[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at [Music] arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com [Music] today today I'm here with Ben westoff and two of the very best books I've read this year are by Ben uh the first is his recently appeared fenel Inc how Rogue
chemists are creating the deadliest wave of the opio white epidemic and the other one is a book about rap music titled original gangsters Tupac Dr Dre e Ice Cube and the birth of West Coast rap so I thought anyone who had two such excellent books on such disparate topics was an ideal guest for conversations with Tyler and so today we have with us Ben westoff Ben welcome thanks for having me here I'm such a big fan of
your writing and your podcast and I'm grateful for all of it let's start with the topic of drugs and Fentanyl why is there such a strong Geographic component to drug use and sale so certain drugs seem to be very popular in New Hampshire but they're not popular in Florida drugs of choice vary across countries uh fenel sales don't seem to be that high as far as we can tell in Florida what accounts for that well with fenel in particular
in the US the epidemic is moving from east to west so it started in New England it's gradually getting to California in Canada on the other hand it's moving from west to east and this has to do with all these sort of distribution networks and so it's actually the heroin distribution Network in the US and for for whatever reason uh east of the Mississippi has always had white powder heroin and that since
fentel is also white is very easy to mix therefore the epidemic started in the east west of the Mississippi they have black tar heroin which is full of impurities it's very dark as the name implies and you can't mix fenil in with that at all and so it's been much slower to take root but if so much fentanyl comes from China and you can just send it through the mail why doesn't it spread automatically wherever it's going
to go is it some kind of recommender network it wouldn't seem that it's a supply constraint it's more like someone told you about a restaurant they ate at last night yeah well it's because the Mexican cartels are still really strongly in the trade and so um even though it's all made in China much of it is trafficed through the cartels who buy the the precursors the fentanyl ingredients from China make it the rest
of the way and then they send it through the border into the us so you can get fenil in the mail through from China and many people do it comes right to your door through the US Postal Service but it takes a certain level of sophistication in the the drug dealers to pull that off so it's such a big life decision and it's shaped by this very small cost of getting a package from New Hampshire to Florida I mean what should
we infer about human nature as a result of that like what's your model of the human beings doing this stuff if those Geographic differences really make the difference for whether or not you do this and destroy your life well everything is local right not just politics I mean you're influenced by the people around you and the the relative costs I mean in St Louis it's so incredibly cheap like $5 to get some some heroin some fentanyl um I don't
know how it works in say New Hampshire but I know in places like West Virginia it's still uh primarily pill market so people don't use powdered heroin for example for whatever reason they prefer Oxycontin and so that has affected the market too and why isn't fantinel more of an urban drug or is it now it is now yeah and it's not a lot talked about people think of the opioid epidemic of which fenil is is a big part of as a
white problem but heroin abuse in the black community has been happening a long time and now it's almost impossible to find heroin that hasn't been cut with fentel and therefore places like St Louis Chicago Washington DC it's a big problem given that Belgian scientist Paul Jansen synthesized fenel as long ago as 1969 uh before rate of productivity growth slowed down uh what took so long for the drug to really spread right that's a long lag
yeah I think a lot of it has to do with the internet and so initially he and other scientists who were making these new drugs uh published them in papers and they were in obscure University libraries and there were some examples of fentanyl appearing on the streets in the the 80s for example but after the internet then all of these University pap ERS went on online and so these Rogue chemists could access them
now with fenil it's not just fentanyl it's all the analoges of fentanyl which are made by just slightly tweaking the chemical formula and then you have something 10 times as strong as fentanyl for example and so the scientists who are all studying these analoges coming up with them published their papers and these chemists were able to find them on line so it's the product differentiation eventually that drove it and the product
differentiation required the internet to get the basic formula and then to spread the variant yeah in a big way because in China in particular fentel was illegal but all the analoges weren't and so the these chemists would make an analog and then when China banned that one they'd make another one and on and on and on so if we're just sitting here in the 1970s and there's a kind of word of mouth compet ition between fantinel and
cocaine why does cocaine win well first of all cocaine is comes from a natural plant it's much easier to make in this era um and it doesn't kill you by having you know a tiny amount so even the the DEA as recently as 2015 did not think fentel would be a problem because such a tiny amount uh could kill you and same with all these scientists so it's sort of baffled everyone when it emerged what was the early FDA stance on fentanyl
well in Europe fentanyl was immediately legalized for Hospital use for medical use but the the the FDA in the US initially bed and it wasn't available here for a while and I was sort of shocked to learn that the reason they did eventually Greenlight it was because Paul Jansen himself the inventor of fentel lobbied for it he called up the guy and said come on rethink this and then they were like okay so it was
judged safe and effective well it was mixed yes it was mixed with kind of a dilutant originally so it was considered um that if a junkie or a illicit user tried it they wouldn't be a satisfying high but eventually that dilutant was removed and if you were in the hospital say you were much older you had a terminal disease and you faced the possibility of severe pain would you take a fental derivative a legal one I
