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plus get free shipping just go to the farmers dog dot com slash rogan this offer is for new customers only he's exactly who we would want in this country a guy that comes here and by the way I want to mention the state there are self defense laws that did not exist then many states have stand you...
>> The Joe Rogan Experience.
>> Showing my day Joe Rogan podcast my night all day.
[MUSIC]
>> Brother Joe.
>> You can see again.
>> I see him.
>> What's happening?
>> Everything's happening.
I got a lot on my mind.
I got notes today and everything.
>> Beautiful.
So, let's kick it off.
What do you got?
>> No, I was just thinking that the more you do this work, the more routine the
stories would get.
And you would start to see fact patterns and situations repeat.
But I'm starting to think the more you do it, the more nutty and bizarre it gets.
And you find yourself in these situations where you're like, that can't be.
You got to check that out.
So, I have like multiple cases going on where I feel that way.
And they range from wrongful convictions to why was this person charged in the first place
where you're seeking clemency.
I mean, yeah, it's a weird world.
Yeah, your world in particular.
The world of wrongfully accused and wrongfully convicted people is one of the darkest worlds in the world.
Because you're taking away a person's freedom.
>> Yeah.
>> And they do it all the time for corruption.
They do it because they're corrupt.
They do it because they're dirty.
They do it because they want convictions.
They do it because they said someone was guilty and then they just want to fucking lock them up anyway.
You know, I started to read this Malcolm Gladwell just published a new book called Revenge or the Tipping Point.
And I'm only like 15 pages in.
And the way he starts it out is about, I think he's going to come back to it at the end.
But I think it's the opioid scandal.
He's leaving it blank until the end of the book about how when they testified, the executives of the company testified before Congress,
that they couldn't bring themselves to apologize or admit that they were wrong.
And they keep on using the words.
Our drug has been associated with, associated with addiction.
And it's almost this.
So I'm starting to think that this inability to admit fault, that you're wrong, that you're sorry, it transcends the legal system.
And you know, I'm starting to believe that the cases where these cops are out to frame someone are far more...
Well, maybe not far more, but they're less common than the cases where law enforcement's trying to do the right thing.
And a detective has a hunch and they just get to where they think they need to be on the evidence by following the hunch, which is often wrong.
So yeah, it's a mix of all that shit.
Yeah, and people don't like to admit they're wrong ever, especially when it comes to something as crazy as pharmaceutical drug company releasing some opioid that's going to kill a million people.
They can't admit they're wrong. They almost have to say things like associated with, especially during hearings.
Yeah, during congressional hearings, I guess there's a lot on the line if there's anything that smells like an admission.
Yeah, they can't admit it. They have to not lie because then they can get hit with perjury.
So they come up with different terms like associated with.
Yeah, I mean, I'm interested to see where he goes with it. I listen to his podcast a lot. It's actually really good.
Some of them are good, revisionist history, because he's a curious dude, this Malcolm Gladwell.
And some of his stuff I agree with, some I don't, but I like that he looks beneath the surface and tries to figure out what is motivating people or what they're tricking themselves into believing.
And I just, I was watching this man a scalco, but the other day, and he was like, "Can't you just say I'm sorry?"
He's talking about his wife, that's all I want.
And him and this dude are going back and forth, forget the guy's name on the podcast, some other comedian.
And the bit is so fucking funny. And so I just find myself apologizing all the time.
It's wrong with just admitting that you're wrong.
Nothing at all. Good. It's actually a show of strength.
And people that don't recognize that, they just believe that they're never wrong, or that they want people to know they're never wrong, or think they're never wrong.
So they just don't admit it. They just bury it deep inside.
But you find yourself apologizing all the fucking times sometimes.
When you're conscious of it, I'm like, "That might apologize a lot. Maybe I didn't call this shit."
Well, better to apologize for something you didn't do than to not apologize for something you did.
Well, I don't know.
How does it mean it?
Yeah.
Yeah, you got to mean it.
Yeah. That helps.
Meaning it helps.
Yeah.
Just saying it just to get it out of a fight.
Yeah, that's not good. It's not worth it.
Yeah, I just finished, I just finished this trial on a case that was super important to Forensic Science.
It was actually the namesake of my center, the Pearl Mutters.
The Pearl Mutters Center for Legal Justice at Cardoza Law.
So I can lorry Pearl Mutters DNA was stolen by a neighbor.
