created a whole new line of business as well with, like, these factories. You know what I mean?

So you'll have your old American farms where they're grown a bunch of crops. and they have their cows in the field and things. And then you'll have the place where it's literally a thousand cows packed into a room this side or a little bigger than this. But you know what I mean? And it's just like it's it's some mongoloid like system that we've invented. But have you thought about maybe writing a book or making a documentary related to that topic? I've thought about it. I would need a way to wrap my mind around it because there's already good stuff out there.

you know, the documentary Forks Over Knives, for example. The book that really got me into this was called Eating Animals by Jonathan Saffron Four. But the environmental aspect to me is another big issue. Like, you know, liberals drive me crazy when they say they're environmentalists, when they say they're humanitarian, but they still just eat meat and do everything. They don't think about these issues. Like I saw some statistics recently that in the Midwest, like 50% of the land is farmland, you know. And so when you think about like you said, we got to feed the society. That's great.

You know, I'm glad we don't have we have enough food for everybody. But the truth is that a huge percentage of this farmland is used to feed the animals. And so all these soybean crops everywhere, all these corn fields everywhere, some of that is for our own consumption of soy and corn and abroad, but a lot of that is just to feed the animals. And so if you took that out, then all of a sudden we don't need all this farmland. This can be forests, you know, like stuff that would help stop climate change because these farmlands do not contribute to carbon capture. It's just, it's just a monocrop. Whereas if we have actual forests, we would, we would deal with climate change like a hundred times better.

That's interesting, because I look at it like if we've had an industry like this that's been around forever, there was a point, before you even look at the science of stuff, there was a point where it operated in somewhat of a healthy manner. And also where we didn't have a, what's the term I'm looking for? Like a prepackage and ship food system, right? People actually tended to their land and they ate the food off their land. Now that was less convenient. That's not something in the modern world at the size of the population is as realistic to do.

I can accept that. But it's like we obviously, no matter how you crack this, cut a million corners to get from that point, say 100 years ago to the point we are now. And it's like, shouldn't there be some sort of middle ground there where we can get food, be able to be shipped at high speeds and to different places where people aren't like producing it themselves, but also not do it in a way where the corners we cut are literally poisoning us or causing serious problems. Like that feels like it should be some level of common sense. And at the same time, it's like how do you even unring this bell when we've let it get this.

far. Well, yeah, one problem is the subsidies. For example, Iowa is one of the first caucus states in the presidential primaries. You know, so all these candidates have to appeal to Iowa. And so they have to appeal to farmers. And so they maintain all these subsidies that make it so you can buy a packet of bacon for, I don't even know, I don't buy it, but how much is a packet of bacon at the seven bucks? I mean, think of what had to happen. that price to be so cheap. Another thing is like the misinformation about health right now is, you know, I was at the grocery store the other day and I saw this mom with all these kids, you know, kind of overweight,

normal Midwestern mom and she's chugging muscle milk, you know, and I'm like, okay, so she doesn't to me look like a bodybuilder. Like she's been convinced somehow that this is health food, you know, and I think one of the biggest issue is that we have this protein obsession. And I know when you are, you know, an athlete, bodybuilder, whatever, protein helps you. And so first of all, you can get great plant-based protein, pea protein. But second of all, for most people, protein is not their problem. Most people don't need all this protein. What they need is fiber. And so most Americans do not get anywhere near as much fiber as they need because all this processed food has no fiber in it,

vegetables, beans, all this stuff, grains. This stuff is what has the fiber. And this is what people need when people are getting all these bowel cancers, Crohn's disease. All this stuff is, you know, not always directly related, but often related to not having enough fiber. And somehow Americans have been convinced that you don't need that stuff that what you really need is more protein yeah the fiber things a big deal so I had I had like some really tough health problems for about four years and when I went to get those addressed medically and other I had some called the incidental phocasma so basically it was like allergy-induced asthma would shut down my whole system, immune system, gastric system, everything was really nasty. But it was fixable. And so one of the things I

had to do was get, you know, commit to like weekly immunotherapy shots to slowly get myself off of all the severe allergies I had. So when I went to do that, it's not like I ate badly before that. I ate by the average American standard extremely well. But like I wasn't paying attention to every single thing I was putting in my body or, you know, having the same types of meals with the same core nutritional tenants in them. And what I decided to do was really go all in in the sense that I was like, all right, I'm going to really clean up my diet to maximize my ability to recover from this. And obviously, I'm not a vegan.

So part of that was like chicken breast. But everything else I have in Diffel will test this. I have the same thing every day for lunch. Like I will have an apple, an avocado, broccoli, banana, and like a little bit of very low sugar dark chocolate and the change in my body since i went to that lineup which was that's about almost two and a half years now insane you know like the down straight down to like even obviously the treatments helped with this a lot as well but like my skin everything way clearer and it's because i'm avoiding like stuff that comes in a package all the time and stuff like that like i can

fuck around on a Saturday and Sunday and have some fun, that's okay. But like, when you're doing this consistently six days a week, whoa, does it completely change how you feel? Yeah, I can imagine. Whole foods. That's like what it's all about because we've evolved over these years to, but something stay the same, that we're used to eating food off the land, you know, fruits and vegetables, stuff that grows in the ground. Yep. That evolved just along with us because we kept it, you know, like what's that book, The Botany Desire? It's like the apple, we think that we developed the apple, but maybe the apple developed us because it was smart enough to make it so we wanted to plant it everywhere.

And these foods just agree with us. That's what's in it. Whereas if someone's making food in a lab, I was watching someone eating this like uncrustables. You know what those things are in a bag. Never had one in my life. It's like it looks like a sandwich, but it's almost all chemicals. And so much processed food, like fast food, all that stuff is, if you ever read that book, Fast Food Nation? I've heard of it. I haven't read it.

Yeah, that talks about the food scientists in New Jersey, I think, is actually where this industry is largely based. But the author walks into one of the rooms where they're working on smells, and it smells exactly, I might have these details run, but something like it smells exactly like a Big Mac. And he's like, wow, I don't see any Big Macs in here. How does that smell? And they're like, no, no, a Big Mac doesn't smell like that because of the food. It smells like the flavoring, you know, the smell we put in it. So that said a lot to me. You see the video of the McDonald's McDonald's CEO with the can we pull this up thief so the McDonald's CEO very in-shaped guy I might add does very well for himself as well he went to go try there I don't even know what it is I haven't

been in a McDonald's since I was 15 years old but yeah what is it called thief the big arch burger let's pull up this video he went to try it and he got roasted on the internet because he was like like I love it yeah it's so good you can tell he's never had it in his life Steve's got over here who's going to buy him. This cracked me up. But it's also like really sad because he's a Fortune 500 company making all kinds of money off this poison.

