#1993 - Josh Dubin & Bruce Bryan

Like, everybody wanted to hear the story, everybody wanted to talk to you, everybody was blown away by it, and by the grace that you displayed. Like, the fact that you could be wrongfully accused, spend 30 years of your young life in a cage, and then come out and just be this wonderful, fun guy, having a good time, everyone's laughing, having conversations. It was beautiful.

There was a lot of stimulation, and, you know, I could tell you that I'm still in shock, even sitting here now, that we're sitting next to each other, because I spent the last several years visiting him at Sing Sing, which is, you know, not a great place. Sing Sing Prison in New York. But I don't want to throw cold water on anything, but, you know, there's a lot of stealing yourself for the moment. last night, going on that people didn't see.

The Comedy Mothership is really a dream. The comedians love it. The crowd was amazing. It was just so awesome to see. So congrats on that.

And, you know, I realized that he was uncomfortable.

And he switched seats very quickly so that he would be side to side, shoulder to shoulder with them.

I think I know why you did it. Why did you do it?

I think that everyone knew that I didn't do this case at all. Everyone knew I didn't commit the crime. I mean, I literally woke up that afternoon because my girlfriend wanted to change her niece's costume, and she also had a taste for chocolate cake. So just imagine waking up to change a costume for Halloween, a child's costume, and then disappearing for the next 29 years of your life, right? And being charged with a homicide, while the prosecutor involved in your conviction has a history of misconduct, and it wasn't until some 27, 26 years later that he finally gets arrested and gets convicted, former Queens prosecutor John Scarpa.

He gets convicted for the very same misconduct that I've been telling him about, that he's been doing for decades.

He would pay off witnesses, and he ended up not only getting convicted but went to federal prison for it. You know, I should give some context here, because, to the extent that Bruce is going to be guarded about certain details of his case, I want to explain why.

Last time I was on with Derek Hamilton, we were sort of previewing the center that we would open. So I left the Innocence Project. I was the ambassador of the Innocence Project. And I think that there was a real need for work being done on cases that didn't just involve DNA. So we deal with cases that involve all manner of what we think is junk forensic science, that we've talked about, ballistics, arson, bite marks, and so on.

But we also want there to be an aspect that dealt with clemency for people that we think got over-sentenced and deserved a second chance. So Bruce was our first client at the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice at Cardozo Law. And I got a call from a guy named Steve Zeidman that runs a clemency center at CUNY Law. And Steve said, you know, congratulations on the new center. I have the perfect guy for you.

His name is Bruce Bryant, with a T at the end of his name. That becomes important in a minute. And he said, I'm going to send you some information about him. So he emails me this list of accomplishments.

It was more than most human beings can accomplish in seven lifetimes. From the degrees that he achieved to starting a gun buyback program from inside to starting something called Voices from Within, these galvanizing sort of community outreach programs. And, you know, I went to go visit him with the mindset that I was going to support his clemency application. And getting clemency in New York ain't easy from the governor.

And, you know, clemency is supposed to be all about rehabilitation and transformation. And historically, especially in New York, you have to express contrition and explain to the parole board. If you are granted clemency and it is a commutation of your sentence, that is a shortening of your sentence. You have to explain to the parole board, here's what I have done to transform myself and accept responsibility.

So, keeping that in mind, I went to visit Bruce for the first time. And I said, nice to meet you. He says, nice to meet you. You know, I wrote you four years ago, he said to me. And, you know, I felt ridiculous.

It was at a time where I didn't have the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice, and I sort of was doing one-off cases, sometimes with the Innocence Project, sometimes by myself.

And I was really struck by his presence, by how articulate he was, one of the most well-read human beings. He was telling me about, you know, how he finished the Viktor Frankl book, Man's Search for Meaning. And we had this amazing conversation about meditation and yoga. And we turned a half-hour visit into three hours to the point where they told me I had to go.

So I went back and I looked for the letter, because I keep all the letters that I get. And I find this beautifully written, super articulate letter. And I'll never forget how he signed it, because it stuck with me. It said, Oceans of Gratitude, Bruce Bryant. And I just got curious.

I agreed to represent him along with Steve Zeidman in connection with his clemency. But innocence wasn't on my mind. And then I read the trial transcript.

And I realized that this guy wasn't just innocent.

But I think what struck me was that the innocence claim was so strong that it didn't make – it was hard for me to get behind a clemency petition without him being able to say, I'm innocent, you know, when he got before the parole board. So his case is being reinvestigated right now by what's called the Conviction Integrity Unit in Queens, which is a sensational arm of the district attorney's office, District Attorney Melinda Katz. And we have to be respectful of that reinvestigation of the case because it's pending right now. And that is to hopefully exonerate Bruce completely. But – and there's a great guy that runs the unit, and they're involved in an intense reinvestigation of the case.

But Bruce got clemency a couple of months ago by Governor Hochul in December, and he got to stand before the parole board. And it was a scary moment for me as one of his lawyers. That when they asked him, did you commit this crime, for him to say, no, I didn't. And to be granted clemency and to be then granted parole on an innocence claim is extraordinarily rare. So I think it spoke to both how powerful his innocence claims are and his accomplishments.

The only –. there's only a few other people. One of them is Derek Hamilton, that went before the parole board and said, I'm not going to admit to something I didn't do just to get out of here. So I just wanted to give you that context, because details of the case, specific details of the case, are going to be difficult to discuss. And I think what's amazing about Bruce is what he has been able to accomplish from inside in the face of his innocence is mind-blowing.

A lot of times when we're on the show, we get inquiries about how people can help and how do people overcome this? And I think, why people are attracted to these stories of the wrongfully incarcerated, I had to search myself because I like being around this kind of strength. I don't know how people like him summon the strength to get through it. And in talking to Bruce the last couple of weeks, what he endured in prison is something we haven't really talked about on the show too much, like in granularity, about what it's like in these institutions. And I was hoping we could talk about, among other things, some of that today, because he was in some of the worst penitentiaries in New York, from Attica to –.

I mean borderline Canada, you know, Clinton, down in Marlborough, Great Meadows, different prisons like that. And the economy of the area depends upon the prison. Depends upon the prison, because there's really nothing there, but snow during the wintertime and farming. So there's nothing else there.

So the prison is the driving force behind the economy. So everyone's there, right? Siblings. So nepotism is, you know, it's prevalent in these prisons. And one of the things that you encounter is that, you know, it's not just cold in those areas.

A prison is a cold environment and it's up to you to create your own heat. It's a dark environment and somehow you've got to find that light, you know, that light within yourself in order to travel, in order to, you know, to do something with your life more meaningful. You know what I mean? And it's difficult. It's not easy.

You watch guys, you know, guys you talk to today and, you know, tomorrow they're swinging from the light, dead, dead, right? Yesterday they were fine. You know, the next morning you wake up, they've hung themselves. You know, and these are the things that you encounter, day in and day out. And you still have to maintain a sense of humanity, right?

