TRIGGERnometry - I Spent Years on Skid Row, Homeless & Addicted - Jared Klickstein

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

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That's 1-800flowers.com slash Spotify. At one point in your life, you woke up in a bathtub and realized that you were missing your big toe and your bottom lip. Can you describe Skid Row for people who have never been there? Incredibly scary, incredibly violent. You know, you'd walk by, you see pools of blood sometimes, dead bodies occasionally. So it was really easy for me to stay sober in jail, but once I got out of jail, you know, they sort of just let you out at 2 o'clock in the morning right next to Skid Row. Eventually, I pulled out a knife. I sort of lunged at him with a knife, so I got arrested for him.

assault with a deadly weapon and went to jail and was going to go to prison for a year and a half. Addicts will take the path of least resistance. The state currently in places like California are doing everything in their power to make it as easy as possible to keep getting high. Jared, you've got what is possibly the craziest life story of anyone we have ever had on the show. You lived on Skid Row for years. Yeah. And your autobiography, which is great, is called Crooked Smile. And the reason it's called Crooked Smile is at one point in your life, you woke up in a bathtub,

and realized that you were missing your big toe and your bottom lip, which you then had to have reattached as part of, like, student training? Yes, yes. How does that happen? How do you get to that point in your life? Tell us that. Well, first of all, I just want to say thank you for having me on. I'm honored to be here.

How do you get to that point in your life? I mean, it's really, like, unadultered addiction, you know, allowed to just kind of sprawl out and do whatever it wants for 10 years. I mean, nothing was really stopping me. And the logical end point of that is death. But if you're lucky enough to live, you might lose a body part. And I lost part of my face from, you know, doing copious amounts of methamphetamine and heroin and crack cocaine. And to my surprise, after waking up, I had done it to myself, actually.

I had munched a bit on it, I guess, and most of it was gone. Wow. Yeah. And tell us your life story, because when I had... say how do you get there i imagine all of that shit starts in childhood right i'd imagine so i mean i i grew up in boston massachusetts uh both my parents were heroin addicts uh pretty stable childhood but still there was the addiction in the household there was you know i got to see a lot of terrible things uh you know no food in the refrigerator sometimes you know things like that

uh i do think that contributed to the fact that i became a drug addict possibly genetic as well both My parents are heroin addicts. I think it's a bit of both. Yeah. So you grew up in a household where, but were your parents using before you were born as well? My dad became addicted to heroin when he was about 12. The Vietnam vets were coming back to America. A lot of them that my dad knew were addicted to heroin.

They would pay him in heroin to do different tasks and things like that when he was a kid. So both my parents had a history of heroin use, but actually, cleaned up before I was born and then got back into it when I was about three or four. Yeah. I mean, that, I can only imagine how difficult that must have been because for a child, there is nothing more terrifying than seeing your parents. I can't think of the word for it, but basically out of it on a drug, whether it's alcohol or heroin or something like that.

It's incredibly traumatizing. Yeah, it was traumatizing. I didn't really understand what was happening. Some of it was fun. I mean, my parents would, you know, act, you know, they would act erratic and then maybe wake me up at two o'clock in the morning and take me to get pancakes and things like that. You know, there was those fun times.

And then there was, you know, other times. There was guns in the house. There was a lot of paranoia. There was a lot of waking me up and hitting me a gun and telling me to cover them because the CIA was, like, outside, you know, doing a perimeter check on my dad for some reason. And, you know, of course, that didn't actually, that wasn't happening.

But that was like my version of catch, like playing catch with my dad, was like doing a perimeter check around the house with a gun and, you know. So there's that kind of stuff. But then there's also the, you know, the parents going to jail, the parents, you know, falling asleep while driving, you know, things like that. And yeah, it was generally pretty traumatic. So when did your journey with drug start? Because there's a lot of people I know who, when they see their parents do that, they go,

I'm never touching any of that. And then there seems to be the other camp, which is, I'm going to do drugs just to cope. Yeah. Yeah, that is interesting how that happens. I definitely had an aversion to heroin, specifically. I didn't really ever plan on messing with heroin, but I really liked alcohol in high school and marijuana. And, you know, it was like an alcoholic, basically, as a teenager. And when I got to college, I went to college at UC Santa Cruz, everyone was doing heroin.

And I was like the last of my friends to try heroin. In college? Yeah, in college. 2007, UC Santa Cruz. Everyone was smoking heroin. Really? Yeah, yeah. All right, don't send your kids to college.

Specifically, you see Santa Cruz. Well, I think, you know, and that's a good college. Well, I think it's, you know, a loser factory. But, but, yeah, but no, but it is ranked well. And I think I was in the art dorm and I really think it was specific to my dorm. So I don't want to, you know, obviously college is probably a, bad place to go. But I don't think everyone's doing heroin at every single college, but I was in the art dorm of a very artsy college where people were experimenting with drugs. And I experimented

with drugs, but I was actually the one that was saying, hey, let's, you know, you probably shouldn't smoke heroin. But oxycotton was around. And I had no idea what that was. And I didn't know that it was an op- It's an opioid. I didn't know. So I started messing around with oxycotton. And, you know, after some- Can I just point you there? because there's going to be people listening who don't know what that is. Can you just explain what oxycotton is? Yeah, oxycodone is a brand name for oxycodone. It is a semi-synthetic opioid.

It is essentially heroin. I mean, heroin is dicetyl morphine that's a fully natural opiate, whereas oxycodone is a semi-synthetic. It still requires raw plant material, but it's more refined. And actually, through years of research, I guess, personal, just general research that people have done, it's, it can be more physically addicting than heroin. And can I ask another question not to sidetrack this, but one thing we kind of skipped over

is you grew up in a home where people are taking hard drugs, getting arrested, you know, giving guns, all of that crazy stuff you talked about. How did you even get to college? Yeah, that's a good question. When I was 12, I essentially told on my parents. I told my distant relatives, I said, you know, I don't know what's really going on. I thought my parents were doing, you know, smoking marijuana or something like that. I didn't really know what drugs were, but when I sort of found some needles and things like that, I realized it was hard drugs. And I called my extended family, and I was actually adopted by my extended family in Oakland, California. So from 12 to 18, I had a very normal childhood. Yeah, and prepared me for college. So you're in college, you're experimenting with

oxy-cocton, what happened there then? Well, I got wildly addicted immediately. I mean, it was like the greatest feeling I'd ever felt. It allowed, you know, I was very ashamed of who I was, you know, growing up, you know, essentially thinking of myself as a crack baby and sort of the, you know, the offspring of undesirables, you know, in my head. And it was ashamed about who I was. And oxy-cotton fixed that. You know, I could, you know, alcohol fixed that to some extent.