With, you've heard about it, here it is, the Big Arch. This is something that we have tested already in Portugal, Germany, Canada. I love this product. It is so good. I'm going to do a tasting right now, but I'm going to eat this for my lunch

just so you know. So here we go. Oh, first. Holy cow. God, that is a big burger. We've got a very unique kind of sesame poppy sort of bun on it. We've got two quarter pound patties, a delicious big arch sauce, and of course some lettuce. So, oh, there's so much going on with this. So much. First of all, let's try to get this thing. I don't even know how to attack it. Got so much too much. I never held it in my life. Oh, there's also some crispy onions on here as well. I see those kind of coming out. He's like,

He's like, we think. All right. That's a micro bite if I've ever seen one in my life. That's a big bite for a big arch. It's distinctively McDonald's. Only McDonald's could do this type of burger, but it also was unlike anything else on our menu. It's a delicious product.

You know, you've got sort of the cheeses and the gooiness. All right. But those crispy. Yeah, basically at the end of this, he's like, Sheila, get it out of here. But that's what we, like, this is where we're at. We're the first, as far as I know, I've heard this from waste more people than me who know about this stuff.

This is like the first time in human history where the lower classes of society are suffering from obesity and all kinds of afflictions related to that where it's a way lower percentage in the upper classes of society. Like, think about that. Like that feels like that's kind of on purpose. I think there's definitely, it's the profit margin. again that we talked about in health, you know. And I agree with you about capitalism, but is it really capitalism if we're subsidizing companies like McDonald's? Like how much, how could they sell a meal for $5 if it wasn't so heavily subsidized so many different aspects? When it, when we talk about ancient eating habits, you know, when the people in the hunter

gatherer society, things like that. I know people, you know, this idea of killing game and stuff that's great and that's people had to do that to live off the land. But they're also getting tons of exercise every single day. Yes. Just tracking down their food. And they're also eating so much more, like I said, fiber. They're eating like for, they're like roughage that's actually out there.

And so that's the other thing in my diet that I think is so important is trying to avoid processed foods for the most part. So that's, you know, that's impossible, of course, because even something like rice, even that's been processed, you know, you can take it even further and be like a raw foodist who only eats like raw vegetables and fruits. That's a bridge too far for me. But, but you can have stuff that's minimally processed. And again, this can be cheap. This can be a way to not an expensive lifestyle. Like some people say, oh, vegan. That's snobby. You have to like be rich to do that. But no, that's not true. You know, beans, grains, rice, fruits, vegetables, all this stuff is is totally affordable. It's just the like packaged

vegan junk food. That's expensive. And I love that stuff. My kids love that stuff too, but it's super expensive and it's not health food. You know, when you, you know, I love a good Beyond burger, but to call it health food is a stretch. But there's also like no matter what the food is, whether it's processed, which you righteously point out the fast food places can really get away with it and get some lower prices on that. But even across processed foods and regular foods, we're seeing the average grocery bill in this country over the past 20 years increase markedly again and again. And then you take that a step farther and you see how expensive it is now to have a child,

which is part of keeping the human race alive, you know, and it starts to feel like, you know, I don't know who the fuck controls this world or whatever. It's probably a consortium of all different types of people in groups who are just elite and we're seeing a lot of that come out these days. But it feels like these patterns, when you start to put them all together and then you see them drugging up society like we've been talking about all day. If I wanted to control a population, this is what I would do. I would disincentivize being able to have children as a financial decision. I would go out there and make sure that people are getting addicted to drugs all the time. I would poison the food. Like, am I crazy to think that there's some sort of weird fucking bigger plan here?

Well, another one to me is sports gambling. And so I compare this, like marijuana, for example. I'm pro marijuana legalization. I just don't want there to be a dispensary on every block. for my own sake, you know, I mean, I'm going to be tempted to get high every night when I should be in my kid's soccer game or something. But the same with sports gambling. Like, I don't really have a problem with sports gambling being legal because people are already doing it through bookie systems and whatever since the dawn of time. But the idea that it's so pervasive, it's everywhere, it's on your phone, and they're constantly sending you these barrage of ads.

You can't watch a basketball game. You can't listen to a podcast about the NHL without being barraged by these sports ads. And the other thing I've been hearing a lot about is that these companies, they don't even want you to just bet on if your team wins or loses. Like they make no money off that. They want you to do these parlayes. And they want to do you to do these crazy micro bets. Like this player you've never even heard of, will he get four rebounds tonight or whatever?

and at least all these incentives where these players are tipping off their friends and gotten guys kicked out of the NBA out of MLB because of that. That's a side issue. But basically it does seem like that's the trend in society is to play on our worst instincts, our most addictive personality issues. Like if someone can make money off it, they're going to pay the legislators to legalize this stuff. And soon we're walking around this free society where everything, we can do anything,

but we're just constantly enslaved to our worst impulses. That's a good way to put it, enslaved to our worst impulses. We actually just recorded a podcast the other day with a guy who is speaking a lot against that and the relationship between some of the same predilections you may have to abusing drugs to gambling and how rampant it isn't available. is and it was funny the timing of it because we had done maybe like a year ago something like that we had a couple draft king spots and then we had another company that was starting to buy up some spots because there's all kinds of brands that come in here all the time we're always moving

quick and i've never been a big handling guy myself or whatever i don't have that gene thank god but i started to think about it more and i'm like this is so you see like 18 19 year olds in college with complete ubiquitous access to this all the time and i was like I feel like that's not something that should be advertised. And there were fans that would talk to me about it as well. And I agreed with them. It was like sometimes you'll get fans reach out about a brand and you just disagree. You're like, well, I use this.

This is fine. But I would see some arguments and I'm like, no, I completely agree with this argument. So we canceled all ads for that moving forward. Wow. Good for you guys. Yeah, there were some booked for the next six months of the year. And I just called my company and they were like that helps us do the brand deals. I'm like, I don't want to be a part of this.

You know what I mean? because if you're starting to feed on things that could then cause residual problems in people's lives if they have a predilection to getting addicted to that kind of thing, it's like, that's not a good feeling. I don't want that to be around this, you know? Yeah. Think about your favorite sports team. And when they lose, say it's a huge game. Think about that sinking feeling you get in your stomach.

Now imagine you had $20,000 on the line for that. And it can lead to some insane, like horrible behavior. behaviors that we all know about. Yeah. Who was it? Stu Feiner was in here who's like a legendary gambling handicapper. He's fucking hilarious. But he was talking about it too when he was here.