mean probably it's hard to say me personally but people have found great success with this stuff I mean in general I don't like opioid prescription pills I think they get you stoned but they don't always address the pain they're trying to to deal with and overlooking the more General opioid crisis for so long what was the intellectual failure there because even leading up to the election of Donald Trump not that long ago right this story
took many people by surprise and then we see rates of addiction Death Rising at very rapid rates over the course of three to four years what were people missing is it just that we all are coastal Urban Elites removed from the actual realities or no I think it had to do with this sort of reclassification of pain as the quote unquote fifth Vital sign and so doctors began deciding that people's pain was a
really serious problem and they deserved to be relieved of it and so this came to a weird situation because you can't quantify pain in any effective way right so I remember being in um you know seeing a doctor and and the doctor said 1 to 10 what's your pain level and I'd say oh I don't know four seven but they doctors were coached that if someone said a certain number I think it was above seven then that meant they were
eligible and should probably receive an opioid narcotic pain pill and it this clearly this got out of hand very quickly when did the story first break who did it or which group did it how did that happen well it happened in so many little ways because at first when you heard about uh the opioid the narcotics all these different drugs it was as like prescription patches for example people were putting you know these fenil
patches all over their body four or five or they were abusing Oxycontin the the hillbilly heroin as it was known and then more in this decade that the effects of people transitioning to heroin particularly in Sam kona's book Dreamland really drove it home for a lot of people so are we still underrating the scope of the problem of addictive substances which are opioids or chemically derived yes I believe we definitely are
and even though the people are abing fewer pills people are abusing less heroin now fentel deaths are still skyrocketing and I heard someone on your uh message board someone asked that you know all the deaths aside which are obviously bad there's still you know millions and millions of people addicted and even if they're not dying how do we quantify the damage to society and that's that's a very good question and
it's something that's not even close to going away anytime soon but if people people are underestimating the severity of the problem what's the cognitive mistake they're making so often people overe extrapolate from very recent trends like oh healthcare costs they'll swallow up all of GDP because they see a number of years where that rate of increase is high so why are we now putting too little weight on the recent
rate of increase when we usually put too much emphasis on that's a good question I've been shocked at like the Democrat debates for example and there's so little talk about this there's the you know more people dying than the peak of the AIDS crisis and you know I've got to think that it's because these are sort of marginalized members of society you know generally you hear plenty about you know politicians kids who die and from
fenil and opioids but mainly it's marginalized people and they're just not on anyone's priority list it seems like if it's mainly marginalized people if we take a non-marginalized person someone with a high income pretty high social status is the main difference that they don't try it at all or when they try it because maybe they have a better life they're able to resist temptation better how much of the isolation of the problem
into lower income or status classes is due to which factor well it's not actually these drugs which kill people because you can take a safe dose of heroin you can even take a safe dose of fentanyl it's all these lifestyle things surrounding the drug use so dirty needles for example you know crime prostitution that to earn the money to get these drugs and so these tend to be the problems if you're wealthy you have
access you can buy directly from China in a very pure form for example and have access to good health care but let's say I'm a lawyer I earn 170k a year I try a potent version of fentanyl once it doesn't kill me what am I likely to do next stop kill myself something else move on to heroin I mean probably use it again I hate to say it's people describe it as that good um so the key decision is not using it at all that would be my
recommendation absolutely but not just recommendation predictively the people who avoid it do it by never using it people have totally different physiologies too right and so people have addictive personalities and I think everyone knows if they have one of these or not I don't but other people when it comes to alcohol for example you know one is drink is never enough if I think of the crack epidemic of the 1980 the
1990s there's a pattern of a significant junk of at least a generation burning itself out but then maybe it's the younger siblings see what's happened an interest in the drug wains and some semi-stable equilibrium reemerges is that going to happen with opioids and Fentanyl or is this a different pattern because maybe they're more addictive well if we go back through the decades yes crack really did seem to burn out
and but that seems to me to be kind of the excep to the rule like when you take the meth epidemic for example we thought that was sort of winding down and the the passage of these laws made it so you couldn't get susea fed without uh you know going behind the counter so they thought well the production is going to stop instead it went to Mexico now meth is worse than ever cocaine same thing it seemed to be on the decline you know
Pablo Escobar was killed now there's more cocaine coming out of Columbia than ever so I am certainly not optimistic at all that the opioid epidemic is going to wind itself down but what's the right way to think about the equilibrium will it just be 177% of us are drug addicts and some percent of those people die and it will be that way forever or what social forces will restore we hope and a
better equilibrium yeah well I don't think it will be that way forever because I think people are starting to kind of start thinking about the problem in the right way finally so we've always been so focused on the supply side for all these years and that's right now too China you know my book is about China and how China is feeding the problem but now that people in power know people who are dying themselves they've started to