But oxy-cotton didn't have a hangover. And it was just so much more easy. And it just really got to the point. And it fully enveloped my entire life within a month or two probably. And I did some Googling and I found out that oxycodone is actually pretty close to heroin. And once I was wildly addicted to oxygen,

I realized that, well, I might as well just do heroin. It's a lot cheaper. It's actually a lot easier to get too. It was. It was a lot easier to get at that point because it's not a controlled substance. It was just kind of on the street. You could get it.

You know, the dealers were taking the bus up to the campus and selling it to kids. And it was just super easy to get and super cheap. I find that horrific. The fact that dealers were on campus dealing heroin. Yeah. You know, this is a drug which has destroyed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives over the years.

Yeah. And did the university, did the college do anything to try and stem the tide or arrest these dealers, et cetera? Not really. I mean, it wasn't campus-wise. It was specifically my dorm. It was a very large campus. I did eventually go to a campus therapist

and told them I was a heroin addict, and they prescribed me benzodiazepines, which, you know, I'm not a doctor, but that's pretty dangerous to prescribe benzodiazepines to someone actively using heroin. I told my professors, they essentially gave me longer times to complete papers and stuff. So they gave me like a break, scholastic

but they, no one really did anything. Not that it's really their place to do anything, but they certainly didn't, you know, they didn't do anything. Yeah, and so then what happens? Do you graduate? Do you leave college? What goes on then? Well, by senior year, I'm wildly addicted to heroin. I can't really afford it.

You know, I'm like committing small crimes to get it, not really going to class anymore. Definitely on the path to getting kicked out or dropping out. I eventually get a deal with the drug dealers who were cartel-affiliated. they gave me a job, and I started driving heroin around Santa Cruz and delivering it. And a requirement of this job was to smoke meth before every shift, so I wouldn't crash while I was driving, which is actually pretty smart, I guess,

because, you know, heroin addicts crashed cars because they fall asleep. So as a result of that, I got really addicted to meth and immediately dropped out of college and got kicked out of my housing. and my family didn't want to talk to me. They knew I was on meth, and my family sort of let me go. And within a matter of months, I was homeless on Skid Row. And you mentioned committing small crimes, and you mentioned your family letting you go.

Was that something, they were like, we just can't cope with someone who's an addict, or had you done things by this point that they kind of, like, they didn't know what to do, maybe? Because you talk a lot about someone who's that addictive, they will do literally anything, right? Yeah, yeah. So tell us, not to like get old kind of, you know, addict porn into it,

but what kind of crimes were you committing? And what is the nature of an addict's relationship with the people around and their family and so on? Yeah. The kinds of crimes that I was committing was petty theft, you know, stealing textbooks from campus and then selling them, and maybe stealing things from CVS sometimes. That was on heroin.

When my family found out about my drug addiction, they had sort of spent the last day, decade dealing with my parents in and out of rehabs. You know, my mom ended up passing away. Like, they went through hell with my parents. So I think I don't blame them. They just said, you know, we can't do 10 years of this with you. We just did 10 years of this with your parents. So they just kind of took a step back and they said, you know, give us a call when, you know, when you're really ready. And now once I started doing meth, meth is very sadistic. It's much different than heroin. You start really doing crimes. I mean, you really, it's like almost

part of the addiction. I mean, I started breaking into houses. I started climbing. I'm into windows. I started doing some dark, darker things, you know. And I don't know why meth entices people to do much darker crimes, but it seems to always happen. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. And you must have some pretty wild stories to tell about those days. Like, I imagine breaking into houses in America is not the safest thing to do.

Well, it's pretty safe in California. I wouldn't break into a house in Texas. But California, I mean, this was back then. Now, it's basically legal to, I mean, you're not going to go to prison if you break into a house in Oakland, California. So I'd say it's a lot easier now. But, and in fact, if someone were to shoot you in Oakland because you broke into their house, that they would go to prison and you probably, you know, get probation or something in a settlement of cash. But anyway.

Yeah, I want to make clear to people as well. We're going to talk about policy and homelessness and all of that. But we're just trying to get your story first. Yeah. So these were the olden days when there was punishment for crime. There was some amount of punishment for crime. I was breaking into houses with other meth addicts. was sort of an apprentice like tagging along.

And I didn't really know the law. I didn't know that it was even that big of a crime. They told me that you can go to prison for like 20 years for doing it. So I stopped doing it actually. I didn't know that. So when I found that out, I was, I stopped breaking in a house. I could make money other ways.

I mean, it was very, you know, when I landed on Skid Row, I made a lot of money. You know, I made, eventually I started making more money than I'm, you know, I've just in my life at 36, hit a financial point where I'm making as much money as I did when I was homeless on Skid Row. Pretty. How are you, what? How are you making money? Well, the first time I was on Skid Row, I was just begging for change at the train station. I'd make like $80 a day, which is pretty good. But later on, once Prop 47, sorry to get into policy,

but basically once shoplifting is legalized, I was making, you know, $3 to $500 a day in cash shoplifting. which... Three to $500 a day. So that's insane. Our producers are looking around going, we're in the wrong job, mate. Yeah. So that's around about, what,

$2,000 minimum? That's your base rate? Yeah, I think... You know, I made six figures probably untaxed. And usually went to sleep with $0. Because you'd spend it all on drugs. Yeah, spend it all on drugs.

And now that game has changed a lot. Now, obviously, shoplifting is illegalized. I will just, you know, I know that's not their correct word, but it's essentially legalized. It's decriminalized. It's decriminalized. And with that, now there's a lot more people doing it, and there's a lot less things to steal. So I don't think people are making $300 to $500 a day, but I really caught it at the golden age. You were at the gold rush. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Wow. It's 1849, you know, and I was, you know, I was there and the gold was there. and, you know, I don't want to sound braggadocious about it.

I'm not, like, proud of this stuff, but there was a code, you know, you know, we didn't attack anybody and, you know, we weren't, you know, there was some secrecy to it. You had to have some skill. You had to really act covertly. And, you know, there was some pride in it at that point. Now it's really just run in and grab everything and leave. But, yeah, that was by 2014-15, I was making, with my partner, about $3 to $500 a day. And that was all going on drugs.

Yeah, primarily heroin, but crack cocaine, methamphetamine. Can you describe Skid Row for people who have never been there? What is it? Yeah, sure. Well, it's different now, but I'd say, you know, I landed there in 2011 for the first time. And it seemed like there was thousands of people, just, you know, out and about. Really in a zombie stage, you know, a lot of them, really not. I wouldn't call them conscious.

I mean, a lot of them just on methamphetamine and sort of in a different realm. A lot of screaming, a lot of mental illness shrieking into the atmosphere and all that. And incredibly scary, incredibly violent, blood on the sidewalk. You'd walk by, you see pools of blood sometimes, dead bodies occasionally, mostly from overdoses. And, you know, I didn't, I had just gotten out of college.