He was like, you know, how do you put it to thief? He was like, gambling should be a rich man's sport or something like that. He's like, if you want to fuck around and have fun because you have a lot of money, okay, fine. You're going to lose. He's like, that's how it works. You're going to lose over time. But he's like when it's just kids doing this or people like betting their whole

business that doesn't make a lot of money on the whole thing. He's like, this is not good. It's not for you. You shouldn't be around it. And I don't hear enough people saying that. If you're going to Vegas, you know, with your buddies and you're going to a sports book, but on your team, watch some of those weird horse racing with like the carts and all this, all that random stuff. Like, fine. It is what it is. But why does it have to be so available on your phone every second? Yeah. Yeah. And going back to your investigation, though, of, you know, we've been talking about drugs that can help with the opioid problem and then because you have a documentary on that that's coming out right now but also you know you exploring the supply chain of fentanyl and how

this blew up and all that we talked about obviously your trip to china and and seeing how that was happening but now some of that's been curbed the stuff on the dark web though because you did investigations there first of all I'm proud to say I've never been on the dark web I've heard you have to use we've covered on podcast before you got to use like a tour router or something like that but like as a journalist, you know, how do you, what's the process there? Because you also have to protect yourself if you end up going into places where you're like, oh, I wasn't supposed to see that. What do you even do to guard against that ahead of time? Well, I went on the dark web and I don't think it's too easy to stumble upon like child porn if you're not looking for it. I, that wasn't something

I worried about. But I just was going to these bazaars, these Silk Road is the most famous. But there's a ton of them that sell, you know, drugs is the main thing I looked at, but they also sold like firearms and all sorts of illegal stuff. But what I did was I started going on there in like 2017 maybe and I bought some Bitcoin. And so I was all set to make a drug purchase. I was going to have some drugs delivered to my door just to like do my full journalistic, due diligence to see how it was done. I actually had it all planned out.

There was in this subdivision where I lived, there was this house that no one was living there, but I still saw they were getting mail sometimes. And so I was like, I'll just order it to that address. I'll just go pick it up. You talk to long enforcement about this? No, no, I did not. But I chickened out, so I didn't do that.

So I ended up because I started hearing about these dark websites getting shut down, and then they said they'd post a warning like from Interpol or whatever the FBI. I would say, now we're going after the users next. So I was like, uh, better not do this. So the only thing that I use my Bitcoin for was someone was advertising how to get any item on the menu at McDonald's for free. It's like a hack. And you could pay like one tenth of a Bitcoin, which sounded like nothing then.

That's an expensive happy meal. But so I bought this thing and it was just a PDF. That's all it was. And it said, what you do is you call this number, the McDonald's complaint line and you say, I ordered a meal, but it was cold. The meal was cold. So can I have a refund? And so they will just send you a coupon in the mail for a free meal.

So that's that's all this was. how to get anything at McDonald's for free. And so I was really disappointed to have spent so much Bitcoin now knowing. But the good news is I didn't spend the rest of it. So I bought something like $60 worth a Bitcoin that now is worth like $6,000, even with all the dips and stuff. So that my chickening out was lucrative in that regard. Yeah, I wish you had planned to make like a really big drug deal.

bought a lot of fucking Bitcoin and not used to be holding on to that. At least you're not one of those dudes looking through the dumpster for his hard drive from like 2012. I have though. I did write the code down and misplace it for like a year. It's so common to do that. Yeah, that's my whole thing. Like I've been on that since the early, well, relatively like since about 2017, but I've always been worried about the fact that there's no backstop with it because people, you know, we may really disagree with some of the tenants of central banking and monetary policy and all that, and certainly I do. One of the nice things you have is you have something like the FDIC and stuff like that and you know like, oh, it's there. Whereas like with Bitcoin or with cryptocurrency, if you

have it on a drive, you're responsible for it. And if you forget your password, there's no, there's no one coming to save you. You're fucked. They got to figure that out. I finally got an account on Toro or whatever. I think it's Toro.com. got to transfer it onto there. So it's, that won't happen. That won't be able to happen now. Yeah,

what's the, because I haven't looked at in a while, what do you, when you transfer it onto one of those platforms, do you technically not, what's the line? Like not your crete, not your keys,

not your crypto, so you technically don't own it. That could be, I really don't know much about it. Sounds like you should look into that. There was something called FTCX a few years ago and I know some people lost some money on that's why I think about it because it's like they had money. Those sites yeah. Yeah. If you had money on that like you were,

I forget where you were in the creditor line, but it wasn't first place. So the other thing I did was I got a bunch of gold coins. I've tried to hedge against financial collapse. And so I got these gold coins. And again, you could get it like in a stock or a secure, you know, you know, a fund dedicated to gold. But then you don't really have the gold. Right. And then this guy was telling me, if shit really hits the fan, you got to have the gold. Right.

You can still use this in the barter economy. And so I got these gold coins, but now they're just sitting in a box in a bank. You know, they've been there for years. And I'm like, well, what if they misplace it or they decide they don't feel like giving it back to me? I don't know. That could be a problem. Everything's sketchy. Also, though, like if the world ended and you built your little bunker or something below your house in Missouri, it's like what's money and gold even worth after that, you know?

Yeah, I would say it'd be worth more than dollar bills at least because for all of you, most of human history, people have like fancy jewelry and stuff like that. It's shiny, I guess. Right. That guy, Douglas Rushkoff, who's going to be coming on my show. I talked to him today, but he's one of my friend Danny Jones's show. he was like he was teaching billionaires in like 2017, 2018, 2019 how to prepare for the apocalypse. And he was like, no, you have to understand. You got to treat your security guys well because when it's over and you come out of your bunker,

your money doesn't mean anything. So they could just kill you. And I'm like, what the fuck is even the point of this then? You're not a billionaire anymore if like a nuclear holocaust happened and, you know, 100 people lived. But I guess those are some real first, first world problems that I can't. I can't comprehend. I'll ask him about it. But when you were going on the dark web, so you didn't end up making any deals yourself, but like were there things about it, maybe the ubiquitousness

of products or options or the ease to be able to do it that surprised you? Yeah. What surprised me most was just how kind of foolproof it is to communicate with these people. You have these encrypted messaging platforms. And I was like, oh, well, this can't be safe. The government could crack this. But no, they can't. The only time that people get busted is when they make a mistake in real life. You know what I mean?

So, like, I'm sure you know this story. Did this happen to you? Maybe a friend of mine. So the most famous story. Not made, to be clear. Well, the most famous story is. the guy from Silk Road. Ross, what was his name? Ross, Albrecht. Yeah. And so the way they caught him is he was on the clear web using like the same handle or something that he used in the dark web.

