EP. 321 — Drug Money For Law School

Chris [00:00:05] Hello to everybody out there who’s getting woken up from a sound sleep by getting punched in the back. It’s Beautiful/Anonymous. It’s one hour. One phone call. No names. No holds barred.

Theme song [00:00:30] (THEME MUSIC)

Chris [00:00:30] Hello, everybody. My name is Chris Gethard, and I want to welcome you to Beautiful/Anonymous. It is a show where we take phone calls and the phone calls are anonymous and they go on for an hour and they give you a little glimpse of human life. Other people’s life stories. If it’s your first time joining us, we’re very lucky to have you. Thank you so much. Also very lucky that people have been supporting my tour. I’ve been getting out there, getting out there, doing live shows. Thanks to everybody who’s been showing up in all the cities we’ve been in. I wanted to let everybody know that this week I’m doing my New Jersey is the World Live show in Asbury Park on Wednesday, June 1st. And then June 3rd. I’ll be in Portland, Oregon. June 4th, I’ll be in Seattle. And we’ll be doing our live Beautiful/Anonymous tapings at the early show. Stand up at the late show. I would be flattered if you came to one and or both. You can get tickets at Chris Geth dot com. This week’s episode we just recorded it moments ago. Recording the intro while it’s fresh and I’m going to tell you, not everybody’s going to agree with the choices this caller has made. There is absolutely going to be feedback. And justified. I think the caller himself would say justified from people going, no, you can’t… You can’t do what you did and claim that it’s okay. But there are going to be many, many people who listen to this and go, this is a smart person who made some very risky choices. And it all comes down to needing to find money to pay for school. And there’s whole systems in place there that it can be and very often are predatory. And our caller responded to those pressures. Not everyone’s going to agree with the choices that the caller made. But one thing that I think all of us will agree with is that this caller is able to break down what he did, why he did it. He is a very eloquent person. Tells us some stories of some behavior that also prove he is kind of a wild person. Keep your ears open for the pig mask section of the show. The lengths that people have to go to these days to make ends meet and to play ball in the system the way it’s set up. It’s really eye opening to think about someone this smart doing stuff that he lays out that he’s done. Anyway. How’s that for a tease? I kept it vague enough that I didn’t spoil it. And I teased you enough where I think you’re going to want to hear every word. Enjoy the call.

Voicemail Robot [00:03:09] Thank you for calling. Beautiful/Anonymous. A beeping noise will indicate when you are on the show with the host.

Caller [00:03:17] Hello?

Chris [00:03:19] Hello.

Caller [00:03:21] Hi.

Chris [00:03:22] Hi. How’s it going?

Caller [00:03:25] Oh, it’s going great. I just had a wonderful bowl of Lucky Charms. I love cereal. Might pay for it later, but right now, it’s a great time. How are you Mr. Gethard?

Chris [00:03:37] I’m good. I had a piece of pizza, so we’re both in great shape.

Caller [00:03:43] I love that. How is how has your day been so far?

Chris [00:03:51] Day’s been good. Woke up early, got the boy out the door for daycare. And then I’ve been home answering emails and I knew we were doing this so I went and took a quick walk around the block to get some steps in. So I would say a pleasant day. How about you?

Caller [00:04:11] That’s good. I like that. I’ve been- I woke up, did a little cleaning, took my dog out, and I’ve been looking forward to this. So it’s been a good day.

Chris [00:04:22] Nice. Nice. And this is a voicemail call, but I have not been told a thing about it. So you’re going to have to fill me in on what this pitch was.

Caller [00:04:32] Oh, that’s interesting. So my little elevator pitch was essentially, when I called, I was finishing up the finals of my second semester in my first year of law school, kind of thinking to myself, reminiscing on how I got there, the things that I did, and how I was a drug dealer through undergrad to make it to where I am today. Just kind of interested in all the various points that my life had taken me to, to give me to where I’m at.

Chris [00:05:01] So you’re studying the law, but to fund it, you’re breaking the law.

Caller [00:05:08] Well to fund it, you know, hypothetically. Maybe. I used to break the law. Now that was through undergrad because I have never been particularly well off financially. And I personally believe the entire college system is a scam and a money suck that’s designed to be that way. But between working two jobs, at one point three jobs, and having car issues, I wasn’t able to sustain any sort of lifestyle while trying to be able to study. And so I found it to be surprisingly easy for a while and a great way to end up with enough money to be alive. And when I say great way, I strictly mean financially. Everything else about it was kind of stressful and it really sucked.

Chris [00:06:04] I got to ask what kind of drugs we were selling here?

Caller [00:06:08] It was really just a lot of weed. I am not a person who is a fan of drugs. Actually, I didn’t even really smoke or drink until I got to college. But I morally don’t have any objections to marijuana. Other things, I’ve got some family who had some significant problems with other drugs, and so I kind of stray away from those. But I sold a lot of weed. I ended up buying some weed, having somebody- essentially kind of like a patsy- getting weed for me from the Darkweb to sell. We sold some wax and on a few sporadic occasions we got ahold of and sold for mushrooms. Another thing that I don’t really find much of an ethical problem with. It’s more of a legal problem. And, well, you know, as long as you don’t get caught, you didn’t do anything wrong. Right?

Chris [00:07:06] So you weren’t out here selling, selling opioids, fentanyl, all this stuff that’s killing people on the streets. You actively avoided that. So this was a very this was a very calculated decision.

Caller [00:07:22] Oh, very calculated, like to the point where most of the time I was doing anything, I had my own ass covered about 12 ways from Sunday. And I had about two or three people who would have potentially, if anything went wrong, been the fall guys and not known ahead of time that they would have been the fall guys and had no real way to prove that I had anything at all to do with it. Like I said, my ass was covered 12 ways from Sunday. Wow.

Chris [00:07:50] And you mentioned the Darkweb. That was a really fascinating stretch in Internet history. I mean, I feel like it still exists, but Silk Road… Was- Silk Road was almost mainstream. It wasn’t a mainstream thing because you needed to have Tor and you needed to know about cryptocurrencies years before they were popular. But it was getting enough mainstream coverage that I knew about it. I understood how it worked. Was this around that era that you were getting into that?