I'm 36 now and I look pretty young. I mean, I looked like a child. And, you know, a lot of people didn't look like me. You know, I was, you know, racially, it was primarily African-American, some Hispanic, not a lot of white people. So when I showed up, they assumed I was like some rich kid that got addicted to heroin. It was just down there to score drugs. And, you know, people messed with me and all that. But once they realized I lived there, they respected me.

and I was treated pretty well. So what you're describing is a community? Well, kind of, yeah. I mean, everything is based on, you know, can you help me? If you can help me, you're protected in some way. If I can get something from you, you're protected. No one's like selflessly acting out and helping anybody. You know, it's all everything, it's a very, it's a free market of, you know,

getting over on one another, or at least I'll help you as long as you are useful to me in some capacity. So what person is? percentage of the people there, Jared, do you think were severely mentally ill, as in they were unable to cope? How many people could, do you think, could be helped? And because there's also this narrative, and I would like you to talk about this as well, people like, well, it's a choice people made. You know, people choose to live like that. They don't want to, they don't want to live in the real world. They don't want a proper job. They just want to hang out, score drugs, smoke, shoot up, and abdicate adult responsibility for one of a time.

I'd say, now, Skid Row specifically, I'd say, now I never met someone down there that, like, lost a job and ended up on Skid Row. That's not to say that people don't lose jobs and find economic hardships and ended up homeless. They just don't go to Skid Row. I mean, Skid Row is not for the faint of heart. You know, it's, you just wouldn't go down there unless you were either mentally ill or on drugs. So I'd say close to 100% of people were either mentally ill or addicted to drugs or both. I'd say roughly 25% were probably just. purely mentally ill. Now, that could be mental illness that resulted from a past addiction to

drugs, or they could just be mentally ill and can't really, you know, they get dropped off there by an ambulance or a police car or something like that. They just ended up there. And then roughly, I don't know, the remainder was on drugs, it seemed. Now, how many of those people are able to be helped? Man, I think a lot of them, I think a lot of them that are just there for purely addiction, those people can be helped. And then a lot of those people that are mentally ill or appear mentally ill, they may not be mentally ill. They may just be on methamphetamine. I mean, I've been known to, you know, cause a scene in a McDonald's dining area. You know, I've been, I would, I appeared like a crazy mentally ill person. And, and, um, but if you take away methamphetamine,

I'm a pretty normal person. I'm a pretty normal guy. So, uh, a lot of those people, if sort of, you know, if they dried out for a few days, we'd really be able to determine, oh, this person is totally capable of self-sufficiency and leading a life of purpose. It's going to be very difficult. It would require a lot of money and a lot of policy changes, but I think a good portion of them can be helped. I was going to say, because Skid Row has expanded hugely over the years. And I was going to ask, number one, why do you think that happens? And number two, is it how much of an influence is Fentanyl playing?

Because Frentine was a very new player on the scene, isn't it, really? Yeah. I got sober in 2018. Fentanyl was around, but it wasn't really, it didn't really replace heroin yet. Now, heroin's essentially non-existent at this point. It's all fentanyl in terms of opiates. So fentanyl has played a huge role. So fentanyl has changed the game in that it, first of all, it kills a lot more people. So it also makes people a lot more. I mean, heroin, you can, I've held jobs on heroin. You know, I've gone to, you know, I've gone to, you know, I've gone to. to Thanksgiving dinner on heroin. Like, you can sort of function badly, but you can still function partially. There's no functioning on fentanyl. There's no recreational use of fentanyl. I've used it. I've done it before. It's like you snap your fingers and you are a zombie. You know, you're hunched over. You don't know what your name is. I mean, it's a completely debilitating drug. Why do people do it? Well, I personally didn't like it. It didn't really react well with me. It was not incredibly euphoric for me, although it did give me the physical properties of an opiate, which is sort of that soothing physical sensation. So I did it because there was no heroin where I was at that time. There was just fentanyl. And if a heroin addict can't get heroin, they will do any opiate. And if fentanyl is the only thing available, they'll do fentanyl. And what we saw around 2019 was essentially the eradication of heroin. And fentanyl just, came in full force and a lot of people got addicted to fentanyl, not even knowing that it was

fentanyl, they thought it was still heroin and everyone sort of transitioned to fentanyl. The news moves fast and it's not just about keeping up, it's about seeing clearly. In a world where headlines are constantly shifting and narratives change by the hour, understanding how a story is being reported is just as important as what the story is. That's why I use ground news. It shows you how coverage of any story differs across the political spectrum, helping you break out of echo chambers and actually see the full picture. Take the recent landmark UK Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of woman. Using ground news, we can see that CNN, which leans left, ran with UK Supreme Court says legal

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More than a million people have already downloaded the ground news app. If you care about seeing every side of the story, join them today. And coming back to this idea of how people end up on Skid Row, you mentioned that like you'd never met anyone who lost a job and then, you know, three weeks later there on Skid Row. So reading between the lines then, you as a college kid, you go there because it's a place where you can get drugs. That's why you, that's why people go to Skid Row. that's why I went and that's why a lot of people go and because back then that's really if you were in

L.A. and you didn't really know what you were doing and you wanted drugs you went to Skid Row and it's a free market I mean they're just everywhere so that's why I ended up there a lot of people end up there for that and then a lot of people end up there because there's services there I mean there are some homeless services there it's also a sort of a safe place to it's not safe but it's you're allowed to sleep there if you're homeless you know so a lot of people will voluntarily go down there because back then you couldn't just sleep anywhere. You know, you kind of had to, you got funneled there, really. And then a lot of people get dropped off there.

So if you get arrested for some sort of disorderly conduct in Burbank or something and you're on drugs, oftentimes you would just get dropped off on Skid Row. And but it's really, that's where the carnival is. I mean, that's, if you're in that lifestyle, that's where you're going to go. Wow. Yeah. And do the police come through there? Yeah, the police come through.

I don't know if they do anymore, but certainly in my time that they'd come through, and they'd arrest you every once in a while. You know, they'd have to sort of make their numbers, I guess, and arrest some people. And I mean, I don't blame them. You know, what are you going to do? You know, you got, you know, two to six cops or something driving around Skid Row and you got thousands of people on drugs. You know, you can't just arrest everybody. But they sort of monitor and make sure no one's, you know, getting, you know, if they see violence, they'll stop it. or if they see someone OD, they'll, you know, resuscitate or...

And then occasionally they'll just make some random arrests that I've been a part of. But, you know, you go into jail for a day and then you come out. Tell us about that, because this is one of the things as we start to edge towards the policy conversations, one of the things that I think a lot of people are kind of like trying to work out is you mentioned shoplifting and stealing things. Yeah. Like, what happens to a drug addict to get arrested by... the police. Back then, maybe three days at the most for various types of crimes. For shoplifting, after Prop 47 passed in 2014, it was a ticket. You know, you might go to the station for a few

hours, then you're let go. Basically, if you're not doing something violent, you're not going to jail. And that becomes very difficult because a lot of people start to desire to go to jail for a long period of time. And the only way to really do it is to commit violence. And if you commit violence, you're going to have a violent criminal record. It sort of becomes this tough situation to navigate. Why do you want to go to jail? Because I couldn't stop. You know, I just couldn't stop doing drugs. I was going to die. I, you know, your back starts hurting from sleeping on the concrete. You know, you grow tiresome of this. And you want to go to prison. You know, I wanted to go to prison. And by 2015, I wanted to go to prison.