So they were able to find out his password or whatever hack into him, not because they cracked the encrypted messaging, but because he screwed up something, put out information he shouldn't have, that was publicly available. And so for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, For me, I was like, wow, these people really can get away with anything as long as they don't screw up. But I was just talking to people. I was just there to talk with these dark web dealers. And you would be shocked by how much information they would tell me. Like what?

I mean, I got a guy to meet me in person. He was a dark operating selling fentanyl on a dark website. And he told me where he lived. in the book I told this story. I don't want to tell too many details, but he told me where he lived and it was within driving distance of my house. So he met me at a Culver's restaurant and his little daughter was there. And he told me his whole story. And, you know, people just want to talk, even if they're in the most dangerous line of work imaginable. They want to tell their stories. And this guy was interested in convincing me that he wasn't a bad guy, that he wasn't like unethical guy. And so that's, I think,

why he wanted to talk. I'm a man of principle. Yeah, no, it's funny. I hear that. Well, his argument was like all these people who are addicted to opioids, they are having to pay so much money to maintain their addiction to buy pharmaceutical opioids so expensive. But I'm selling them the opioids they need or they'll go into withdrawal, I'm selling them those opioids for dirt cheap. So I'm really doing a public service. And this is what he, at least what he convinced himself. When you're talking with him and interviewing him and how long was this, you're meeting with him? Uh, maybe an hour or so. Do you, I mean, obviously as a journalist, you're getting a story, but is there, you're also a father, too, of kids that, you know, if one bad decision, God forbid,

were ever made, something horrible could happen. Like, do you ever look at a guy like that and be like, that's what you tell yourself, but you know that's not the truth, right? You're talking about this guy with his daughter and his perspective? I mean, I definitely, but I think the issue is he was an opioid addict himself. And so he's fighting this addiction. He's got this nasal spray. He showed it to me.

It's, he's like taking this nasal spray for his own addiction. and I felt super bad for his daughter and the whole life that they... And then he made a business out of it for other people. It's just amazing the mental hula hoops people will do to defend the ability to, for lack of a better way of putting it, do some get-rich quick scheme.

That in this case is extremely illegal. But it's a lot of people, you know, and it's like incentivized for them to be able to do that. You can go on behind a router. Government can't find out who you are if you're careful. And you can look at the market and say, all right, I'll do it at 5%. And you add that up across 1,000 people. You got yourself a fucking booming business.

Well, in defense of some of these markets, they will not allow fentanyl. There are a bunch of these markets that just said no fentanyl allowed, no opioids allowed. A lot of them. Some of them just specialize in psychedelics. And then, you know, as we've been talking about, it's a lot easier to justify because these are illegal in so many countries and can have real potential health benefits for some people. Yeah, yeah, that's kind of a separate issue for me. I mean, I guess like that's good that some places are banning the stuff that's like really actually dangerous. I guess they're like self-policing in that way.

But then like you said, there's a lot of places that don't do that and just make it. free for all and then you get these dealers on there and that's how that's part of the way this shit seeps through the cracks and gets into the marketplace and hurts so many people that's what's so hard for me to wrap my head around but you know i don't know if if i don't know what the answer is in a world where things are also moving so fast and changing so quickly to where you do have to it's very important for the government to maintain, you know, the right to privacy and the constitutional rights that people have over sometimes like, all right, we can go get the bad guy here, but you'd have to break the Constitution and do that. It's a tough spot to be, but you do,

in my opinion, you do have to hold to that. It's just with this particular industry, people have found a way to really, really take advantage of that in an awful, awful way. Yeah, I agree with, you know, the kind of Edward Snowden sort of philosophy and the NSA overreach and Glenn Greenwald, I'm sure you've seen his reporting. And it continues to this day that I guess there's this some of this stuff could have been overturned or like more safeguards and it's just not happening. But yeah, it's a shame. Yeah, and there was just now they're like trying to get this Faisal 702. What happened with that, do we? No, 702, the FISA law, did that officially get re-upped?

You know, it's like when you have politicians, in this case it was Trump doing it, literally quoting like the opposite of the Ben Franklin line where he's like people who who would sacrifice a little liberty for safety would deserve me. either. And he's like, I'm willing to sacrifice some of my safety for to make sure some of my freedom to make sure we're safe. It's like, bro, you just did the opposite of the line. Yeah, Congress passed a 45-day temporary extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Vice of the stopgap measure extends the surveillance authority through June 12th, giving lawmakers time to negotiate a permanent renewal and debate reforms. Because part of the issue is they can look at terrorists here, but in the allowances they give, they can also just have access to any American or anybody they don't like.

What this reminds me of is, have you ever had someone place a contract in front of you and you actually read the contract and you go through? And you know, I appear on documentaries a lot and they have some language in there that's like, you know, I'm making this up, but we could use your, you know, image in perpetuity on whatever we want. We can use AI to change what you're saying to use your image. And I'm like, well, why is that there? They're like, oh, don't worry about that. We would never do that. You know, it's like, well, then why is it in the contract? Yeah, so take it out. And that's, I think, what a lot of people probably think about, about this stuff, is they're like,

I'm not breaking the law. They're not going to look in on me or they don't care about me. It's like, well, why should they even have the right to do that in the first place? I agree. I agree. It's like you people unfortunately tell you a lot about their intentions when they give you those things. And then to your point, I've seen it a million times too. They're like, oh, don't worry, that'll never come up. And now I've had a couple situations before with luckily very minor stuff that didn't really matter where it did come up. And I'm like, yeah, remember you said that wasn't going to go? No, it did. And now I know. But it's like every day, hypocritically, every time I get a terms of service on here.

I never read that in my life, man. It's like fucking 80 pages. It's like designed to hide away the little fine print that you also have to read six times to know what it means just so that they can get society to go along with it. Yeah, I've thought about that. It does seem like there has to be a better way than that. I just don't know what it would be exactly. Well, that'll be the next book. That's what it would be.

You'll put people to sleep. You've written about so many, at this point, like such a range of topics. Obviously, we've been more focused on one of them today. But, like, how do you be doing this a long time? How do you decide what's a cool story for you to really, really sink your teeth into what can end up being sometimes a three, five-year project? I came up a big hip-hop fan growing up. And, you know, people look at me and they don't think I look like a hip-hop type of guy.

but I will say at my high school, you know, in Minnesota, pretty white place generally, but NWA was like the biggest group in my high school, Snoop Dogg when his first album came out, it was in everybody's cars. And those guys were like my heroes growing up. And so then when I became the music editor at LA Weekly, I got the opportunity to interview those guys. And so that was like a dream come true for me. And that was the basis for my book Original Gangsters, which is a history of West Coast gangster rap, basically. And so there had never been like a journalistic real treatment of that era, you know, in a sort of complete way. And that's

always the perspective that I've taken is to treat this stuff like a journalist, music. You know, I'm not just some fanboy. I've interviewed all these big rap stars, and I'm not there to just kiss their asses, you know. And I read all this, like, bad music writing. There's so much bad music writing. And it always starts with something like, when I met Bruno Mars, he was so humble.