You've got to become, you could either do two things. You could become bitter or you could become better. I chose the latter because one of the things I did early in my incarceration was make a conscious decision to not serve time, but to have time serve me. I made up my mind that if you were going to have me incarcerated for a crime. I did not commit, then I was going to take this time and use that cell as if it was an office.

I was going to use that school building as if it was a university. And every chance I had to just self-reflect and engage in introspection and do the things that I needed to do to protect my soul, I was going to do it. You know, and I made it my business to do so. And I started delving into material that I probably would never have read, you know, being a free man. I started reading, you know, everything from, you know, philosophy, books to, you know, very few novels.

But I tend to learn from the experiences of others. So autobiographies became my thing, you know, from Quincy Jones to Miles Davis and just continuously studying, right, and then studying the system and what drives the system and why it has become what it is, you know, from education to, you know, to the whole system, of why the educational system looks at a guy in the third grade and determines whether or not he's going to be caught up in the criminal justice system as early as the third grade, right, based on your reading level. They can determine how many prison beds that they're going to develop. These are things that most people don't know, right? Like 50% of the incarcerated people in New York State, or probably in the country, are living with dyslexia.

So they're unable to learn, you know, the basics of education, like reading, and these guys go home and they commit crimes over and over again because they were never corrected. And these same systems that were built on the premise of rehabilitation are draconian in that they do nothing but, you know, steal a person's humanity and allow them to become or look at as nothing more than a number. You've got to wake up 6 o'clock in the morning. Sometimes, when they're coming around, they're asking you your name. They're not asking your name.

They're asking you, you know, your numbers, what cell location you're in. They're not calling you, Mr. Brian. They're calling you 60 cell, right? And a lot of people begin to internalize that and lose their sense of self.

And so I remain guarded and try to maintain a sense of humanity through my meditation, right, through fasting every now and then, and just through deep introspection and reflection. For me, that was the hard part. The easy part was education and learning. The hard part was introspection and fighting a system, right, not just a prosecutor or a court, but fighting a system that was premised on, you know, oppression, right? That was premised on.

it's a business, a prison, industrial complex. You got cheap labor. You know, the 13th Amendment says you're allowed to be enslaved if you're convicted of a crime. You see? And so, you know, in a system like that, you have to find a way.

You've got to find it within yourself too, to rise above the fray.

And these are neighborhoods that were all impoverished, that were all plagued with what we call crime, generative factors, from, you know, substance abuse to dilapidated housing, to, you know, just poverty, right? And so you see violence. And what I've come to realize is that poverty is violence. So wherever there's poverty, you're going to see violence, because poverty itself is violence. And so these neighborhoods, you begin to learn and study and you begin to see that this is not by accident.

These, you know, these prisons were built for a purpose.

There's a saying, they say, you build it, they're going to come. That's the same thing with prisons. You build them, they're going to come. Similar to the 1994 crime bill that was signed by Bill Clinton and co-authored by our now President, Joe Biden, it incarcerated more people across the country than at any other time, right? It perpetuated the three strikes, you're out.

You had guys who stole a slice of pizza, third strike, he gets 25 to life. We're looking at cases now where guys took $200, he'd been in jail for 20 years. Some guys sentenced 70 years for armed robbery, right? All of these things come under the 1994 crime bill. So when you begin to see it as a system that was designed to do certain things, it's a wake-up call for you.

And you begin to say, hold on, man, I fell for the trap. It's time for me to begin taking a different route and begin educating myself more. And so the Resurrection Study Group, these guys steered me in that direction. They steered me in that direction, and I began to learn from another gentleman that was a part of it, by the name of Dr. Gary Mendez, who also died.

And he had a program called the National Trust for the Development of African American Men. And what it did was it helped us restore those values that we strayed away from. So this is what got me on the right path early in my incarceration.

All of that takes place. Right. And so it's extremely difficult. It's almost like a battle, because the guys in my age group, they were not doing what I was doing. They were in the yard either gangbanging, selling drugs, getting high.

You know, very few of them were in the law library. But I come to realize also that is when you're wrongfully convicted, you fight a little different than a guy that's actually accepted his fate for what he's done. I think that your fight and your pursuit of your liberty, but also your pursuit to become, to rise above your circumstance, becomes a little different. You know, where I was, didn't have to define who I was or who I can become. And once I began writing and putting these things on the cell walls, you know, like affirmations or quotes, that I would develop, not that I, you know, would take from anyone.

But one is that I would develop myself, right? After reading and studying. and then you have these epiphanies. I used to sleep with a pen and a paper. That's what the guys from Resurrection Study Group taught me.

I would sleep with a pen and a pad. And because they say, some of your most pure thoughts come in the midnight hour, in the midst of your sleep. And certain things, principles that I began to live by, would come to me in those late hours. And I would write them down. And the next day I would wake up and I would stick them on the wall.

And I would begin to internalize these principles and these morals that I began to develop. that reconnected me to, you know, my own humanity. Because prison strips you of so much of that, man.

What was that? Is it even possible to describe that feeling?

still breathing, still alive. Because I lost my father in 2017..

So to see. love is what I saw.

It's indescribable. It was beyond being elated, you know, joy. It was just a deep, deep sense of bliss. It was almost like heaven, man. If there was such a thing as heaven on earth, there was heaven.

the day that I walked out of prison. I walked out of hell and straight into heaven. There was no purgatory, right? There was no purgatory. So I went straight from hell, straight to heaven.

The super, the warden of Sing Sing is actually a great man. His name is Mike Capra.

He's too bad, he's retiring soon. And he really believed in Bruce. And, you know, he was responsible for making sure that there are a lot of programs in Sing Sing for the people that want them. And they typically release people out of Sing Sing, which is in Ossining, New York. It's about an hour and a half north of the city on the Hudson.

And they usually just take them from a prison van to a bus stop and just drop them off. I was outside the prison gate. And so was Bruce's family and friends and other loved ones that had come from around the country.

And I called the super about half hour before he was released, because we had got word from another guard that was standing outside. Oh, they're not going to release him here.

Wall.

Steel green wall. That all of a sudden just parts and you see this figure.

Emerge.

With a net. With his worldly possession. And.

You know, it was and his. he was walking his sister, Justina, who is, oddly enough, a court officer, in the very courthouse where he was convicted.

They were walking to each other and the walk started to turn into a a fast walk. And then they both, at the same time, just ran to each other and embraced.

You know, I'm a crier. I, just like I, just stood back and watched and everyone was just weeping, you know, and and his mother had just pulled up. She got, you know, sort of like lost on the way to the prison. It's not easy to find.

And.

That one for me, this one, he, Bruce, and I have a deep, special relationship. He had spoken to my children on the phone before he got out. They call him Uncle Bruce. And, you know, I'm sitting back. I feel like like a proud brother listening to him speak.

You know, what an impressive human being. just to hear him articulate in his command of the of not only, you know, his knowledge base, but his understanding of the world around him. It just it always hits me like what what a weird irony.

That this man, in the face of his innocence, still recognize. I got to change my life. I didn't commit this crime, but I don't like the way I'm living.