And I just didn't know how to do it without doing something horrible, you know. And how did you end up going to prison? Oh, I got really lucky. Well, I actually didn't go to prison. I faced a prison sentence. So I was on meth and I was in a Panda Express, which is a restaurant here. And it was actually the Panda Express inside of a food court, of the major library in downtown Los Angeles.

And I was in that Panda Express, and I reached for a plate, you know, people would leave plates of food sometimes, like when they were done with it. So I went and I started picking at orange chicken. And another homeless man, unbeknownst to me, had claimed to this chicken already. And sucker punched me in the face. And we started, you know, fighting over this chicken. And I didn't really know what to do. You know, he was bigger than me.

And he, you know, we sort of got to a state. stand still and he was like, you got to pay me for that chicken. And I said, oh, no, you know what? I was on the, he took my cell phone. That's what happened. He took my, I had a cell phone. Most homeless people do. In fact, the more cell phones you have, the more likely you're probably homeless.

I mean, because they sort of hand them out. So I actually had multiple cell phones. But he took my cell phone and essentially said, you're going to have to give me $10 if you want your cell phone back. And I said, well, I really, you know, I don't want to do that. And eventually I pulled out a knife and I sort of, I didn't, I sort of lunged at him with the knife and at this point security from the library had come and sort of detained both of us and the police came and looked at the footage and you know you can't do that you know you can't

try to lunge at somebody so so i got arrested for assault with a deadly weapon and went to jail and was going to go to prison for a year and a half for assault with a deadly weapon i got a public defender and they basically told me they were going to drop the charges and let me go and i said please don't let me go i don't want the charge but please don't let me go and they said well you know that's pretty difficult to do and they said well we can give you a six-month violation and then drop the charges. And I said, that's the most perfect situation I've ever heard. You know, that's exactly what I want. And she told the judge and the judge gave it to me. They gave me a six-month violation. And I did six months. You know, when you're saying that, I'm just thinking,

why isn't there a program which takes these people off the streets, drives them out, and gets them back functioning and hopefully back into the real world? Well, there were programs like that. You know, there was the midnight mission, there's the Union Rescue Mission. These are programs on Skid Row, and they're great programs. And I actually went to one time for about seven months. They're, you know, it's a miracle factory. I mean, but you have to voluntarily go. You know, it's very hard to voluntarily go.

And, you know, you can voluntarily leave, too. So it's very difficult to, you know, encourage someone on fentanyl to go to one of these programs, especially the detox process. It's so difficult and painful. But there was a, there's SB 1380, which Gavin Newsom passed when he was lieutenant governor. And this is a state bill in California, passed I think 2014 or 2015, which states that any program that desire state funding cannot require sobriety. This was a housing first policy, sort of topped down from the federal government under the Obama administration. And that sort of ended everything.

So the midnight mission wanted to get that sweet state money. And in order to receive that state money, they could know. longer require sobriety tied to housing. So it's essentially a fentanyl housing program now. Wow. Yeah. You know, when I was listening to an interview you were on, you said the words, you were glad that you went to prison because prison helped you get sober. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I didn't go to prison. I went to L.A.C. Sorry. We all, Brits always get it. No, it's okay. You went to Joe. There's a lot of, there's all these podcasts now with guys from prison, and they always want to call each other out for lying about their time at prison.

So I didn't go to prison. Call us out. It's awful. You went to jail. We went to jail. Which is worse than prison, probably. Why? Because it's smaller quarters.

There's worse food. Everyone's kind of on edge about their case. Once you're in prison, you sort of know the deal. Okay, I'm going to be here for six years. It's just a little bit more of a tense place. But I had a great time. I mean, I had a wonderful time. It was one of the, probably the greatest times of my life.

Because you weren't using or why? Because I finally got a bed and a pillow and I just didn't have any responsibilities. And I just knew that like my one task was like to not just to get off heroin. You know, it took me like three or four weeks to get a full night's sleep and just I detoxed hard. And I just read books. I read books every day. I just, you know, I pretend I was on a beach and just lay on my bed and just read a book. And I really grew up.

I mean, I really became a man. You know, that's not, there's better places to become a man, but, you know, I really was a boy. I was still a boy. And I got to learn so many things about different cultures. And, you know, I had to join a gang. And I had to really, you know, immerse myself in some dangerous situations. And I came out of it on Skate. And I really think that was a growth experience.

I don't recommend it for everybody. But I had a phenomenally interesting time. Yeah. You said you had to join a gang. Yeah. Talk to us about that. Yeah, well, when you go to LA County Jail, you have to join a gang. Everyone has to join a gang.

There's no, like, I'll just opt out of that. You know, everyone goes to a gang. And the gangs are racially based. So you have to join a race gang. That wasn't excited to join a race gang. But, you know, when you went in Rome, you, you know, you join a race gang. And if you're white, you have to join the Pecklewoods or the neo-Nazis. But everyone just joins the Pecklewoods.

And that's really kind of like the easy route. Who all the Pecklewoods? The Pecklewoods are like diet Nazis, I guess. I mean, they're not really racist. They're just white guys. So like if a dad goes in for drunk driving and he's like a businessman, he'll join the Pecklewoods. I mean, there's just no, that's the lowest level that you can join. But there were Nazis.

You know, there were Nazis. And I am, by birth, I'm half Jewish, half Irish. I don't really look Jewish. So, but my last name is relatively Jewish. So I went in there and like a Nazi greeted me and was, you know, asked me what my name, asked me for my paperwork. My name is Jared Klitsyn. He, you know, his eyebrow raised a little bit and then he looked me up and down. And he said, you know, he's like, are you German?

And I just said, yeah, I'm German. And he loved that, you know, because. I bet he did. He is one of us. And but weeks later, I figured out that they actually didn't have a problem with Jews. What? What? Yeah, I guess they were like, they've had like a Reformation or something or, you know, they're like, they've, DEIs really hit the Nazis, I guess.

So prison Nazis don't hate Jews. Well, I don't think they're like fond of them. But also, this was like 2015. Kind of a peaceful time in America, like people were getting along. So maybe they had sort of calm down about that. But I found out there's a kosher meal in jail and it's like worth the most money out of anything. So I actually came clean and admitted that I was, I was Jewish. And the Nazis thought it was funny, and they thought it was fine. And they asked me about legal advice for their cases,

and they sort of thought, because I was Jewish, I could help them with their case. And to be honest, they were like, at first, they were like, well, what are you doing? You know, if you're Jewish, what are you doing here? Right. And they're like, can't you make a, because of your uncle owned the prison or something?

