The Sevan Podcast - Paul Solotaroff | Rolling Stones #986

Episode Date: August 17, 2023

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Contact a licensed TD Insurance advisor to learn more. You're a test run for it. Bam, we're live. Brilliant. Just like that. Good to see you. Good morning. Brilliant to see you.

How are you? I'm awesome. Your name popped in my phone in text messages from what I think is a mutual friend now, Dale King, over at Portsmouth CrossFit. Correct. Yeah, Portsmouth is an extraordinary story, not only as a recovery community, but as a touchstone location in the worst of the war on drugs, and most recently, the best of the war on drugs. Oh, meaning because Dale's like, he's doing it.

He's doing it, but he happened to hail from the one town that's actually getting it right. The one town that is lucky enough to host the most effective broadband treatment program for severe veteran opioid addicts I've ever seen. And I've been writing about the war on drugs for 35 years now. I know. I was kind of tripping on that, how long you've been covering it. To give people some history on you, when I looked over, how many books have you authored? I've written four.

And are there any other, Paul, will you pronounce your last name for me? Is it Solotaroff? Solotaroff. and four and um are there any other paul will you pronounce your last name for me is it solitar off solo tar off solo solitar off solitar off are there any other paul solo tar offs i've never met one or seen one in a phone book anywhere yeah wild okay because i was i was looking i'm like wow this guy's had an incredible uh uh i wasn't to say career, but what's a better word for it? Repertoire or there's just a lot of good stuff you've done and there's certain topics that you've been covering a long time. Is drugs your forte, sort of just the drug use in America, drug use on planet Earth? It happens to be the thing that I've covered longest for sure. I have been writing about

reporting on the war on drugs for 35 years, or as I prefer to call it, the war on the poor, which we've been waging for 50 years, ever since Richard Nixon walked out into the Rose Garden of the White House in June of 73, and launched this woefully misbegotten piece of public policy called the War on Drugs. He called it that? That's what he called it he launched it um as i say in the early 70s um to create a phony war um for at the time a phony problem um we were not living in a country that was being flooded with overseas product with narcotics from mexico col, Bolivia, Peru, etc., etc. And nowadays, of course, from China in the form of fentanyl. And yet, despite the fact that drug use was limited to recreational drug use,

was limited to the youth community largely, and of course to rock and roll. Richard Nixon spun up this global crisis that didn't exist and devoted an extraordinary amount of our national treasure to standing up the drug enforcement agency, um, to empowering the FBI. Um, Hey Paul, sorry, sorry to interrupt. People are in the comments are saying that they're having trouble hearing you. Ah, let's see. What's a better way to do this? Shall I go to speakerphone? Yeah, let's try speakerphone. Is it currently using the mic on that headset? It is, yeah. Okay, yeah, let's try. Thank you. I appreciate you. I apologize for interrupting.

Not at all. That was a concise, solid history of the war on drugs. Hang on just a second. Okay. Easy, people. Easy, easy, easy. Everyone settle down. Settle down. I know he's saying good stuff. Everyone settle down. How's that? Uh, am I any clearer? Wow. Much better. Thank you. Good. I could hear you fine, but I have headphones on. You were talking straight to my brain. Hey, I want to get something clear. Were you saying in 73 that there wasn't the problem, but today there is the problem?

Is it still – because that's the drumbeat that's going today, that the border's open, tons of drugs are coming in, that it's intentional, that it's a sentient organization or being doing it, whether it's to make money or to kill our youth. Is it a real problem today? Oh my god, is it a real problem today oh my god is it a real problem okay okay um here's the problem yeah we live next door to the world's number one wholesale distributor of narcotics okay mexico canada oh mexico thank you The flip side of that is that we are far and away the world's number one consumer of narcotics. And so you have a relationship between buyer and seller that is un to interdict in any meaningful way because we share an 1,100-mile border with enormous gaps, not just above ground but below ground.

So I've written extensively about El Chapo and his genius as a man with a second grade education who didn't learn to read and write until he was an adult, by which time he was already a billionaire. And Chapo's great brainstorm was to, well, he had two. He had an extraordinary eye for patterns. So he figured out at a very young age when he was a lowly driver for the Sinaloa cartel, actually at that point called the Guadalajara Cartel or the Federation, he could get loads across the border where nobody else ever dreamt there was a passage. And so he very quickly rose to power as a logistics guy and a ruthless logistics guy. Chapo has killed tens and tens of thousands of people. But back then, he was doing the shooting himself. He had no problem walking up to somebody, putting his tool to their forehead and pulling the trigger. Utterly ruthless. In any event,

In any event, it was Chapo who built the world's first great narco super tunnel. And since he hired a Mexican architect to do that in the early 90s, and he did so so he wouldn't have to pay what's called plaza or a tax to the cartel running Tijuana, which is the world's biggest land point of entry between two countries. What's that called again? That largest land opening? Point of entry. Okay. Okay. It is the San Ysidro port of entry. It's actually two ports about five miles apart, if my geography is right, in San Diego.

drug checkpoint on the planet, he decided to dig a tunnel underneath them and for years was funneling first weed, then cocaine, then heroin, and then fentanyl under the points of entry in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. There were four, ended up being four major tunnels? Oh no, there were dozens. We have no idea how many there are. It's done so brilliantly. These are tunnels dug by hand through soft, loamy dirt that he and his engineers somehow figured out a way not only to buttress, that essentially train rail, his guys will push these big carts full of product from one warehouse on the Mexican side of the San Ysidro point of entry to a warehouse on the San Diego side of the point of entry, except it's not just one warehouse and it's not just one tunnel, it's dozens. And as soon as the DEA or its tunnel

crew, yep, a separate standalone federal agency, a bunch of cops whose only job is to find and take down or seal up these narco tunnels. As soon as they find one and pour concrete into it, the cartels simply dig another one right next door to it using one of the buttress walls as a foundation no shit it's just like that it's just like hey they filled that one we'll dig the one right right next to it and utilize because we already know the path we know where it pops up exactly this is falling into the weeds a bit I want to You said so many things that I want to talk about But

Isn't that like obvious And then It's the same building And the people who've caught the first one See the trucks going in and out of the same buildings again And they just shut it down Again you never see the trucks Even at the

warehouses well of course so there are trucks on either side chapo was a genius not only at pulling and pushing stuff through pushing drugs through pulling pulling cash out um he was a genius at setting up auxiliary businesses. He owned a chain of supermarkets. What do supermarkets use? 18 wheelers to truck produce. We get an astonishing amount of our produce, lettuce, avocado, nuts, tomatoes, bananas, etc. from Mexico. That point of entry I named San Ysidro is the busiest in the world. There are 75 vehicles passing through every day from Tijuana to San Diego. And once they're across the border,

it's a straight shot up I-5 to Los Angeles and points north and Los Angeles I know we're getting very weedy here but Los Angeles is the great western distribution point Los Angeles has an extraordinarily vast complex of warehouses

in South LA from which drugs are constantly coming and going. So LA, connected to all the major highways by one or two left turns, then feeds its product to Chicago, which is America's central headquarters for drugs. And once it's in Chicago, Chicago is two and a half hours from New York, from just about anywhere in the country, and also is completely networked by superhighways. A couple couple things. I don't know if this is true, but I'll just throw this out there because I know you're a sports guy too.

I heard that Wayne Gretzky's genius, I probably read it in some pop psychology book somewhere, was the fact that he could see patterns. So that basically he would see something happening in a minute, the guy's doing something with the puck that he's seen his whole life and so he would go skate somewhere that no one else was because he knew that 82 percent of the time the puck ends up back over here he gets it he scores so i think yeah i used to say of gretzky that he could see two seconds into the future okay so it wasn't that he knew where the puck was going to be he knew where the the puck would be two seconds from the time he had it on his stick or the time it was on someone else's stick.

And Gretzky, like Steve Nash, it's funny with these Canadians. How do they see into the future? Was able to read plays that hadn't happened yet. Jordan, same way. Could read plays. Steph, the same way. Steph Curry can see a play, can see a play's end before it's begun. So, so we got that with El Chapo. Another just quick connection. This is just pointless what I'm saying, except I just, I fancy it. You said that he was a logistics genius. I

don't remember who it was. I don't remember if it was Darwin's thames and that's how they eventually got to the queen and when the queen started using those teacups that business fucking exploded but it was a logistics things they uh uh problem that uh that person solved and it was a teacup maker god i wish i could maybe someone in the comments will um so i'm seeing these like these these stories right these once, these patterns of these... And then Ballsy, right? Oh, yeah. One of the things that they say about paratroopers, serial killers, and narco-traffickers is that they lack a brain chemical called mao mao is the fear neurotransmitter

and there are people with panic disorder who have way too much of it um or they have generalized anxiety disorder all that or they have ocd and then there are the people with little or none of it and those are the people to be really scared of because they don't fear consequences. David Weed, I met El Chapo in the Isle of Del de Margarita in 1996. Wow. Wow. Glad you're still on this side of the grass to tell us that. asked to tell us that. Hey, I wonder, I wonder if you know that the second they tell you about one of the tunnels, your odds of living the next 10 years goes down by like 12% or some shit like that. You know what I mean? Cause like. Oh, much worse than that. So who digs the tunnels? Chapo essentially kidnaps peasants. He doesn't kidnap them. They don't know they've been

kidnapped yet. Right. They'll find out on the other end. So these folks who are desperate for money, you know, the folks who are swimming across the Rio Grande, who are skulking under or over the fence, he rounds up these migrants, many of them not from Mexico, but from Honduras or Salvador, who are even more desperate than the poorest people in Guadalajara, Sonora, etc. And they dig these tunnels by hand, and their bonus at the end of the tunnel dig is a bullet in the back of the head. What percentage of them?

A hundred percent. And how long does it take to live a tunnel, to dig a tunnel? That I couldn't tell you. That works too, to live a tunnel. I said it wrong, but that works too. How long to live a tunnel? No one who's ever dug a tunnel has talked to me because they'd have to use a swami to speak to me from the afterlife.