Caller [00:08:22] It was a little bit after that, when Silk Road was no longer a thing, but there were, there were and are still other websites that ended up replacing it. But it functioned very similar in the sense of you’d have to have your cryptocurrency, your account, and then whoever you bought from, your money got put in escrow, you got your shipping details, and once you got the package, that’s when money would be released from escrow or you’d be able to challenge something. But most of the vendors that we dealt with had very good reputations. And several they got a ton of reviews. So it really wasn’t as much of a worry on whether or not they keep their end of the bargain.

Chris [00:09:02] Yeah. So this also sounds like-

Caller [00:09:04] So now my uh-

Chris [00:09:04] Oh, now what? Continue the thought. 

Caller [00:09:07] I’ll say now the friend that I had kind of used in a sense to get these transactions done, he ended up buying some other things through there that I had absolutely nothing to do with and suggested that he not do. Like he bought some DMT, some coke, some acid, things that, you know, I don’t always trust chemical composures of things, especially when you’re buying them online from people that you don’t know. And even worse, when he wasn’t doing things my way, he wasn’t- let’s say he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, you know? Those things that weren’t under my control, he may or may not have had sent to a state university.

Chris [00:09:54] Wait. Repeat that.

Caller [00:09:57] The purchases that he made that weren’t under my control, he may or may not have had them shipped to a state university.

Chris [00:10:06] That’s not that doesn’t sound smart.

Caller [00:10:09] No. He was not a particularly smart person. Now, granted, he’s not alive anymore. But he wasn’t a particularly smart person. He didn’t last long in the university anyway.

Chris [00:10:20] So did he. He got caught and expelled for that?

Caller [00:10:24] No. He didn’t last long cuz he wasn’t really that smart. He didn’t make the grades he needed to. He spent more time partying and doing the drugs than any bit of work that he could have done. So he did not, like he would have been on academic probation if he would have stayed in the next year. But then he opted to not do that because it was just too much work.

Chris [00:10:45] Right. Right. Now. Oh, I got so many questions. I’m hitting a traffic jam of questions in my head.

Caller [00:10:55] Well, let’s start with the easiest one. What’s the first one that pops through?

Chris [00:10:59]  First one that pops through is, do you have any regrets about this?

Caller [00:11:06] Um. Let’s see. Honestly, not really. The only regret that I can really think of is that I wasn’t able to do it for longer. I ended up stopping somewhere between the middle of my junior year of undergrad and my senior year, I believe. And part of the reason that I ended up having to stop was I went from funding my own purchases and sales to I had a very lucrative situation going on that I was working and selling with a different partner who was my at the time roommate. And he and I had different clientele that we sold to, but he ended up selling a lot more and in larger amounts to various people, which was to me a little bit too sketch. I didn’t want to go down that route. But I had all the supplier connections and so he was getting me the money to get his purchases, and he was paying fair street market price the way he was getting. But I was making a good portion of money off the top of that. So it ended up funding my purchases and I didn’t have to do much work of my own to get there. Like, for example, he would go through probably a half pound to a pound every 3 to 5 days, and he would have no problem paying like 1350 for a half pound. And I was in good with the people I was buying it from, so even though 1350 was an outrageous price, it was pretty normal, I’d be getting it for 1000, 1100 dollars. I’d be making 250, 350 on the top of him. And that’s enough for me to buy a couple ounces to sell in between there if I don’t have a whole lot of stuff going on at the time. So I ended up not even having to pay for the drugs in the first place. And then every bit of sales was completely in the green.

Chris [00:13:06] So it became an- you became a middleman to a degree where it became a no overhead venture for you.

Caller [00:13:13] Exactly. And it worked wonderfully for while that happened.

Chris [00:13:18] Let’s pause there. Everybody, there’s probably some people listening right now going, I think I could do this. And I just want to say that if you choose to commit crimes, it is not Beautiful/ Anonymous’ fault. I’m going to go ahead now and run some ads, because I got to make money, too, just like the caller. We all got to make money in this world. So we’re going to have our ads and then we’ll be right back. Thanks to the advertisers who allow us to bring this show to the world. Now let’s go ahead and get back into this phone call. So it became an- you became a middleman to a degree where it became a no overhead venture for you.

Caller [00:13:52] Exactly. And it worked wonderfully for while that happened.

Chris [00:13:56] Now, you started by explaining how this was how you stopped. But that sounds like it actually would be encouraging you to continue.

Caller [00:14:07] Reasonably it could have. But I… I didn’t want to have to put my own money into it. So I started putting my own money into it. And I got to the point where I, like, so, you know, I didn’t have like 16 ounces. So say if the half pound was 1350, then, you know, if I was getting an ounce off the top of that from him, then I was paying for it at the price of 150, 170 dollars, give or take, for one ounce. Well, that came out of the money that he already gave me. And that one ounce, when you’re selling it to college kids, you can sell it for a price that’s moderately unreasonable piece by piece, and you’re selling in eighths. I mean, that’s like 45 bucks each. So, you know, you’re getting up there, and every single bit of that was just pure profit. And I wasn’t really smoking at that time at all, so I was making a lot of money off of doing very little work. And when that stopped being a possibility, it wasn’t really worth it for me to continue, because I wasn’t in as much of dire financial strait as I was when I needed to start doing it.

Chris [00:15:22] Now let’s speak about those dire straits. So there must have been people in your life who were aware that you were working two jobs, three jobs, who noticed that all of a sudden there was a massive shift in your lifestyle and the amount of free time you had. How did you explain this?

Caller [00:15:39] So I stayed working those jobs. I stayed working those jobs and eventually I cut off one of them. But it was like a work study job. It was kind of a time set thing anyway. So when it stopped there wasn’t any real reason to question it. The other one, I stayed working and I kept paying my bills, as is. It did raise a couple of questions when I ended up buying a second car. Probably not my best decision, but it also wasn’t a phenomenal car. So like I was able to reason that my first car was on its last legs, which was true. It ended up with the engine seizing while I was on a road trip. That was not a fun time. But other than that, most of the cash that I uses either went, you know, just to some fun things or ended up paying like my actual bills so that the money in my bank account that was coming from work was just kind of accumulating and not having many things to go to other than like going out or buying food, because most of my bills were paid in cash.