And, you know, it's a nutty story. You could read about it online.
I did read about it online.
It's crazy.
Fucking great.
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But I had an expert, a so called expert on the stand, and there was an email where it was an unaccredited DNA lab.
And someone that worked for him gets the results of DNA testing, one round of the results.
And she says the good news is we have a full profile.
The bad news is it's not associated with the pro motors.
And I said to him in words or substance, why would it ever be bad news for a scientist?
If one particular person was implicated in a crime or not, aren't they supposed to just give the facts?
And in a moment of candor, I think it's one of the few times this has happened in all my years doing this.
The guy said, you know, I wouldn't have used those words and it had no place.
And it wasn't an email that he wrote, it was an email that someone that worked for him wrote.
And I almost said right in front of the jury, good for you man, that's super rare.
And I mean, the case is, I think it's an important one for forensic science because their DNA was stolen at a deposition over some petty shit.
It was about a tennis dispute in their community.
And they're lured to this deposition.
And their neighbor takes their DNA without their consent.
How did he do it?
He had a former crime scene analyst and some retired deputy chief of police from Toronto.
Because this guy's from Canada, come down and the former crime scene analyst sits at the deposition and they planned it all beforehand.
And they made sure that they did not handle paper, the Ike Pearl Mudder would handle.
And they made sure that no one touched this water bottle that Lori Pearl Mudder was going to handle.
And they hand him this phony exhibit and they had it worked out before that they would only touch the bottom corner of it.
And they have a water bottle sitting in front of Lori Pearl Mudder and they ask questions about this dispute over the tennis center.
And you know, when they leave, it was treated like a crime scene.
And it was like some vigilante justice type of shit where they send all this stuff to an unaccredited lab who then sends it to an accredited lab.
And instead of waiting for the results to come in from this accredited lab, the unaccredited lab starts interpreting it.
And they're having pressure put on them by this man that ultimately accused Ike and Lori of being involved in this awful crime.
What was the crime?
All right, so it doesn't make sense without context.
So here's what happens.
Ike Pearl Mudder is, you know, the former chairman of Marvel, he's very reclusive by all accounts. He and Lori don't have children and they live a very quiet life in Palm Beach.
He was an avid tennis player. This is about 14 years ago, avid tennis player and he became very friendly with the woman that was the tennis pro. She was a single mother, she would set him up with tennis games and he became friends with her.
So she sold real estate on the side. I mean, this is like a fucking episode of like Seinfeld or Kirby enthusiasm at the beginning, then it like goes off the rails and descends into the depths of hell.
So bear with me. So a man moves into or man had been living at or moves into their neighborhood and he becomes friends with this other couple who also sell real estate, the wife sells real estate.
And apparently they approached the tennis pro and they're like, we should team up on a real estate and she's like, nah, it's just my side hustle. I'm going to do it alone. So this guy from Canada writes this memo and in the memo, there's all these accusations about this woman that she could go to federal prison and she's committing.
She could be, you know, that there's bid rigging going on because they never sent her her. They never sent our tennis pro contract out for bid. It was just kind of like nutty stuff just because she wouldn't go into business.
I mean, that's our theory. That's my opinion. And yeah, that was our theory in the case. So I stands up for her. He's a very loyal guy stands up for the people that he, you know, is friends with and he thought she was getting bullied.
So she sued the guy for defamation and Ike and another resident in this condo complex paid for her legal fees. So about a year later, male starts to arrive in this community.
And it is the most awful shit you have ever heard and it's accusing the Canadian guy of being a child molester of being a murderer. It's horrific twisted sick shit.
So it's about a year after this tennis center dispute and there's misspelled Hebrew words and Jewish stars all over it. So this guy thinks naturally that Ike and his wife are behind it like they have nothing better to do.
All right. So because he's so convinced that they did it. And or that they were involved and he, you know, initially suspected that other people might be involved. This guy's going around and swapping DNA.
Off of with a Q tip off of cars he's digging through trash in the condo community and he's like on this mission to collect people's DNA. So he calls them to a deposition about the tennis center case and that's where this all went down.
So once they collect their DNA, this unaccredited lab claims that DNA taken off of the hate mail matches lorry promoters DNA from the water bottle at the deposition.
The problem was that this unaccredited lab didn't wait for the report from the accredited lab. And that run of the DNA that this woman was relying on.