We, by we, I mean archaeologists are going to be digging up they'd have to use a swami to speak to me from the afterlife. We, by we, I mean archaeologists, are going to be digging up Chapo's mass burial sites for thousands of years. The reason Chapo killed everyone connected with the digging of a tunnel was at some point or another, they were going to have some kind of innocuous run-in with law enforcement, and Chapo could never be sure that they wouldn't panic and

tell whoever had stopped them, whether it was a traffic cop or a federal officer, where that tunnel was in exchange for immigration consideration. Paul, I'm going to make a leap here real quick. Bear with me. I would go to a hotel with a friend of mine for years, and he would bring a stack of 20s. We were going to stay in the hotel for a week. This happened all the time. And he would bring a stack of 20s you know i don't know how many let's say 100 and and every person he saw from the second we drove showed up there he would give 20 right 20 to the guy who opened his door 20 to the guy who took his bags up 20 to the guy at the front desk and so by the time we got to the room he had spent 200 right he'd given at least 10 20s away and he would do that throughout the stay and it would change our entire stay

and he would explain to me that um you do that you know these are nice hotels right the four seasons in beverly hills things like that right and you do that and what it does is it completely changes your stay there because everyone there is now working for you because they know that they're going to get a 20. I understand and appreciate the phenomenon greatly. And I'm always, I love rewarding people. You know what I mean? I love giving the Starbucks guy a tip who says, thank you, please. You have beautiful kids. Fuck yeah. Thank you for contributing to the happiness and civils. I love all that stuff, right? for contributing to the happiness and civiliz- I love all that stuff, right? Rewarding the people around you.

But I'm also- I think I'm also a libertarian. And the problem is, is that if the- I don't want big government, but if the government- What I'm hearing you say also is that whoever has the most money is running the fucking show. Like, every time you're saying this, you haven't said it explicitly now.

I'm like, how is he getting away with so much? And I'm like, well, because he's putting food on so many people's tables, right? Yeah, so it's – what's that phrase? Silver or lead when a guy is recruited into some low-level function for the cartels. It is not – they're not filling out job applications, although Chopin made everybody fill out job applications. And the information he was most interested in was the age and location of their children. Oh, fuck.

Right? of their children. Oh, fuck. Right? So, but the boarding bonus is lead or silver. You either take our money or you take our bullet. And that is a really strong incentivizer, right? Okay, so real quick here.

So there's two things. The guys, so what you're saying is the guys digging the tunnels they did it for the money and for food trying to feed their kids but you're saying there's another group of people who if they didn't work for him they knew the only other option was death that is correct and interesting i'd never heard that okay okay well so you know if you're going to run a 15, $20 billion a year operation, you need all sorts of employees, right? You need the folks who dig the tunnels. You need the folks who carry the product through. Um, you need the folks, um, on the other side who never see the drugs, never touched the money, the logistics people. You need the folks who operate, who open and operate phony businesses on the U.S. side, because you've got to wash that cash

somehow, right? Much of it is coming back on the retail side in fives, tens, and twenties. Nobody wants fives, tens, or twenties. You can't take them to a bank and you certainly can't hide them because they're too bulky. So what comes across finally is hundred dollar bills. And one of the agents I have written a lot about, I won't name him here, agents I have written a lot about, I won't name them here, did a raid on one of Chapo's houses, and I'm going to get the town wrong. I think it was Monterey, where they went in looking for bodies. They thought, because people were going in and not coming out of this particular dwelling, that it was a kill site. And they found no bodies. They brought the dogs in,

no trace, no scent. They couldn't even find weapons. And then finally, somebody has the idea to open up the living room wall, just for giggles. And what do they find? They find that the entire house, two-story house, is insulated with $100 bills in vacuum-sealed bags. Wow. The insulation in that house was $26 million U.S. In hundreds. And I know your next question, where does all that money go once it's seized? Yeah. So it goes to the U.S. Treasury with a, I think it's a 10% kick out to the local law enforcement agency who recovered the money. So you ask why it's impossible to win the war on drugs or make any

progress. Well, we have now built $100 billion a year industry called the prison industrial complex. We have 2.2 million folks sitting in state, federal, and county prisons in America. That's a thousand percent more than we had when the war on drugs kicked off. And last numbers I saw, two-thirds of the folks in all of our prisons combined have substance abuse issues. It's why they're there. combined have substance abuse issues is why they're there. So if we had elected to treat those folks instead, which is vastly more effective as a crime deterrent, we would have a third of the population in prison, and those folks would be out working in the community as taxpayers,

not tax burdens. But I digress. And that's why I was curious what your opinion, what some of your opinions were on them, on the situation. So you're basically saying one out of every 150 people in the United States is locked up behind bars, right? Correct. And in certain communities, challenged communities, communities of color, the number is vastly higher. So the prison population in America, God, it's been a while since I looked at these.

But that's not because of their skin color. No, no, no, no, no. And unfortunately, because it's said like that, it feels like the vast majority of the United States thinks that. Yeah. So which is which really I have to tell you, kind of scares me at the IQ of the people around me. Well, we get warnings of that or reminders of that every four years during our national elections. So there is a grossly disproportionate number of people of color in prison. But they're in prison not because they're inherently more criminal, by no stretch of the imagination. They're in prison because they're poor and because their communities are saturated by out by external sources with drugs used to be the Italian mob in the 40s and 50s, New York.

And then, of course, it was, you know, Colombian mobs, Dominic, Dominican mo moms, et cetera, et cetera. What about culture and like, what about culture, culture's role? And yeah, what about culture's role? Including that in terms of like households, like there's a statistic I see over and over and over just everywhere. If you don't have a father at the, if you don't have a mother and father that are together, your chances of having cancer go up 50%.'re correlates they're not causes your chances of going to 80 of the dudes in jail are um uh don't have dads another really

strong correlate paul is the penis if you have a penis it gets like i mean your chances of going to jail are significantly higher than if you have a vagina. All true. You haven't said a false word yet. And that's why it bugs me every time. The color thing really bugs me because I just don't think it's a strong correlate. No. I think it's a – God, I think it's bad propaganda for people who are better equipped to live at the equator than at the North Pole. You know what I mean?

I do. The truth is that, you know, the vast, vast majority of people in prison are poor. Right. Right. Right. You know, I'm not a criminologist. Sometimes I play one on TV in these series that get spun off from my stories and rolling stone uh but you know the things you said are right if there's not a father around if there

is economic trauma because it is an enormously traumatizing thing to be poor in America, right? You are surrounded on all sides by images of luxury, by images of acquisition. And here you are with barely enough to eat, if that, you know, attending horrifically underfunded or understaffed or all of the above schools in dangerous communities. You've seen people die. You've seen violence from a very young age. The traumatized brain will treat itself one way or another. And, you know, the greatest folly of the war on drugs is that we are trying to eradicate the ways people dose themselves for pain and fear without doing anything about the pain and fear that people live in. Right. All of the drugs, whatever it is, right? It's a coping mechanism. Yeah. Coping tool. whatever it is, right? It's a coping mechanism.

Yeah. Coping tool, right? Alcohol, all drugs. I mean, almost- Natural, synthetic, you're right. So we've been doing this since we pushed the rock aside in the cave and walked outside for the first time. It was an inherently terrifying thing to be alive, you know, in prehistoric sub-Saharan Africa. And it's, you know, for a lot of us, terrifying to be alive right now. One of the things that has changed so much, though, in the 30-odd years i've been covering the war on drugs is you could not get yourself dead by smoking a joint or huffing a line of cocaine back in the days when we were all doing that when we were all playing when we were all experimenting when we were all running around on thursday friday saturday nights

obsessed with getting ourselves laid these days in fact then i appreciate you saying that too the getting laid part so many people forget that that's kind of what keeps us uh the whole fucking earth spinning i appreciate you throwing that in there well it's either you know neglected the drive to stay alive which is built on fear um it's the drive to procreate which is built on the other thing and so the difference as i was saying is that nowadays a thc gummy that isn't thc an ox OxyContin that contains no OxyContin, an Ativan that has zero Ativan can and will kill you the first time you take it. And that is the biggest tectonic shift in the war on drugs since it began.

shift in the war on drugs since it began. We are now losing, well, the official number is 110,000 last year, dead of overdoses in America. That is a grotesque undercount. I talk to cops all over the country who tell me they're pulling bodies out of houses, buildings, et cetera, that never get autopsied. And there's never a cause of death listed. So that 110,000, which by the way is, oh, 500% more than just six years ago, is a woeful undercount. And the thing that's most terrifying to people who know anything about how drugs are bought and sold in this country is that the dead are our babies. They're 11-year-olds. They're 15-year-olds. They're kids who go online looking to make friends, looking to keep the friends they have, looking just not to get cyber bullied by the kids at school they know don't like them. And they are not only exposed to

drugs online and exposed to dealers online, they are bombarded on various social media portals with drug menus. And that's my next story. Can someone please put in the chat the guy we had on who made the movie about the fentanyl deaths? The kid. God, I have to share the name of this movie with you. This kid made a movie where he interviews five families who lost people from fentanyl. They're all young people, right? And he weaves all their stories together.

I had to stop the movie like four or five times because I was crying so fucking hard. Yeah. Jake Chapman showing his understanding of math. I appreciate it. You're much more likely to get hit by a nuclear bomb if you're Japanese. I understand.

A very strong point. It is a tough life being Japanese. Well, it was a lot tougher in 1945. As we all know now, having walked out of the theater in the last month, what's really, really extraordinary, and I don't know how much you know about the story of Fentanyl what's really, really extraordinary. And I don't know how much you know about the story of fentanyl and Chapo's role in-

No, tell me. I'd love to hear it. Okay. So Chapo was, again, among many, many qualities. He was a fearless world traveler. Chapo spent a lot of time opening and creating markets in Europe, in Western Africa,

but above all in China. And Chapo was making and exporting crystal meth long before he got into the fentanyl game. Nobody. Did he do drugs, Paul? Did he do drugs? The word on the street is that he never touched them until he went to prison. Okay. And in prison, again, this is all fist hand. His main drug of choice, dear friend, was Viagra. Wow.

And everybody who was working with or for Chapo in prison, whether it was at Altiplano or what was the place before then where he spent the most time, basically it was pizza and pussy for all. At least the guys who were down with him, and that included the prison guards, it included prison officials. And if you're using $100 bills as insulation for a house, you can pay off anybody. That's what it comes down to at the end of the day. If you have enough money, you can do whatever you want. And I'm not saying that with any negativity or connotation. It just is that way. It really is, yeah. There's so many fun facts about Chappo that i learned through you know so i i i

wrote about these two brilliant uh dea super cops uh the number two at the time jack riley and his right hand man john delena who is now the number three at the dea um in in washington and they told me so much incredible tradecraft. For instance, every house that Chapo owned always had at least two things. It always had a hidden stairway to the sewer system, no matter where the house was or how humble it may have appeared from the outside. There was a combination of electronics in the house that, when operated in the right sequence, would lift a bathtub off its hinges. And underneath that raised bathtub would be a really well-built concrete set of stairs into the catacombs, the subway, or the sewer systems of a town, village, city.