Chris [00:16:47] So you did do this in a very intelligent way. This is like Breaking Bad. You’re like Walter White. You really put some thought and some brains into the infrastructure of this. Now, I also feel like thinking of the timing, so you said Silk Road, we mentioned it before. For anybody who doesn’t know, this was like a very notorious underground website a lot of people were using to sell and purchase drugs, but also legendarily supposedly guns and people hiring hitmen. And that was the sensationalized stuff. And the person who founded that website got taken down hard by the government. So you’re saying this is post Silk Road, but you’re still using the dark web. That also feels to me like it’s probably right around the era in history when states are starting to legalize weed more and more. Did you start to run into that as part of this story?

Caller [00:17:41] So in my area, no. There there was no chance of anything legalizing in my area. But some of the other areas that we had things shipped from, that did benefit the pricing models, because when they’re legalizing weed in some places, sometimes because of taxes or because of the regulations, not all the weed passes all the little marks so they can sell, or it’s not as pretty as they can use. So some of it ends up into, you know, trash cans, right? So those trash cans never actually end up being trash. So people end up selling them to friends or having a large amount that they can find other ways to get rid of. And one of those ways tends to be selling them on the dark web. So we’d get some pretty nice prices through that. Like there was one time, now, at this point I was like sort of semi homeless. Um kind of my fault, but I was living with a buddy, um a buddy who was like one of those JROTC National Guard, ended up being a cop type buddies. So he wasn’t particularly fond of weed. He wanted me to keep it all out of his apartment, which it did for the most part. But while he was gone, there was a day where we had a delivery that we went and got of about 4 pounds, and we had it all like sectioned out and sold within like 4 hours while he wasn’t at his apartment. Because every bit of that was pre-purchased and pre-paid. I didn’t use any of my own money to pay for it. Everybody paid the standard price of what they were expected to pay, just minus like 2 to $300 I told him it would be a few days I be holding onto their money. And so I made a real nice chunk of change off of that because the price of those 4 pounds off the Darkweb came to about the price of maybe one and a half that I could have bought off the street. So with all the people paying close to the full price, that was a couple grand that would have been pocketed in that one day.

Chris [00:19:46] I was just reading about how there are people now who will put under special skills on their resume, they’ll just put Googling. Like I’m really, really good at Googling things. And there’s and you know, there’s people who roll their eyes at that. But then a lot of employers go, no, like this reflects the fact that this person’s realistic and smart. Like your ability to Google and find solutions to things, like, we all do that all day. So that that shows us that you’re smart, that you’re putting that on your special skills. It sounds to me like effectively you managed to make a whole lot of money by going, I’ll figure out the Darkweb for the people who don’t have the capability or are scared to go mess around on the Darkweb. That effectively was the job. As much as it was weed dealer it was, I’ll figure out the technology on how to get it here so that everybody else doesn’t have to. It sounds like.

Caller [00:20:39] And that’s what made me the bulk of the money. Other than that, when I still had those like deals with my roommate and I had like the ounce of two off the top, those I would still sell like person to person, whether it was I brought an eighth to the job I was working at and someone came through my line to buy something and it got put in their bag with their receipt, or whether it was they came over to smoke and that’s when I sold it to them then. Made sure they stayed a little while so cars weren’t just coming in and out of where I was living and stuff like that. So I had some hand in like actual physical transactions from person to person where it was from my stash that I was selling them and making money that way. But that was, I mean like chump change compared to the amount that I could have made from the larger transactions that I had someone else take care of the purchasing and the Bitcoin and all that. And I just dealt with the marketing side more or less.

Chris [00:21:35] Now it sounds like… You were very, very crafty. Sounds like you had some ethics from your end, from start to finish, and that they didn’t bend and that that’s a good thing. It sounds like you tried to approach all of this intelligently. Still have to wonder, were there ever any stretches where you thought you might be in trouble from this? Were there ever any- ever any paranoia any time that there were knocks on the door that you didn’t want?