I'm like, all right, you met him for half an hour. He's has media training. He's trying to, like, get a good look in the story. it doesn't mean he's humble person. So I tried to like rip out all the bullshit and to like actually look into what these people are saying and treat it like an investigative story instead of a puff piece. And so that came into most play when I was researching Dr. Dre. And so Dr. Dre is obviously one of the biggest most important hip hop producers ever. he sold his beats headphones to apple for three billion dollars and was huge but somehow no

journalist had ever looked in had never looked into his criminal background and so i was in l.a in these archives these l.a. county archives like below ground it was like literally opening up files and like dust everywhere and i found out that he had this restraining order put against him by the mother of three of his children when he was a teenager. And so I think she was 14 maybe when they got together and had kids. I might not have that exact age right, but she was a very young teenager when they got together. And she alleged that he beat her all the time, that he, you know, while she was pregnant, was beating her, all this stuff. And it had never been reported on. So I reached out to her.

I got the full story. I talked to her family. Like everything she was saying checked out. And then it turned out that Dr. Dre had this history of beating up all these women he was involved with. You know, Michelet is another famous one. There was, in some people he wasn't, like the writer Terry B. Anyway, it turns out he has all sorts of these arrests or restraining orders or just the person's word. very credible going against him. And so when that came out, that was a big scandal. And especially

since the movie, straight out of Compton, I don't know if you've seen that, the biopic. I think it's a pretty good movie overall, but so much of that is just whitewash, just lies. Like, they make it look like he's a one woman guy in that movie. When really I found he has like 10 kids by nine different women or something, you know, it's not like that at all. And so, You know, I'm not saying like I'm being judgmental against him for having a lot of different children with a lot of different women, but it's like, let's just tell the real facts and make them stand up for themselves. You know, EZE was a famously was a crack cocaine dealer in Compton. That's been pretty well covered though, right?

Yeah, before he started Ruthless Records. Yeah. But let's go talk to the people. I went to his house. I talked to the guys he dealt drugs with. I tried to see. separate the mythology again from the actual story. And so, you know, that book original gangsters has been become a classic. I think it's one of the best selling hip-hop books ever. And I think it's because it's real and it takes these subjects seriously. I love this music. I love this subject. But I also think it deserves to be held to high standards. Does it change how you look at the music when you learn some of those things? Some of that stuff, yeah, because, you know, they're talking about being gangsters, basically.

You know, Dr. Dre is like nothing but a G thing. And NWA that has this line, like Ice Cube has that line, what's that line? Something about it's our group is a gang or whatever. But it turns out those guys hated gangs and they even put out songs like that sounded like after school specials. It's like, don't join a gang. It's not cool. And then Dr. Dre had that line about, I don't smoke cess

because it's known to give a brother brain damage, like cess being marijuana. And so he had that, and then he had the chronic album a couple years later and acting like he's the biggest weed smoker of all time. Bizz. You know? Yeah.

Yeah. And so it just made me realize that these guys are full of shit, but so what? You know, like they're entertainers. If these guys were real gangbangers, they wouldn't necessarily have the time or the inclination. They're great rappers. They're great producers. That's why they're famous.

But don't think they're really gangsters and stuff like that. Right. Yeah, I think one of the things, not to condone any of that stuff behind the scenes or whatever, but one of the things I think about a lot with any form of celebrity, be it an athlete, an entertainer or whatever these days, is the ubiquitous, access to them online to anyone with any fame, you know, you see them in their living room. There's the Camelot allure of like pre-social media era when you just see a person when they were in the movies or when they popped up on TV or, you know, my God, if you ran into a big athlete like in the Wawa, you were like, holy shit, that's them.

Now you know where they are at fucking two o'clock on a Tuesday. there's almost something that's been, like that transparency has almost removed some of the magic in some ways. At the same time, the other, the reason I say this is because the other end of that is it also exposes the mortality of people in sometimes the worst ways, too, where it's like you didn't know what these people were doing 30 years ago. But by the way, it wasn't exactly what it looked like. You know, there's some ugliness behind the scenes too. And I think that's, you know, it's important to report on everything. I fucking love the song I believe I can fly.

Ignition is a great song. I bump it. I'm glad R. Kelly's in prison. He's an awful guy. Great music, you know? But like, it's a weird thing with art because it's like people are like, well, if Hitler had made like a fucking banger would be when people be playing it or whatever, I would, I would think not.

But at the same time, it's like. Kanye had that song about Hitler or whatever. Exactly. It's like, it gets weird because there's just something with art where people are like, you know what he's a bad guy but that shit's fire well yeah it's like how do we make these decisions like our kelly he's gone forever permanently canceled but michael jackson we all still love him you know it's totally arbitrary yeah um you know that much i didn't see the michael jackson movie but i heard the way that you know they did all those reshoots to get around the the child abuse

allegations but i heard that the way they dealt with it was to be basically cut it off at a certain year, like 1988 or whatever, before the allegations came out. And then they're like, to be continued. And it's like, well, we'll see if they cover that in the next installment. Yeah, it'd be continued in Neverland. That's not, it gets weird. It gets weird and it gets dark. And there's sometimes like, you know, stories like that when it's kids being abused.

like, yeah, I mean, we're seeing in society why that stuff needs a way bigger light. But also then some other stuff, like if someone's just a fuck up or something like that, it's like, you know what? I don't even want to know. It's just like, whatever. Because there should be something about like if art is art, it's, it's great. There's been some great we've talked about before, but there's been like some great artists in history that like now we know like, hey, it was a total asshole. But like, man, he painted a banger. Yeah. I mean, if not most of them, you know, you feel like all my heroes, I feel like that's been the case. I just did this big investigation for my substack.

I have a substack. It's called drugs plus hip hop. Let's link that down below. Yeah, drugs and then the plus sign hip hop. But I don't know if you're a deep hip hop fan, but one of the pioneers is called Africa Bambata. Okay, there you go. You got Tupac, yeah. So this guy, Africa Bambata, he's one of the true original.

he like coined the term hip hop he was in the Bronx he just died and so it came out during the last years of his his life that he was he had molested all these kids all these kids and most of them were what was called crate boys yeah so when he would go to gigs he would just have kids who would carry his boxes of records and so these were the big fans of his, they worshipped him like a god, and he would take advantage of his most loyal fans. And so that stuff was starting to come out. He denied it. He tried to pay people off, it seems like. But I found in my investigation that it actually went a lot deeper that he got tied up with this cult based in Georgia, and it was basically a pedophile cult. And it was basically a pedophile cult.