And at the bottom of that staircase, you'd always find the same thing, a goat horn or an AK-47. Goat horn is Mexican slang for an AK-47 um goat horn is mexican slang for an ak-47 and on the bottom of that ak-47 which was chapo's favorite weapon the number 289 and i think it's 289 but again i don't want to be held to it and 289 would be engraved in gold and diamonds on the butt of the um of the gun and it was years before they finally figured out what the number stood for might have been 789 it was chapo's place on fortune's richest men on the planet. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Forbes El Chapo. Yeah, look up that number. Yeah, he's in there. Joaquin Guzman Larea, that's him? That's him. Yeah, a bunch of names. Hey, is this guy still alive? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Well, you wouldn't want his life. He is going to spend the rest of his days in a windowless cell at the impenetrable of Florence ADX, the world's most secure super prison in Eastern Colorado. It is a horrible place to spend a single day if you're on the wrong side of the door. I can't imagine it's much fun for the folks who work there either. But it is in the middle of nowhere and you have no access to visitors. You have no access to entertainment. You get books. You get, if I get this right,

you get a shower once a week and you get a second hour out of your cell in a so-called recreation area which is essentially the size of two cells and you're by yourself from today for the rest of your natural life

there was a guy named Otto let me go back a second do you think El Chapo has any value to society anymore do you think that he could be utilized to make he could be rehabilitated so that he adds value to society or that he could he should be allowed to write a book or he should be interviewed and then the follow-up to that is have you tried to interview him since he's he's sort of you know

one of the premier characters in a in a subject matter that you are very passionate about. Have you tried to go there? Well, I certainly sat with him in a courtroom enough. Okay. When he was tried and finally sentenced in a U.S. Supreme Court in Brooklyn, New York, I was there every day. A couple of days, I actually sat next to his wife at the time, who is now herself doing life in prison as a co-conspirator. And Chapo was 15 feet away. But no, Chapo has never spoken to a U.S. journalist unless you want to get really jiggy with the term journalist and call Sean Penn the journalist. He did Chopo famously. Crazy. And do you think that there's any value in – we started the show with putting people in and talking about rehab as opposed to prison.

Do you think that dude could be rehabbed? Do you think there's any value in rehabbing him? The main guy? Well, what are you rehabbing him from? Right. Right. You know, he's a question. He's a guy who was killed.

We'll never know. Right. Right. We'll never charge him with those crimes because there's no way to prove any of them. because there's no way to prove any of them. And oh, by the way, he's doing a quadzillion years in consecutive sentence bids for his narco-trafficking crimes, the Kingpin crimes. He must have some value.

Like he can tell us how to stop this in the future. Or maybe, right? What he can do is tell us where he buried that 15 billion dollars so we can begin to recover some is that true tell me about that there's 15 billion dollars buried that's the guess so chapo not only owns supermarkets he owns banks enormous amounts of property in mexico and abroad um and of course we don't know where any of it is. I am sure that the United States attorney in the Southern District negotiated fiercely with him, or attempted to negotiate fiercely with him, to lessen the severity, the location, the terms of his sentence with him in exchange

for revealing where his assets were. And he didn't give up anything. As far as I know, Chapa's the only guy who never flipped on anybody because who's he going to flip on? You only flip up, you don't flip down. Has he been replaced? Oh, yeah. So the, none of this is funny. It's all horrific. It's all just saturated

in blood. There used to be five cartels in Mexico. So from the Big Bang moment in 93, when the Guadalajara cartel went kaboom, it actually went kabo the leader, El Padrino. Since it broke up into five, we have been waging this disastrous war against those five entities, Sinaloa, Gulf, Sinaloa, Gulf, Juarez, Tijuana. And we successfully cut off the head of the snake. We successfully arrested and or killed the cartel bosses, their underbosses, and their plaza lieutenants. And for our trouble, we now have 100 cartels. So instead of five king cobras, we've got 100 super poisonous rattlesnakes. And we have no idea who's running which. We have no idea how to, again, decapitate, disable any of these awful

operations, who, by the way, have gotten wildly more bloody and medieval and indifferent to human life in the last 30 years. So for all these trillions we have spent trying to disable these cartels in the idea that once you left them leaderless, they were then going to be easy to crush. We got the exact opposite. We got this huge multiplication of demons. And so now nobody knows who we're chasing. We have less and less of a relationship with law enforcement in Mexico than we did. And the folks that we have hired to be super cops have all retired. The great undercovers are gone. The real ass kickers, the Jack Reillys, the John Delenas, they're either retired or they're now wearing suits in D.C. And the DEA and the FBI are essentially run by Goldman Sachs these days.

They're all analytics people. They're no longer the badasses and gun carriers of yore. And honestly, we are running around like headless chickens in ways that we weren't doing even back in the bad old days. We don't have a drug policy that's coherent, that's effective. And maybe it's because there is no coherent or effective drug policy. But in any case, this country has never been more at sixes and sevens

about this existential menace than it is right now um the guy i sent you a link by the way or i'm gonna yeah i'm gonna send you a link right now um nothing you need to look at now but the kid's name is dominic torino i only call him like i don't mean call my kid as disrespectful the movie's brilliant just because he's half my age but um he, after I watched the movie and I, I, I, I'm not a, um, statistics major by any means, but with those numbers that you were saying over a hundred thousand kids dying every year, you know, between the age of, I don't know, five and 25 from fentanyl overdose, not while they're trying to take something else. Right. Um, uh, it ends up being, I did the math on it. Don't quote me on it, but basically, if you're born today and we keep up at this pace,

you have a one in five chance of, it's actually stifling our population growth. You have like a one in five chance of fucking dying from fucking a fentanyl overdose. When you start doing the numbers, because you look how many people are born every year in the United States, and you look how many are dying from fentanyl, and you start playing with those numbers,

you're like, uh-oh. That's not good. It's really, really awful. Here's another number that should scare the shit out of you and your listeners. I was talking to someone from SAMHSA. Please don't ask me what that stands for. All of these government super agencies, it's something about mental health. And they really are the curators of all

the dreary numbers. Substance abuse and mental health service administration. Thank you. And what they told me is the day you first start with fentanyl, you have essentially 18 months to live. The average life expectancy of a fentanyl user in America is 18 months. of habituation, you are knowingly or otherwise seeking out your headstone, meaning you're looking for that high that will replicate your first high, but because you build up such chemical dependence, it now takes so much more. And essentially what you're looking for by the time, you know, you're one of the walking dead on our streets is you're looking for what they call the hot shot, the shot that takes you out. you out and you'll never know you died you'll never feel it coming you'll just be higher than you ever were and then you will be never were i i was born and raised in the bay area and i don't know any single i don't know a single person who's died of hiv and yet in the last 18 months less than one degree of one degree of separation away from me

or less, I know five people who've died from fentanyl overdose, all young, all under 30. None of them, like, just like you said, none of them doing fentanyl. None of them were doing fentanyl. I mean, they did fentanyl, but they weren't, you know, they're trying to do something else. Yeah. Of course. You know, I got got an argument with one of my rolling stone editors at christmas party good i like you more for that already right now she was furious at me because i just published this story called we hunt killers about a group of top secret federal agents in san diego this unit has been disbanded because it was so fucking good at its job. That's what we do in America. We take a bunch of super agents, we put them together,

or they find each other, right? Much more often how it happens. These six brilliant cops in San Diego, whose only job was to hunt, catch, and if need be, kill cartel assassins on the streets of San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Tucson. And they caught 300 of those motherfuckers in a span of less than 10 years, 300 stone cold killers. And as I said, they took those guys and broke them up as soon as they got so good at their job that they should have basically opened their own academy and taught a bunch of other border feds how to do exactly what they did. In any event, I can't remember.

Oh yes. Why'd she get angry? At a Rolling Stone party. And in the story, I explain pills and tablets for American pharmaceuticals. So if you are getting an Ativan, ifite Aid, or Walgreens, that shit's fentanyl. Straight up, straight down, that's fentanyl. You're going to die.

And why are you going to die? So when you take pure fentanyl and you start chopping it on the Mexican side, you start cutting it with, you know, all of these additives, not only to stretch the product, but also so that you don't kill every single consumer every single time. every single time. You're taking stuff that if you want to be sure of quality control, you have to atomize. Basically, you can leave nothing called a hotspot, a speck of pure fentanyl. You have to dilute, you have to thoroughly homogenize so that there isn't still flex pure fentanyl in that pill, in that powder, in that liquid, right? But Mexico's chemists, and they're all amateurs, are not doing quality control. Well, that's not true. They are. So, again, talking to my DEA pals, what I hear is that the folks who they try the product on, the Chapitos, Chapo's three sons, they do quality control testing, but they're not testing for safety they only send the product

north when it kills their human tasters that's when they know the soup is done ship that bad boy out wait a second Paul you're telling me that they they'll make it while they're it's

like it's like if my wife's making cookies and she's having me taste them they make these drugs and then when someone dies they know it's done that's correct why would i i don't understand why they would do that aren't they in the business wouldn't they want to keep their people, the consumer alive? In any other form of commerce? Yes, 100%. But in the world of addicts, the dose that kills the kid in the midst of your circle is the dose that everyone is running top speed to grab. Damn.

Why? Because a month, a year into your addiction, the dose you started out with is just a fraction of what you're taking now to stay high. You'll never get as high as you were that first time, but man, do you build up dependence to morphine derivatives fast. It's why OxyContin was originally compounded as five and 10 milligram tablets. And within a couple of years, the Sackler family was pumping out 160, 160. And time was at America's pill mills, which are largely gone from the scene. You could, as a Medicaid recipient or as a private pay patient, walk in, put your $250 cash down, pay the phony doctor, get a script for 90 Oxycontin, either 80 milligrams each or 160.

That, and by the way, then pay a $3 Medicaid copay, walk out on the street. That bottle of pills was worth 10K on the street if you sold them individually. That's so hard to get my head wrapped around. a bottle of pills was worth 10K on the street if you sold them individually. So – That's so hard to get my head wrapped around. And now what you're saying is that people can actually make this stuff. I actually went on Amazon. Look, you can just get some fentanyl and start pressing your own pills and start selling your own shit. Exactly.