Caller [00:22:02] Oh, my God. Yes. Lord have mercy. Absolutely. There were two incidences, well, two stretches of time where I was more riddled with stress and anxiety than I have in any other time in my life. And I am routinely on an SSRI for that purpose. Which I probably haven’t taken, which I should probably take care of that. It’s beside the point. But yes, so one of the times, one of my local dealers who was a friend of mine, he would have like, you know, usually about 10 pounds or so at his house and some (UNCLEAR). And the guy he bought it from had like hundreds. But there was a time where one of the people who bought from him had brought someone else along with them, and he thinks it was this person who caused the issue because a couple of weeks later, someone broke into his apartment and robbed him. He wasn’t there. But they took like the five or 6 pounds that he had left there and some of his like personal items and some money and stuff. And so because there was no actual weed left in the apartment, he filed a police report, which probably wasn’t a smart idea of his, but he filed a police report about just his stolen items. And then he didn’t have many answers for why someone would break in and steal it, who knew that he had these things, because he didn’t think that out. But after that, he was someone who has, you know, semi prosperous business family. He wasn’t particularly doing this for money as much as the thrill and entertainment, but he ended up having some DEA look in like on his LinkedIn, which was out of the normal for him, and on his parents. So there were like people searching him, he felt. And he got real paranoid and said he thought that there were like cars that weren’t supposed to be there, that were sitting there for a while. So he got real sketched out about that. And so because I was there so often, I don’t know whether or not he was correct, but, you know, any time that there’s a question, always assume that they’re right, even if it’s very clear that they’re probably wrong, because it keeps your ass safe. So I was sketched for a bit there and ended up having to find someone else to buy from because I wasn’t really as trusting of that source for a while. He ended up moving and changing things and I bought from him for a while after that, but that one was like the low stress for me. The high stress for me was when I was living at the apartment of my friend, while I was living on his couch for a few months and I had two cars, one of the cars was super crappy condition and it kind of sat in the guest parking lot. And then the other car was the one that I would use regularly. Well, after I started coming to the apartment complex, shortly it ended up being an officer, um it started off as like a security guard who was like sitting in a truck over in a second second, a second section of the guest parking lot. And he never really did that before. I visited these apartment complexes frequently because they were close to the university and other things that I was doing. So this was new. And then after a while, that security guard stopped being a security guard and ended up being just a sheriff’s car. And so, you know, I was a little more sketched then. And but I was like, you know, he’s not moving, not doing anything. Maybe there’s just other like high traffic or maybe there’s a time that they’re patrolling for certain reasons. That’s what I thought at first. And then after I like a little, I think like a month passed and then every time that I would drive into the complex, that cop’s car would start, and then they would start circling the apartment building. So I got to the point where I would I would duck off at the first turn, which wasn’t where I was going, go around the backside, park elsewhere, walk between and through a few buildings. They had doors in the back that was like a little courtyard. So I’d go into a building that I had no business being in, go through the courtyard, go through another building, out the back side of that, and then across to get to the back of the building I needed to be in, because I needed to avoid wherever the cop was driving and circling actually. In my mind, which could’ve been true and could have not been true, they were there circling every time that I drove in, and that’s when they started circling because they were looking for that car for some reason. And I couldn’t really drive for the other car because it was crap, but it’s where I stored most of my things. And so I would only go out when I didn’t see the cop car there at night to gather the materials that I needed to like weigh out or bag or do whatever, because I kept it out of the apartment because my buddy did not want it in his apartment. But that had me on high alert all of the time. Um, there was even a time. Oh, sorry. Let me send this call to voicemail. Don’t call me. But there was even a time where we had gotten some really, really nice wax off of the dark web. And I had tried some of it, you know, note for anybody in legal states who’s consuming wax, if it’s not a thing that you’re doing all the time, you should really weigh out of the amount of wax that you’re doing or be careful with it, because greening out is not fun. I hit way too much wax, got super stressed, super paranoid, sweaty. Like I left the apartment immediately. And at that time there was a cop sitting at the entryway to the apartment. So when I left, my heart was beating through my chest. I was absolutely terrified. I knew that I had things in my car. I knew this could have gone down very bad. So I, once I left, I didn’t look behind me. I drove like normal until I got to like the first right turn I could have taken that I knew had more stretches and like some housing in it that I can take turns around, park, find somewhere else. So I did that and I waited for a good 30 or 45 minutes just in my car, pitch black, seat down so that I would only see the lights that passed. Oh, that was a bad time.

Chris [00:28:21] Yeah, that doesn’t sound fun. It doesn’t sound fun at all.

Caller [00:28:26] It could have all been in my head. I could have, like, it, it could have all been in my head. But logically, there was no other reason for the cop that wasn’t there before I started doing that to be there. There was no reason for him to only be circling once my car came in. So those things together to me meant something could be wrong and it could cause me some problems. It never did. I had some personal interactions with cops, but they were mostly due to me being a dumb ass because there were times when I wasn’t as smart about what I was doing. They normally weren’t related to selling drugs or selling weed. They were related to when I was drinking or when I had a mustang that I really enjoyed driving, like how probably a 16 year old would. So got in a little bit of trouble for peeling tires and stuff like that. Being too loud and speeding. The things that you do when you have a Mustang. It was like one of the V6 or it wasn’t, you know, super nice one, but it was one of like a 5.0. It was fun. I liked that car.

Chris [00:29:37] Now did you know, while you were in undergrad, that you were heading to law school?

Caller [00:29:45] I did. I well it was kind of a pipe dream. I had it planned, like since middle school. I just didn’t think it was very realistic because I kind of left high school with like a 1.9 GPA. I didn’t do anything. If they assigned homework, I felt like it was busy work and that it was dumb. There was no reason to do it. If I was going to prove my knowledge or my skills I’d do it in a test. So I didn’t do practically any homework they gave me and I just aced every test they handed me. I didn’t think that I’d ever actually be able to get into law school, so I tried my best in undergrad to do all of the work, even the busy work. But it was sometimes a struggle because I was working so much and I didn’t often have time to complete everything so some of my work ended up being done at the very last minute.

Chris [00:30:43] And what type of law are you studying?

Caller [00:30:48] So in your first year of law school, you actually really don’t get much choice of what you’re studying. You study the doctrinal law. So you study the main things that are going to be on your bar exam no matter where you take it. So torts, criminal law, contracts, constitutional law, property and civil procedure, those are the main things that you’ll take. And then you get like legal writing, legal research, and sometimes you get like one elective that you may choose during that time. So further than that, I don’t really have- I’m very open to what I’m interested in doing. Ironically, I’m fairly interested in- maybe it’s not as ironic- but like criminal defense is something I’m pretty interested in. Just cuz I want to make sure that people don’t get screwed over by the law because I have no trust in the government. At all. And so I want to make sure that even if people did something wrong, that they’re not getting the harshest punishments possible because they want to make an example out of them or because someone’s chasing some sort of political career and the prosecutors or the D.A. is just like, yeah, let’s do everything we can to make this as harsh of a punishment as we can, because we want to make it so that public opinion of us gets higher for taking care of crime. So I want to help to make sure that that shit doesn’t happen as much as I can.

Chris [00:32:16] So that tracks. So your approach- you are approaching your law career from a point of I don’t I don’t trust the system. I don’t like the system. Let me go tinker with it from the inside and be a person be a person who learns it backwards and forwards so I can get on the inside and help, which does speak to a bit of an outlaw streak, which I guess tracks with how you paid for it.

Caller [00:32:41] You know what? I think you’re right there. Yeah.

Chris [00:32:45] And there has to there has to be some part of you. Although it’s not like lawyers are always aboveboard people. Right? There’s like. There’s like. Well, that’s a funny thing, right? It’s like, there’s lawyers who never technically break a law in their life who are probably bigger scumbags than it sounds like you’ve ever set out to be.

Caller [00:33:09] That’s fair and totally accurate.

Chris [00:33:11] That’s a cliche as well. There’s probably, you know, there’s also, I think, a pretty popular cliche that law students are known to maybe party pretty hard. And I certainly.

Caller [00:33:25] Oh my god. Yes.

Chris [00:33:26] I know law students- I know people in my life who have told me that, uh, the law school experience that a lot of, a lot of people stay up all night and do amphetamines and cocaine to study all night and that that’s part of the law school experience is that a lot of these people are out there breaking the law as they study it. Um, so maybe you’ll fit right in.