The accredited lab discarded it because the man that actually did the test and contaminated the machine. And he knew it. So he didn't rely on it. So years and years and years go by.
And well after they knew that lorry had nothing to do with this in fact in 2017 a man got arrested in Canada and he got arrested because a package got intercepted at homelands at the border by homeland security.
And it had samples of the hate mail latex gloves you know in the package and it was a former business associate of this Canadian guy and their relationship one sour.
And I thought the case was over you know in 2019 I believe that guy gets arrested again and there's a detailed affidavit so it's clear that this man is responsible for it. So in any event in 2016 the I believe it was 2016 there's an article in the fucking deal book in the New York Times saying that lorry pearl mother DNA is on that hate mail.
And then there's another one in the globe and mail which is a big Canadian paper. So it was a defamation case against this guy and against this lawyer for a chub because chub helped this chub lawyer federal insurance also known as chub helps him draw up the blueprints for collecting their DNA at the deposition.
So it was a super gratifying case we won a $50 million verdict and you know he was found liable for defamation abuse of process which is abuse of the legal process.
And you know it's taken I can lorry all of these years to have their name restored in court and they've they kill me if I admitted it and be a violation of their confidence in my professional obligation but they've spent an untold fortune.
And you know the case is important for forensic science because DNA supposed to be the holy grail and you can't have private citizens running around trying to collect people's DNA without knowing what they're doing.
You could be leaning on someone and have good intentions to get results but if I told you or if I said to Jamie here's my suspect take a look at these fingerprints and tell me if they match him or her or here's my suspect here's their genetic profile.
Tell me if it matches you don't realize the I mean sometimes the error rate sky rocket spy as much as 50% with fingerprints over 80% and fingerprint analysts will agree and they will say yeah I know that that happens and if someone tells me who the suspect is.
And only who the suspect is and I'm comparing it I think the error rate goes up but not with me not with me I mean again it's that phenomenon where you just can't think that you would be biased.
So look the case was super important because I think it Reis but beyond restoring their name and you know it's the namesake of the center where we do this work it also preserves the integrity of forensic science and especially DNA which is really one of the few super reliable forms of forensic science but even that when put in the wrong hands.
Or if it's exposed to subjectivity and people's belief that they have the right person it's vulnerable and science shouldn't be vulnerable it should be it's either a or b it's either yes or no especially with DNA.
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in features and network management details so can I ask you a question yeah when you said that her the evidence against or the DNA evidence had to be thrown out because the machine was contaminated yeah how was it contaminated how did that implicate her DNA so what happens is when you're I don't want to go too deep into DNA analysis but it is actually interesting when you're conducting DNA testing
the manufacturer of the machine I think it's called the powerplex plus they ask you to run what's called a positive control and a negative control to make sure that the machine is correctly calibrated
because it's what it's doing through electrophoresis is shooting out what's called an electropharogram on the other end so that you're able to you're able to do what they what they what's
referred to as calling alleles so you're calling you know chromosome pairing at a specific genetic marker right so and they called them there's various different low
side or locations where there are you either have two alleles or one you get one from your mom one from your five one from your mom one from your dad
and sometimes the one from your father might not show but your mother's will show but there'll be two alleles at most at a specific location
so they want to make sure that the machine is working properly so the manufacturer has the lab analyst every time you do it run a positive control
meaning that you'll put a solution through the machine and it should on the other end give you very specific results
and he accidentally pipetted or took the solution from her DNA mixture instead of from the positive control mixture
and put that through the machine so when he was running the tests hard DNA is already mixed in there
but he realized he made a mistake so when he issued his report he didn't rely on that run because then when I say run
it's another it's another you'll run the DNA on different occasions and sometimes on different dates
because you want to make sure that your genetic profile will never change my genetic profile will never change
so when you were looking at somebody's genetic profile it should be consistent so when he saw that wait a second the first run of this doesn't match the second and third or the fourth he realized he made a mistake
but without having the lab analyst that's doing the interpretation you know weighing in on the results and you're antsy to get an answer
and you're leaning on an unaccredited lab saying interpret the results interpret the results
money's no object there's an email that said that you know instead of waiting she relies on this run of the DNA
and you know then what happens happen but at some point this Canadian guy came to learn what actually happened and kept on going
and kept on going and kept on going and there was evidence that he wanted hundreds of millions of dollars from my clients
you know I think what turned out to be a shitty situation for him because no doubt getting hate mail like that has to be disturbing
and just setting to the family
did it turn out that he had any sort of relationship with the Canadian man who's sending him to hate mail? Yeah that was his former one of his former business colleagues who he had a vicious falling out with
and he kept it from everyone so I think that the inference in my opinion the inference is that at some point and in fact there's an allegation in the hate mail
where it says you were involved in the murder of these two people
he accuses this man in Canada months after the hate mail began to arrive of spreading that rumor
so I believe that he knew it was him the whole time and at some point I believe he was trying to shake the pro-mothers down
so he wanted money from them otherwise he was going to go public and he went public how much did he request?