And, you know, I mean, we say the words 29 years and you hear of what he overcame. But, you know, it wasn't without incident. You see the scar on his face. There were stretches in solitary confinement that I'd rather him describe because I didn't live it.

And, you know, dealing with the violence of prison. And, you know, he's explaining to you, like waking up in the night with a thought and writing it down on a pad. And it's like conjures up an image, at least for me, of someone blissfully sleeping. I mean, this is against the backdrop of him living on a, on a tier. That is full of people.

Many of them suffering extraordinary mental illness, screaming, yelling, having rap competitions until two, three in the morning. I mean, deafening noise on a cell block for those that have never been there.

And a guy's way down there getting stabbed. The guard is by the staircase. And this guy is screaming for dear life. No one hears him. But you know he's getting hit.

And you know the prison culture. You got to fend for yourself. You know.

You know what happens in an environment like that. Guys keep quiet. Sometimes a guy gets shoved back in his cell. Either he's left to die or he prays that an officer comes and finds him in there laying in his blood and he survives. I've watched guys that I was close to.

You talk to them today. You have coffee with them today. And tonight, when they call on the child, he doesn't move out of his cell. You find out what's going on with him. You find out he OD'd off a fentanyl 15 minutes earlier.

There's no Narcan in the cell blocks to hit this guy to wake him up. They know drugs are ubiquitous in prison. They're everywhere.

Yet, you know, the procedures that are in place are not there. The safeguards are not there to protect lives because they don't see your life. It doesn't matter, right? There's a huge sense of being devalued. Human life is completely devalued in these institutions.

You're numbers. And once you leave, someone else will take your place. And that's the attitude of the prison industrial complex as a whole. You know?

Because no one is born a criminal. These are conditions that people come out of that drive them, unless you're a nut, right? Unless you have some serious mental health issues and you're just like this, you know, you're obsessed with children, little boys, like we talked about last night in the comedy club, or you're a pedophile or something, and you need some serious mental health work. No one is talking about dealing with the crime generative factors that exist in poor communities across the country. When you look at, in New York City, the Bronx is the poorest community, poorest borough.

in New York City. Brownsville is the poorest community. Both of these communities, both of these places are, you know, crime is, you know, is high. Violence is high, right? Drug use is high.

Because the social conditions are that bad. Right? And the cycle continues. You know, it's a cycle because people are living in not just poverty, they're living in concentrated poverty, generational poverty. So my family grew up, one family grew up in the projects, their children wind up growing up in the projects, right?

Unless someone comes and breaks that cycle, unless there's serious intervention to break the cycle of incarceration or intergenerational incarceration, you know, it continues to be perpetuated.

It has to be a concentrated effort. I've always said, you want to make America great? Have less losers. How do you have less losers? More people with opportunity.

You figure out where people don't have opportunity, you provide opportunity. And you pour all the money into that. We obviously have billions of dollars to provide to Ukraine. There's always something. There's always something that they come up with where they need trillions of dollars for this and billions of dollars for that.

Green energy and this and that. There's no better use of resources than making better human beings. Giving human beings opportunity.

So what we're trying to do at the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice is to get the word out to even the private sector. If we can create self-driving cars and artificial intelligence and send people into space, this is a solvable problem. I don't know why I needed this as some epiphany, because I've been doing this work for close to 20 years. But lately, I have been struck by the cases that we're working on in a way that I haven't before. And if you ever want to see the true, best way to articulate this, how fucked up this country is in terms of racial disparity and the mistreatment of minorities in this country, go visit a prison.

Sing Sing has a program where we'll talk about it, where they take people from the community in and say, here's what is going on here. I have routinely sat across a table like this in a small room in the legal visiting room at Sing Sing. Let's just take Sing Sing, for example. We recently,

one of our new clients was sentenced to 70 years, 70 years for a first offense in which the extent of the victim's injuries were four stitches. This man, Sheldon Johnson, served 26 years and I took a look at this case and I said, how is this possible? A few weeks later, I'm visiting with a man who's serving 25 to life for the alleged robbery of $200, in which the alleged victim has a condition where one eye is shut and the other eye had multiple surgeries that were never disclosed to the defense.

African-Americans have a higher propensity to commit crime. That's not it. It's exactly what Bruce is talking about. And what. what I hope to do is to continue to get the word out, because we so often have people writing us, calling us, sending us emails, DMs on Instagram.

How can I help? Right. And one of the ways that you can help is getting involved in communities that are poor, whether it's volunteering at a community center in areas like Brownsville, whether it's donating funds to community based organizations, whether it's corresponding with someone. And it's just getting the word out in a way. And if you're going to be a politician for the young generation, you know, you have to actually not look at what the public is wants to hear or what you think the public wants to hear.

It's OK to run and lose. As long as it becomes, you know, a way to propel a message in a certain direction.

And I think it's very terrifying. And I think we're probably a brink of conflict all over the world. And there's all sorts of problems they're constantly dealing with. And they don't want to hear jack shit about what you want to do for communities. They want to know.

how much money can we get for these military, industrial, complex corporations that have been sponsoring your campaign, that have been helping get things across on, whether it's social media or mainstream media. Whatever narratives you want pushed, whatever the pharmaceutical drug companies want pushed. All of this is very clear. This is not conspiracy theory anymore. Now that we know, like with the release of the Twitter files from Twitter with the FBI, we know they're involved in narratives.

We know they're involved in doing these things. We know they're involved in putting agent provocateurs into all these organizations, like that Governor Whitmer lady who got the kidnapping plot to get her 14 people, 12 of them were FBI informants. That's just fucking insane. So all this stuff exists. This is not conspiracy theory anymore.

I think that's the problem. what happens when you get into office. You are dealing with a fucking tsunami of bullshit. And it's just deeply ingrained. It's just like the system of these impoverished communities is deeply ingrained and generational.

I think the culture of the deep state is also deeply ingrained and generational. The culture of the relationship that they have to money, to whether it's money from the bankers, money from the pharmaceutical, drug companies, military industrial complex. There's sensational amounts of money that can be had. And we're seeing it in motion right now in what many people are framing as a just conflict in Ukraine. But there's also an insane amount of money involved in this.

And you have to be very careful of whatever the fuck the narrative is that's being discussed when there's an insane amount of money involved. That's what's going on right now. And I think that if we as people, what I like, what you're saying is if the United States and if you can get businesses involved and businesses can actually generate revenue from rehabilitating communities. If they could figure out, if Halliburton can figure out how to rebuild Iraq after they blew it up, which is one of the craziest things of all time. You got a guy who's the CEO of Halliburton, just happened to be the vice president of the United States.

And then they get no bid contracts to rebuild shit. He decides to blow up. I mean, it's wild, right? But if they can do that, if there's profit in that, how is there not profit in rehabilitating neighborhoods? It seems like profit for everyone.

And maybe it sounds like, you know, ass kissing, and I will kiss whatever ass there is to kiss. This show has become such an important platform for us because watch this. Ready? I spoke about this before. There's a case in California right now, a case of this guy, Pierre Rushing.