Caller [00:33:46] If I could address this in general knowledge of that being roughly accurate, I may or may not know some friends who either have readily available access to coke and use it, and I know some that have readily available access to Adderall. And if they don’t, they’re more than willing to pay almost coke money to buy it because, yeah, there’s a lot of being up for way too long, whether it’s studying or whether it’s cause you needed to study and now you want to party. And there’s a lot of partying. I mean, I’m also, you know, one of the people who does my fair share partying. Maybe more than my fair share of partying. There was a time that I went off for a mimosa brunch, unlimited mimosas for twenty bucks. Beautiful. Not as beautiful when you have like ten of them within an hour and a half, then you go to pregame for a bar, then you go to get a few drinks at a bar and you wake up in a hospital. Not a great time.

Chris [00:34:43] Yeah. Let’s pause there. It’s not a great time. Caller, I’ve rarely talked to anybody who both has- is so driven and eloquent and also willing to just lay out with that eloquence the completely insane things they’ve chosen to do sometimes as well. Anyway, we’ll be right back with more phone call. Thanks to everybody who advertises on the show. You’re the reason that the show gets out into the world. Let’s go ahead. Let’s finish off the phone call.

Caller [00:35:08] Then you go get a few drinks and a bar and you wake up in a hospital. Not a great time.

Chris [00:35:13] That happened to you?

Caller [00:35:15] Yeah it did. That’s the worst way I’ve ever woken up in, yeah, so waking up with a tube in your through and a catheter in your dick. Not a good way to start any Monday.

Chris [00:35:27] Hold on, hold on. You woke up with a tube in your throat and a catheter in your dick?

Caller [00:35:36] Well, actually, (UNCLEAR) beforehand. But, yeah, that’s how I woke up on a Monday morning.

Chris [00:35:42] And that’s started with a mimosa bar.

Caller [00:35:45] Yes, it started with a mimosa brunch that was to celebrate one of our buddy’s birthday. And, you know, it’s 20 bucks for unlimited mimosas. I’m going to get my money out of it. And so I did, but then- that would have probably been fine, and then we went to someone’s apartment to pregame, and I probably had three or four shots of tequila, a couple of drinks. And then we went to a bar where I had at least two Long Islands. I know that. Anything else is a blur. The tube in my throat, they told me was because I would not stop puking and they didn’t want me to aspirate. And I had like three IVs. They were jumping so much liquids in to me and medication. Oh, it was. It was not a good time.

Chris [00:36:37] Yeah, that sounds awful. It sounds truly terrible.

Caller [00:36:42] Yeah. Definitely cut down the drinking after that, though.

Chris [00:36:46] Yeah, I bet. I bet. Damn. People going hard in law school.

Caller [00:36:57] And I still. I mean, like, I have the lowest GPA I’ve had in any serious education. But that’s only because your law school GPA is not likely to be anywhere near as high as your undergrad GPA. I still have a good GPA for law school, but to me it’s not high enough.

Chris [00:37:22] Do you imagine that your dealing days are totally behind you or have you ever considered going back to it?

Caller [00:37:29] Oh, so anything on the scale with weed or things like that, I’m probably just going to avoid because I have no real need for it. It was fun at times, but it was much more stressful others. And I wasn’t doing it just out of a sense of like, you know, fuck these laws, I think they’re stupid- which was definitely part of it- but I was doing it because I really needed money to survive and I wasn’t doing very well financially. I mean, I even before I started doing that, in my first try at my sophomore year of undergrad, I ended up dropping out of school and then going to work at a manufacturing plant and then a warehouse working like night shift at 12 hour shifts because I didn’t have the money to get back in school. I had to drop out because I didn’t have the money for rent because my car broke down. I fixed it and it broke down again. And then I couldn’t make it to either of the two jobs that I had. So I wasn’t able to sustain my living place. I didn’t live on campus, so I couldn’t go back and live on campus during that semester because everything was already full. So I had to drop out. And then when you drop out, all of your loans and things get rescinded. And since I did so poorly in high school, I had no financial aid besides loans. So then I had about $8,000 of a bill before I could access any of my transfer credits or before I could access any sort of registration. So I had to go work in factories to make that money, to go back and then pay them like roughly $8,000 in cash to be able to just to be able to take out more loans to go to school. So after doing that, I had no money besides the loan money, and that was not enough to cover very much at all. So I was like, okay, I’m not letting this happen again. I am doing something to make sure that I can sustain an actual lifestyle and pay my rent. And I didn’t have time to work in a factory while also working any other job and trying to go to school.

Chris [00:39:46] Well, that’s the real condemnation of the system, isn’t it, right there, of like…

Caller [00:39:50] Oh, absolutely. The entire thing is flawed and designed for you to have to take out loans that, you know, there’s policies or laws that were put in place to enable these colleges to charge so much because there is the student loans that you can’t you can’t go bankrupt on student loans. They’re there forever. And these things, when they were changed, enabled the private loan lenders, you know, to lend you more money because now they’re not as worried about someone going bankrupt and never paying it. They’re going to charge you more interest and charge you for the rest of your life. And then there’s the government loans that you can get. And all of that just means if you’ve got more money available to you, then why not raise tuition exponentially. As they did and and they still do.

Chris [00:40:37] Is it fair to say- and you seem, I will say, you seem like a straight shooter. You don’t seem like you’re somebody who’s hid anything. Is it fair to say that if college was affordable, you never would have done any of this shit?

Caller [00:40:51] Oh, absofrickinlutely. I only did it because I needed the money. If I could have afforded college with even working two jobs and paying rent, I would have never had to fuck with it. Not at all.

Chris [00:41:06] And there must be people out there listening going, no, there’s got to be another way you could have funded this. But it sounds like…

Caller [00:41:14] I mean, you know, maybe. I could have donated plasma every two days when it was available. I could have worked nights at a factory or something like that while I was in school. But, you know, working nights at a factory, working days somewhere else and going to class and studying, I’m pretty sure that takes more than the 24 hours of a day. And you don’t have the time to actually pay attention to your studying because your brain it mash- mush at that point. So, sure, I could have paid for it by spending years of my life working to the bone, working like a dog to save money, which then wouldn’t have been enough as the rising price of tuition. But, you know, the American dream is- the American dream is dead. So, like, it’s not like that’s a thing that would have been easy to do while making any sort of grades that would have been worthwhile.