you know look there's an article in the Globe and Mail saying that he wants $600 million
there was an article he admitted on the stand that it was $100 million so he was just trying to get paid
well that's my opinion that's the Jerry's opinion he was some embattled in my opinion an embattled businessman in Canada he had like a executive recruiting company
but there was all sorts of public information out there that he was worked on the Toronto Harbor Commission
and then been involved in what the press called Cloak and Dagger campaigns where he was wasting public funds
you know he bragged about all the lawsuits he's been involved in so I think the Jerry saw through it
and you know look again sometimes you become really close with your clients and that's not always a great thing
I'm guilty of that a lot but these are wonderful people reclusive they give most of their money away to charity
and to watch these people get dragged through the mud for over a decade and you know there was evidence in the case that this is interesting
because I initially fought this on the day the first day of Jerry's selection they had been invited to go to Marlago and sit at the president's table for a Halloween party
it was just perspective jurors filling out questionnaires so the defense and it was really I think the attorneys for Chubb or for the lawyer that worked for Chubb
wanted to introduce evidence they got photos of the party and they wanted to introduce this evidence
and there was one day during the trial where they went to the White House because one of their close friends was appointed to be the ambassador for India
and they used that against them during the trial and I fought it tooth and nail and then I finally said you know what fuck it I'm gonna let it come in
I stopped fighting it and I knew that the jurors on their questionnaire filled out who they publicly admired most and least
two of them wrote they admired the president the most one of them said they admire him the least
so I really had to speak to that juror and say during my closing argument you know what they're doing here is they're trying to say that
her mother's reputation doesn't matter that she can't emote and suffer humiliation or public ridicule and that you should disregard her
because of who she's friends with who she votes for the fact that her husband was came here and literally with $200 in this pocket
and you know ascended it's though with the weird paradox about success you know you get there and people are like oh these fucking rich people
but these are like they represent the best in all of us lori promutter with her free times started to work at the gift shop at NYU
and because she liked the feeling of selling flowers and little gifts to people that were going through terrible times
and she ends up becoming a board member at NYU and they give 50 million dollars to start the promutter cancer center
I mean who among us wouldn't want to aspire to that and they were trying to say but she doesn't matter at one point she was asked the question
you know because with defamation your reputation is on the line right and you have to argue reputational damage
and they said boy isn't your reputation bound up in your husband's and they said this to a jury of like four or five women
and I thought what a dumb fucking thing to say in my opinion at least it was like and I was able to say to them during the closing
they're saying she doesn't matter and that she doesn't she's not her own person her reputation so it's like these little victories
help restore my faith in the system because if billionaires can get awarded 50 million dollars which is what they got awarded
I think that that's the jury saying her reputation mattered and not only did her reputation matter
but it mattered to the point where you can't just tear somebody down when you know the facts
which seems so insane that he would pursue that I mean the guy literally owns the ike promutter center for legal justice
like yeah I'm gonna test that I mean I'm gonna test that justice just bullshit my way I mean the irony of that is that the center was born out of their experience in this case
really yeah the center was born out of at one point I was offered this role to start a new post conviction center
up until four years ago five years ago I did work at the innocence project and when I was offered this position at the same law school of Cardoza law
where the innocence project was born they said if you get that role the promutors we're gonna fund it for the first 10 years
because we realized that if you're wrongfully accused in this country of a crime you didn't commit
if you don't have the resources to fight it like we did that you're really in trouble
and for them to have that kind of insight while going through this you know it's it's remarkable
I'm indebted to them for life I mean they've become like surrogate family to me but yeah the center was born out of their experience in this case
so good came out of it does the guy have the money to pay them I don't know I don't know but I'm gonna find out
about you know we have post trial motions that the judge has to decide and then you know once we get hopefully we get the judgment entered
Ike is not the guy to pick a fight with he was standing up for his wife's honor really and look sometimes you pick a fight with the wrong person and what do they say you fuck around and find out
there's a lot of people that fuck around a lot until they find out and it sounds like this guy might have been one of those people
I don't know I don't know I mean perhaps perhaps allegedly it just seems like there's people that are involved in conflict
they're whole fucking life man and they never get out of that pattern I don't get it yeah unhealthy people they develop a pattern
they develop a pattern of thinking and behaving you know
well I don't know if it's the empath in me but I try to see like what are you thinking why can't you realize I've gone down the wrong path let me course correct