think that of drug addiction and whatnot as a disease we're trying to think about how to educate people how to give them treatment how to do harm reduction which is basically admitting that people are always going to use drugs and finding more safe ways for them to do it so even if the abuse rate even if the number of people trying these drugs for the first time stays the same I think that we can reduce the
casualties true or false the opioid crisis is driven primarily by restrictions on the legal access to opioids uh legal that's a little tricky because I wouldn't say it's driven by the legal access because for example decriminalization has had a really positive effect but I do think that um the way we go about the War on Drugs is is fueling the problem absolutely so what does the world look like if we decriminalize opioids what force to step
in to make things better well first of all people are treated like they have a disease so they're not sent to to prison or jail and it doesn't start the cycle of recidivism again people are instead given these sort of opioid blockers or these low-level opio oids like methadone and Suboxone and can can can figure their lives out that's the main driver to be honest of the opioid epidemic it's not just that people are taking these
addictive drugs it's that their lives are a mess and so sending someone to jail just makes their life a bigger mess and giving time counseling and help people can actually beat these drugs did New Zealand do the right thing legalizing so many synthetic IC drugs in 20133 I absolutely think they did it was a unprecedented thing now um drugs like marijuana cocaine heroin all the drugs you've heard of are internationally
banned but what New Zealand did was it legalize these forms of synthetic marijuana so synthetic marijuana has a really bad reputation it's goes by names like K2 and spice and it's biging homeless populations it's causing huge problems in places like DC but if you make synthetic marijuana right as this character in my book named Matt Bowen was doing in New Zealand you can actually make it so it's less toxic so
it's somewhat safe that's what he did they legalized these these safer forms of it and the the overdose rate plummeted um very shortly thereafter however they banned them again and now deaths from synthetic marijuana and New Zealand have gone way up and what about Portugal and Slovenia their experiments in decriminalization how have those gone I mean by all accounts they've been massive successes uh Portugal had this
huge problem with Heroin talking like one out of every hundred members of the population was touched by it or something like that and now those rates have gone way down in Slovenia they you know they have no fenil problem they barely have an opioid problem they're rates of AIDS and other uh diseases passed through needles have gone way down so if we look at Vancouver where they have safe injection sites but a
persistently High death rate from drug use is that an argument against decriminalization and public health treatment of these drugs yeah well that's a very good question because Vancouver was sort of seen as the city who is doing things right uh with these supervised injection facilities where you can legally shoot up fenil and heroin and there's doctors and nurses and clean needles and so people applauded that but the overdose death
rate has actually gone up since these facilities have come in now the supporters of the facilities say they death rates would have gone up even more without these sites but that's sort of a hard argument to make and so I um I I'm generally very much in favor of these type of facilities and they've worked great in places like Europe but I cannot explain what's happening Vancouver let's say you're in charge of Singapore and as
you probably know there aren't many ways into Singapore and also as you probably know Singapore is fairly willing to Simply execute drug dealers would you relax this policy and move toward decriminalization or were you would you to say we're Singapore you can't get in here that easily you know we're going to keep it tough uh no I am not in favor of executing drug dealers or anyone else say like life in prison if if the
materials are so potent and so harmful and if you're in a country that can to some degree keep the material out why not just be as tough as possible well I think you're sort of deluding yourself if you think you can keep it out even on a landlocked you know even in a place like Singapore that's so hard to have entries these are synthetic drugs and that's this revolution is that everything is being is moving towards
synthetic and that is what can be made anywhere and so often the big problem with penalties against dealers is that the dealer is often just an addicted user these are the same people now it's all fine and well to say we're going to go after the you know the top of the the Kingpin or whatever but ultimately what happens is you just end up locking up a lot of very lowlevel addicted users essentially now America is legalizing
decriminalizing or simply tolerating marijuana use to to a very surprising degree unpreceded precedented in this country what do you see that equilibrium looking like there is just really preliminary data coming out of places like Colorado which was one of the first to legalize and it's encouraging for the most part there's not uh kids aren't using it in Greater rates the one thing to be worried about is that deaths from
driving well stoned are increasing and so this is something to be worried about I tend to think and I think you've said this on on your blog or linked to it that decriminalization is maybe a way to think about it and in places like St Louis where I'm from they're they're having more success they're not locking up people but at the same time there's not you know stored selling weed on every corner and um so I'm I'm not an
expert on the legalization of marijuana but I I urge a little bit of caution in all that's happening is the American Medical Association responsibly managing the prescribing Authority it grants to doctors when it licenses them would you change those policies the only thing that I know that should probably be changed is that to prescribe these uh treatments you need to go through this rigorous screening and and I think it
should be much easier to prescribe the treatment drugs like like Suboxone uh when it comes to prescribing opioids and things like that I know the the pendulum is way swinging the other direction ction now and it's becoming much harder to do this and this is affecting a lot of people who have chronic pain and who are using opioids over the long term now there's there's evidence to show that