Like, can't you make a phone call? And I, because they had already gotten to know me as a normal guy, and they're like, this guy's just a street crackhead. And then when they realized I was just Jewish, I think it opened up their mind to like, well, I guess a Jewish guy could just be a normal guy. I mean, I guess anything could happen. You know, people are just people. And, and I've stayed in contact with some of them. And one of the guys, like, covered up his swastika tattoo and he's sort of like a normal, he got off drugs. And I don't think I did that, but I think

I might have, like, played a role in it, you know, just kind of opening up people's minds to, like, you know, a Jewish guy can just be a guy. You know, he doesn't have to own the prison, you know, or whatever. So I don't. I don't. I don't think he'd ever really met a Jewish person. Right. Yeah. So you joined the Pecker Woods, and you mentioned, from what I know, which is nothing, there is a lot of tension between the different gangs on a racial basis. Was that going on when you're there?

Yeah. So the Pecker Woods or just really the whites are linked up with the Mexicans. So the Mexicans, the Southsiders, they have an alliance against the blacks and the Asians, which is like a very funny, So I don't know the history of that. I don't know why it's like that. I think it does date back to like meth-dealing agreements between neo-Nazis and the Southsiders. I'm not sure, but you're basically linked up with the Mexicans.

And you're their ally. And really, the whites get a lot more benefit from this relationship than the Mexicans. So you have to be a worthy ally, which means you have to work out every day and keep up appearances and, you know, you gotta sort of pretend to give a shit about all this stuff. and there is tension, you know, mainly between the Mexicans and the blacks.

The Asians and the whites are kind of on the sidelines. Because those are the two biggest demographics in the prison? Those are the two biggest demographics, and also on the street, they have a huge rivalry for territory. There's a huge problem. Really, specifically in Los Angeles, where there's almost an ethnic cleansing of blacks by Mexicans, which has never reported in the news or talked about. But, you know, there are cities that blacks have essentially been,

They call it greenlit, meaning like there's the green light to kill any black person if you're in a Mexican gang. You know, like places like Highland Park and places like, you know, Weneca and, you know, places in the valley. So that's sort of a war that isn't really reported. I don't know. Maybe it's died down a bit. I'm not sure. And how did this affect your life when you were in prison? All of the stuff that's going on?

Well, since you're allied with the Mexicans. In jail. Sorry. No, no, it's totally okay. You're allied with the Mexicans, so they sort of set the rules. I mean, they run the place. I mean, they run the place more than the guards. I mean, they're in charge.

And because of that, you know, they view blacks as lesser than human. And there are out, the Mexicans are our allies, so we have to do what they'd say, really. And they make the rules. And the rules are that you can't share food with the blacks and you can't shower with the blacks and you can't sit on a black's bed. You can't get too friendly with a black. But you have to respect them, you know, to prevent a race war. So it's actually a very respectful place, although there is this sort of nasty racial stuff going on.

And the whites in jail that, at least in my experience, kind of didn't care about any of it, but they just had to follow these rules in order to sort of impress the Mexicans. It's all about impressing the Mexicans. That's, that's, that's, that's, that is, it's a different world. And were you worried?

Because you know, you're watching movies about these types of institutions. And, you know, you're always constantly their eye over the shoulder, looking around, thinking if someone's going to attack me, beat me up, or is that just not true? Well, I think it really is different across the United States. It's very specific. This is very specific to Los Angeles, really greater California and maybe even the southwest of America.

It's all pretty standard. I mean, these gangs, this is a gang, you know, culture. It's the Beckerwoods, the Southsiders, and the blacks. And these are the rules. And really, there wasn't, there was a lot of violence, but it was inflicted by your own race. So if, like, a Mexican saw you spitting trash into the urinal or something, which is a rule, you can't break that rule, they would then inform your shot caller. And your shock collar to show respect to the Mexicans would do an in-house punishment. So three white guys would beat you up for 23 seconds.

Why 23 seconds? Because W is the 23rd letter in the alpha. and W stands for wood, because we're woods, I guess. And so there's really, the majority of the violence is actually inflicted by your own race to show respect to the other races if something disrespectful occurs. So it's maintaining this, it's not like random violence

where someone is like, oh, you're new here, I'm gonna beat you up or rape you or whatever. I think that definitely goes on in other states and other regions of America, but it's non-existent really in Los Angeles. And how come there are no drugs in prison? Because we keep being in jail. It's totally okay.

How come, I keep, no, I want to be accurate. How come there are no drugs in jail? Because what we hear is there's more drugs in jail than anywhere. Well, there are drugs in jail. That is a common line by anti, I guess, D, what's the word for someone that's against prison? Abolitionists, yes. Yeah, so that's a big talking line from them,

is that there's more drugs in jail than there are in the streets. I mean, that's absolutely not true. There are drugs in jail. They're very limited quantities. They're primarily reserved for the shock callers and anyone, they call it politics, like anyone high in politics in jail. They're incredibly expensive.

I mean, if you want to get a single, you know, serving of heroin in jail, you know, you have to have someone on the outside wire money to someone else's family, like $100 for like a tiny little $5 piece of heroin. So it's a 20x, you know, price increase. So, yeah, there's drugs in jail. It's very, it's, they're very expensive. Hypnosis gets a bad rap, but it's not a gimmick. It's a legitimate therapeutic tool backed by research.

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traditional diets alone, and 94% maintained that weight lost more effectively over time. It's not about hacks, it's about fixing the deeper programming. Hypnosis-based programs reduced BMI and emotional eating significantly compared to standard diets. So what you're waiting for. Use our link in the description box and pin comment and grab 15% off your first subscription. And was there a sobriety program that you attended in jail in a way? And so, like a 12-step program in order to help you become clean and sober? Yeah, they would bring AA meetings into jail, you know, various 12-step meetings into jail. I'd go to the meetings. You know, I enjoyed it, but the real problem was that, you know, you go to jail and then they just

sort of let you go, they just let you out of jail after six months and there's no real like landing pad for you to hit. So that was the, you know, I was like wishing that they would mandate me to a treatment place after jail. And, and I was even writing letters to treatment places to try to get them to take me in. But, but yeah, so it was really easy for me to stay sober in jail. But once I got out you know, they sort of just let you out at two o'clock in the morning right next to Skid Row. So it's pretty, you know, it's tough. So you ended up right back there? Yeah, my intention was to stay sober, but I was in a release pod with someone that I knew that had money.

They were getting released with 40 bucks, so we went and got high. And, you know, there's nothing I could really do. So this is like, you know, people accuse me of being like a very pro jail. Like, let's just send everyone to jail. And I'm not, you know, that's not what I'm saying. You know, there's, we really need an all-encompassing, you know, solution to this. And jail alone is not that solution. Jail plays a role in the solution, but, you know, there has to be, like, a process of graduated

reintroduction into society and, most importantly, like, a preparation for joining society, you know, in the form of job training. Absolutely. Because one of the things, and you know better than me, about addiction, is that you literally put a pause button on your life. So when you're an addict, you don't care about, you don't care about acquiring skills, getting better, becoming a better person, progressing in a career. So when you get sober, you're behind a lot of people.