All right. The attorney that's handling it from a big law firm named Greenberg Traurig. His name is Jordan Grotzinger. He is this this kid really was accused of murder in 2011.. He's sentenced 50 years to life.

There's one witness. This guy's name is Robert Green. He's a serial felon, a seven time felon. He doesn't identify Pierre Rushing until three weeks after the crime. He is a crack addict who admitted that he was high at the time the crime was committed.

No physical evidence implicating Pierre Rushing. Two other witnesses at the scene when the shooting took place say it was not Pierre Rushing. So Jordan Grotzinger sends me a direct message on Instagram because he heard this podcast. Now, here is a global law firm that has vast resources. And he said, I just want to do something.

How do I get involved? And, you know, he learns about this case and gets the pro bono department at his law firm to take it up. He now has declarations from the only witness, this guy, Robert Green, who has totally recanted and said he made it all up. He has another declaration from, you know, another witness saying that Pierre Rushing, actually the other guy that was convicted of this crime, said Pierre Rushing had nothing to do with it. So the question becomes now, what can you do?

So, look, it's a testament to the power of this show and this platform that this guy is hopefully on the precipice of getting out or saving a life. But the question becomes, well, what can you do as a listener? Grab your pens. All right. You can write to the Alameda District Attorney Pamela Price at 1225 Fallon Street in Oakland, California, 94612..

And I know you can just rewind it if you miss the address.

Write D.A. Pamela Smart and ask her to please release Pierre Rushing. There's a petition called a petition of habeas corpus, which I think translates in Latin to the holding of the body. Can I stop you for real quick? Spell Fallon.

F-A-L-L-O-N. F-A-L-L-O-N. F-A-L-L-O-N. So it's Alameda District, Attorney, Pamela Price, 1225 Fallon Street, Oakland, California.

I've had them reference appearances on this show acting like, how could you say that about, you know, Douglas County, Kansas? You know, but then, you know, they get a thousand letters and they realize that politically it's not going to look very good to keep an innocent. What is the holdup? You know, these wheels of justice grind slowly. And for a man like Bruce, who is sitting in there and having, to, you know, witness violence on a day to day basis, unthinkable conditions, where he sleeps in a room when he's put in what they call the box or the hole, and has rodents crawling across his chest as he sleeps.

I'm not making this shit up. This is, this was his day to day existence. Pierre Rushing is in similar circumstances. You can make a difference to write a letter, read about the case. The habeas petitions are out there to read them.

And, you know, I think that we just need all I can do, all I can think of. We could have grandiose ideas. It would be amazing if a big corporation didn't decide to donate a lot of money because they felt guilty about what happened to George Floyd. And then, all of a sudden, it became the summer of like corporate guilt and everyone starts donating. You don't donate because it's in vogue.

You donate because you actually want to make a difference. and take it from little old me. You know, I know that I'm one grain of sand on a massive beach. But what Bruce said, and I've said it before, I'll say it again. I've done my fair share of drugs and mind altering substances.

There is no feeling like helping restore somebody's life and freedom. Nothing. Nothing comes close to it. So if you want to be another grain of sand on that beach, hopefully the grain of sand will form a sand castle, and then there'll be more sand castles and people will start paying more attention. That's all I can think of as just an individual and an organization.

to keep on doing is to keep banging the drum. And the more we bang it and the louder we bang it. So again, I thank you for the platform. And I want people to be able to see and witness these marvelous human beings. It's such a waste to have them locked away behind prison walls when you hear him speak.

Bruce just accepted a position with the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice. He's going to be a criminal justice reform advocate and a student mentor. Not because I feel bad for him. Not because I think, because he's earned it. Listen to him speak and listen to his command of the issues.

You know, so I sometimes find myself like I feel like I'm trying to climb. I feel like Sisyphus, sometimes, right? And the boulder keeps rolling back on me.

And I heard this, like with like childlike wonder at the splash. And like, you know, I went over and he had both arms in the air. He said, take a picture of me. I still got it. And I fucking blanked.

And I thought to myself, this must be the first time he swam in over 30 years. And, you know, it was just to be able to watch that and to be even a small part of it.

It's just like makes you feel like getting up the next day and with a smile on your face, with the will to want to do it again and help someone else.

These guys, you got artists, you got guys that guys will make anything in here, man, out of just, you know, just anything. I've seen guys make statues like this from paper towels and soap. So the talent pool is broad. if we're willing to invest in people. Right.

If we invest in the social infrastructure and tap into that cultural capital that exists behind prison walls and just start beginning to invest in people instead of things and prisons. Right.

Is prison the right answer? Who's corrected from prison? Corrections has never corrected anyone. It's the person that engages in introspection and says, I want to make a change. But even when you look at the investments that they make in law enforcement, if law enforcement were the answer to crime, we'd be the safest place on the planet Earth.

Because we got more cops than anywhere else. Right. So we give so much over time and we give our money to the police officers and they grant it. They, you know, they're important. Right.

But they don't solve crime. They don't prevent crime. It's just that simple. They just don't. Right.

When you invest in people and you provide them with opportunities to create better lives for themselves and to allow a hand up so they can pick their families up out of poverty. That's the change. That's the difference. I mean, incarceration will go down exponentially if people begin to feel like they were important, to feel valued because someone's invested in them.

prisons aren't like family members stuffing things down their pants and coming through. It's guards. It's prison guards. Of course. And, you know, I just think that I guess where I get frustrated when you said this is where it gets tricky, or gets tricky for me, and where I get frustrated and feel like overwhelmed.

I'm listening to the two of you speak and thinking to myself, you both get it right. The question becomes to me, well, how do we make it happen? So how do you, how do you rebuild a community like Brownsville, Brooklyn? Right. Everybody knows Brownsville, because Mike Tyson comes from there.

Zab Judah comes from there. Some pretty famous fighters come from there. Biggie Smalls comes from there. Riddick Bowe. And, you know, they're not going back there.

How do we solve the problem? Is it us trying to convince the owner of a sports team, a billionaire, a philanthropist, someone to go like, here's a plan. Let's go to the mayor, Eric Adams, and propose this community center. I mean, I just don't know what. and this is like not.

this might be out of ignorance for me, because I can only take on what I can take on. I'm sure there's some people out there trying to get this done. But I think the more influential voices we can get behind an idea. Let's try this experiment in one community. I just I'm at a loss, for I know what, I know how to do.

I know how to see a case and know that someone's innocent and fight for it. I think I feel like I know the right levers to pull to get that done. It gets way more difficult and intimidating to me trying to figure out, well, how do we solve this bigger social problem?

I have a completely different opinion after having conversations with you. And it's not just me. It's everybody who listened to these conversations. So you're talking about millions and millions, and millions of people have heard these conversations now. It's a crazy number.

And we've done a lot of them. now. We keep doing them. And as we keep doing them, it gets out more and more and more. And slowly but surely, something's going to happen.

It's going to have to. If we value humanity, if we really value our community, which is what our country is supposed to be. It's supposed to be a united group of human beings. That's right. It's supposed to be a big community.