and you just end up with theories I mean look I um I can understand why a former detective might be concerned about liability so they can't just say well
here's what I was up to all this time I guess I can understand that but I could understand the thinking and not just saying I've gone down the wrong path
and some people start to believe their own lies I think some people start to believe their own theories human psychology is like it's vast and abstract and so complicated
it varies varies from individual to individual what they can justify what they can sort of rationalize in their head
there's only been like a handful of cases where I was like yeah that can't be there's some there's got to be something missing from that story that you're not telling me but watch this
two officers in 1998 were on patrol in New York City in Brooklyn I'm picking Avenue gunfire breaks out and literally as they're rolling down the street the gunfire breaks out one of the officers looks to his left and sees the muzzle flash of the gun
that was used to kill this young man Trevor Vera he exits the patrol car draws on the man and says drop the gun
the guy's pointing the gun still that was used to shoot Trevor Vera and there's a tense moment and this officer has testified that there was a 14 year old girl in the area
or he otherwise would have shot the guy so he literally catches the murderer with the gun smoking in his hand why use that expression over the past two decades oh it's the smoking gun
this is the fucking smoking gun he finally drops the gun his name is at water at water Rodriguez he's put in handcuffs and you know you get documents as you're going through the discovery process during post conviction
you get it from the prosecutor from the police and there's a radio call by a serge a detective that says perps in custody contemporaneous with the arrest they arrest two men one guy standing next to him and the guy that at water Rodriguez that shot the gun
he's placed under arrest he's brought to the precinct and he's delivered into the arms of no other than one of the most corrupt sadistic detectives to ever work homicide in Brooklyn in my opinion Louis Scarcella
no why should that name sound familiar to you or to others because Louis Scarcella is the guy that frame Derek Hamilton who's the deputy director of the pro-mother center for legal justice a cardozo
Louis Scarcella and his partner I think his name is Chimble or Chimble Chimble it's CHMIL these guys were so notorious for framing people for murders they didn't commit that there have been 21 cases where people's convictions were vacated
where they were the lead detectives 21 Derek's is one of them so at war at war Rodriguez is delivered to the precinct smoking gun in his hand and a couple of hours later
he's brought to the home of Nelson Cruz who was 17 years old at the time 16 turning 17
and it's the story of these cops that while he was in the precinct that he was yelling and screaming and tearing the place up I didn't do it
Nelson Cruz did it he shot him and ran and dropped the gun and I just picked it up the officer that arrested him never saw Nelson Cruz he didn't see someone shoot and drop a gun the story is literally ludicrous
Nelson Cruz is arrested and charged with murder so when I heard the story I was like there's no fucking way that this is what happened you're leaving something out and I then read the trial transcript
there's another guy that shows up at the precinct named Andre Belinger and Andre Belinger says yeah I saw Nelson Cruz do it too
and he shows up at the precinct and he's told what kind of gun was used he's told that Nelson Cruz is the suspect and then he picks him out of a lineup after being told we're going to put Nelson Cruz in a lineup
all three of those things are gross violations of investigatory practices and this has been established for decades so this guy ends up
put on trial and they somehow claim that they don't have they can't locate this guy that is saying that he witnessed the crime they can't locate him he's not around to be located
so this the person who had the gun in his hand that is shooting the gun who they believe who who says Nelson Cruz did it and Nelson Cruz's trial he's nowhere to be found
wouldn't you think that the prosecutors would put that man at word or Rodriguez on the stand so he could explain how he picked up the gun he could explain what did you see you saw Nelson Cruz do this and he ran and dropped the gun
and he's never put on the stand it's like a three day trial the only person put on the stand that claimed to have been a witness is this guy Andre Belinger
so I mean some people have like bad luck shitty luck or cataclysmic fucking apocalyptic bad luck and Nelson Cruz just happens to have won that shit lottery
Nelson Cruz ends up before a judge about eight years ago and about six years ago and it's a post conviction hearing
and this guy Andre Belinger who claims that he watched Nelson Cruz do it is outed as a liar
there are eyewitnesses that were with him that night who said he wasn't at that murder scene he was like blocks away with me
he was outed as a liar on so many different occasions it becomes like it would become laughable if it wasn't so serious
after these post conviction proceedings during which twenty some odd witnesses were called the courtroom is packed on the day of the decision because the expectation amongst the press
and then the legal community is Nelson Cruz is about to get exonerated this judge had exonerated people that had been investigated by Louis Scarsela
and she's acting kind of weird and erratic and she rules against Nelson Cruz and contradicts herself on multiple occasions
and this is in 2019 and we later or 2020 and we later learn she never takes the bench again and she resigns because she has advanced stage Alzheimer's disease