Yeah, I mean, you basically don't have anything on your resume. You know, you get tattoos that you probably regret, you know, like me. You know, I just got all these tattoos now. Now I have a little bit of a criminal record. You know, I have a felony on my criminal record. Obviously, now I have a facial scar. It becomes more difficult to get a job. We are obviously going to need a lot of people working in the,

in the coming 10 years, you know, in various industries, we should really have like a labor expert, you know, examine this, you know, where do we need people? Are we gonna need 300,000 electricians to support the grid? If so, let's maybe do some training programs for these people. I unfortunately didn't get anything like that, but I did have carpentry skills.

So I was always willing to do construction and do carpentry and eventually landed at a nonprofit long-term rehab where they allowed me to go look for work. I got a decent paying carpentry job. And that sort of, of that's where I got sober. So jail sort of helped me get to that point, but jail was not the actual all-encompassing solution.

And speaking of solutions, I mean, one of the things that I can sort of sense in reading between the lines of everything you're saying is getting clean is the most important thing, and it sounds like a very, very, very, very, very, hard thing to do by yourself. Yeah, it's incredibly hard. What makes it infinitely more hard is that, or more difficult is that the state currently in places like California are doing everything in their power

to make it as easy as possible to keep getting high. And when it's easy to get high and when it's easy to keep doing what you're going to, I mean, addicts will take the path of least resistance. You know, they really don't have agency. I mean, I've been there. You're really not you. I mean, you will do anything to get drugs. I mean, you will rob your grandmother. You will, you know, sacrifice, you know, you would sacrifice an entire relationship with a family member for 20. I mean, you know, you're not really making the decision. So if you just let that thing coast, it's just going to keep coasting towards death. I mean, that's what's going to happen. So every incentive we currently have is for people to keep doing what they're doing. And we need every

incentive in place to be encouraging people to get sober. What does that look like? That looks like, at least in California, where I'm familiar, what I'm familiar with, recriminalizing crime. Crime has essentially across the board been decriminalized. This is not good. As a drug addict, when I was out there, before Prop 47, which was the decriminalization of shoplifting, I didn't shoplift. I mean, you actually got consequences for that. You could get a felony, you know, if you stole enough things. I just didn't do it. I would panhandle or whatever. I remember, you know, we wouldn't smash car windows because there was a thing in L.A. where if you smashed a car window and you entered the car, you could get breaking and entering, you could get a felony, you'd go to prison. I've never smashed a car windows. Once they got rid of that, now it's like the biggest problem in California is smashing windows. So, you know, people will do what you let them do. So we need to recriminalize crime, especially property crime, which is probably the crime that most addicts do to get drugs. So we need to recriminalize that and then we need to actually arrest people for doing these crimes.

And if they happen to be drug addicts, we have to give the option. You know, do you want to get punished for this crime or do you want to be mandated to a long-term treatment program? That's going to take a lot of money. that's going to take a lot of work. You know, I understand why people don't want to do that. The biggest problem is that it's the least easy path to launder and steal money by, you know, nonprofit, you know, globs or whatever you want to call them.

You know, people that have made billions off this industry. It's a lot more easy to get a $5 million contract to hand out crack pipes because there's no, you know, you just need a cart and crack pipes, and you just need to hand them out. And, you know, you just pay someone with, like, like an art history degree to hand them out for $30 an hour, and you get to pocket millions of dollars.

That's really easy. What's not easy is pocketing million dollars from actually having to do some work and help people. Not that people should be pocketing millions of dollars, but it's become a grift. You know, it's, we've spent, California spent $24 billion on homelessness in addiction in the last five years. And until last year, the number just steadily climbed, you know.

Do you think that that's a really, reason why a lot of crime has been decriminalized? Because it's just easier than actually tackling it? Or do you think there's an ideological basis behind that policy decision? Well, there was definitely an ideological basis for this decision. I mean, during the time of criminalization, we'll call it, you know, I'd say pre-2016, especially pre-2020, people were getting arrested for doing drugs and selling drugs. And it did ruin some people's And some people had to go to prison for 20 years for selling crack cocaine. And, you know, that's, that's, you know, a bit harsh. I agree. I think we, we did go over the line a little bit. And,

and the system wasn't working perfectly. So those in charge said, this system's not working perfectly. Let's do the exact opposite. You know, it's never going to work perfectly. It definitely some lives got ruined. But a lot of lives, you know, did, you know, get saved by getting the, the threat of the, of these repercussions, really did encourage people to change their lives. and get sober. If you go to any AA meeting or NA meeting, a lot of people will tell you the reason why I got a judge sent me here. Or, you know, I was facing a prison sentence and I, they told me to come here. And then now I've been sober for 20 years. So definitely ideological. Also, we were just running into an issue where jails were getting full. I mean, people were committing crimes and going to jail.

And we were running out of space. And then COVID happened. And they wanted to let everyone out of jail so they wouldn't spread COVID. I mean, there's all kinds of horrific, terrible, you know, mistakes made. Because also the other problem is in going back to the discussion about fentanyl, you've got this deadly drug on the streets, so you need some kind of policies in place. Because if your whole thing is, you know what, we're just going to let it run rampant and then people come and see us when they see us. If you've got a drug that's killing people, what the right fentanyl is, most people aren't going to be around for that long. Yeah, so now we're seeing a drop in ODs. And I'm wondering, are we, you know, are we doing the right thing? and that's why it's dropping, or are we just running out of people to OD?

I mean, 806 people ODed last year in San Francisco. San Francisco is not a huge city. I mean, you know, there's, I don't know, 700,000 people in San Francisco. It has the highest per capita OD rate at 80 per 100,000 residents. It also spends the most amount per capita on harm reduction and, you know, homelessness services. It spends the most per capita probably on anything. And the number has just steadily increased. I mean, we spent $1.1 billion.

to address homelessness and addiction in 2022. That's a 500% increase from 2016. Meanwhile, homelessness rose 64% in that time frame. So the more money that we throw at it doing the wrong thing, it seems to just actually increase the level of ODs, the level of addiction, and a level of homelessness. Because you're doing the wrong thing. We're making the complete wrong thing.