opioid use long term is not helpful at all that you're just you're sort of creating a new problem but taking away people's opioids I also think is not the answer who are using them for medical reasons do nurses and doctors view opioids differently I have no idea should anyone become a fentanyl addict is there any rational case for becoming addicted not that I can think of but say you don't have much
time left in life right why not do it but you would think under a rational Gary Becker model of addiction you would see more of it yeah I've thought about if the end of the world was coming and I knew it was coming what would I do well I'm a vegetarian but I would love to have a a Whopper again uh I would want to try heroin that's I think uh in these last few moments but then really ultimately you're you're feeling this
Euphoria but then coming down is much worse and so to me it just wouldn't be worth it can you imagine that we create synthetic drugs where there's a high but no crash afterwards or is that physiologically very very difficult I think I think physiologically just from my own experience as a human consuming all sorts of psychoactive Ive substances including coffee right I mean there's no free lunch you you drink coffee you feel
you feel great for a while then you have a crash you eat a big piece of chocolate cake you feel great there's a crash I just don't think it's out there what other changes to us drug policy would you make beyond what we've discussed there are places like the state of Pennsylvania which for some reason bans fenil testing strips to help people find out if what they've got is pure hair heroin or heroin mixed with fenil for
example fenil testing strips save a lot of lives it's crazy that it's illegal places there's also something called The Rave act which was co-authored by Joe Biden and what it does is it cracks down on promoters and concert promoters Rave promoters and they are not allowed in these big ban alls with tens of thousands of people at these Raves electronic dance music parties every everyone's using drugs and yet because
of this obscure law called The Rave act they're not allowed to check their drugs they're not allowed to hand out these kits that help people realize if they're taking what they think they are or something else and so that's why at these Raves you always hear about some someone dying and in my opinion this is just crazy law now let's turn to China how complicit is China in the export of fenel the Chinese government that is
well the Chinese government as we all know is not one thing right so there are all these different layers of government and at the top level it's crazy because China offers these vat rebates value added tax rebates for fenil exports and so including the one sent to Mexican drug gangs exactly any anyone and so ostensibly this should be for the legal sale of fenil but it's so poorly enforced that there's undoubtedly these
subsidies and many more going directly to the cartels and I and I report on this for the fenal precursors so that to me is crazy that the government is offering tax incentives and other grants and subsidies for the export of fenil and fenil like drugs why does that persist what's the political economy I think it's a it's trying to grow China's chemical Industries exports so China has the biggest chemical industry in the world and but the
problem is they don't make as much money because it's focused on generics mostly so the us our industry is smaller but we do these brand name expensive Pharmaceuticals so China is trying to go up the value chain and they're trying to encourage the export of more expensive chemicals and pharmaceuticals so that's why all these obscure fenel analoges get these export rebates and I think it's been um
unfortunate side effect that so many of them are going to illicit uses has president Trump had any success in shutting down the supply of fanel from China I will give Trump credit for making the fenel discussion part of his trade war and he got China to ban all of the fenil analogs which became effective a few months ago so he's kind of used fentanyl as sort of a carrot and a stick to to varying degrees of success but do we
know yet if that's mattered I'm fairly certain that it's going to make some difference because whenever China bans one of these drugs you see an effect in the US there the seizures drop so it's a little too early to tell but I suspect it will be have some effect what's the drug of choice within China the three most abused drugs are heroin meth and ketamine and marijuana barely registers why don't they like pot that's a really
really good question you I've heard stories of people who go on like a crowded Chinese subway car and are smoking weed or hash openly and you know it's it's an annoying thing to do or they're doing it in public and no one even says anything cuz they're not used to the smell why don't the Chinese do fent more they have it locally it's very cheap uh highly addictive they can uh recommend it to each other on We Chat why doesn't that
happen well the fenil crisis really has only come to pass in places that had the opioid crisis starting with the overprescription of Oxycontin and all that so it's the US and Canada but they never had that problem in China and a lot of other parts of the world too so their doctors make other mistakes undoubtedly all the reporting you've done on fenel in China how has that revised your view of China more generally the drugs aside well I have to
say I loved being in China and it was so exhilarating now the state department has told me I can probably never go back which is very sad due to all my investigative reporting there but I don't know I think of China really like the US you know um supposedly people around the world hate the US policies but clearly we're a Force for good in many ways the US is not one thing there's extremely liberal people there's
extremely conservative people and I begin to think of China as the same way it's absorbed all these other countries around it it's doing this incredible innovation in so many ways the food the culture is is astounding but at the same time they're evil in their own ways are you allowed to tell us why you can't go back I basically because I'd be worried of putting being put in a Chinese jail just for my work I
when I went there before I didn't have proper credentialing necessarily and so that's reason enough what's your favorite part of China I love being in Beijing and uh I loved the the food and the music culture and just I don't know everything about it really and given what you've absorbed and learned about China what view might you have fun the trade war that maybe the rest of us would not unfortunately on a podcast that so