And we can isolate it into neighborhoods. We can isolate it into cities. But reality, we're supposed to be on the same team. If we're on the same team, if you care about these people, how, how is it possible that you can continue to ignore it decade after decade? And it's going to take a lot of work.

This is not going to be a thing that you're going to fix, because you have grown people that have been indoctrinated in these horrific ways. And these people have to, somehow or another, have hope to change, which is a big thing for people. It's hard for people to lose weight. You know, it really is. Just stop eating food is hard to do.

That's. all you have to do is not do something that you know you shouldn't be doing. And it's hard to change your whole life. Have you been involved in gangbanging and drug dealing because you had no other options and you had no other role models, and you had no other examples anywhere around you of people that had hope and you felt like, well, the rest of the world is different. And what we got here sucks.

And that's just the way it is. And I'm just going to be a part of it. And that's how, human beings, do. We imitate our atmosphere, whether it's positive or negative. We are part of a tribe and this tribe should be expended.

It should be expanded to the whole fucking world. But at the very least, we have to be an example here in America. We have a possibility. because of these kind of conversations, because of this narrative, we have, we have a possibility to change, particularly the way young people look at it. This idea that people that live four blocks away are different than people who live right next door is nuts.

We're all just humans. And if there is a community that's fucked, it's better for everyone. if we chip in and do whatever the fuck it takes to reengineer that. And it's going to take a long time. There's an old saying from gambling.

in pool. They would say you got to get better. the same way you got sick, meaning if you're gambling, say, if I got you stuck like ten thousand dollars, you're like, OK, all or nothing. Like, fuck you, fuck you, double or nothing. Fuck you.

We play for a thousand dollars. So then I went eleven thousand and then another thousand. Now I'm twelve. You can't just win one and get it all back. You got to get better.

the same way you got sick. It's a long road.

And nor is there any one size fits all. I told Bruce last night, you know, it's an odd thing to get recognized for.

But, you know, a bartender said to me, hey, aren't you that guy that helps get people out of jail? And I was like, man, that felt so good. Right. I don't know where. if you saw me on 2020, most definitely it was probably on this podcast, or, you know, like I was pulling into into the Aria in Vegas.

And, you know, the valet guy goes, hey, aren't you? I've seen you before. You help innocent people get out. I just saw you on Rogan. I get that a lot.

And I always take a minute to stop and say, you know, do you want me to help, you know, point you in the right direction, of how you can help? I had so many people. take me up on it. So you guys made me feel better. I mean, look, I just there are moments where I feel like, is the problem ever going to get, you know, solved.

It is frustrating to me. So frustrating. And that's why I'm so in your debt, because we, Joe and I, had this idea. Bruce, you don't know this a couple of years ago, where, you know, he, you know, committed to doing this once a quarter. And of course, I thought, really?

Is he really going to do it? And not only has he done it, but allowed me to bring, you know, an exoneree on every time.

And I hope that people not only see the humanity in these men, but see the talent and see the. I mean, think about these three men, right? Robert Jones said, I'm going to one day get out of here and put on a suit and come back in and help the people that need help. And he did it. Derek Hamilton, known the country over as probably the the brightest legal mind in the prison system, said one day I'm going to get out of here and I'm going to help the people inside.

And not only has he done it, he's like a. he's like a meteor. You know, he's like a streaking comet of a human being. I've never seen anything like it. District attorneys, conviction integrity units, when he calls, they pick up the phone and they have meetings.

A district attorney in Manhattan,

you know, Alvin Bragg, say what you want about him. My opinion is he picked up the phone when Derek called about about Sheldon Johnson. And, you know, there is this great group of lawyers called the C.A.L., the Center for Appellate Litigation. And they had brought the case right to the goal line. And they said, you know, we need the D.A.'s ear.

You know, can you just sort of get this? And there's some great people in that office, Brian Crow, that really want to make a difference. And, you know, we met with the D.A. in Manhattan and spoke to Derek. And then, you know, Sheldon gets released.

So, yeah, it does make a difference. And I think that for Bruce, you know, when I heard about some of the programs that he created from on the inside, can you tell Joe about, and the listeners about, the Gun Buyback Program and Voices from Within?

So they began doing this progressive work inside and created this event called Choices, which is choosing healthy options and confronting every situation. And what they do with these Choices events is they bring in children whose parents are incarcerated and then begin, you know, having what they call playback theater, which is they'll have a young person talk about a dilemma in their life, and then they'll have two of the guys incarcerated actually play it out. So the person can actually visualize what it is that they went through and see the opportunities to make better choices. So that's one of them. But also the civic duty initiative we founded in Sullivan, myself and a guy named Joseph Robinson and Stanley Bellamy, who was also just granted clemency.

He had 62 years, he did 37.. What we did, we began, you know, finding these poor, impoverished communities and whether they've been upstate or in the inner cities, and decided that what we're going to do is we're going to do book drives, we're going to raise money in prison through these prison organizations to buy backpacks and school supplies for children of incarcerated parents. And we did just that. We gave, you know, we gave thousands of books away. We raised tons of money to contribute to a gun buyback, hopefully through a church bomb in Albany with a reverend by the name of Charles Muller, who had a program.

Albany was being ravaged by violence and his program had run out of money. And so I reached out to him and we collaborated in Sullivan Correctional Facility and decided that we're going to put our resources and see how we can come together. We also had him bring in some young guys so that we can talk to about youth violence. And this has been going, this continues to go on, right? The Youth Assistance Program, YAP, that they have both in Sing Sing and in a few other prisons in New York State.

I was on the YAP team in Sing Sing, where they bring in 30 at-risk youth.

From El Salvador who were dealing with, you know, MS-13s. And I had one young guy and one young girl tell me that they had to leave El Salvador because where they lived, you know, their friends were all in gangs. And what they did was they would play soccer with the heads of the rival gangs.

And I had that, that, that had made me cringe. I had never heard anything like that until this, and this kid, these kids were like 18, 19.. And they had to, I literally leave the country because their family was like, if they stay there, they have to be in a gang. I mean, these kids said that their friends would literally play soccer with the heads, the decapitated heads of rival gangs. So these are some of the kids that we, you know, we've been able to reach and talk to through the YAP program.

It's never enough, because sometimes they bring in kids that will never be at risk. Sometimes they bring in kids from high-end society that have no business coming in there. They're going to be successful, right? So, you know, sometimes we have a little issue with that, but the other program is Children of Promise NYC. I've been working with them for the past decade.

And they realized what they were unloading were bars. Bars and doors. And they said, hold on, man. They're opening up a shop where we have to build cells. So a few days later, these guys says, we're not doing that.

We're not building cells for our kids. All these guys went to the box and they shipped them from a prison that's close to their family, Greenhaven. They shipped them to Clinton.

Every prison, when COVID started, a lot of people don't know where the hand sanitizer was coming from. It was coming from Great Meadows, right? It was coming from Great Meadows. And at one point, Governor Cuomo, he had it on the news. We got a hand sanitizer the guys are making.