Chris [00:42:05] What’s your personal life like during this stretch? Like it sounds like, I mean, certainly pre dealing, it sounds like, you know, like you’re saying you could work overnight shifts at factories and basically sign up where your entire life is labor to pay for your education and no time. But then you also said that, you know, you kept some of the jobs when you were dealing and you were just accruing money for like future financial breathing room. But it does it still doesn’t sound like you had much of a life in terms of are you able to find dating? Are you like are you able to have any hobbies? Are you able to?

Caller [00:42:45] So I kind of intermix my hobbies with school. So I am an artist. I’ve done a lot of art things. I did every art class my high school had to offer. So I took some courses in photography and art related things in undergrad. I was thinking about maybe getting a minor in it because, you know, being a triple major would have been a pain, being a double major was enough. So that’s where my hobbies went. For anything social life, most of it had to do with the people who I met that were smokers that I smoked with because I wouldn’t just, you know, give you a bag and let you leave because I don’t want attention drawn to cars coming and going so frequently. So it would have be I would go there and smoke with them, stay for a few minutes, or they’d come over there. They stay for like ten, 20, 30 minutes, smoke and talk. So most of my socialization happened through that or like through parties. I did end and dating towards the latter end that was like once I was mostly done with the selling of anything. That was a terrible idea. Ended up dating, ended up dating this person who we were exceptionally toxic with each other. It was a very bad time. Like there was a night after we had broken up, but I was still like, you know, hanging out because when you only have an ex and you’re not talking to anybody, you know, sex. So we weren’t together, but we were drinking and I’d gone to bed early. She had gotten a whole lot more drunk and then apparently started to go through my phone and found that I was, you know, talking to other people. As we weren’t together. The same way that she was, actually. But she didn’t care because if, you know, she can talk to people but I can’t. I woke up to getting punched in the back about four or five times. That’s what woke me up. That was a hell of a night.

Chris [00:44:42] Yeah. That ain’t good. That ain’t good.

Caller [00:44:44] No, she wasn’t a smaller, dainty lady. She was a formidable foe, a sizable opponent. And as much as I would have liked to retaliate, never in my life will I be doing that shit. So it was just a lot of effort to, you know, grab the flying fists and hold down and restrain this person so that they could not badly, drunkenly injure me, which was a real possibility. And I am also not a small individual. I’m a tall dude. I’m not buff but I am also not someone who is scared of most, if not any physical threats that don’t involve a weapon.

Chris [00:45:26] Wow. Yeah. That’s one of those relationships where everybody listening is connecting the dots and going, Oh, that sounds crazy. But like you said-.

Caller [00:45:38] I actually had a I had a whole lot more fun with the- so there was a stripper that had a fiancee that I wasn’t dating, but I did have like a strong sexual relationship with for a couple of months. I had a lot more fun with that than I did with the person that I dated for like a year and a half.

Chris [00:46:01] Wow. So you’re like dealing drugs, you’re shacking up with strippers who have fiancee’s. Like, this is real. This is like… This is like movie script life. This is like rap. This is like rap lyric life.

Caller [00:46:18] You know, I actually have started like, you know, some outlining to potential books where once they get well past these sort of statute of limitations and you can actually be non anonymous with things and am far enough into a career that public opinion either won’t matter anymore or is not relevant to me, or in the long shot, having a ghostwriter and a pen name. Because I’ve got so many stories that would be so much fun to be able to write and tell people about. I mean, like there was a time that I got arrested with a pig mask sitting in my- sorry, not arrested. I’ve never been in handcuffs. There was a time that I got pulled over with a pig mask sitting in my lap. It was wild.

Chris [00:47:03] Why’d you have a pig mask?

Caller [00:47:07] Um for fun.  I’m also an odd character and there- it was a photography prop that I used, but I would also sometimes just like put it on at stop lights and just like put my car in park and start, like dancing around and looking at people to get reaction. And then there were a couple people who were like, kind of scared, but most people were laughing their ass off because who expects to like look over at a stoplight and see a dancing pig? I had a fun time.

Chris [00:47:45] When you put it like that. Now let’s say years go by. You pass the bar. Now I’ve had enough friends go through law school where I know a lot of people start out and they go like, right now you’re saying like, I really want to be inside the system because I’m not a fan of the system. And there’s a lot of people who go to law school saying, I’m going to be a public defender, and then maybe they do that for a couple of years, maybe they don’t. And then they get scooped up by some big corporate law firm where they’re making bank, and that’s what they do. There’s a lot of types of lawyers out there and there are a lot of good ones. Let me also say that. There’s a lot of people who work on behalf of individuals who need help. There’s a lot of people who work on behalf of organizations that are doing the right thing. And the lawyers are like frontline in so many ways. You know, you look at places like the ACLU, you look at, you know, people who are mounting Supreme Court challenges to try to, you know, affect social change. You look at people who, you know, donate their abilities and their expertise to try to get people who were falsely convicted reversed. There’s a lot of ways that lawyers do good. I don’t want to claim otherwise. But there is also, you know, people who Exxon hires them and they go, I don’t want to be a public defender any more. Exxon money, you know? There’s those types of lawyers. Let’s say you get down that line some time and the statutes of limitations on everything are up. And and maybe a prospective employer comes to you and says, you know, you know the- you know… The drug world from the inside. And we want you to come help us take down drug kingpins. And we think you have this expertise. Could you ever see yourself working on that side?