And call it whatever you want. And there are people getting FedExes from China, you know, envelope mailers that contain five, six ounces. Well, five, six ounces of fentanyl, that's a lot of heroin, fake heroin you're putting on the street. And yes, you're absolutely right. But by far, 99.99% of the fentanyl coming into our country is over or under our southern border. Do you have kids, Paul? I do. I have one beautiful young man who's 24. I am spared this particular hell for a different hell. My kid is severely disabled.

He has a fragile X and autism and is largely nonverbal. So this is one fear I don't walk around with or lie awake with at three in the morning. I have a whole different set of concerns about my young man who will outlive me and who will nonetheless need cradle to grave care. Let's talk about something a little more upbeat, if that's OK. Please, please, please. It bears very closely on this. So we began by talking about Portsmouth, Ohio, and its historical importance and conversation, war against drugs, war on drugs. The Sackler family, we all know who the Sacklers are, yes? The Oxycontin people, right? The Oxycontin people, arguably the most lethal, the most, what do we call the Sacklers without getting sued? Yes, they invented

OxyContin. They persuaded the Food and Drug Administration that an end-of-life narcotic that was only supposed to ever be used in an operating room or under hospice conditions was in fact safe for everyday Americans to use to treat minor aches and pains. The extraordinary sales job they did on the FDA in the mid-1990s and in 1997, I believe, 96, 97, OxyContin was approved. It wasn't just approved. It was raved up by the American Medical Association to all of its practitioners as their moral duty to prescribe to people suffering from what was called the fourth indicator, which was pain. It was their moral duty to treat pain, it presented and to prescribe end-of-life drugs that were,

per the Sackler family, not addictive, were safe to use every day. And you want to know who paved the road for fentanyl? It was the Sackler family. And not a single member of that family has ever faced criminal prosecution, will ever pay out a dollar of their own money, will ever be forced to live in hiding or shame. Far from it. The Sackler name is on hospital wings, is on galleries, is on the door of museums in every city in America. That family is the Caesars of America. And they did their original mass distribution of OxyContin in Southeast Ohio. Why there? Because Arthur Sackler and his son Richard did extraordinarily deep market research, not into the community there, into the population of doctors who prescribed to that community. What they saw was that

middle America, especially along the Ohio River, people who grew up working in factories, working in steel mills. Suffered disproportionately from aches and pains. Went to their local country doctors or general practitioners. And for decades, the most prolific prescribers of painkillers, which were primitive things in those days. I don't remember the names of them. You know, Percocet came along before, but codeine, basically codeine derivatives, were being prescribed at really prolific rates in Appalachia. And so that's where the Sacklers sent their beautiful or handsome young drug reps to all those country doctors and small town general practitioners and said, look, these will treat the folks that come into your office every week or once a month much better than the stuff you're prescribing now, and they're safe. And so in 1997, 98, no sooner had the FDA approved of this demon drug than there was

America's first pill mill directly across the river from Portsmouth, Ohio. Within five years, there were 15 pill mills serving the Portsmouth community, a town of 19,000. Damn. 27 million pills written a year or some such number. from 97 until the DEA ran herd on all those pill mills towards the end of the aughts. But there was like a 15-year run. I think it was 2012 when the last pill mill fell in southern Ohio. But— Sorry, Paul. Can you tell me exactly what a pill

I know I can picture in my head Pill mill is a place where they just make shit loads of pills But how is that happening? There's not oversight on it You can just make It's legal drug making No, so nobody's making the pills The pills are being manufactured

By Purdue By Purdue Pharma This Unheard of drug company or being manufactured by Purdue Pharma, right? This unheard of drug company that got very rich off a distribution deal for Valium in the late 60s, early 70s, which then introduced the most powerful narcotic at the time, something called MS-Contin, which was the father of OxyContin. MS-Contin was Oxycodone plus. So it was Oxycodone plus Tylenol or Aspirin. I can't remember which. The difference in OxyContin is it's straight oxycodone. It is the pure drug itself. It is essentially pure heroin. So a pill mill, what is a pill mill? It is a place that may look like a doctor's office oftentimes, but the machines, the diagnostic machines aren't plugged in.

It's a place where patients spend an average three minutes with a physician. Um, first time, the last time they see them, no matter what it's you walk in, you get $250 us currency, you slap it down on that physician's desk. He or she writes you a prescription without doing an MRI, without doing an X-ray, without calculating your level of pain. leg, ankle, and you walk out of there with a refillable supply, refillable prescription for 90 of whatever your poison is, whether it's oxy 40s, 80s, 160s. They don't make 160s anymore, but they did. So I go to college for eight years to become a physician, do four years as residency or some shit. And the next thing I know, all I am is a drug pusher for pharma. If you're a rogue doctor who has lost his license in the state you are practicing, but whose license is somehow still seen as valid by the state of Ohio, if you still

have a DEA account, if you're still able to write prescriptions, you can make a million dollars a year sitting at a desk and simply writing scripts. And that's what pill mills were. They were these strip mall storefronts where you would see lines of out-of-state cars parked at six in the morning waiting for the door to open at 10 a.m. and there'd be fights in the parking lot and there'd be people throwing up in the parking lot and the poor bastards who own stores next door to the pill mill, would be run out of business or would run for their lives from these zombies who were sitting on... Real zombies.

I've seen them. Portland turned... The whole city of Portland was taken over by zombies. 100%. Downtown LA. LA, yeah. You know, the legions of the undead. Kensington, Philadelphia. Oh, Kensington, Philadelphia.

Oh, Kensington, Philadelphia. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know, I just saw a friend of mine, Tommy G did a video on, he hung out in Kensington and soon as he gets there, he's like, maybe we'll see someone shooting up. Not only within three seconds, does he see someone shooting up, but someone else has to come over and Narcan them. And it's just in the middle, it's just on the street and there's cops. No one, no one cares. Nothing you can do.

No, it's, I have a brother who lives in Kensington and his, his condo is behind a set of gates and he doesn't leave the house unless he's driving in and out of that gated yard. And every day, whether it's coming or going, he's either stepping on needles or, you know, hopping over them in the curb. Kensington is one of the saddest places on earth because there's an above ground subway that runs through it and under every overpass right because the track is elevated there are 300 people living sleeping dying pissing shitting um in that you know that half a block long tunnel. And it is the saddest site on earth. But again, we were trying to talk about something more upbeat.

And back to Portsmouth. So Portsmouth, a town vaporized by OxyContin, by OxyContin was lucky enough to host, and through no genius or anything other than Kismet of its own, it hosted the first great treatment program, the first comprehensive treatment program for fentanyl addicts, a place called the Counseling Center. And it is a one-off in this country. Why do I say that? Because even before the folks who run the Counseling Center, by far the biggest treatment nonprofit in all of Appalachia. It's the biggest treatment center in, I think, five contiguous states. And again, it's in Portsmouth, Ohio. Before it joined forces with a special forces captain to create the fourth leg of this brilliant treatment protocol, and that fourth leg is Snapchat.

It's not Snapchat. Pardon me, that's my next story. That fourth leg is CrossFit. But long before then, beginning with the advent of fentanyl, pardon me, OxyContin addiction in Southern Ohio, they began doing something that no other treatment center does in America. They not only gave folks 90 days of really intensive inpatient care,

group therapy, one-on-one, a zillion things. They also created this extended community of sober houses. So they converted all of these abandoned houses into sober houses. They literally rebuilt these falling down houses and created subsidized lodging for addicts in long-term recovery. So for a year or two, after you got out of outpatient, inpatient, you were now in outpatient care, living with four, five, six other people in sobriety. And then the third thing they did, which was really brilliant, They brought in the folks who did most of the building, landscaping, electrical work, From the second or third week of inpatient treatment, these folks were getting vocational training eight hours a day so that when they got out, they not only had their sobriety, they had a union card. They were able to make double or three times the minimum wage, but it wasn't until they stumbled onto a man named Dale King, or actually he stumbled upon them

in 2018, that the fourth leg of this incredible treatment stool was added. And that fourth leg is CrossFit. So what does CrossFit do to the brain? First of all, when you've got a substance abuse problem, and not just the substance abuse problem, because why do you have a substance abuse problem? More likely than not, you are treating something in your brain that doesn't feel good. You're either someone suffering from anxiety, suffering from depression, suffering from both, suffering from childhood trauma, the breakup of an important relationship, the loss of a loved one. Something doesn't feel good in your head, and it hasn't felt good in a long time. Maybe it's intolerable, right? What CrossFit does is take those broken pleasure receptors, what we call dopamine receptors, dopamine pathways, and remake them, basically trim them so that

those receptors not only are able to receive dopamine again, make and receive dopamine again, but they're able to make and receive it in manageable doses. So what happens in the attic brain? Those dopamine receptors are instantly flooded with external dopamine in the form of, you know, morphine or morphine derivative. What happens when you addict the brain to external morphine is it forgets how to make its own, or it wildly over or under reacts to the transmission of dopamine in your brain. So intense exercise remakes and refits the dopamine receptors and pathways in your brain. But unbeknownst to the folks, the good people at CrossFit, it also does something else. And this is the magic. When a mom gives birth to a baby,

both baby and mom are flooded with a hormone called oxytocin. It's called the love hormone. It's also called the bonding hormone. The purpose, the evolutionary purpose of oxytocin is to form this unbreakable hormonal connection between baby and mother, so that the species survives. Mom will throw herself in front of a saber-toothed tiger, in front of a saber-toothed tiger or in front of a bullet to keep it alive, that kid will go on to sire children of his or her own. All right. FanDuel Casino's exclusive live dealer studio has your chance at the number one feeling,