and I have an affidavit that from an investigator that says her husband said that she had been suffering from these symptoms for years before
there was a judicial complaint filed because she wasn't showing up to court there's a pro-publica article about it about this whole debacle
and you know it's stories like this and it's so the pro-mother center for legal justice is working on the case
and you know thankfully we're before the conviction integrity unit in Brooklyn and it's led by a really special guy
Eric Gonzalez is the district attorney in Brooklyn and he listens to these cases he has a real conviction integrity unit so I'm hopeful that once we present the case to them
that we'll get him some relief but to think about he was paroled in 2023
he's a mess he walks around nervous he's got terrible anxiety and parents a wonderful guy and he's so stone cold innocent and you just wonder how and why this shit can happen to someone
and you know it's like the perfect constellation of like you got this these crooked detectives who have already been found to have ruined a bunch of people's lives
you have the smoking gun found in the hand of the murderer who mysteriously disappears and if you're wondering so why why did they believe this guy
how does he go to the precinct and he raises hell and says Nelson Cruz didn't I picked up the gun even though there's no evidence of that
what would be your guess?
well he's probably some sort of a witness than something else it was pretty well known back of the time that Louis
Garcella while their detectives in Brooklyn homicide and all the burrows had informants
I mean that's my best guess why else would you just believe and they've gone as far as to try to discredit their own
and say well Piotty must not have seen him drop the gun and run this guy has been consistent throughout
he hears the gunfire looks sees the muzzle flash he literally witnesses the murder
so you know there was an F there was a joint FBI task force with the NYPD going at the time so yeah they relied on informants
where what's the state of the guy who actually committed the murder currently he's out she's he's running around the streets who knows where he is
so if your guy gets exonerated does this guy get tried no that very rarely happens that fair I mean
so that guy just committed murder and he's free oh that's happened you know how many times that's happened to anyone that's done post conviction work
so you but you don't even think that's a possibility you're just dismissing it like no the murderer is going to go free
yeah because in order for me to expect that that would happen will be to defy logic as I know it in this world
because think about what happens if you municipality admits we did something horrible and it was a mistake
and we did the wrong thing there's going to be a civil rights lawsuit I mean look to Brooklyn's credit with this DA
they have done that and done the right thing but in terms of then going after the person that they think did it
you know it's 2000 almost 26 and this crime happened in 1998 it's 30 years later to be able to reassemble the witnesses
and some of whom are probably dead or hard to find but it's very rare that once there's an exoneration
and you're able to point to who the true killer is very rare that
law enforcement will go after the person that defense council has established actually did it
that's insane is it yeah because if the defense council has ruled that this other guy is innocent
and that the police officer did see the guy execute that person how do you not try that person with murder
now you're stumbling into the how could that the how could that be of our legal justice system
it just it doesn't happen I mean Clemente Aguirre who I've talked about before who was exonerated from death row
you know if there's any doubt about this phenomenon of children killing their parents
I think that that was laid to rest a few days ago it happens happens a lot more than
than was recently publicized you know the real killer was the daughter of this of her mother
and her grandmother Clemente Aguirre gets you know charged put on death row
and in the middle of his retrial you know she all but confessed on the stand to me
they have her blood mixed with her mother's blood at the crime scene and in a trail
leading to the bathroom where the killer cleaned up she confessed on six or seven different occasions
not under duress not the law enforcement to various people around town
she's roaming the streets the day the Clemente got exonerated
I you know like I said you know I think I might have quoted like Jim Morrison I'll say there's a killer on the
Rome and she's in Kentucky and you better go get her you know and they were like
ah objection as well you know but yeah it happens I mean it's my belief that she's
she's stone-cold guilty and they haven't gone after her and that happens a lot
I mean look the word exoneration is thrown around but it's like Derek's case is rare
he was declared actually innocent sometimes the conviction gets vacated
sometimes it um you know they decide not to retry the person and agreed a time served
but you're pushing a massive boulder up a steep hill every time
Nelson Cruz should not have to carry this weight around anymore he's had
other lawyers that have done a great job representing him you know we've come in
now how much time did he wind up doing 26 years Jesus yeah it's horrifying
Jesus I mean when you've done so much time that you've paroled out and are still trying to prove your innocence
Jesus oh I hate to give you indigestion I mean but it's this is like I'm past
tears at this point I'm more like we just got to keep going and keep fighting
when you get these little victories here and there like we've had a few releases
recently that were super encouraging where you're able to get people a second chance
where you're able to you know get get it to the point where they could
even though they didn't do it plead guilty we just had a release