And your book has a forward by our friend Michael Schellenberger. Yes. And one of the things she's talked about a lot, and he talked about San Francisco, he talked in San Francisco about this, is book San Francisco, is the mental illness part of it. Yes. And one of the things that I've always been persuaded by,

I'm happy to be corrected, obviously, is that when the decision was made to deinstitutionalize people, that is to say, close the mental asylums and basically let people, you know, live their life whatever way they can with mental illness, that became a big part of the problem. How much of a problem do you think that is and how much of this can be solved by creating facilities

where people who are not mentally well can be given the help they need instead of like, hey, you're free, this America, go and live on the street. Yeah, I definitely think that played a big role in the problem. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came out in, I don't know, in 1976 or something like that. And rightfully so, it sort of enraged a lot of people that this could possibly, you know, not that it's a real story,

but like, you know, that stories happened. Of course, some people have ended up in mental institutions, that shouldn't have been there. This was really, you know, Reagan did this. Reagan did this as governor of California as sort of like a deal with the libertarian left of California. Like this was a freedom issue, and he sort of cut this deal.

So, of course, he got something out of the deal by cutting the budget. You know, that's what he wanted to do, and then they got something out of the deal by increasing freedoms for people. And then, you know, here we are 30 years later, or 40 years later, or 50 years later, I don't even know. But, you know, now there's really no place for these people to go.

And, you know, when I was out there and I was on meth and I was going crazy, you know, I went to mental institutions. They take you for three days and then they let you loose. I don't even think they're taking you for three days anymore. This is an issue. It seems like people have gotten crazier due to the lower quality of meth. Meth is very low quality right now. It's very cheap. It's made, we used to make it in America, and it was pretty good.

You're sounding like Trump thing. Yeah. It was the greatest. Not my words. I mean, you know, meth is terrible. No one should do meth. Even great meth, people shouldn't do it. But meth, you know, you used to kind of,

you used to be able to somewhat, you know, function. You'd start to go crazy after like three days or something like that. But meth now, you take a hit and you're just crazy. And it's like $20 an eight ball. You know, not that that means anything to you guys. But it's gotten very cheap. And people are going insane. And people have the right to be insane.

You know, I believe people have the right to do. drugs. I mean, I think if you have your little apartment and you want to do drugs in your apartment, do drugs. But if you're smoking fentanyl on the train around children, I mean, that's not a freedom issue. That's, that's a, it's almost like a civil rights issue for the people on the train. You know, they don't want to inhale fentanyl. So we're sort of living with in this, in this age where, yeah, we are feeling the effects of closing down those mental institutions. I don't really understand the path how we get back to creating those and sort of changing the laws to being able to mandate some people

to these facilities. Do you think this is the action overreaction, over reaction, over reaction, over reaction, sequence playing itself out. Like you talked about there would have been a time when people were very harsh on these things. Very harsh on people with mental illness.

You know, like the stuff that used to happen in mental assault was like horrific. Yeah. So the reaction is, the overreaction is we've got to have more freedom, right? So then you end up with a position that we've ended up in. And hopefully there is a move to, a, recriminalize crime. I mean, that's just insane, right? The fact that you can commit crimes, you can steal things without being punished for it.

And hopefully we can now move back to a kind of more sensible middle position where it's like crimes are crimes, but we aren't going to throw you in an institution and throw away the key. Do you think that's likely or are you seeing something else? All right. A bit of an unexpected one for you, but this actually got my attention. The other day, I was scrolling online and came across this video from none other than Chuck Norris. Yes, that Chuck Norris. He's in his 80s now, and according to him, he still feels like he's in his 50s. And honestly, watching it, I could believe it.

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could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe. If that happens, LifeLock gives you a U.S. based restoration agent who will stick by your side from start to finish. Phone calls, filing documentation, preparing insurance claims, your agent handles it all. In fact, we're so confident restoration is guaranteed, pour your money back. Isn't it nice to have someone like that on your side? Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash Spotify. Terms apply. Well, that's definitely the way we need to go. Now, is it likely? I'm not sure. We're already sort of seeing the overreaction. I mean, even in California,

California, you know, 70% of people voted for Prop 36, which Governor Newsom did not endorse, and Kamala Harris did not endorse, and it turned into a 70-30 issue in the most liberal state in America. And what was the proposition? Proposition 36 was essentially the recriminalization of crime, I mean, especially retail theft. Now we're, so it's like the people want it. I mean, the people voted, I think, 65% in San Francisco to tie welfare benefits to drug testing. In San Francisco, the most liberal city in the war.

the people overwhelmingly voted for tying a negative drug test in order to receive your welfare. We're seeing the overreaction, but we're not seeing that the politicians really reacting to the will of the people. And it's already bit a lot of them in the ass. I don't really know what's going to happen, but we're also seeing, you know, like in places like San Francisco, they voted out the DA,

they voted in more of a moderate DA, and then we're running a lot of a little bit of a little into more roadblocks where we see activist judges just not charging people. So we got the DA, but now we're like, okay, now we have to get the judges. When are the judges up for re-election? Now we have to wait another two years. Will people just eventually overreact and say, okay, we're just going to elect Hitler or something? You know, like, are we just going to elect the guy that's going to be the most extreme? Because we're not getting anywhere with these, like, little moderate steps. So it would really benefit everybody if politicians started listening to the will of the people.

Jared, this is a, how can I put it, a provocative question, but I think it's one that needs asking. When I look, and I love America, but when I come here, I'm always shocked and horrified and depressed by what I see when it comes to the homelessness. Is that just a symptom of a society that's sick in some way? Yeah, we got some major problems. I love America, you know. I love this country. My family. They came here from Ukraine. That's where they came from, and they built a beautiful life. My great-grandparents, my father with high school education, was able to make a very good living

as a blue-collar union worker and owned a house by the time he was 30 and was able to support a family, although he was a crack-head and a heroin addict. But my dad as a heroin and a crack addict was able to own a house, whereas I can barely rent an apartment, you know. So we're seeing a loss of hope. You know, my generation, I think, is looking at the future grimly. You know, we don't see a lot of opportunity out of this. We, I think there is just a loss of hope.

I mean, my generation went to college in droves and came out with really not a lot of opportunities. And I'm not saying let's make fake opportunities for them, you know, but it's like we were sort of sold a lie about, and that's our fault. You know, we all got liberal arts degrees and we were basically worthless. So there's just a general loss of hope. And the leaders, I mean, they're like, I can't name one leader that's like gives me any sort of hope. And that's a real issue because it doesn't matter how bad things get. If you've got hope, you're probably going to be okay. Yeah.

The moment the real darkness sets in is when you see no hope. There is no light. That's when you lead to despair. And despair leads you to do some very, very dark things. in dark places. Yeah. We need to create opportunity. I mean, the reason why I was able to, you know, get off the streets and stay sober was because I saw some kind of path to self-sufficiency and self-esteem, you know,

with the carpentry stuff. And I was building, and I was, you know, I was building America. You know, I was, like, building things and contributing to society. And we need to figure out how to provide that to a larger pool of people, you know. Not everyone can be as lucky as me and, like, wake up missing body parts and get, like, shook and, you know, wake from this nightmare. A lot of people are just going to wake up, or they're not going to wake up. They're just going to die. Yeah. And, you know, you said, you know, about liberal arts degrees, I really have a lot of empathy for people of your generation

and our generation. Look, I did a liberal arts degree. And I was told that that was a thing to do and you need to go to university. You're 18 years old. What do you know about life? All your life, you're told by your parents what to do, how to do it, when to do it, or your guardians and your teachers. So why wouldn't you follow them at that point? Why would you choose to reject them? Yeah, listen, my dad didn't go to college. He was making $51 an hour as a carpenter in 1998, and he wouldn't let me touch his tools. He was like, you can't go down this horrible path of making $51 an hour. You know, you have to go to college where he will make $30 an hour in 30 years. He didn't know that. He just assumed that, well, if I make $51, people at college must make $500 an hour.