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1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca Please play responsibly. If you survive, when you survive, an hour in a CrossFit box, exhausted past anything you've ever known before, but flooded with dopamine, you also are flooded with this second neurotransmitter called oxytocin. And what it does is it binds you emotionally to everyone in that room. So by the end of week one, the end of month one,

you suddenly have a new family. You have your CrossFit family. And that CrossFit family, people who are doing the right thing, people who are eating the right thing, who are showing up every day, who are building their bodies, rebuilding their lungs, rebuilding the circuitry of their brains,

form a hell of a better family than one that sent you down the road to addiction in the first place. And by the way, no slag on the mothers and fathers of addicts. By no means, I know way too many of them, way too many of these lovely people who through no fault of their own had a kid, usually a boy, with neurotransmitter difficulties of one form or another. They've got ADHD. They've got, you know, a mood disorder, an anxiety disorder, you know, the whole maquila, right? And so these kids all start out smoking weed in the school bathroom. Of course, the weed is 20 times stronger than it was when you and I were smoking weed. That is its own fucking nightmare. who are weed psychotic. They are so high that for three days,

they have to be in a locked facility while that stuff exits their bloodstream. This is, you know, this is happening in every emergency room in America right now. But back to Portsmouth. So from 2018 forward, addicts who come in off the street are being offered and strongly encouraged to take part in an exercise program with Dale. Dale King, a two-tour veteran of the Sunni triangle in Iraq, a man under fire, a man whose base was blown up by a suicide bomber

within weeks of his arriving in northern Iraq in 2004. By the way, that blast killed 20-something U.S. soldiers, the biggest suicide bombing death count, at least of U.S. personnel in the course of the Iraq War. after 10 years gone from Portsmouth, came back to his hometown late 2007 and immediately realized he was safer in northern Iraq than he was in southern Ohio. No hyperbole there, no hyperbole. None whatsoever, because Portsmouth was just this movie set

from The Walking Dead, particularly downtown, this once thriving honky tonk of bars, restaurants, nightclubs, antique stores, frozen yogurt shops. All that shit was gone. It was boarded buildings and junkies, 20 or 30 of them living in the basement, shooting up, shitting, fucking dying together. Speaker 1 Do junkies fuck? Do junkies fuck? Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. Junkies have their brother. Junkies have children. Speaker 1 Sorry. Sorry to derail you sorry fine it is fine we are good um yeah you know junkies are human beings whose human functions still work um not so much uh their neo-frontal cortex you know the executive function of the brain but everything else yes the part that has you put a condom on paul um it really irritates me and speaks for me to the stupidity of society that we keep talking

about a homeless population yeah because i think it's a misnomer the same way people keep saying we have a type 2 diabetes problem what it is is once again it's fucking propaganda we don't have a type 2 diabetes problem we have a fucking sugar because fucking propaganda we don't have a type 2 diabetes problem we have a fucking sugar eat because then if you say we have a type 2 diabetes problem they're going to try to solve type 2 diabetes that's not the problem that's the symptom of the cause which is eating too much refined carbohydrates they keep talking about this fucking homeless problem i was homeless for many years and of and there were only two people, myself and one other guy, of the thousands of homeless people that I hung out with who weren't drug addicts, whether it be alcohol or – it was before fentanyl. This is in the – 1999, maybe 2004 or 5.

But everyone was a fucking drug addict. And it's like – and i hear this governor of mine gavin newsom wants to build these fucking people shelter and so this is another place where i'm torn why i asked you why i had kids and this is sort of getting into policy at 20 years old i'm like make drugs legal i don't give a fuck now that i have three little boys i'm at the place of um thank god what happened to george floyd happened to george floyd sorry but i can't have you on the street high on alcohol fentanyl and meth with your 18th arrest in three years because i have kids who are riding tricycles in the street like i made it i made a massive like

leap do you know what i mean like all of a sudden my singular focus is to protect my kids. And maybe I've gotten too myopic on that desire to protect them to where I literally was like, hey, let bygones be bygones. Let everyone do drugs. So I know I'm bringing up a lot, but we have a society that's trying to fix a homeless problem that's not a homeless problem. And we have a society that is now tolerant of a place that's not hospitable to kids and so i i i'm just like do you have any advises is that like um i mean i do not let my kids my kids don't go to school and they're not they and they're not allowed screen time like then they're not going to get a cell phone until like they escape from the it's not the El Chapo jail, but it's the Savon Matosian jail. I completely understand your wish to throw a coat over those kids. It's a really, really psycho world. And by psycho, I mean the world online.

Yeah, you can hide from it. You nailed it. It's the world online. If I can protect them from that as long as possible, all the kids I know, whenever I see a kid, I'm like,, Hey man, you seem really well put together. And I started digging a couple of things. Yes, they have both parents at home, but they're the kids whose parents didn't give them a cell phone until they were 15 or older. It seems like. Yeah. Yeah. There, there are a lot of things we shouldn't allow kids do until 15. One of them being playing football. I'm the guy who broke the NFL concussion scandal 15, 16 years ago. I agree with that. So back to what's so profoundly powerful about this program is you are taking folks who were costing us.

So let's do the numbers here, shall we? We were talking about homelessness. Yeah. of their use, their criminal conduct in support of their use of drugs cost $31,000. So let's do the numbers. $45,000 a year to put an addict in prison, $31,000 to convert that tax burden into a taxpayer. And it's a one-time expense. Now, I'm not... You mean if it's successful? Uh-oh.

I'll tell you. Portsmouth is a profoundly important story because it works. We have been trying to treat addiction in this country as an industry now for 40 years, right? We have business, and it is a business, is roughly 40 years old. What works and what we now know works is not just impatient, not just outpatient, not just vocational. It's everything. You have to surround an addict with the four most desperately needed commodities, one, sobriety, two, safety in the form of long-term subsidized housing. And, you know, whatever you think is acceptable or affordable, you know, whether it's six months or a year of outpatient safe housing before they can purchase or rent their own apartment, et cetera. The third thing, of course, is you have to give them a way

to earn a living and support the children that they've left behind with their own parents or in extended foster care. And then the fourth thing, the fourth thing, which is CrossFit. So again, CrossFit on its face is intense exercise for an hour a day or three times a week. No, CrossFit is family. CrossFit are those people who adopt you, who bring you into their tribe, and who hold on to you, who care about you, care about your sobriety, care about who you're dating, care about what's going on with your kids. They are the people you will keep. You know, the best of us have two

families, the families we were born into, and then the families we make for ourselves of our own children and the people who are dear to us, our best friends, our keepers, right? That's what CrossFit does. So whether you're an addict or not, whether you're an athlete or not, what we're finding with CrossFit is that working out intensely with a bunch of people, not in competition, but encouraging. I mean, CrossFit gyms are so loud. Everyone's screaming, but they're screaming for you to beat your personal record, right? It's pure support. And so when you complete that year program at the counseling center, you not only have a job that you couldn't have dreamt of getting,

whether it's in the building trades or, you know, working on a factory floor somewhere in a senior position, you not only have a safe place to live because at the end of the year, you are now renting your own place, or you have bought an abandoned building and you and your buddies are turning it into a beautiful house. And so what Portsmouth has done, and by the way, this is not a love story in Portsmouth. There are enormous numbers of people living in that town who hate the fact that their town is now overrun, not with addicts, but with recovered addicts. They hate the fact that people are coming to their city to get well, and once they get well, they stay as builders, as car mechanics. Really? It's a desk. I didn't. That's the first I've heard of that.

It's a it's a destination sobriety place. It has become a magnet. Wow, that's cool. Or addicts in southern Appalachia from Kentucky, West Virginia, Western Pennsylvania, northern Ohio, Western Ohio. It is, again, a portal to a life that anybody would want. is almost surely you are carrying a felony conviction record because you've stolen from somebody, you've hit somebody with a vehicle while impaired. That's the occupation of addicts, thieves.

Thieves. Thievery. Exactly, because you can't possibly make enough, and you're not sober enough, long enough to hold a job. In most cases, there are functioning addicts. It doesn't tend to be a long career or a stable career, but yes, there are functioning addicts. And the tolerance for that career is skyrocketed in California, thievery.

The tolerance for it is just skyrocketed. It's kind of amazing. Yeah, tolerance and, you know, maybe acceptance even. Well, I think there's an enormous pushback and sense of futility and outrage. You know, what once seemed like, you know, well, nothing else is working. Why don't we decriminalize petty crime? Yeah, right. That didn't work out. criminalize petty crime yeah right that didn't work out um but again the how does that can i ask you a personal question how does that work when you say stuff like that and you work at rolling stone is there a conflict there that last statement no the whole idea of working at

rolling stone is i get to say whatever the fuck i want as long as i don't get sued for saying it okay well that makes me happy. Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a vastly more corporate place than it was 30 years ago when it started. But, you know, um, I'm not censored there. Um, well, I was censored once and that was the last time they pulled that shit on me. I spent two weeks one-on-one with Donald Trump in 2015. I saw that article.

Yeah. They tried to censor that. They did censor that quite effectively. Yeah. About 10% of what that man said to me wound up in the story. The rest of it was deemed too dangerous, too actionable legally to publish. Have you ever talked about that? I pitched about it a lot to my friends and my family in any time uh moving back to portsmouth because this is something i am so

honored to have written about you know for 30 odd years now i've been writing about the darkness in america and for the last four or five years i really, really made it my mission to write at least one huge story a year about a genius, a local genius, or a local community that is taking on a huge national problem and beating it into the ground. And I am the beneficiary of one of these geniuses. I told you I had a severely autistic son. Well, when Luke, my son, was 16, I scoured the country looking for a single program, just one, that would give my nonverbal boy a chance at a life that he might choose for himself when he turned 21 and everything stopped. School stops, therapy stopped, all government funded treatments end at 21 in the state of New York. So I traveled to California where there was a huge cluster of autism in Silicon Valley. That's a whole separate podcast. Southern Florida to Phoenix. I saw some really impressive programs, but none of them made sense for Luke. And then I found the Shared Living Collaborative in Northeast Massachusetts. It's why I now live in Northeast Massachusetts, why I uprooted myself, my beautiful second wife, from our lovely home in New York City

and just outside it. And we moved lock, stock and barrel to Northeast Massachusetts. So Luke would be eligible for this one of a kind program, farm based program, five different farms, horses, cows, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, you name it, organic produce. And at the time I wrote about the program, eight years ago, there were there was one or two farms and 50 individuals. Now there are five farms, huge farms, and 300 individuals who are all living with permanent second families, who love them, care for them, bathe them, feed them, et cetera, and who earn enough money to lift themselves out of working poverty, money to lift themselves out of working poverty, three steps up the economic ladder. So this genius, Daniela Morris, solved a local problem with a model that has now been imitated all over the country. What's the name of the program? It's called the Shared Living Collaborative.

the Shared Living Collaborative. And it's, as I say, it's based out of Merrimack, Massachusetts, but it is now the model. It is now the gold standard for all of Massachusetts human services programs, and it has spread to other states. Daniela gets visitors from all over the world asking her to replicate what she's done in Finland, in Marseille, in Turkey. but many programs have taken her inspiration and started their own version of it usually parent-friendly

I'm digressing wildly I want to share something with you really quick Paul there's a movie called Our House when I was I was barefoot for two years i was homeless and i walked by this home for disabled adults um a supportive living home in isla vista california a few blocks away from the pacific ocean right in santa barbara and i would walk by there just on

my journey every day just doing my homeless thing and um and i eventually one day walked in there and applied for a job just Just, just barefoot. I got the job. I ended up working there for, I don't know, fucking four or five years. And I made a movie there. I made my first movie there. The, the, um, Apple released some software called final cut pro and I bought a used car and I bought the laptop and the software the day it came out and I plugged it into a cigarette

lighter and I made my first movie, our house there. It was 30 film festival awards. Um, and I ended up becoming the lead there. I basically lived with severely mentally disabled adults in a supportive living home, experimental supportive living home. The film won 30 film festival awards. I got the award for best film in Park City from Selma Hayek and Forrest Whitaker. Everywhere I played against the Academy award-winning film that year, Spellbound, we always beat them. And HBO said that the film just wasn't sexy enough, so they didn't buy it. But it's interesting that our paths cross like that and that you have a son like that.