It was a group called the Nuwabians. And it was kind of based on the nation of Islam, actually originally in Brooklyn, but they had all these charges filed against them, all these investigations for child abuse up here in New York. So they moved to Georgia to try to escape that stuff. They built their own, like, replicas of the Egyptian pyramids and, like, the Sphinx. And so this was just in the middle of no one. where this cult compound and the guy was eventually accused of something like a hundred plus allegations of child abuse and trafficking children across lines for abuse they didn't charge him

with that much because they didn't think the jury would even believe it but this guy became like africa bambata's close ally and friend And so, yeah, you can see these pictures. This is their compound in Georgia. Yeah, that's not creepy at all. That doesn't say arrest me outside of it. I mean, come on, people. And so Africa Bambada met this guy, the guy who ran the new Obians.

He was called Malachi White. No, sorry, Malachi York. Malachi York. And so he was a big hip-hop fan. Yep, Dwight York. He called himself all these different names. He became buddies with Africa Bambotica because he loved hip hop. And as we know now, they both were really into molesting kids.

They both kept these scrapbooks with pictures of their victims, like, you know, something you could hold in your hand. And eventually what it appears is this guy, Malachi York He made himself into a god He convinced his followers that he was a god And he told Africa Bambata Basically If you really want to succeed in this game

Convince your followers that you are a god And so Africa Bambata started referring to himself As a god And had started his own religion and was doing the same shit. Oh, my God. All right.

Dwight York is an American religious leader, best known as the founder of New Wabian Nation and new religious movement that has existed in some form and under various different names since the 1960s. The New Wabian Nation is identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center

as a hate group advocating black supremacy. York's origins are contested after converting to Islam in prison in 67. He began preaching to everything. African Americans in Brooklyn during the Black Power movement. He last called the group the United Nuwabian Nation of Moors. Around 1990, Norik and the Nobian Nation relocated to rural Putnam County, Georgia. They came under scrutiny in the early 90s after they built Tamaray, an Egyptian-themed

park and compound for about 100 of his followers in Pullham County before York's trial. The community had joined directly and in the area by hundreds of followers from out of state, while alienating both black and white local residents. Community was intensively investigated after numerous reports that York had molested many children of his followers. York was convicted in 2004 of travel and transport of minors for the purpose of criminal sexual activity. He is currently serving 135 years in prison.

That's good. But at ADX Florence too. Great. Glad he's there. But like this is years ago. Yeah. This was years ago. Yeah.

And so like, so I'll bring it up today in a second. but also just wanted to mention that like Wesley Snipes was a huge he I don't think he even knew about necessarily about all this child abuse but he like built his own small little compound like next to them all these rappers like if you heard of MF Doom yes he like grew up in this there's um stetsasonic these guys some of these guys were got out of it because they saw these abuses some of them may not have known about it but he was super tied into hip hop but anyway but Bambada became buddies with this guy. And then after he was convicted in 2004,

Bambata, everyone else distanced themselves from this guy, York. Except Bambada. Except Bambada. Yeah. Even Al Sharpton had gone down there, but he was like, no, no. Jesse Jackson was like, no, no, we can't do this.

But Bambada is like, no, no, we got to let this guy have a fair shake. We don't know what really happened. He defended him. And so he started this organization that was called the Uniboneration, Universal Zulu Nation. Bambata did way back in the day. And that was supposed to be an organization that, by the way, I got a lot of my reporting from this amazing journalist named Laila Wills out of

Chicago who interviewed a lot of these primary players. But the Universal Zulu Nation was supposed to preserve the culture of hip-hop be hip-hop historians. But eventually, under Bambata, he turned this into, like I was saying, a church made himself a God. And so it became, he said it was basically the same as the New Obians, according to someone who interviewed that that church with all that child molestation and his organization were one and the same. And that's what he announced. Why?

I mean, I'm glad you're covering a story like this too, things like this. or of the most importance to shine a light on because it's just the darkest shit ever. And it's like something every normal person should agree on like protecting kids anywhere around the world, let alone in this country. But like, why is why are there so many scandals in the entertainment industry and in high culture? You know, it's bigger quotes there that seem to come back to this. It's not like they're running gambling dens or like even being drug dealers, which I don't condone at all. That's horrible.

But like, why is it this? Like, what the fuck is that? I think it's because you just, you've achieved so much. You've got all the money you could want, all the fame you could want. And you have all these yes men around you. And people just go to their darkest places. and they think they're a god they think nothing can happen to them they've had nothing but success they think that the rules don't apply to them anymore and so that's where it leaves

you know if you're a god bigger quotes obviously why does it have to be this like abusing kids why why can't you go to the club and just be like a fucking scummy player you know what i mean like that would be a lot that would be markedly better i'm not i'm not condoning that either but like why does it go to this to where you have people setting up egyptian monuments to basically our word children i mean i don't under i don't understand how pedophilia works exactly like someone gets to be a pedophile? Is that something they're born with? Is there a cultural aspect? I really have no idea. But I think some people might have that instinct in them, but society keeps them at bay. There's a certain percentage of the population, I'm guessing, that has that instinct, but society

keeps them at bay. But when you get to this certain level, you think society doesn't have that control over you anymore. I mean, that's the only theory I could come up with. What's crazy is when, can we check when Africa Bambaata died that was like just recently, yeah. Like a few weeks ago maybe? Yeah, just a month or two ago. Okay. I didn't hear anything about this. I didn't hear anything like hip hop legend Africa Bumabata who was also the source of some allegations regarding child trafficking.

There were no headlines like that. It was just like hip hop legend Africa Bavada is dead. People aren't covering this? Well, his name was so badly ruined by these allegations. That's why you didn't hear much about it. So part of the reason I wanted to do this story was because I grew up. Everyone just loved this guy. Everything that was ever written about this guy.