she was actually my co-counsel in the Clemente a Geary case
a Marry Palmer and her client pled guilty but we believe he's innocent he did it to get out he had done
24 years and he had enough but for hard to get it to the place where he could even plead guilty
after serving all that time you know innocent people plead guilty all the time
yeah they do just to get a lighter sentence
yeah it's a dirty business you're in buddy
filthy it's filthy and it's got all these tentacles
because if you're doing post-conviction work
it's not just the wrongfully accused and convicted it's also you know we do clemency work
commutations and partens we you start to wait into the human mess
and you see that like people have made mistakes
and are worth a second chance what they do with it is up to them
but some of the stuff you can't explain some of these prosecutions are political
look I'm dealing with the case right now that's like at the intersection of wrongful conviction
and what the fuck are we doing with our immigration policy in this country
and I don't even want to mention his name because I don't want to you know
or the state because I don't want to sacrifice the good work that we're doing to get him a public hearing
but I can say this much
this is a guy from Albania that came to this country in the early 70s
and had to sit in a refugee camp in Italy
for them they're a month under horrid conditions just to come here to try to live a life
he's in his early 20s he's at a gas station
he has a hundred dollar bill for five dollars of gas
he goes into the gas station the guy takes the hundred dollar bill he doesn't have change
he says when you get five dollars come back I'm gonna hold on to this hundred dollar bill
and they get into an argument
he won't give him back the hundred dollar bill
so he leaves and goes to get his brother
and he tells his brother about it
they return to the gas station they have a gun in the back seat of their car
his brother tells him you stay here I'm gonna go in and try to talk some sense into this guy
get your money back give him five bucks my client sitting in the car and gunshots erupt
he goes in the back seat gets the gun goes around to the side comes into the gas station
it comes into the you know the remember back in the 80s where they you would go in to pay
and it would be like a little a little front desk area
and the gas station attendant is holding the gun and he looks to his left and his brother is bleeding out
the gas station attendant had shot his brother in the stomach
still holding the gun shaking he shoots him one time dead
shoots the gas station attendant dead
his brother miraculously survives and he's put on trial for murder
and he goes to trial the first time memories in his early 20s
and it's a hung jury most of them are in favor of acquittal
goes to trial a second time and gets convicted
the judge must have seen that this was damn there as close to self defense as it gets
he got sentenced to like four to seven years he was out and just under four years
he had become an accomplished boxer in prison
he's lived the last 51 years of his life without so much as a traffic ticket
he goes to New York joins the union as a super for buildings
he pays taxes social security pays into his pension
builds a life for himself has five kids eight grandchildren
and he's living in upstate New York
leaves the country a couple of years ago to go to Albania to see family
comes back and gets stopped at the border
somehow is not detained at the border but they start removal proceedings on him
because there is no he's not but he's a green card holder
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he's exactly who we would want in this country
a guy that comes here and by the way I want to mention the state
there are self defense laws that did not exist then
many states have stand your ground laws I think under different circumstances
he doesn't even and if the laws had evolved he doesn't even get charged
I mean you see your brother shot and the facts are not in dispute about this
I've researched it exhaustively
you know isn't that the type of person we want who has contributed to this society
for 51 years and built a family
what what happened with the brother and the attended
they got into an argument and he called the attendant called him some
some slur against Albanians and they started to argue and he just shot him on the stomach
there's this isn't even it's not in dispute at all what happened
and there's a law that if you committed a violent crime you're removable
but for 51 years he was not removed from this country
and he lived here as a green card holder
and he paid taxes and he built a family in a life
and now this removal was all during the Biden administration
no unfortunately it was during the Trump administration
when he was first asked at the airport
and they flagged him I believe it was during the Biden administration
but no enforcement action was taken
it was during the current and this isn't an indictment of the president
this is just during the current administration that they started removal proceedings against him
to try to have him removed from the country
so did they just go through all the old cases and find out anybody that had any sort of a violent offense
I believe I believe that that's what happened
nobody knows but that's what I believe happened
so again I made the mistake or maybe it's a virtue at this point
I'm getting to know this family and I've met every sibling
there's two boys and three girls and they're literally like some of the most wonderful people I've ever met
I wish I didn't like them as much as I did
and I stay in close contact with one of the I mean I guess I could give first names
with one of the sons Anthony and his sister Joanna and to see the love that they have for their father
and the fear that they're living under that this man could get deported and sent to Montenegro
why Montenegro?