And this was for sale at one point. And so that's another form of extraordinary profit.

Wow.

A spokesperson said he makes no apologies for single-handedly solving a hand sanitizer shortage. Oh, really, spokesperson? Hey, how'd you do that? Maybe you should make an apology for how the fuck you did that.

And this is a guy that has a history of doing this for decades.

this has been going on for decades and decades. I think that it should shock people, and it should be a rallying cry. If you've never been in a prison before, and it just sort of occupies a space in your mind, as it's just a bad place that I don't want to be in ever, and I wouldn't want my family member to be in, that's okay. You could live your life that way. But you can also take notice of the fact that somewhere between 4% and 7%, some estimates of the people in there are innocent.

And some of the other people that are in there just made a mistake. And you don't throw away a life because they made a mistake. And to see some of these sentences, 50 years, 70 years, and it's not just in California, where there was a three-strikes rule. To see sentences getting doled out that are de facto life sentences to children.

So Bruce said, I want to be there when he walks out. And he got – so that is them FaceTiming me. as Sheldon walked out of the gate. And J.J. Velasquez is the other gentleman on the other side of Sheldon.

J.J. Velasquez is – it took one guy who believed in J.J., this investigative reporter named Dan Slepian, who believed in J.J., amongst many other people that believed in J.J. J.J. now goes into Sing Sing regularly and runs a program there called the Frederick Douglass Project. And he does it with the professor from Georgetown, Mark Howard.

And he goes in there and he brings people in from the community to try to show them the humanity that is behind prison walls. There was over 100 years of over-incarceration and wrongful incarceration in that – a century in that picture.

Look at that fuckhead.

Queens lawyer convicted of bribing witnesses get 30 months sentence. That's it?

When the governor is considering someone for clemency, they check with the district attorney's office, where they were convicted. And the Queens County District Attorney's Office, who is also reinvestigating Bruce's case, its Conviction Integrity Unit, as I mentioned earlier, is reinvestigating his case, did not oppose Bruce's grant of clemency. Extremely rare in a murder case where an 11-year-old boy was murdered for them to not oppose. So I think that she deserves recognition for that. Her office deserves recognition for that.

And what we can hope is that we keep on making believers out of them by presenting cases like Bruce's.

People like to make broad generalizations, whether it's police, officers, prosecutors. I hate it when people do that about anything. There's good and bad in all professions. And I just think that when you see people trying to make change happen, even if it doesn't go sometimes at the pace you want it to happen, at, as long as it's moving in the right direction, it deserves to be recognized and applauded. So I just wanted to make sure because it's easy to see this guy who was a former Queens prosecutor and then make a dangerous leap that therefore all prosecutors in Queens are bad, which is not the case.

He didn't just come down with a cold case of the bribes one day. He wasn't like, oh, this sounds like a good fucking idea. This is learned behavior. This is the way he learned to work the system, in my humble opinion.

It had to be filled to like 80% capacity. And what happened was these judges, they were charged with keeping these jails filled, right? So as long as they kept them filled, they got a kickback. It's called Kids for Cash. There's a documentary on it.

People get a little bit of fame. They get a little bit of notoriety. Or they get the ability to have influence over someone else. I'll give you an example as it relates to Bruce. For people that think that this doesn't happen.

As soon as Bruce was granted clemency, all over the papers, you know, when a governor grants clemency, it's news. There's people that oppose it because they get, you know, the 60,000 foot news headline view of it and don't know shit about the facts of the case. How could she have done that? You know, letting a killer out, and they have no idea about this guy Scarborough, about any of the facts of his case. And the people that read those papers are often corrections officers too.

And just to show you like, the final stretch of discipline, I think, for Bruce is, you know. There's good corrections officers that I'd go in and visit Bruce and knew what we were doing and knew what the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice is about. And knew that Derek Hamilton used to be in prison and turned, you know, his life into basically a mission to help others that have been wrongfully incarcerated or just that need a second chance. And there are others, like the CEOs, that find out he got granted clemency and don't want to see him go home.

Part of our legal justice center is that we have a clinical program where Derek and I teach these students. We get 10 a semester. They have a seminar where they come in for two hours a week that we teach in the law school.

And we teach them about all disciplines of forensic science, how it goes wrong, what to do if you spot it, whether you're a prosecutor or a defense attorney, how to, if you're a prosecutor, rely on it in a way that does it justice in the name of science. Right. There are certain conclusions you can draw about blood spatter. You just can't make ridiculous conclusions like saying what instrument and from what angle, and the manner in which it was swung. Right.

So you get my point. But then they also have 10 hours a week of fieldwork where they come to my office and do work on actual cases. So they worked on Bruce's case, as did, you know, I have a partnership with Jay-Z and his mother. They have the Sean Carter Foundation and we have the Josh Dubin Fellows at the Sean Carter Foundation. They worked on Bruce's case and they wanted to meet Bruce.

So they came in and met Bruce. Some of them and some of my students came in. I hadn't really ever seen Bruce mad, exacerbated. I'd seen him emotional, but never losing his cool. And I came in one day.

and when you go to visit someone in a maximum security prison, it's a real ordeal getting in. And it's really sad. You see families coming in and it's very emotional. Sometimes there's kids with them. And, you know, you would think as an attorney or as law students, you might get treated a little different.

But you come across the wrong CEO, the wrong corrections officer. Yeah, I don't like the way your shirt is saying to a female student is a little bit too low, or you're not wearing a bra. I mean, it's kind of like, like, really? That's what you're saying. And take your pockets, pull them out.

I want to see the bottom of your feet. You know, in any event, we're waiting to get into the visiting room. And all of a sudden there's this loud crash against the door. It's behind bars. And, you know, all of a sudden there's a lockdown because an inmate punched a female visitor in the face.

And, you know, and it was the person that was visiting him and they were rewinding it on the surveillance as we were waiting. So the students were already like, wow, this is, this is some crazy shit.

And then we go in the visiting room after they sort of cleared that situation out after 40 minutes or so. And Bruce came down and, you know, he's. he's as cordial as he is intelligent, which is to say he's always just super warm and comforting. And two of the students that have worked on this case for quite a while were in the visiting room with me. And he sort of like, blew past them and said, I can't take it anymore.

Everywhere I go, every time I see this corrections officer, he is trying to goad me. He is trying to get me to do something. And it was the closest I had seen him to tears because of the prison experience.

This officer, John, right, that's had a hard on for me for some reason. He comes. So I'm like, oh, man, I got a visit. Now this guy is going to handcuff me and take me. so I can't even defend myself because the prison was locked down.

In fact, that was a major New York Times article as well. The abuse that took place at Sing Sing in November of last year, when they locked the whole prison down. That's the case that Bruce Barquette and Epstein and Marty Tankleff took on. Big article. They came into the prison, shut it down and began picking certain guys out, cracking ribs, cracking heads open, just abusing guys.