Hundreds, if not thousands of articles, you know, blog posts, social media posts, documentaries. This guy is the greatest. Because he had a good story. Basically, he was in a gang, the Black Spades, in this like, you know, that movie The Warriors? Oh, yeah. That era of New York City, he was like a warlord. And he convinced, in the Bronx in the early 70s,

he convinced his gang members to put aside the violence and go to hip-hop instead, start throwing these parties. They could make money. They could have a following that way. And so it was just this heartwarming, story. And he just convinced all these journalists to believe him. No one knew his real name. No one knew his age. These journalists didn't even bother trying to find out. They were just so spellbound by this story. And that's part of the reason I wanted to do this was to set the record straight about

all this stuff. I'm glad you did. But I also, like this is the worst kind of example where it goes bad. like the worst stuff you can do, but I see where people come from with that. I've seen it in my own career to where you want to see the good in people. Maybe you sit across the room for three hours and they seem really great. And you're like, wow, I'm really happy to give what they're working on a platform. And luckily, this is not happen a ton to me, but then later you learn, ooh, there was a sign there that I could have seen. And I didn't see because you want to be like you don't want to be the best. bad guy, but it's important. What you're getting at is it's important to tell the story and go

where the evidence leads and not just, you know, like you as a lifelong hip-hop fan. I'm sure you would have loved to meet everyone in NWA and find out they were the second coming to Jesus Christ. But that's not reality. Yeah, it depends on what you're doing for a living. What's your job, you know, if your job is to be, uh, uh, uh, uh, or, uh, it's not. You're, uh, uh, it depends on what you're doing for a living. in publicity, then that's great. You know, you got your client, you make them look like the second coming, like you said. But too often journalists act like they're publicists. They work in publicity. Meets so many, you know, I've been an editor for a long time. I've young writers. All they want to do is just meet their heroes, make them look good. They don't even,

They don't want to, like, do a background check. They don't want to look and talk to people who know them. They don't want the counter-narrative. But if you're a journalist, that's your job, and you've got to hold people to power. That's what's hard about it, but that's the reason it exists. So, you know. But then are there also times where you work a story, doesn't matter who it is, but with someone prominent, where obviously no one's perfect, but you're like, hey, all right, this guy's kind of what we thought. Well, I think it's also important to give people the benefit of the doubt.

You know, absolutely. It's like when someone says like a racial slur on their Twitter when they were 17 years old, you know, for example, it's like don't hold people to unrealistic standards. And even worse than that, people make like bad mistakes, dumb mistakes when they're young. I did that. Everyone does that. Or even people make mistakes when they're an adult who should know. better. It's like that's not the sum of who they are. You know, like Kanye West can be like a total

idiot and say the most like offensive stupid things on his social media or whatever, but that doesn't mean he's not also an incredible artist like you were talking about. You know, two things that can be true at the same time. And I would almost say everyone has like this good and this bad in them. And it doesn't mean all these artists are secretly child molesters, but it also doesn't mean that they don't have shit to find. So, you know, that's the other thing about journalism. It's all about narratives, you know, and we're always, every aspect of life. That's how we make our way through the world. That's how we understand this insane world we live in with all these different stimulus. We don't know why we're here. We don't know what the whole point of any of this is. We

tell ourselves narratives. And the same with journalism. You know, you pick up a story, it's got to have a narrative. Otherwise, you wouldn't read it. Otherwise, it's like, what's the story? Why do I care? If we spend every sentence saying, yeah, what this guy did was shitty, but he's also really good family man. You know, that story would get old really quick, but where it matters, you got to have nuance. 100%. So how many years did you spend out? I mean, you still cover the music industry, How many years were you out in L.A. covering it? About four years. Does it, you know, you see the good stuff, you see the good art, the things that actually

are what they are, but then you see maybe not even the stuff like this, like Africa Babata. It's the worst of the worst. But you see the underbelly. It's a business. You know, there's a tit for tat. I've been around it a little bit in my life. And the music industry is like kind of a nasty place to me as far as like how the sausage

gets cooked. but did that take away, like as a fan, did that take away some of the allure of it for you? What I kind of realized is that a lot of these celebrities, a lot of biggest music stars, are not necessarily the most talented, but they have the best personalities. They're the best of getting along with people.

In fact, I think any celebrity you meet, you're going to be charmed by them because that's how they succeeded. Like I interviewed 50 Cent, at his offices in Manhattan. And just from the moment I've met him, I'm like, oh, my God, this guy's incredible. I want to like spend every day with this guy. He's just so funny and making fun of other celebrities.

He was like ranging on Little Wayne and doing stuff like that and just being candid. Yes. But, you know, that's great. But it's also a problem because you don't want. your music industry dominated by people who have great personalities, you want it to be dominated by the most talented musicians. And so that's really not how music becomes, you know, music is given a platform. It's not because of someone's personality, someone's talent. And so we all know that. But, you know, everything now, the music industry is just so completely screwed up by the

transition to streaming and you know to try to think that it's a viable career to be a singer-songwriter and it still is for some people people make a go of it and that's great but how many like potential amazing artists could we have who just never got into it in the first place because they thought well there's no money in it because there isn't sure sure and you went and to your point you want to see the people break through who have the most talent and are doing it for the love of it. And I do think there are examples of, I think it's like both. I think you see that where that does happen. And then maybe they are the best charmers, like you said, and have the best personalities

that suit them to be able to get to that spot. So they beat someone else out with similar talent. But then you do see sometimes someone where you're like, they're not that good. They're just checking all the other boxes and they're kind of getting the little astro-turfs. And I think that makes people suspicious. of the whole thing. And I try to look at things on a case-by-case basis. So sometimes I'll be like, well, they suck, but they're great. But it's probably a mixed bag. But I mean, you, as a Minnesota guy, you came up on West Coast hip-hop. That's what you liked. Yeah, it was blowing up. And it was also

the movies of the time, like Boys in the Hood and Menace to Society. Like Compton was in the news all the time. I thought of Compton as like another, a distant galaxy. I could never even imagine what that place is going to be like the way it was portrayed as like the most dangerous place in the world and then you went later and then i went there yeah i went to easy's house and i was talking to um his uh his son a little easy and i'm like am i all right like walking around here like this and he's like yeah they'll just if anything they'll think you're a Mormon missionary yeah yeah yeah you're all right no it's funny i had this this my friend Kyle moved in across the street from me when I was like 12 or 13 and he was a few years older

in me and like a genius with music. He stretched every single era there was, knew everything about it, and really, really like got my view on music. And one of the things he really put me on to was West Coast hip-hop and Tupac and all that. And I got obsessed with that stuff because the sound, the sound was just so different. And to this day, I've never seen something like that replicated in any way. some sort of new fashion, but what those guys were doing, whether it was, you know, Dr. Dre producing incredible beats or like Pock just rip an album after album of gold. It's like that was a real

fucking era. And then, I don't know, did you ever see that four-part documentary series, the Defiant ones? Yeah. What did you think of that? I thought for what it was, it was pretty good. But again, this is like the producers are the star, the people in the film. So you're not going to get the real story. But, you know, Jimmy Iovini had all this, like, footage of like M&M in that what color tracks you when he first started. He looked looking crazy. I love seeing the behind the scene stuff. Yeah. I see it from your perspective in the sense that, of course, there's bias into it because the guys who are the stars are making it. I've always known that. But when forgetting like the actual individual stories of Jimmy and Dr. Dre and who did what and what was

really happening, the rest of the. it around them as far as like capturing that moment, the inner scope really came onto the scene and what it was with music is just like incredible because that happens so quickly and then they just dominated everything and basically created new genres. I can't even imagine what it was like to be there at the time. Yeah, Jimmy Iveen is really amazing. I mean, I think he's done some really shady shit for sure, including with Tupac. But, um, But he's done so much amazing music. In fact, I just found out this morning that he was dating Stevie Nix for a while.