Caller [00:49:41] Yeah. Because presumably at that point, there’s gonna be a prosecution in the state, and I have no interest in working for the state in any capacity. Don’t want to do that. And also, I don’t want to be in a place where I am working to take down drug kingpins or large people like that because that just put an unnecessary target on your back. Yeah, I get that there is some public detriment to what they do, a significant amount. But in my opinion, all of that blame can be placed on the government and their war on crime or the war on drugs, which, you know, leads the war on crime. But like the war on drugs in certain areas is what fuels all of the drug trade and causes so many extra problems. So, yeah, sure, the blood it on the hands of people who actually do it, but like the proximate cause of all of this is unnecessary laws and regulations, unnecessary prohibition and antiquated laws that are about drugs that they have taken no time to put in the effort into studying the actual effects of, or seeing the benefit to, you know, decriminalization in ways that will keep it from causing such a massive drug trade that will end in so many deaths and things like that. So I want nothing to do with that at all. Absolutely, if I get a chance out of law school, take the good law job making a quarter million dollars a year. I’ll do that for a while until I can, you know, save up enough money to have interest accruing like accounts or different money and stuff that will make it so, like, you know, I have more money coming in or some real estate interests that I know will make me residual income so that I can have a safety net and then stop working in that big law kind of place to go work at something I actually have a passion for. But I don’t think if I if I did it the other way around, if I started on a think I’ve got a passion for and then ended up taking the money afterwards, there’s like no coming back from that. Because that is your lifestyle, that is your money, that’s your social club. But if you start there, you get your loans paid and you haven’t done anything with that passion, it’s going to make you resent yourself for not doing anything with that passion. It’s going to burn more inside of you and make you want to do something. So if you have the money to make a life change, it’s much more possible to do if you start out at the big law kind of place and then leave that lifestyle for the passionate one, rather than start with the passion and then leave for the money.

Chris [00:52:08] So you’re going to go grab that cash out of the gate. And then once you once you’ve got your investments in place and once you got that money making more money for you, you’re going to go do some good in this world.

Caller [00:52:22] That’s the plan at least.

Chris [00:52:24] You know, we’ve talked a lot about your past, and you just laid out like some very clear goals for your future, at the very least, bullet points that you’d like to, you know, the umbrella that you’d like your future to be under. We haven’t talked so much about your present. What’s the status of things right now?

Caller [00:52:43] You know, things are going pretty well. I don’t have my grades back yet for the semester because those things take forever. But I felt really confident in the exams that I did. I’ve always been a test taker, like I said earlier. I was- one thing is that I like about law school is you don’t really have assignments. You don’t have busy work. For most of your classes, your final exam, that essay is either worth all of your grade or somewhere from 75/85% of your grade because you might have had a midterm or you might have had participation, just make sure that people are engaged, that count towards your grade. And because I really like tests, I feel like I did pretty well. I did fairly decent last semester. Now it’s just about trying to find a job for the summer so I can get some more stuff on my resume. Other than being an entrepreneurial individual with a drive for success and being good at Googling. But currently that’s what it is. It’s finding a job for the summer, waiting on my grades, waiting on the results from like my extracurricular stuff that I applied for, whether it be tutoring or (UNCLEAR) court or like the Law Review, like the Law Journal. Just kind of seeing how things go. The present, I’m just kind of coasting.

Chris [00:54:09] And what about financially? How are you doing, because so much of this story is about being in a severe financial squeeze and finding a way out of that that was outside the law. And looking forward, you’ve talked, you know, I asked you about your future and so much of it is, well, I’m going to go make that money, find that money, and then spread out from there. What about the present financial state of things? You still coasting with some of this, this weed money or?

Caller [00:54:37] I wish. That ran out a hot minute ago. That was mostly depleted during COVID times when everything was locked down and I didn’t have a steady source of income. So my savings is all gone. But one benefit to being good at working loopholes around things is I was able to register for a couple of classes there in the summer. The maximum amount they let you. And then drop all but one of them, which allows all of my loans to not understand, cuz I’m still in a class, and to just refund back in my account during the refund period for dropping classes, which then provides me with enough money to pay my rent for the summer and move to somewhere else, pay my rent for there, and pay movers because moving sucks.

Chris [00:55:29] So you just found some loopholes with the student loan system to basically give you some give you some liquid cash on hand.

Caller [00:55:39] Yep. Loopholes are my thing. Anything I can do to find something that I can exploit in the system that will get some sort of gain out of it that doesn’t cause particular harm to an individual, I’m about it.

Chris [00:55:54] Yeah. So you got. No. I mean, this is money you’ll have to pay back at some point, but you got you got no problem bilking a student loan corporation. That- you’re not even blinking twice at that.

Caller [00:56:07] Nope. Because A, fuck them. And because B, either I’ll be able to- I mean it’s just the simplest answer. You know, they suck. They- their whole scheme is to exploit people who don’t already have enough money to pay for what they want. I mean, it’s not like law school isn’t an elitist society in the first place where getting in, a lot of it has to do with class or money, and being able to afford it, those things have a lot to do with it too. Jobs, the pull of the parents. I mean, when you’re a first generation student or first generation law student, everything’s significantly harder and you don’t have the kind of connections or the knowledge of what’s going on. So yeah, loans feel predatory in most sense, so whatever. If it’s me exploiting the system for my own gain to make sure that I’m not struggling financially, I’ll either pay those loans back by working in some sort of big law job. I’ll end up in an area of law that I can do, like a like a loan forgiveness program after 10 to 15 years of working for some sort of public service, but not for the state of government, or, or I’ll die, in which case, like, you know, they’re not my problem anymore.

Chris [00:57:24] Are there any… Are there any things you’ve learned as, as a dealer that you feel like apply in law school? Or are the things you’ve learned in law school…?

Caller [00:57:41] Oh yeah, you learn people things.

Chris [00:57:42] Okay, talk to me.

Caller [00:57:44] You learn so much about people. I mean, I, I feel like it’s relatively easy once you have a lot of experience with people who are seeking, seeking something and are getting that something from you, to be able to see differences in how someone is acting or the way that the vernacular changes or the pitch in their voice changes because it may determine what they’re going to do or say next, whether they’re being truthful, whether their actual intent is what they stated or whether there is some sort of hidden agenda that they have. There’s a lot of ways you learn about people and dealing with them by dealing to them. And all of those things are directly applicable to any sort of thing, any sort of career where you have to deal with people. I mean, whether it be retail or whether it be where people are your clients, because they’re never going to be fully honest with you. Or if you work in a corporate situation, sometimes you, you’re like the pain in the ass to them. Like you’re like, you’re, you’re the regulation. You’re what I’ve got to avoid. You’re what I’ve got to keep you from looking into me kind of thing, even if you’re a partner with them, working as an in-house counsel. So you learn so much about people and the wide variety of the human experience from doing something like that that’s applicable to literally every different point in your life.