many economists Listen to I probably should just stay out of this well it could be a non-economic insight about how the Chinese perceive it or what citizens are allowed to know about the trade war or well in general they're not allowed to know anything that the government doesn't want them to know so for example no one knows anything about fenil because no one wrote about it and so I'm sure that there's a complete lack
of credible information now we're about at the middle of our segment and so therefore we turn to underrated versus overrated we are going to get to rap music but some of these will leap ahead a bit uh but let's start off with an easy one Tor Swift underrated or overrated i' have to say underrated I mean people are always complaining about her for some reason but she does nothing but make amazingly
great and catchy song so I see no problem with her Gil Scott Heron possibly a forerunner of rap music overrated or underrated I would say underrated generally his body of work but overrated as the forefather of rap music for example people are often citing him but they're I don't see him being the main Creator Clint Eastwood Clint Eastwood as a director probably underrated I I like so many of his films but as a public intellectual
I'm sure quite overrated uh the city of St Louis completely underrated St St Louis has so much going for it that people don't realize the architecture is gorgeous it's kind of a crumbling decaying City but there's a beauty in that the St Louis Cardinals are an amazing small market franchise that always punches above their weight um it's kind of like a social activity just to go to the games people go who know
nothing about baseball they just go to have a beer and sort of chat with each other there is a lot of parking there is incredibly cheap housing why don't more people move there then what why isn't it in no-brainer oh go to St Louis one great University a lot of hospitals there's there's some even more good universities cat but I for one thing the crime rate is very very high and it's also made to seem even higher
because the county and the city are are tabulated separately so I think people see these statistics and and they're like uh I think the Ferguson unrest 5 years ago I think it was a very important thing that happened but I think it generated negative publicity for St Louis New Jersey hip hop underrated or overrated again very underrated I think New Jersey gets a bad rap in just about everything but the first popular hip-hop song Rappers
Delight came from New Jersey the Sugar Hill records had was basically like a Hit Factory in in early hip hop all of these important people like Queen Latifa and Naughty by Nature and even Jay-Z spent a bunch of time in his early days coming coming up in New Jersey so it's so where does the underrating come from everyone talks about the South Bronx right why don't they talk about New Jersey any possible reason for that well
yeah exactly it's like where are you from in in New York well the South Bronx well what part of the South Bronx oh this part and then but if you're from New Jersey it's just New Jersey it's just one big place so it doesn't have its own little Regional identity mixed martial arts overrated or underrated oh I've got to say overrated but that's because I don't know anything about it Tupac or biggie you know I was a biggie
fan like most music critics are for a long time and there's really no arguing with his style he's basically platonic Perfection when it comes to delivering a rap song but I really came around to Tupac and though he's not as smooth as biggie he's not as perfect but he ultimately was rapping about something he has a message he was about liberating the people about sort of you know understanding yourself and being who you
are and and Biggie was mostly about parties in the club and stuff like that Stevie Wonder or Marvin Gay I would have to say Stevie Wonder I just love him so much I love Marvin Gay to Seinfeld or Larry David Seinfeld again it's there's just like a platonic Perfection about so many of those jokes that uh it's it probably will never go out of style but was Larry David the true creative element behind Seinfeld I
don't think so because he wasn't even there for part of it I I don't know I'm I ride for jerrym Cohen Brothers or Quinton Tarantino oh the Cen Brothers by a million miles um there's almost not a bad Cen Brothers movie I say you know it's like pizza and sex even when it's bad it's still pretty good and what's the best Prince album the best Prince album well I'm going to just be generic and say Purple Rain because um you know
it's everything about it is great from beginning to end I love side one but side two drags for me and sign of the times yeah I think I go back to more or even uh the very early albums the you know the short EP I forget what it's called it may have been the first one okay well I'm not a prince expert but now some questions on rap music more directly and again this is drawing on your two wonderful books on rap music
One on West Coast rap the other on Southern rap uh does the concept of authenticity still matter or even exist in rap after so many years or is it simply so much of a commercial product that we toss it out the window and just think of it as like a Tor Swift pop song no I think authenticity really does sort of still matter it's built into the DNA of the music and every time you know a rapper goes Hollywood if you will
there's someone who's Young and Hungry who comes up who's come out of poverty who is not you know being groomed for stardom at all and they speak in a language that really resonates with young fans and it's just constantly happening but how can you be transgressive in rap today it seems we've attained the limits on misogyny use of various Words which I will not name uh citations and approval of violence what is there left to do
haven't we just hyperinflated away all possibilities of shocking people well I think that's a misconception actually about hip hop is that it's transgressive I mean I think it's a fairly conservative art form at its core you know there are rules of how you do it there are even sort of Unwritten rules about what you talk about it's kind of like a a mafia movies in a way there are conventions and people tend to stick
with them does it matter that now Hasbro owns Death Row Records well it's certainly funny but Death Row Records has long ago ceased being important so it probably doesn't matter if you had to pick who's the most important Trapper right now to understanding the rap and hip-hop landscape in 2019 who would you site and why well well I would probably still s Kendrick Lamar because he you know everything is so political now and