And eventually the state – when the state of California saw the movie, they said that I was doing a huge disservice to disabled people by, by, because of the depiction of them. And all of the parents of these disabled adults came to my defense and they said, you want it to paint it like it's all like roses and shit. And it's not. And that the movie depicts it perfectly. Yeah. And, uh, it's really hard work. It's crazy hard work. It's crazy hard work, especially also to be real with them. You want to be real with the people, with the people that you're serving. But then there's also this whole state corporate like shit, like trying to keep everything in like the hamster wheel going. It was crazy. Well, you put your you put your finger on something really important and it leads us back to Portsmouth. So anything, as I have learned in reporting on these local wizards who have figured out solutions for really, really intractable societal problems, is that they work brilliantly in spite of or without top-down government assistance, meaning

the most powerful kinds of organizations that we build in this country to deal with problems are not vertical, they're horizontal. So at Daniela's company, everybody does front of house care. Everyone, including Daniela, does one-on-one work with the folks who are living at shared living. And there is no separation of front office and back office, there is no hierarchy. I mean, there's a hierarchy in terms of who makes decisions, but in terms of who does what every day, everybody does everything. And it's such an essential example for the rest of us. You know, creating these middle managers, creating these yes and no people on the corporate masthead

just makes for horrible decision making, allocation of resources, et cetera, et cetera. And inevitably, what happened in the special needs community was that during deinstitutionalization, where we emptied out all our psychiatric hospitals and sent people with severe mental illness, with severe cognitive impairments back to the community, there was nobody ready. There were no programs ready to receive these folks. And so we wound up with a massive homeless population of people who were unable to care for themselves. It was an absolute nightmare born out of good intentions. born out of good intentions. Back to Ohio, what you have is a program where, again, everyone is customer facing. Everyone is client facing. Nobody is sitting in a corner office only doing admin or leadership work. Everybody is intimately involved in the actual business of treatment. And it's such

an important lesson for us that we can't create these monolith solutions. They have to be community-based. They have to be neighbor to neighbor, house to house, rather than Washington flow of money through Cleveland flow of money down to, you know, it just look. I have friends who are rich from the rehab space. I know what you're talking about. I have friends who are very rich from the rehab space. Yeah. Very lucrative right now.

It's what you're saying is, is that's not the model that's going to work. It's got to be someone like Dale King who moved back to their town, who gives two fucks, who's going to actually like if you want the solution. Exactly. So there has to be community buy in. Right. You can't you can't build it and they will come. Right. You have to do this from the ground up organically. come, right? You have to do this from the ground up organically. And so since I published that story last month, Dale and the counseling center, by the way, they're not the same thing. Dale runs a gym, Dale King, and the counseling center is a standalone enterprise with an enormous number of employees and therapeutic sites, et cetera. Now, but since that story ran in Rolling Stone, they've had reach outs from cities all over

the not just cities, not just politicians. They've gotten reach outs from judges, magistrates who run drug courts and have lots of opioid settlement money to spend creating their own therapeutic communities. Because what anyone who works with these people comes to understand quickly is you're never going to end the flow of narcotics. It will never happen in the course of human history. All you can do is treat those people who are susceptible to addiction. And in doing so, you not only empty out the prisons of nonviolent offenders, you also take this enormous expense, this enormous disbursement of national treasure every year and convert it into earnings. do it like i always think well shit if i was a fentanyl and i was peeing and shitting on the street i like if my kid was on the streets addicted i part of me would want him to get arrested so that he gets off the street and he doesn't have access to the drugs anymore

do we in that i know we're not going to solve all the world's problems here but do you still grab the people do you still use the police and force them into rehab into this well you can take people off the streets but you can't keep drugs out of prison. So, OK, prisons are because of money, because of money again. Yeah. I mean, you know, look, drugs will find their way everywhere. What was Fox on about for a month? There was cocaine found, you know, in the White House for fuck's sake. Joe Biden is not doing cocaine. Thanks so much.

You should. In any event, you know, you can't do anything about supply. I don't care how many people you stack at the border. I don't care how many people you give oxygen tanks to and stick them under the border. It ain't going to work. It's, you know, it's an enormous landmass there is no way we can interdict um everything that comes and goes in our country first of all nothing would come or go if we search every tractor trailer for secret compartments you know and maybe it's one out of 20 that do have them,

nothing would ever get to a supermarket and actually sell it. So again, this is a problem whose only effective treatment is on the other side, on the consumer side. And by the way, I got to bounce in five minutes, but, have got to start thinking creatively and humanely about who these people are and what they want. Nobody wants to die. Nobody wants to live ragged on the streets. Nobody wants to be alienated from their children or their parents or the woman they loved. Nobody wants to live in walking, sleeping misery. But you have to give people hope. And you have to give them a reason to want to come in. Because at least when they're high, they're not feeling the agony of being

themselves. So if you can put across the message that really powerful treatment is available, it's free. In Ohio, Obamacare covers drug treatment. For those people who are suffering from addiction and hear my voice, the barriers to entry have fallen. Now, that doesn't mean you're going to get into the counseling center today if you show up on their doorstep. There is a waiting list. It may take them, you know, some time to be able to find a bed for you, but they will do everything in their power to do so. And once you're under their roof, taking advantage of intense inpatient vocational training, exercise, nutrition, they've got nutritionists. They, you know, they're teaching cooking. They're getting people to change so many bad habits. And by the way, if you're standing outside the counseling center or a treatment center anyway, what are you watching people doing? Smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee. Right. It is the law. Right. You've got to replace replace one drug with another and nicotine won't kill you,

at least not that day. Well, replace it with CrossFit. And ultimately you're going to replace it with CrossFit. And by the way, this is not a one-off. So we know that because there have been PET scans done on the brains of mountain climbers, of runners, distance runners, marathoners. What they have found is that extreme exercise, really, not just extreme, but vigorous exercise regularly done, changes the brain for the better. Changes the brain for the better. Changes the brain, makes it much more adaptive, resourceful, and calm. But again, CrossFit has that additional magic, oxytocin.

And so you will meet your best friends. You will definitely fall in love at CrossFit. I mean, the number of marriages that have grown out of this one gym is redonkulous. And what's the first thing that sober addicts do? They start pairing up, right? Because they've been all alone in the world. And suddenly, here's that woman sitting across from you in group. She might have four teeth in her head, but you only got two. So you have something in common. Oh, by the way, they fix your teeth at the counseling center, too. Whether you need bridges, whether you need dentures, whether you need, you know, veneers, they will fix your teeth. It'll, you know, wind up costing you something, but

all the things you're ashamed of can be fixed, can be treated, come in, come home, get well. Paul, thanks for coming on. The next article you write, the next story you write, if you have any interest in coming on and sharing the details of it, letting us read it, having you on, pick your brain, do 20 questions with you, I'd love to have you back on. You are an incredible storyteller. I appreciate all the information you sent me in the hour and 45 minutes you gave us today. Thank you so much, dude. What a pleasure, Sevan. Thank you so much, and what a great pleasure to meet.

By the way, I'll be out there next week reporting this new story. Out where? I'll be in Venice. Oh, okay. I'm up in Santa Cruz. When does your next story come out? This one is deep, and I can't really get into it because I'm going after a monster. Okay. a monster. I'm going after the world's deadliest drug dealer. Nobody you know, nobody you think you know, and yet you know who this is. Okay. Please keep my contact information and let us jump on the Paul Solitaroff bandwagon and

pump the story up when it comes out. I'd love that. By the way, we're shooting a documentary around my reporting the story, which is the first time i've ever done it that way usually i write the story and then the doc people come to me and say can we do a deal with you this time we're doing it right from the jump so i'll be on screen for all of this thing awesome all right brother thank you so much good to meet you thanks so much ciao ladies and gentlemen pa Paul Solitaroff. Hey, it looks like, Dale King, there's a documentary. It's called Small Town Strong. Pre-order now.

Comes out October 3rd. I don't know if that's this year or if it's already out. I don't even know. There's a trailer here. Subscribe. I guess we'd have to find out from Dale King if this, uh, uh, pre-order rent by, oh, it's available now. Is it available now? I'll find out. Someone will reach out to me. Uh, available October 3rd, 2023. Oh, so it's not available now this year, dork. What do you mean?

What month is it? It's, uh, September, August. What? What month is it? It's September? August. What the fuck month is it? It's August. August 16th, September, October. Oh, October. Oh, so it's not even out yet. Although, for some reason, you can buy it already. Who knows? There was a funny comment here.

Someone said they spoke to Dale King for an hour, but they can't remember any of it. Madmar, what's up, buddy? Dildo, good to see you. There's a comment in here from Jedediah that I liked. I saw your comment turntable also in regards to you have an autistic son. I didn't know that. There's a comment in here from Jedediah that I liked. I saw your comment turntable also in regards to you have an autistic son. I didn't know that.