So here this guy comes to get me. I had no idea it was you that was on the visit. But in my mind, I'm saying I swear, I hope it's my lawyer coming to visit me, man, because this guy is taking me. So he's antagonizing me. Hurry up or you won't go on your visit.

And just juking at me, juking at me. So I'm handcuffed and I'm maintaining my composure. I see a sergeant there. I tell him, listen, get your dog off me. So the sergeant knew me and he tried to say something to the guy, but the guy, he listened right then and there.

In route to the visiting room, he's steady, trying to go with me, trying to pull me out of my character, you know.

So it just became so distressed, so stressful, man. That's why I came. I was like, man, I was so glad that it was you that came that day. But I was just glad that he didn't actually put it, because he was on the verge of putting his hands on me. Because I was handcuffed.

If it was an isolated area, he would have definitely jumped on me, because it was open season in November. During that lockdown, it was open season on guys in the joint at Sing Sing that day. For whatever reason, that special team came in and just started, like, crushing people. And some of these guys I'm talking about are 6'8", 6'9". They're from different prisons.

So they come in with their military uniforms and they're stomping the floor, like they're doing a walk, like on a military run. And they're pulling guys out the cell, man, and they're crushing them. So it was a moment for me because I had no idea how this guy was going to respond or how I was going to be able to defend myself. And I know I'm on the verge of getting out and I know what he's trying to do. So my mind was just focused on getting out, trying my best not to pay this guy no mind.

But it's hard. It's hard dealing with them in those situations because they got the upper hand.

And a lot of them are abusive, because you can do that with him. And, like you talked about power, when you can do things knowing that there'll be no repercussions.

I don't know if you're familiar with this. It became so intense.

And the guy was working security at the door. And what a shitty attitude he gave me about it, right? Because he's the bouncer. And I was like, you know, five or six years ago, I learned the strength in silence. And I learned the strength in restraint.

Because I was...

Because you have a sense of...

The more gratified I feel afterwards. But what bothers me about this power thing, that's fine. I could exercise restraint. It's taken me many years and a lot of therapy to get there. A lot of introspection.

But what does that say about humanity when you have a bunch of kids that are at an Ivy League school. Stanford or an Ivy League school, I think it is.

And they know they're in an experiment. And they're given that taste. And then they abuse it. And I see it at the airport with TSA agents. I see it, you know, if you make a kid a safety patrol in an elementary school.

It just seems to be something that has to be guarded and approached a lot more.

A lot more. A lot more carefully. Intentionally and carefully.

They all didn't listen. You had to yell at them. You had to tell them what to do. And there was a culture of doing that. And these people behaved almost exactly the way you describe in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Or you describe with cops in some occasions. These people, they were terrible to these people. And it was normal. And I found myself doing it, yelling at people and stuff. And you realize, what is this?

I realized at 19, I was like, what is this weird inclination? to make it us versus them? I go to concerts. I could be them. It's the same person.

I'm only 19.. None of this makes any sense to me. But there was a clear, natural pattern of behavior that emerged. That emerges in war. It emerges everywhere.

It emerges whenever people have ultimate power over other people. And it's power that's not earned. That's a big part of it. To be a person that has that kind of power and influence, that is an extraordinary position to be in. And you have to be an extraordinary human being to manage that ethically and morally.

And most people are not extraordinary. That's the reality. So if you're given these jobs, you have this extraordinary responsibility to people that have never developed character. They've never really developed compassion and true empathy for other people and a true understanding of their strength. They're always trying to puff their chest out.

They're always trying to peacock.

That's the worst person to ever have that position. because now they have this unqualified position of power. They didn't do anything to earn it, but they have it. And they want people to listen. If you don't fucking listen, no, you have to listen.

You have to listen.

We recognize it. We understand it. We don't think of cops that way. How many cops have PTSD? How many cops are terrified every day, every time they pull someone over?

How many cops are deeply ingrained in this blue gang, this us versus them mentality? You ever see the 7-5 documentary on Michael Dowd?

You shut the fuck up. I guess I shut the fuck up. This is what we do. Stealing money from drug dealers. Setting up hits.

It was all inside the business.

There needs to be better training of law enforcement. For sure. Because they need to be desensitized or sensitized. Whatever their background is needs to be taken into consideration. But I couldn't agree with you more.

I can't stand when people that are so far left start talking categorically about police officers. What a fucking hard job. And, of course, there's great cops out. Look. I went through it myself recently.

Teaching. I had done one-offs before. But I'd never taught consistently. And I'm looking at these young future lawyers. And they look up to you just because you're the professor.

And I had this moment. And it took a lot of work for me. And a lot of therapy. And deep introspection. And a particularly humbling experience for me to really take a long, hard look.

And say, who are you, Josh? And who do you want to be? I had always equated vulnerability with weakness. Probably my whole life.

And, you know, there's issues tied up with my father. And all kinds of shit that sort of led me that way. To thinking that way. And I don't know if I told you this, Bruce. But I had a moment with you, actually, in public.

Where I had to fight the urge.

My instinct told me, don't do this. And then my sort of, my new project. Project, of sort of reinventing myself and how I think. And sort of having this as close to an awakening as I could have. Sort of won the day for me.

And said it's okay. You know, I had Bruce come to my class at Cardozo Law School and teach.

Four days after he got out. I wanted him to, the students, to see the fruits of their labor.

Because some of them hadn't met him yet. And he came to my class. And, you know, like the faculty was cheering when he came in. It was really a beautiful moment. And he came and sat in front of a group of lawyers.

Jamie, I think I sent you a picture of this also. This is an extraordinary moment for me.

I sat next to him and I was so overcome with emotion. And I was like, I bit a hole in my bottom lip. Because I was trying to fight this feeling of guilt that I had. For letting this man sit there for four years. And I didn't write him back.

And I had never addressed it with him. And I apologized to him in front of the class. And I just started weeping.

And I felt so good that I allowed myself to be vulnerable in front of these students. And I got to tell you, I felt a shift in the way they looked at me from that moment. I wanted them to know that it was okay to be vulnerable. And that just because I have a quote unquote position of power. That they need not look at me as being on some sort of pedestal.

I started sitting sometimes in class so I could be at eye level with them. Because I read a lot about, you know, being a young father. How sometimes just getting on a knee and being at eye level with an adolescent.

Changes the dynamic when you are trying to teach them or discipline them. And it was, you know, it was like a great moment. I felt more like a man in that moment. More like a man, a strong man, in that moment. Than I have, you know, many other times in my life when I thought I was being cool.

Or really filling some insecure void in me.

And he's one of the more vulnerable people I've met. Authentic, allows himself to cry when the feelings come over him. I've seen you do it. You know, it's the strong and secure among us. That I think you're, there's a long way of saying.

I agree with you. That. I think, if we teach our kids more. That just because someone is in a position of power. Doesn't make them better or more commanding.

And if you were ever put in that position of power. You remember what it's like to be on the other side of it. I really go to great lengths to try to do that with my children, with my students. Am I perfect at it? No way.

I'm trying, though. And maybe, you know, the more we do that with. How great is it when a police officer helps you? You know, it feels great.