Kendrick is this amazing he has this amazing ability to appeal both to the sort of you know um kind of uh marginalized communities and the sort of political Mucky mucks if you will he can speak to to everybody and he pulls it off which is so hard to do what has been the political impact of rap in fact I think it's been really profound I think that you know Barack Obama cited you know as cited rappers and and rap
lyrics before and I think it's it's just brought a voice to these sort of underserved communities that people tend to ignore you know you you know in St Louis for example when someone is murdered from the north part of the city it's barely even news but hip hop is something that all young people of all Races listen to pretty much and it brings these messages to a big audience this question is maybe a little difficult to explain but where in lies
the musical Talent of hip-hop so if we look at Mozart well there's Melody there's Harmony right uh if you listen to Stravinsky's right of spring it's something very specifically rhythmic and the textures and the organization of the blocks of sound uh the Poetry aside what is it musically that accounts for the talent in rap music well first of all writing a beat rapping if you will is extremely hard and anyone who's ever tried to do it
will tell you there's you know you have to have the right Cadence you have to have the right breath control and it's a talent um there's also you know this might sound trivial but picking the right music to to rrap over so hip hop of course is a genre that's made up of other genres and you know in the beginning it was disco records that people use and then Jazz and then you know on and on rock records
have been wrapped over even but you know what song are you going to pick to use and if someone has a good ear for a sound that goes with their style that's something you can't teach so how do you train yourself to be better at rap say you're 17 you feel you have some Talent you decide I want to be a rapper what is it you go out and do well the traditional way is through freestyle battling or just freestyling so you know
just rap about everything you see always be rapping but the sad thing is that a lot of people are just never going to get any better as you point out in your book aptly titled original gangsters some of the important early west coast rappers who are in fact gang members or violent or they have not so wonderful histories but a frap is a skill that requires a lot of practice are you saying these were actually High
conscientiousness individuals how does the whole picture fit together oh yeah I mean when it comes to NWA the the two main talents in NWA were Dr Dre and Ice Cube and so both of them not only weren't in gangs but their early songs were specifically decrying the gang life they were mocking gangs and telling people to stay away they were really concerned with their craft and that's all they did for fun and so
it's another I think misconception about hip-hop music so how how hard did they work uh they worked incredibly hard I mean it it wasn't work to them like Dr Dre just wanted to do nothing but make music all day long what management lessons do you think we can learn from successful hip-hop groups I think that just applying your trade uh on the streets if you will you know not trying to get a job and be employed by someone else to start your
own business right in the area you live as you know e e was also a member of NWA he he has a cool voice but he wasn't a superstar Talent out of he didn't work that hard right well he he worked on the management side he made he built NWA pretty much from scratch so that was his great contribution what management lessons can we learn from the southern rap group Outcast and why don't they exist anymore
well yeah I mean big boy would say they still do exist but Outcast I think their thing was they just didn't care what anyone else thought they didn't care about the existing business model they had a vision of what they wanted to do they knew there was an audience for it it was sort of a it wasn't East Coast it wasn't West Coast they wanted to do an Atlanta sound they wanted something that was tough but it was also not tough it
was fun and silly and they just did it but they could earn much more money making music together why doesn't the coast theorum hold they hate each other too much they have other goals model this for me it's a weird thing I think big boy loves Andre and Andre is kind of like H sometimes with big boy Andre is just the quintessential sort of tortured creative artist and he he doesn't he more money than he needs and he just
doesn't care about making more what makes southern rap Southern uniquely Southern to me it's the beats and when you hear rap from the Northeast it it moves very fast it's very intellectual it's meant for sort of showing off your vocabulary largely but Southern rap is about being on the dance floor it's about something when you hear it you immediately can't help yourself from you know going out and dancing and are the underlying sources
or influences different where does that distinction come from they are and they aren't there's a lot of sort of Caribbean influence uh in both places but I think it was more the culture of New York versus the culture of say Miami where Southern rap started and Miami has very influenced by these beach parties for example and so the two live Crews Luke Campbell was a DJ at these beach parties and he just wanted to make
people dance and so started doing everything he could to to pull that off and how are the underlying influences in West Coast rap different West Coast rap comes very much from the culture also and so in the the mid to late 80s there was the crack epidemic there was the CPS in the Bloods there was this that you know they had their own sartorial Styles and all of this was sort of consciously infused into the music NWA didn't plan
on being an internationally known group they wanted to appeal to people in Los Angeles and Compton and in their areas and so that's what they did schooly D one of my favorites comes up with with an incredibly unique sound what in 1987 give or take yet it seems he was a gangster now where did that come from or you telling me he was also a high conscientiousness individual I don't know his whole biography like his real
real biography there's not that much written about him but if I had to put money on it I would suspect that was likely true in fact he said that he he usually didn't have swear words in his early songs but the crowds responded to it so well he started swearing a lot how did you get access to Dr Dre for your book he donated a lot of money to a new USC program along with Jimmy ien who was the founder of inner scope