Or if I did, I'd forgotten. I apologize. Or we could take all the drug addicts and scoop them all up with a dump truck and toss them in the desert. Oh, here it is. Coffee Papa Mountain Mama. I got to talk with Dale at the OG meetup unfortunately i do not remember any of it fair enough where's your comment jedediah oh uh here we go jedediah snelson i believe this is one of the largest benefits to adaptive athletes as well people whom often isolate now have a community my one takeaway from all of this is if you're in a fucking affiliate owner and there's people

working out and you don't utilize that oxytocin or whatever fucking chemicals are being built to come over and talk to all the people individually after every class especially the new people and build a bomb with them you're missing an enormous opportunity the only fucking reason i think techno electronic music the grateful dead fish any of those fucking genres of music have any popularity is because people did so much drugs when they were there and so you start to put make the connection between the two and there's so there's endless stories of fucking affiliates fucking neglecting their new people you have these fucking clicks in your gym that i always i hear about more i don't talk about it enough i probably should these clicks in your

gym that don't aren't nice to new people not that they're not not that they're mean to them they're just not nice to them and it's like dude what are you doing like what what a waste not to take advantage of the fact that people are high on whatever chemicals you're producing after a CrossFit workout and then to go over and put the love on them. Just go put the love on them. And hey, if you're a dude, after a workout is a perfect time to go talk to a girl. Or if you're a girl, perfect time to go talk to a guy. Pick someone that you think you have no chance with and start talking to them. Dale King, love you guys. Just now and start, start talking to him. Uh,

Dale King. Love you guys. Uh, just now tuning in. Paul is the fucking man. I get it. I was getting this Vincent price, uh,

feel from him. Do you guys know who, I don't know if you guys know who Vincent price is. It's totally getting this Vincent price. Maybe I can pull that up. Vincent price. Vincent. Vincent price. I wanted to lead the conversation but he had so much stuff he wanted to share

that I didn't I mean there was only so much I could fucking interrupt him but I really wanted to lead the conversation ask him shit like hey were you ever was your life ever threatened by any of these drug dudes? Shit like that. Essential facts about horror legend Vincent Price.

Oh, no, not this. Sorry. I'm just trying to find, like, one little Vincent Price clip. Let's see. Vincent Price Collection 2, now on Blu-ray. Oh, here we go. Here's Vincent Price. He was on a Brady Bunch episode. That's how I know him. Here we go. You guys recognize that dude? most of you are probably too young

oh yeah from Thriller good job dude you're right Jake fuck that was Vincent Price awesome okay that's where he's that's that's his true fame from that song Thr Thriller, yeah.

Yeah, I was totally getting Vincent Price vibe from him. Dale, there's a lady in here who spoke to you for an hour and she can't remember what you guys talked about. I apologize for that. Sultry expression. If Mexico wants to send us fentanyl Then we should send Mexico Our fentanyl

Bums Ship them on down to Tijuana Let them rip Alright Dick Butter Lying again Fish is fun without drugs Oh shut your mouth

You don't know what the fuck you're talking about your dick made of butter Oh that's totally my fault not hers. Oh, yeah, cuz you weren't memorable enough What else do I want to tell you guys there's something else I want to tell you guys Guys watch the Ricky podcast yesterday? Ricky. God, what the fuck is going on with my studio? I got a new mic.

Can you tell how much I'm fidgeting with it? I can't tell. Not a new mic, but a new mic arm. I used to have this one that came in from over here. Now I got like this really fucking fancy one. It comes in from over here I don't know it's just different

can you guys hear that sound right there when I is this what you call the gluck Gluck 9000 when you do this? Wait, where did the cord go? Or did we already talk about that? It's here. It's here, don't worry. It's here.

Just hidden in the shadows. After we got off the show, Caleb tried to talk to me about that gray back there. But I'm going to frame the black and gray. I'm going to fill the whole room with this. I got boxes and boxes. Thinking about telling you guys a story that I definitely was not going to tell you before.

I would definitely never tell this story, but I think I'm ready to tell it. I was thinking about it today in the shower. When I saw the no plan B shirt is what made me think of it. You guys want to know? No. about about seven months ago i don't know how long have i been doing this podcast now is it two years or is it three years but i get up every morning basically you guys know i get up at 6 a.m

i fool around for like a half hour in my house drink coffee walk around open the blinds let the dog out feed the dog look at my phone try to catch up start like a half hour in my house, drink coffee, walk around, open the blinds, let the dog out, feed the dog, look at my phone, try to catch up, start like doing the podcast in my head. Then at 6.30, I jump in the shower. And then by 7 a.m., I make it into my office back here and I start the podcast. The podcast goes from 7 till 9 and then it's over. And then I – from here, I can hear my kids playing piano that means their school's probably over and then i grab them and i go out into the world with them and i do that and i stay out in the world with them until about two and then from like two to four we're at

home and then from four to seven they're back at jujitsu and tennis and shit like that then then they come home at seven um and i usually eat dinner and just fool around in the house or work out with them in the garage or do whatever. And then they go to bed. And when they go to bed, I work for a couple hours preparing for the podcast the next day. But I also prepare for the podcast during the day. So let's say if I'm driving them somewhere,

I'll be listening to podcasts of guests I'm going to have on or calling people and trying to get information and shit like that. So, okay, fine. I won't tell this story. Never mind. Sevan, pull up the Kyle Casper Bauer's About the 49ers shirt.

I'd love to. Let's go. Kyle Casper power Kyle Casper power do I follow Kyle I don't follow Kyle

I don't I don't I don't oh yeah I think I played that that's just a that's just like a video clip of yeah yeah I think I played I have that's just like a video clip of...

Yeah, yeah, I think I played that. I have that for one of my... No, come on. Thank you. I'll follow Kyle. Wow, he has 18,000 followers. Does this story end up with you getting fingered? No.

Fair question, though. So I... I grow up, David. It grow up david it's not funny it's not funny it's not no it's not funny me getting fingered is not funny so about six or seven months ago i'm trying to think of how i can tell this story oh i'm doing a podcast podcast a podcast I podcast I um about six or seven months ago eight months ago I knew the whole time that hey this thing might not get off the ground and it might not be sustainable right and i live a fucking lavish lifestyle i have a 2016 um toyota sienna i have a 2014 toyota 4runner i have credit cards i can fill the tank up i got um

i got like i got cool shit my i got i. I own a TV set. I have Apple TV, have computers. Um, I buy organic, you know, I mean, I ball, I live a fucking good life. Yeah. I eat cashews. Um, uh, I have a skate park near my house. I drive to when I fill my tank up, I fill it up all the way with gas. I don't just put like five bucks in you know what I mean I don't do a lot but because because I have this all these awesome things in my life I have like clean clothes I always have soap to wash my clothes in um I always have bars nice bars of soap in the in the shower I mean I live a fuck I have a chocolate cock I live a fucking good ass life I have kids that love me I have clean water

um my house is my house is um like you know it doesn't leak um my TV gets the UFC I don't I don't use premium gas anymore I don't have um Sirius XM I eat a lot of macadamia

nuts yeah I mean I fucking i live such a good now i don't do things that a lot of other people do like i would never stay at a hotel that would just seem like a fucking waste of money i would never like i don't i might if i'm ever traveling or doing anything it's because someone else is paying for it like i don't do anything like to rock the boat like i don't buy new clothes i don't i wouldn't like take my kids to disneyland i don I wouldn't like take my kids to Disneyland. I don't. I wouldn't take my kids like camping.

Like. And have to pay for a campsite. I don't do any. Like I'm just at home. Like protecting what. Semblance of steadiness I have. You know. Being able to just have a nice steady life.

I have a Colton Mertens trading card. I didn't pay for it. I got it for free. But I have it. And I like it. That's what I mean. I have a Colt Mertens trading card. I didn't pay for it. I got it for free, but I have it, and I like it. That's what I mean. I have nice things. Yeah, here's Mertens.

I even have the brand new, which most of you probably don't have, the Alex Gazan trading card from Wad Zombie. I hope Wad Zombie's not mad at me for me going off last night. Anyway, but with this lavish lifestyle um yeah kind of i didn't really pay for it that's the thing is what i'm saying like i don't do i don't do it i don't i don't i just i just ball in my own house i just ball in my own like sphere all almost all the money i spend on is but but i do do it is on like shit for my kids right driving my kids around making sure the car has new tires the the twelve hundred dollars a month i spend on tennis lessons shit like that new skateboards

that's everything right but i live a fucking good ass life but I could tell with the way I was living this good ass life like buying avocados and shit eating cantaloupe buying UFC fights on Saturday nights that it wasn't going to be sustainable it just wasn't going to be sustainable

and for like six months my wife was pulling money out of our savings to pay for our mortgage like we'd run out of uh runway this thing wasn't sustainable i was like fuck so and when that happens to someone like me, I start freezing. Like I will do even less. Do you know what I mean? I'll water the – I'll just immediately start doing things. Like I'll start eating less.

I'll do anything. When I go out to restaurants, I won't order food. I'll eat the scraps off of other people's food. Like if someone takes me out, even if they're paying, I just start freezing. I start like really, really really becoming hyper aware of everything so i'm not even going to get too many into details so are you moving to ohio where i'd be rich right no so i get this note from youtube saying that they they're demonetizing my account this is like a month ago i'm like huh i wonder what that's about so i cruise over there and i look and it's because i haven't sent them they don't have updated information on me that they supposedly had

sent me emails for a shitload of times right by the way take note of this you fucking assholes who people who think like i'm trying not to respond to you, listen to this story very closely. People who are like, hey, you didn't text me back. You didn't call me back. You didn't answer my DM. Fuck off, dude. I mean – here we go. So because I'm trying like my fucking hardest. I'm fucking trying. And not only am I trying, I want to for selfish reasons to get back to everyone. I love it.

I love you guys. I love partying with you guys. This whole thing is fun as shit. But I'm tripping. Anyway, so I see my YouTube account has been demonetized and I go over there. And while I'm filling out the form, sending in my driver's license, giving them an updated social security number, I look over and I see this fucking huge number. I think it's a huge number of money.

I can't tell if my YouTube account has made it or if they've paid me that. And I'm like, fuck, this is weird. And I, because like I told you guys, all I do is do the podcast, go out with my kids all day, research my podcast, repeat. And I tell my wife, I'm like, hey, come over and look at my computer. Does it look like YouTube's going to pay us all that fucking money, that giant number in there? And she's like, yeah. Yeah, I agree, David.

I always try to answer the phone when my mom calls. And what had happened was a year ago, YouTube, I guess a year ago, had stopped paying me, And I never noticed. Because I don't do any of that shit. I don't do any of the adult shit. My wife does all that shit. I mean, I do some adult shit. I pay the cable bill and shit like that.

But I don't do any of the real big boy stuff like the housing and the mortgages. And fucking I filled out my tax form and sent up a new picture of my driver's license which i should really show you guys it's ridiculous i have a fucking beard like this and a fucking giant chunk of money from all the donations you guys had given me over the last year came in and landed i told my my wife, hey, can you go into my bank account and pull all that money out and put it all back into our savings? And it was an even swap for whatever it was, eight months of mortgage my wife had been paying.

