Hello everyone and welcome to Pod Damn America. This is Anders and it's going to be a bit of an unusual

episode. I'm hesitant to call it a bonus episode. It is a tribute episode to one of our former guests who I'm

sorry to say has passed on.. Some of you may know.

Ryan Carson, who was an advocate against overdose death, as well as bad environmental

policy and a poet.

And a really great guy, unfortunately, has passed on.

He was interviewed by us in 2021.

Actually, right before he was about to walk across the state of New York

to draw attention to Andrew Cuomo's failed promise, broken promise,

to build more safe injection sites. So we talked to him back

then. And when I saw this news, it, of course, was shocked and frankly, a little hesitant

personally on sharing this interview again. I don't want to misrepresent my relationship with Ryan.

I knew him primarily as a guest for this interview,

and we did follow each other on Twitter after that.

But just seeing the outpouring of love and affection for him

made me want to bring attention to his life and

help celebrate that life, which some of his loved ones I'm sure are trying to do right now.

I'm not going to dwell on the details of his death, but I think that's an important thing when someone passes on

is to focus on what they did in the world. And I think a lot of that is on display in this

interview, how he spent his time fighting for justice, and also who he was, just a really

knowledgeable person who had a lot of insight and was very charismatic and very funny as well.

So, yeah, I hope this helps people heal and mourn him if they so choose to listen, which

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