and so I talked to him under those offices and he was very excited and proud he's a very shy guy he hates doing interviews but I got him to open up in sort of this context originally and other than being shy how is he different from what you expected well he just um I don't know most I've interviewed a lot of musicians a lot of celebrity musicians over the years and they almost all have this sort of natural star shine about them they
can just talk to you about anything and you feel excited to be in their presence but with Dr Dre he just um he was just a Wallflower let's say you have to give an answer what is the best rap album do or die what's your pick oh man this is definitely putting me on the spot I would have to say 808s and Heartbreak by Kanye West why it's just again unlike anything that existed at the time or since it's it's a really
decep itively Deep album it's about the the death of his mother the dissolution of a relationship and um the songs are just not only the the lyrics but the the sound it's um you know there's a lot of autotune a much derided technology but it has this ethereal quality it just it stayed with me ever since it came out I still listen to it all the time and what is the best entry point into rap for a
rap SK skeptic which may not be the same as the best album and I'm not a rap skeptic but I know many of them some of our listeners believe it or not are rap Skeptics where should they start well I think that a lot of people have a problem with the misogyny of hip-hop which is understandable the violence so I would Point them to Something Like A Tribe Called Quest you know there's so much Afrocentric positive hipop out
there especially in the the early 90s uh the late 80s and day L Los soul I would Point them in that direction how should we think about the economics of the optimal length of a WRA CD to go back in time just a bit so the CD era comes along and there are so many rap CDs that seem to be 79 minutes and 18 seconds and I feel just about all of them are too long why did they do this what's the reasoning I think you're
absolutely right and I think the skits inflated all those albums there was a time in hip-hop where you had to have not just one skit but lots and lots of skits they were very rarely funny and I think that in general just shorter is always better when it comes to CDs of any genre I mean how often do you say this CD was too short maybe once in a while how often do you say a CD is too long um very often so maybe the cassette
era was better for Rat music that is completely possible the cassettes it changed everything about the sequencing compared compared with CDs you know you had have the number one song be good and then you had to have the number one song on the other side of the cassette be good if we go back to the very early days of rap music say the very early 1980s I think a lot of people at the time figured well this is a new trend it
might last 5 to 10 years or even just three to four years and then be gone was there anyone who foresaw that come 2019 rap might be the single biggest thing in popular music there there were yeah I think people probably like k won a lot of these big boosters in New York saw it but really the the executives were the ones who dropped the ball like NWA couldn't get a record deal for example and everyone still thought you know this
was already the the late 80s and people still thought this thing was going to Peter out any minute and in your account why hasn't it exhausted itself if it has relatively few dimensions of musical Talent well maintaining the beat choosing the music to go behind what you're rapping why is it still so fresh and vital well there there's a lot more to it too you know there's a lot of live music on hip-hop albums for example and
it it certainly is a comp complex art form but I think the Simplicity though is part of its appeal because anyone can be a rapper for example rapping is just such a a thing anyone can pick up and try and so it it you don't there's not a high barrier of Entry so people with really interesting things to say can can just start doing it and get their music out there so it's like almost like a garage inventor phenomenon you can do it
without needing approval from too many other people very few veto points you'll get a lot of creativity so it just mobilizes more creativity would you accept that hypothesis absolutely what's a musical genre that's the opposite of that I think these days it's anything with the string section and maybe anything with a horn section I just I I always think about band class at school and the kids who have to Lug their
instruments back and forth to school and so you know the viola the upright base you know even something like the saxophone who's going to want to do this every day I don't know that's one way I think about it the United States aside which other countries have the best rap scenes I think that there's some great rap coming out of Nigeria there's uh kind of Afro beat afro pop stuff coming from lots of parts of Africa
and um I like some different French rappers too I like Algeria and Mexico I'm not even sure it's all still rap anymore or what that word yeah reggy tone and stuff yeah it all kind of comes together in certain ways if you think about career trajectories for rap stars I have the Casual sense that they don't last that long are there rap stars who just keep on getting better as they age like Beethoven or is that very hard to
pull off and if so why you know I haven't seen a lot of that but I don't know why it shouldn't be the case though I mean you have Blues musicians who undeniably often get better when they age um when it comes to rap stars it tends to be like all the money as with any celebrities once you get a lot of yes men around you it's hard to keep your your creative Edge is the Entourage inefficient should we tax the Entourage
discourage it would the world be a better place if we outlawed the Entourage no a fan of the Entourage because for a lot of rappers who get famous they the people who supported them there's kind of this implicit agreement that if any of us break big we're going to bring the other ones and all rappers who have entourages say that they're basically giving jobs to people who would otherwise be engaged in nefarious behavior in the streets how
does male versus female taste and rap music differ well you know it's hard to generalize but part of what I talk about in Dirty South was the reason that southern music my my book about southern rap music Dirty South the reason southern music succeeded was that it really focused on women and what they liked and so that tended to be more of these dance floor songs rather than this like rapity rap rap sort of mentality so