I pay the internet bill too. I do that. I pay the internet, not I do that I pay the internet Not cable whatever the internet one is I pay the internet bill I'm trying to think what other bills I pay I used to pay the car but I paid that off I pay all the bills But just like the dipshit bills

I don't do like not the shit that keeps the roof over your head I pay the electricity Yeah Brandon Waddell i bet it was huge yeah yeah it was it was it was fucking we broke even all my fucking money problems went away like in fucking three seconds oh i just felt my back get better just telling you guys the story i was like, fuck, I can't tell anyone this story. I don't know why. But it's fucking crazy, dude. Just fucking, when I thought, I thought today, I'm like, hey, it's a fucking no plan B story.

I just never had any plan B. I just put my head down, come in here. My wife believed in me. I don't fucking do drugs. I'm not a fucking alcoholic. I work out every day. I take care of my kids. I do my podcast. I try to research it, I try not to fuck around, I try to bring you the best stuff, I try to have people on that are gonna push me and make me uncomfortable. Dude, it was a lot of fucking money, just think, 8 or 9 months mortgage, I'm gonna fucking eventually have to sell a house,

which I need to fucking live a lavish lifestyle and drive the 2016 Toyota van around, right? You need all that money just to put gas in it and water for the avocado trees and all that. Yeah, dude, I'm telling you, I do so fucking good. I do so fucking good. But I wanted to maintain it. And I was like, fuck, I'm not going to be able to maintain it. I'm going the wrong way. Yeah, how many figures?

Anyway. It fucking, it happened. And it's like, like, this, I can't tell if it's going to keep going this way, but it's like, it's been like the best two, two, I can't believe what's happened. It's been a two years of me just wondering kind of like i like i like i'm so like i have my head down so much in the no plan b phase that like i don't really wonder but it but but it kind of the wrote the i didn't i didn't like hearing my wife say that she was like hey she would tell me before she she never talked to me about money and then all of a sudden she's like hey we pulled money out of this account

to pay for the mortgage again we paid mortgage is fucking a lot here in california i got one of those i don't know what's i don't know what it's doing but i got one of those i put like as much as i could when i went crossfit when i worked at crossfit they doubled or some shit everything you put into your 401k and you could put a shitload in and i put a shitload in i don't know how much is in there to be honest with you none at all i give all of those envelopes that come from people like that to my mom and my wife. I don't, I don't look at any of that stuff. Anyway, uh, I feel like this year was my biggest crop of fruit that I've ever had. Crazy. I'll take pictures and post them on my Instagram.

Last night we had a tree branch break on one of our apple trees, and there were so many fucking apples that I got a dehydrator. I mean, my kids spent two hours slicing apples and dehydrating them last night. And I feel like when I planted the, I planted about, I planted probably 150 trees here in my yard. It's only a half acre. 150 fruit trees, probably 50 of them have died from gophers and just whatnot and when i planted all these trees people thought i was crazy my mom

and my dad and my friends are like what's the plan what are you doing it's too many trees and like now five years later it's paying off because i have so much fucking fruit right i feel like this podcast is like that too. The real question now is Beaver getting paid. Fuck no. That's not the real fucking question. Oh yeah, I just broke even. I get to stay in my house and now I'm paying Beaver.

Fuck no. Pay your taxes so Beaver can get his money. This is the first year I didn't see a lot of bees. Do you get a lot of bees? This is the first year I did not see a lot of bees. It's a little unsettling. I mean, I see bees. I saw a bee yesterday.

I saw a dead bee yesterday. I gave someone a huge bag of apples. They came over to my house and they had a dead bee in their Ford Bronco. And so many of my friends took care of me. Like people like Beaver. Doing my show every morning. Fucking couldn't do it without him.

I owe those people a huge thank you. Yeah, you could borrow a dollar. No. No, I can't. You should start beekeeping, Heidi says. Anyway, that's the story. So, I'm at ground zero. I'm happy.

Podcast is exploding. Viewership has doubled in the last three months. Viewership and listening, which is crazy. It's nuts. Support from you guys, crazy. This crew, this 135 that are listening now, it's crazy how powerful you are. People make fun of it.

Oh, your podcast is so small and cute. Dude, you guys are fucking not small and cute. You guys are potent and agile. Am I being vulnerable? Jeez Louise, I like it when you're vulnerable with us, Seve. Keep it up. Yeah, I know. That's the funny thing, right?

Just all you need is 10 new subs a day if they're fucking savages like you are. It's nuts. Let's see who's coming on. Oh. I don't understand that text message. Oh, no podcast tonight. Okay, so I'll keep building out my podcast studio tonight. And then tomorrow morning, Jason Kaliba and Rich Froney.

That's cool, right? That'll be fun. That'll be a big show. All sorts of... And then 11 a.m., Taylor and JR with Shut Up and Scribble. That show's just kind of taken over. I think that might be the most popular show of that kind at that length. I know that Max Elhaj's The Training Think Tank gets a lot of views, but theirs are usually broken into pretty small clips.

I'm really impressed with J.R. and Taylor. I am not going to Idaho. I thought I was going to Idaho for a month, but I'm not. Oh, wow. Wow. Some sort of flying beetle, right? Someone just sent me a picture of a bug

and said, do you know what this is? Some sort of flying beetle. Maybe I could check Google Images for them. You think I've gotten too comfortable with you guys since I now text and shit when the show is going? Sometimes I wonder that. I'm like, did I get too comfortable with these guys? Hold on.

This is an important friend. Not that you guys aren't important. Oh, shit. Okay, I'll do that later. Do you guys know about the Google app? You can go to Google, and there's a camera, and you can point it at anything and take a picture of it, and it'll tell you what it is, where you can buy it. You can point to a flag, a bug, just whatever.

Point to a flag, a bug, just whatever. Lauren Lewis, hi. Oh, are those your sons? You are a proud mama, huh? I love this podcast and Seve's thought stories, trying to catch the lives, but back teaching high school full-time. Summer's over.

Oh, are those, those, oh. Good, we, good teachers. Google Lens, is that what, is that what it's called? Seve from Slater, how is your new friendship with Craig Ritchie, you inviting him on? I don't think starting to realize the. I'm starting to realize the. Potency of this podcast. Have you ever seen like a plant that's wilted in your yard and you give it water and then you come back like an hour later and it's completely vibrant

and you're like, it's like, holy shit, it's a completely different plant. Like literally it's completely vibrant and you're like, it's like, holy shit, it's a completely different plant. Like literally it's like this. I have this, um, brand new passion, uh, banana passion fruit vine that's in a corner and the soil is really weird there. It doesn't hold water well at all. So if you go, if you don't water it every three days, the whole thing just droops. And I've realized the potency of this podcast is like watering something. It can really breathe, for some reason, I don't even know exactly why, but it really breathes life into things. It's like the peptides that um ca peptide cells it's got like some sort of healing properties it can re um i don't know someone's gonna you could be you could start

analyzing be like well you really humanize people or people get real on here or makes us empathize with people. But for some reason, this podcast does something. And I just want to make sure that I'm using that wisely. Does that make sense? Sevan's dog, her hip bone was surgically broken apart to repair hip dysplasia problem. I know. That is fucking crazy what Hillerer's chicks going through crazy i don't i tried to like put myself in that position to see what i would do if i was her i couldn't even fucking do it

i didn't want to do it i did rather like i'd rather have a venereal disease and have to deal with that I don't want anyone breaking my hip Slater I don't understand but it sounded good thank you I'm beating around the bush that's why it didn't make sense I'm feigning some humility

alright have a great day everyone make it a day of drinking lots of water nothing else to drink besides water eat healthy push back on at least one bad decision try to catch yourself in a situation that you normally would have been mean to someone or get angry and be nice.

Try to flip the script. You know what that means to flip the script? Just, it can be so absurd. Like your kid spills milk on the table and normally you'd be like, dude, what are you doing? I told you not to put your milk there. You can just look right now and be like, I love you. I love you. Oh, Two Brain Survey, thank you. You have

to, if you're an affiliate owner. Take the Two Brain Survey. The link will be in the show notes. Thank you, Robbie Myers. The Two Brain Survey is awesome. I'm so super fucking excited about it. These are the kind of things that have happened in the last two months. Every time this fucking guy, Chris Cooper, calls me, I call my mom and tell her about the conversation. It's fucking crazy. So this guy fucking calls me and he says, hey, you know our state of the industry report. I'm like, yeah, I fucking know it. It's fucking dope. I don't even own an affiliate and I

love it. I keep it here near me. here. I'm going to open another page and read you something from it. Uh, trends and opinions and analysis. This is just in there. While the data in the former sections is objective and quantifiable. Most of the data in section seven is qualitative. It's based on opinions as such. I share my take on the poll numbers. So here he goes in here and he starts analyzing the information he's gotten. So like some of the information he's gotten is $40,000 is the median cost to open a gym. $88,000 is the average cost to open a gym. Oh, average versus median. And then he goes in to talk about all that.

This thing is full of just all that stuff and it's presented just yummy. Anyway, he calls me and he says November 13th, the new state of the industry report is coming out. And he would like to announce that on November 13th and new state of the industry report is coming out and he would like to announce that on November 13th and talk about it on my podcast like dude can you imagine how crazy the that compliment is this is a worldwide survey this is the the most there's no second place for information regarding owning a small gym than what chris cooper and two brain puts together this guy also a week or two after that said oh by the way i saw you're doing behind the scenes let me know if you need any financial help doing that i'd love uh anyone who's producing the kind of content you put out to support the affiliates that's almost verbatim and i'm like

okay well i don't know what I can do for you yet he's like oh it's okay just if you have some cost accrue invoice me and we'll start working I mean there's just like this trust there it's fucking nuts it's cool no manager for this

although Hiller was like kind of, Sousa's kind of your agent he's kind of my attorney and kind of my friend and kind of my tax guy and kind of everything. So I don't know. Prefer just to call him the executive producer of the Savant podcast.

Anyway, there will be a link. If you're a gym owner, please respond. I don't know how long the survey is going to be open, but then your information will be aggregated, curated, and used in the 2024 version of this which comes out in november and um um it's gyms all around the world i think all you have to do is be able to speak english i think that is the the survey is only in english CK Kevin I read the whole thing on Two Brains

just interested in all the nerdy stuff cool stuff yeah oh yeah so the PDF is on their website right if you don't have a hard copy hard copy hard cocky hard coffee

alright thank you a handler yeah he's kind of my wife's more my handler alright love you guys great show Paul Soteroff tomorrow Jason Kleba Rich Froning tell a friend see you guys soon bye bye