And when I heard like Bono, is it Bono, Bono, Bono. Bono. Bono. Excuse me. But he was talking about making music with Jimmy Arvien and he's like, you know, he wants it to shine. He wants your song to shine like a diamond that can be seen from 100 yards away and he's not shy about telling you. So I was like, what does that really mean? It means he wants the thing to be perfect.

And he doesn't rest until the sound is just right. And he made all these amazing works with like Tom Petty. You know, all these guys are like my favorite artists from the era one by one. It's like, oh, he did that. He did that. He did that. When he was trying to turn Snoop and Dre into the next McJagger and Keith Richards. And he basically did it.

It's pretty incredible. My understanding is he was the business genius and the marketing genius. But the cook and the sauce was over-emphasized. Well, with Dre, certainly, because Dre came into his office and played what would become the chronic, the early versions of the chronic. And Jimmy Ivan was like, wait, who did this? And Dre was like, I did. And he's like, did you have help?

And he was like, nope. But he knew it was good. There's no doubt. So, yeah. What was the shady shit with Tupac? Um, okay. So Tupac was already on, um, an Interscope sublabel before he went to prison. So there's basically two halves of Tupac's career before and after prison.

Before prison, he was basically this like conscious rat, conscious rapper talking about positivity, you know, dear mama, all this stuff. But then once he got out of prison was when he signed with Death Row and Shug Night. And so at that point, he threw all that conscious stuff out the window and it was like, I fucked your wife, you fat motherfucker, Biggie Smalls and stuff like that. And so that, at that point in prison, Shug came to. to visit him. This is another, I got a ton of scoops about this for original gangsters, my book. Shug came to visit him. He signed his napkin contract, basically. That was like, I agree to go to

death row. At that point, he was kind of signing his death warrant in a certain way, because his getting together with Shug Knight was kind of like their agreement that they were going to go against Biggie Smalls and Bad Boy. And so Shug basically said he was going to partner with him to go, because he believed that Biggie knew he was going to get shot. You know, this was before he was killed. He was shot non-fatally in New York when he was going to be doing this collaboration with one of Biggie's associates. And so he said, Quad Studios. Quad Studios, exactly. And so he said, you knew, Biggie you knew, or you should have known that I was going to get shot. You didn't do anything about it. They were best buddies. They were great friends before that Biggie and Tupac,

but now he was going against him. He was riding against him. Shug Knight said, I'm on board with you. I'm on board for you with this. I'm going to war with you too. And so that was the beginning of the end because it was really only, what, a year two, I can't remember the Yeah, you say halves. He died 11 months after, less than that, after he got out of prison. Right. I guess I only say that because he had so much music after he died that that was weighted that way to that way. But yeah, from the timeline, 11 months, like you said, he was dead. And that was directly owing to the, you know, the animosities with Biggie at least, according to some of the most reputable theories about why he died. So where Jim,

Iovine came in was that he just didn't do anything about this like he he knew or he had to know that Tupac and Shug was a volatile pairing that these guys together were going to get into some shit he already had Tupac signed a lot of people think he either shouldn't have let him shift over to death row or he should have monitored the situation tried to like cooler heads prevail, gotten in there somehow. So I tend to agree that Jimmy Iveen really fell asleep at the wheel in this situation. Dief, can you stick the camera on Ben real quick? I want to show him something off camera.

Did you talk to that guy? Yeah. I can't remember the context, though. Who was that again? I'll talk about that. Okay. But I do remember that name. He don't really talk to people.

Maybe I just read interviews about him. I can't remember now. Yeah, that's, that's, there is, like, I just had to bite my tongue about it, but there is so much bullshit about a lot, but particularly about Tupac out there that like, man, he could reset that if he wanted to, but I fully understand why he doesn't. But it's, I haven't talked to that guy in a few years now, but. I had spent some time with him for over about a five-year period. Really good dude.

Sorry for the blue ball's people, but I'm not going to, I'm not going there. He's a really private dude. But, yeah, there was a lot going on behind the scenes there at Interscope. That's like, you know, some of it's like, yeah, like Jimmy Iveen definitely built the business, was a genius at that stuff, marketing God. Like, all that's true. But the way the food that they served at the five-star restaurant got cooked is not necessarily. the way that's publicly put forth. I think that's the best way to put it.

And then some other kind of cynical way of looking at it is like let's think about what happened with death row. Okay, so the biggest star, Tupac, was killed. The second biggest star was probably Dr. Dre. He walked away with nothing. He just left because Shug and like swindled him out of his money. Dre worried he was going to be the next to die.

Snoop Dogg worried they were going to kill him. Snoop Dog just walked away too. He went to No Limit, Master Pete. So those guys got like just about nothing. Even Shug Knight, what happened to him? Well, he's in prison now. Long-term prison sentence for, what is it, manslaughter, he ran over a guy.

So all those people, all those hundreds of millions of dollars made by Dothrow, who's the only person that got rich off that, Jimmy I.Vee. And he still has his, like, huge mansion. So I'm not saying that alone makes him guilty, but that's one way of looking at it. That's interesting. It's interesting. Well, I know you got to, you got the premiere tonight and everything, so you got some places to be. But Ben, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain all this and continuing to report on all aspects of him, particularly like the opium crisis in this country. It's really, really important work you're doing. And I hope to see the documentary, the latest thing, have a lot of success as well.

Well, thank you. Yeah, it's been a blast talking to you, Julian. All right. So we will link your substack down below. Also, any links you want related to the documentary, give that to me. We'll link that as well. And then, of course, we will link the book, Fentanylink, which is how I found you in the first place. And it's probably the greatest book ever written on the subject. So go check that out, everybody. Well, thanks, yeah, and my overall website is just Benwestoff.com. All right, cool. We'll have that link down below, Ben.

Thank you. All right. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is? Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Hey, guys.

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