I said, yeah.

And I thought about it and I said, the most important thing is therapy. I need a therapist because, like you said, PTSD, right? The trauma that we experienced from being kidnapped for 20 something years. The trauma that you experienced from being behind prison walls and being dehumanized. And being labeled the number for decades as opposed to being a human, right?

See, it's easy to dehumanize, first they dehumanize you, right? And they take that from you, and then you begin to internalize that and feel this way about yourself. Feel like you're less than. So. I asked Josh, I said therapy.

And I think that kind of surprised you when I said that.

it surprised me and it didn't. I think Bruce is a highly evolved person, especially considering the circumstances. But your emotional intelligence is such that it shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did. But it's very rare for me, just in my own experience, for people to get exonerated or serve long prison sentences to recognize that they need. that.

I mean, for me, it's had such a profound impact on my life to have a person to speak to that understands how the human mind works and what human psychology is. Some people don't believe in therapy. I'm a strong believer. And if you get the right therapist and you're willing to take that journey, you know, it can be, I feel like it's like going to the gym for your mind. Like the feeling that you get after you go to the gym and you feel like that release of endorphins and whatever else gets released, which I'm sure Joe knows better than I do.

But, you know, I just feel that way from my mind and being able to trace back, sort of like where my trauma comes from. And we all have trauma as human beings. It's been, you know, it surprised me, but it didn't. I'm grateful that you, you know, entrusted me to help you with it. And I think that, you know, more people that, you know, we read these stories about the wrongfully incarcerated and they seem like feel good stories.

Right. But the sad truth is that the vast majority of my clients that get out struggle terribly when they get out. There's just no way to undo the psychological and psychiatric damage. You could hope to keep it in check. But, you know, the vast majority of them struggle really terribly with PTSD, social anxiety, general anxiety, difficulty sleeping, difficulty trusting and a whole litany of issues.

That was why it was so great to see you just out last night smiling.

At least I didn't ask you what the guy says. Oh, you got to take him to a strip club. At least the average guy that comes out, he normally says, what's the first thing they ask for? Man, you got to take me to a strip joint, man.

It was interesting. He had dinner with someone that had gotten out recently, and he said, this guy reeked of the penitentiary. And I don't want to give off that vibe. I have a second chance to reinvent myself.

And I just think it just speaks volumes about him. Not that he should be, like, applauded for not wanting to go to a strip club right when he gets out. Some people want to do that, and that's cool. Don't begrudge them.

Because once you begin to really reflect and you become aware of how you've been duped by the system and how the system was designed to continue to do that and to create this permanent underclass, because that's what it does, right? It creates a permanent underclass. So you got a group of formerly incarcerated guys who, many of them still dealing with dyslexia. They can't read, can't get educated. Many of them are still dealing with barriers towards getting a decent job.

A lot of them can't go back to the housing projects because, you know, if you're convicted from projects, oftentimes they won't even allow you back, you know, to live, to reside there. Really? Yeah. So now you have to find housing somewhere and you're limited to a menial job with a lack of education.

He couldn't buy this house that he wanted. I mean, this is a guy who won three country music awards just this year. He came, it was in Austin. He came to the mothership that night on cloud nine because he wins these awards, comes to see Ron White, and then finds out that this house that he thought he was buying, he can't buy now because he's a felon.

Like, you'd want him as your neighbor.

Young and dumb. Not raised. well. You know, it tells a story about his childhood. It's horrific.

He's just, he's a guy who pulled himself out, and there's people who still don't want to believe. Just meet the guy. Just go, meet him. He's got tattoos all over his face. You know, people get weirded out by him.

Yeah. Listen to this motherfucker's voice. Is he singing in this?

This is the Ryman, right? He's playing in Nashville at the fucking Grand Ole Opry. The man is amazing.

If you want to be depressed, don't do anything.

And no one teaches people that. No one teaches kids that. No one teaches that there's a beneficial kind of struggle. That's right. And you have to, like, become disciplined and you have to have a mindset of improvement and you have to understand that you are very blessed to be a human being that's existing in this incredible time, 2023, and you live in America.

Go get it. And somebody needs to guide people. They need to be there. You need, like, real mentorship. You need hope.

You need a place where someone can go when shit's fucked. You need, like, real guidance. It can be done.

And she, we would run into her former students and they'd come up to her with a tear in their eye or give her a hug and a kiss and say, they called her Doobie. All her kids called, you know, my last name can be Doobie, Doobie, Doobs. People used to play with it a lot. With my mom. it was, you know, all her students called Doobie, you saved my, you know, you changed my life.

So I always have had deep reverence for teachers. And I had this experience with my son where he, I think he was in kindergarten or pre, he might have been in like pre-K. And here I am a civil rights attorney. And I remember him coming home in pre-K, you're like four. And he's telling me about Martin Luther King getting killed.

And I remember thinking to myself, God, that's so, so young for him to be learning about death. And isn't this too young? And I had a great rapport with his teacher.

This really awesome guy named Olu Bala, still at the elementary school where my son went. And I went and spoke to him about it.

And he pulled me down the hall. And he said, listen.

I've been watching the way African-American men have been treated my whole life. You know, he's an African-American man. And he said, and the only way I know how to try to write this is to help create different human beings. You know, a different kind of human beings that understands empathy, young. And then I read the book that they were reading.

And it was so fucking appropriate. And I felt really idiotic in that moment, because everything, the way that he articulated it to me was, you know. I want them to understand now that difference is beautiful and to be celebrated, just as I know you teach them at home.

And that stuck with me. I mean, my son's 11. now. This is, you know, seven years ago. And it stuck with me.

And every time I see him and he said to me sometimes he didn't know what I did at that time. Every time I see him, I say, man, I'll never forget what you said to me. It really, like, changed my perspective on how important it is to teach our kids at a young age that difference is good. And it means strength to be vulnerable. And that power is not something to be abused.

It is something to be treated, you know, with the intention to help other people.

And I just loved to watch him as a father.

And that's why he's that guy. And sports is one of the great ways to do that. Especially combat sports. The problem is, there's also the downsides of it. The people that don't make it.

The people that get brain damaged. The people that get fucked up. There's that too. That's real. You know, it's not a fucking 100% path if you choose combat sports.

But if you do choose combat sports and you become an Andre Ward, that's an exceptional human being. That's a guy who won world titles with one arm.

He's a beautiful husband. And he does so many great things.

Millions and millions of dollars at him.

I'm done. I won gold medal in the Olympics. I won two division world champion. That's it. Undefeated.

That's it.

Yeah. Comes with struggle. They tell you that in physical condition. Right. No pain, no gain.

Right. You got to rip that muscle. You can't think you're going to live an easy life.

The way you handle yourself is incredible.

Yeah. Right?

And yeah, that's hit home. for me, you know, lately more than anything, is that having a few good quality people around you, it just makes you, it propels you forward. People that are happy for your success, that propels you forward, not looking to, you know, tear you down.

Like, what is this? This is insane. Like, this is not, this is not fixing anything. This is not, you're not making it better.