Yeah. You know, he, but he was uneducated. He just didn't know, you know. It's just a very funny situation. Well, listen, brother, it's been great having you on, and it sounds weird, but I'm really proud of you, man. Thank you. It's so great to see you well and after that kind of journey and you spreading your message, I think is really important because one of the things that really worries me, you know, and I think it's partly because of the way America is structurally is you guys don't walk a lot. Yeah, you drive. And so all the people who have money, all the people who have power, all the people have influence,

those DAs and judges and politicians and whatever, they can just drive past the shit and they don't see it. But for us, when we walk around in America, like we would do, our episode with Joe Rogan will be out by the time this comes out. We talked about this.

It's like just walking down the streets in D.C. And fully mentally ill, drug-addicted people are just there. making their own life's hell and everyone else's life's hell. And all of that's going on, but I think it's very easy, especially in this country, just for that reason alone, for people not to see it and not to talk about it. And you've been there and you, and, you know,

when someone says we need to recriminalize crime, everyone goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But when you're talking about it, I think it lands in a different way. So I'm really excited about the fact that you are now getting your voice out there and spreading your thoughts on this because it's really, really important. So thanks. I hope everybody gets crooked. smile and reads it. And I hope people who have influenced hear that message is very important.

Well, thank you so much. It's been an honor and I just really appreciate this opportunity. And the final question we end every interview with is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Before Jared answers the final question, at the end of the interview, make sure you click the link in the description. Go to our substack where you will see this. Do you think California and other places like it are just too soft, allowing homelessness by not scraping tents, et cetera, way, and jailing people for small crimes. Is social media kind of a drug that the young minds get hooked on clickbait and outrage clips are a continuous dopamine hit?

I mean, people are talking about this a little bit, but I think it needs to be taken a lot more serious. The labor market over the next five years, it just seems like I've been playing around with some AI stuff, and I just really think we need to actually formulate a real plan. I mean, I know people talk about UBI, but I think, you know, there is a situation where we just need to prepare for the worst, you know, what are we going to do? What does society look like if 50% of people are out of work and 50% aren't, you know, where's this go? I basically just hear people mumbling about UBI. You know, I don't know if that's the solution. I don't know what we do. But it seems to be something that I keep obsessing about as I sort of figure out what I'm going to do with my life. Well, let me ask you a question on that since you bring up UBI universal basic income, which is the idea of the that as automation and AI and robots take over, there's not going to be that many jobs. There's going to be a lot of wealth created by AI and robots and whatever.

So what we need to do is we distribute it and give it to people as a form of like a monthly paycheck for not actually for work and just, you know, we've got a lot of money. Let's give it to people. Yeah. And I always wonder about that because when you tell your story, I'm not hearing I got clean and stray and decided to like focus on my life and make my life better when someone gave me money. You got that clarity when A, you had time to be away from that shit, when you couldn't get drugs, and B, when you had something in your life that gave you purpose and meaning.

Yeah. Which I think is so important to people. So I guess what I'm wondering is, when you were living on Skid Row, if someone came in and gave you a thousand dollars a month, wouldn't you just stay on Skid Row forever taking those drugs? Yeah. Yeah, this is like a giant thing that people talk about. Like, what if we just give them money? First of all, I got money. I got food stamps and I got general relief.

I got about $5.50 a month. I spent it within three days, two or three days. And then people ask, well, what if we gave them housing? I got housing while I was on Skid Row. I got kicked out of housing twice for getting blood everywhere and causing a ruckus. But, you know, the housing did not help me get off drugs. and a lot of people would get housing and actually sell it. Now, that means rent it out to like a pimp

or rent it out to their drug dealer. You will take anything given to you and try to convert it into a way to get drugs if you are terminally addicted to drugs. So, you know, but giving people UBI in general, you know, it could go either way. It could give people enough time to actually find that passion and that purpose in life

or if you're already sort of prone to doing drugs and things like that, it could create a crisis. I'm not sure. We're going to have to, I guess we'll see how that plays out. Well, I just think what's true of what you're saying as an addict is also true of all human beings. But when you don't have meaning and you don't have purpose, having more money just gives you more leverage to do things that are bad for you. Yes. Yeah. So it's like, do we incentivize people? Do we open up like art studios everywhere and, you know, axe throwing and,

you know, make a clay pot over, you know, like do we open up all these arts and craft stuff so people can get started with hobbies? I mean, we're going to have to really try to, Because people, a lot of people, will take the path at least resistance, just like drug addicts, and they will lock into Netflix, and that can become a very dark future. Well, I, the reason I'm honing in on this is, like, I know, Francis and I, we both have addictive personalities in different ways, right? For me, work and having a job and then family, that's kind of where I channel that energy. Yeah. But if you create a world in which I don't need to go to work, and no one around me goes to work, I am not sure I come out of that situation. about a person. I really am not.

Well, I'm not that good at anything, so I don't know what kind of hobby I'd take up. I mean, I'm not like exceptionally good at drawing or, you know, playing basketball or anything. I don't know where, I mean, I'd figure something out, but a lot of people, yeah, I don't know if I think it could be detrimental. Yeah. Yeah. You know, particularly a lot of people, and understandably so, find a great deal of meaning and men in particular of having a family doing a job that actually they don't really like.

You know, it's a grind, it's a bit miserable, but they get a hell of a lot of pride and deservedly so and putting food on the table for their family. And you take that away from them, then you take away pride and self-respect. And men in particular, and I'm saying this from my own experience, I wouldn't cope very well with that, if at all. I would go down a very, very dark path. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, we're seeing it. I mean, you can go to San Francisco. There's not a lot of smiles. I mean, there's a lot of people that can make just enough to barely survive. There's no chance of, like, you know, having a wife that doesn't have to work or being a little forward a kid. I mean, no, there, of course are people like that, but the majority, you know, are people that,

you know, are my age that, like couldn't even dream of having a family. Not, you know, what are we going to do about that? I don't know. Yeah. Brother, like I say, great to have you on. Appreciate your time. Head on over to Substack where we ask Jared your questions. If drugs were legalized or re-legalized even, that would immediately take the criminal element out of it. Make drugs cheaper, make drugs safer, and make lower-dose drug taking, i.e. opium smoking more likely. What do you think? This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart?

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