Chris [00:59:06] Wow. And are there are there is there vice versa? Are there things you’re learning in the formal setting of law school that you look at and you go, Oh, that’s just like dealer 101?

Caller [00:59:20] Yeah, only break one law at a time. Cover your ass. Those are kind of things that sit within most laws. You know, if you’re driving with anything illegal in your car, wear your fucking seatbelt, use your turn signal, don’t speed. I mean, those are things that are pretty simple because, dude, you don’t use a turn signal then, oh, hey, look, you got pulled over for a turn signal, which is normally a B.S. thing, but if there’s anybody whose eyes are on you, that turn signal becomes your entire downfall. If your turn signal’s on, if you got a dash cam, if you’ve got ways to prove this, then I mean, they pulled you over for doing nothing. You have at least a good argument for why you shouldn’t have been pulled over and why maybe anything that they found might not be used against you. Now you might not win, but, like, you know, set yourself up for success. If you’re committing crimes or civil wrongs- civil wrongs, at least do it smart. Find the ways that you can, you know, make sure that you are the least likely to get convicted, the least likely to leave any evidence. And I am not a component- I’m not advocating for anyone to do anything illegal. That’s always a bad idea. Don’t break the law. But if you’re going to break the law, don’t be stupid about it.

Chris [01:00:34] And being that so much of this part of your life was defined by basically a system that- a system that was built in a way that you couldn’t sustain within it, right? Is that a fair way to phrase it? Like this system, something’s got to give.

Caller [01:00:55] Yeah, like I could have- it would have had to break at some point, just because it, I mean, it kind of always does. Any time you’re doing something like that, the more you do it and the more you don’t get caught, you’re increasing your likelihood of getting caught. Like it’s the kind of thing you shouldn’t stay doing for a while. If you’re doing, you shouldn’t do in the first place. But the longer you do something that is illegal or has a chance to ruin your life, the more likely you are to get caught and actually ruin your life.

Chris [01:01:23] And… When you take a step back and you look at the overall system we have in place, what are the things you would change first? Like because there’s a lot of people listening going, man, how do we keep our smartest people away? Right? Like, how do we keep the people who can just ace tests without studying away from having to become hubs in a drug distribution network to pay for their life? So what what do you change about the system right out of the gate to help a future version of you to not have to do this?

Caller [01:01:52] My, right out of the gate, if I could change about the system would be probably the predatory college loan system, the pipeline to the college because there’s a lot of careers that you don’t need college for. You’re pushed into college, you’re going to accrue debt that you like, you’re not even going to get any use out of it. You’re goint to be paying on those loans for the rest of your life. Paying to the government or paying to some private third party. And those third party loans are sometimes not as predatory as the government loans, sometimes they’re more. But all of these things are set in place because there’s no caps on college tuition. There is the ability to have these loans, no bankruptcy to stop them. Everything that’s in place is probably set up by lobbyists who have just paid enough money in written legislation that people have signed without paying any attention to because they don’t care. They just care about who’s lining their pockets and all that makes it so that they can have loans as high as like $250,000 in the sense of graduate school, and that schools can charge outrageous amounts of money because there are well-funded families that have the money to pay for it. And so it doesn’t matter if they succeed or not. And the people who don’t have that money, who are striving to succeed, will take these loans. And if they fail, it doesn’t bother the school. It might bother their numbers so they want to keep them as long as they can. But it’s just a benefit to everybody else in that system who’s getting their money and getting paid for the rest of this person’s life. And they’re never going to be able to make enough money to pay this shit off. So I would- what I would want to do is make fundamental changes to the way the system works and the amount of loans that they can give you and the amount that tuition can raise and anything that’s state regulated rather than private and free enterprise stuff, you know, things that everyone has the right to do what they want. But if you don’t have the access to these crazy loans to pay for it, then the only people who can pay for it are like the wealthy. Then if they don’t want to pay for, they’re going to actually have to be better schools. They’re going to have to lower their prices. They’re going to be competitive and not charge out the ass because they know that if you get accepted by the grace of their system, that you’ll have the loans to pay for it and you’ll just be in debt to the rest of your life to chase your ambition.

Chris [01:04:01] I feel like I know your answer clearly, but since you’ve been in both worlds, who do you think does more damage to society, your average drug dealer or your average person in charge of a student loan lending system?

Caller [01:04:15] Your average person in charge of the student loan system. Or any politician that regulates it.

Chris [01:04:22] Damn. I mean, that was a hell of a call. Our time is up. I tell you what. I’m glad to get your perspective. I’m glad to hear how much of it was born out of necessity. I’m glad to hear that you’ve left it behind. And you got some crazy stories out of it. That’s, that’s for sure, huh?

Caller [01:04:45] It’ll be a hell of a book someday. Thank you, Chris. I really appreciate it talking to you. I had a great time.

Chris [01:04:50] Thank you. Caller, thanks so much. And I am glad you’re out of the game. And I hope you feel a lot of financial breathing room in your future based on all the sacrifices you’ve made to get there, and that you do follow through on trying to work that system from the inside. And doing your part to tear it down, so to speak. Thanks for calling. Thanks for telling us your story. Thank you to Anita Flores, who produces the show. Thank you to Ryan Conner for engineering the show. Out theme song’s by ShellShag. You can go to Chris Geth dot com to learn more about me, including my upcoming live dates in places like Portland and Seattle and Pennsylvania and West Virginia and Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California. We’ve got a lot coming up in June. Go check ’em out. ChrisGeth.com for those tickets. And if you want any mugs and shirts and posters, we got them all at pod swag dot com. And if you are looking for an easy way to support the show that’s not any financial investment of yours, one thing you can do that’s so simple, there’s a button that says subscribe, favorite, follow. Whatever system you’re listening on, there’s some button like that. When you hit that button, it helps us so much. So please do so. Thanks in advance. You can find ad free episodes of Beautiful/ Anonymous and tons of other shows over at Stitcher Premium. Use the promo code “stories” for a one month free trial at Stitcher dot com slash premium.