that's been a big factor I think now you also have an early book on dive bars in New York City correct that's right how did that come about well I was doing writing for the Village Voice and they had these different books about dive bars in different cities and I signed up to do the one for New York what is now the best burrow in New York for dive bars it can't be Manhattan anymore right no I wouldn't say although
if you the higher the street number the more likely you're going to find a good dive bar with decent price drinks but I would say Queens queens has uh a lot of dive bars that truly are what you Would Imagine a dive bar to be so you know um Christmas lights um wood paneling sort of formica type bars and you know things like bar fights if if that's your scene can be found a plenty in Queens other than simply wanting to drink what are in
fact the reasons to go to a dive bar I think it's just a camaraderie you know if you go to sort of a corporate bar you're not going to really feel comfortable chatting up people as much and dive bars it tends to be regulars from the neighborhood and it's like a second family for a lot of people so the model is that it lowers the status expectations for everyone so you can say what you want be who who you want behave
in any way yeah absolutely that lowers transactions costs I I think that is 100% true these are these are decidedly unpretentious places and that's part of their DNA why don't we run more social institutions on that basis or should we why don't we run podcasts on that basis like hey here's my dive podcast yeah well we probably should is there a European equivalent of dive bars H that's a good question I mean it
seems to me a specifically American thing in a lot of ways because in Europe they have more beautiful long lasting architecture while in the US a lot of dive bars are just someone some Shack somewhere is there a Chinese equivalent of dive bars uh undoubtedly and I did not get to see any though for our final segment just a few questions about the Ben westof production function if I may uh you wrote a book on fenel and it's
now turned out fenel is one of the country's biggest issues was this simply luck or did you have actual insight and if you had Insight where did that come from I think it had a lot to do with luck the way I got into the story was writing about these Rave drugs that were being adulterated and then I found out about China how these Labs were making all these new drugs and it wasn't until I was well into the reporting that I
even heard the word fenel and then it sort of just took over the book but how did that happen what what clicked in your mind what was that moment like well I was writing about Raves and you know one person out of 60,000 would die at a rave and I thought oh that's bad but then I was hearing that fentanyl more people were starting to die so I was like this is a much much bigger problem let's imagine this is a dive podcast
what's the weird fact about your childhood that you're willing to tell us the weirdest fact about my childhood well probably just that my parents had us living this kind of weird hippie lifestyle where we never had chocolate we never had uh anything that might be considered delicious food for children and we all revolt and I got so upset about this I began shoplifting at a very young age from the the local College
their little store where they had candy bars and so I'd like to say my parents drove me to crime and this was in St Lewis no this was when I was growing up in Mano Minnesota do American kids watch too much TV yes I think that they do I think that um just there are so many more things to do in life but TV doesn't have to be so much of it let's say that a very smart 18-year-old comes up to you and says that in way they want to follow in your
footsteps to write books on disperate but very interesting and hot topics like rap music and fenel and they ask you for advice what is it you tell them other than the non-obvious like work hard you know be like a rap star practice what do you say well I think just follow what you really want to do and so what you're really interested so I came up in alternative weeklys and for how underpaid we were we got that was made
up for for by the fact that we could write about whatever we wanted and so we were encouraged to to follow our interest whereas at a daily paper you might have had a certain beat that you always wrote about every day and there's stuff that just intrinsically you know more about that inspires you more and so again you want to get to a point where it doesn't feel like work like you would be doing this anyway now when I when I
first dreamed of being a writer I thought about you know have I needed all these life experiences like I needed to go running with the bulls and I needed to maybe be an alcoholic I just needed to really live but my feeling on that has shifted a lot and now I think just the opposite that there's plenty of stories out there there's things to write about are all around you and you need to discipline yourself get your
health right you know I'm like I said I I try to very careful about what I eat I'm very big on exercise long-distance running yoga getting my body right getting enough sleep every night and it's not glamorous but I feel like it benefits my work a lot so you're a big believer in practice yeah and what do you do to practice writing just to become a better writer obviously you write but what else can you do um I mean
this is this part of that but just journaling you know and and when people think about writing they think oh I have to write a profound short story but I always say no just write like everything that's happening to you non-fiction to me from the average writer from the beginning from the entry-level writer is almost always a thousand times more interesting than something some fiction they're writing do you love book tour do
I love book tour I'm very grateful to be on book tour the food is difficult it's it's kind of a grind but um I am certainly happy to be here on this podcast and last question do you have any sense what your next book might be if you're allowed to tell us I think it's going to be about the murder of my little brother from the Big Brother Big Sister program his name was Jerell Cleveland and in 2016 he was murdered he lived in
Ferguson and the murder is still unsolved so I want to find out what happened that led to his demise wow Ben westoff thank you very much well thank [Music] you thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show