because that's where you get sent if you're Albanian, if you have Albanian citizenship
why there though? I think that's the protectorate of Albania at this point
so and to watch them they went to one removal proceeding and the judge
I have the transcripts of the proceeding and the judge is like saying to the prosecutors
at one point he says what are you doing here?
he starts speaking Albanian to my client
and look I don't know immigration law that well not an immigration lawyer
but I spoke to the immigration lawyer and he's like look I'm afraid that they're going to take him
I mean ICE is waiting outside courthouses
and they're going to take this guy he's in his 70s
take him away from his family and his grandchildren
so again you don't just see these wrongful conviction cases
you see cases that are like this man has built a life
and if you start to get beneath the surface and you see the pain and agony
fear that people are living
they're living it day to day
we were able to get a delay into February for his removal proceeding
so I'm now trying to get him pardoned
because if he gets pardoned there's no basis upon which to remove him
and you know we have a team in my center that's working on it
and you want these are the kind of people you want to fight for
once you get to know them
so there's like I don't want to just tell nightmare after nightmare
but the reason why it's important I think for people to hear this
is it's not just what you're seeing on TV or what you're hearing about
I mean what basis do we have to remove a grandfather
who's lived here for 50 years and contributed to this society and paid his taxes
and paid into social security and was part of a union
and just like I'm looking for a flaw
I really am I'm looking for like a reason for me not to like them
and I just get drawn in more and more
they're just wonderful people
and these are the kinds of things that are like worth fighting for
I think what's going on with ICE is one of the things that's going on
with quotas for speeding tickets and things along those lines
is that they have numbers that they want to achieve
and they've openly talked about this that they want to remove a certain amount of people per week
and when they do that I think everything's on the table
then they start showing up at home depot
instead of like looking for gang bangers looking for criminals and cartel members
they go to whatever's easiest pickings so they can get numbers up
there's you know Ed Calderon do you know who he is?
he's he worked he was a Mexican military guy
who now is an American citizen but he reports extensively on the cartels
and just was telling me some horror stories about ice rates
and one of them was they took this guy who'd been brought over here when he was a baby
but didn't have American citizenship his family you know came over here legally
lived here for 20 years can't speak Spanish
they deport them send them to Tijuana
can't speak Spanish can't speak Spanish does not speak Spanish
he is essentially an American citizen he just never lived anywhere else
he just doesn't have the paperwork
he's not a criminal they send him over to Tijuana
and now he's still living Mexico
he doesn't know what the fuck to do he's on the streets
there's no idea it doesn't have any money
yeah I don't understand I wish that there was
it's sort of a black box immigration
in terms of what is
what the policy exactly is
and why do you want to continue
this narrative that seems to be again
more of a human rights issue than a political issue
like what is the endgame here?
the endgame is to get as many illegals out as they can
because so many were brought in over the last four years
well that's a fair argument
I understand that
but do we want to be getting rid of seven-year-old men
that really I mean I got to tell you
I have an older brother
and if someone did something like that to him
I can't tell you I wouldn't have done the same fucking thing
of course
almost anybody who has family would say that
go and you see your brother shot
and you know the whole circumstances surrounding it
yeah
so I just don't
and it's not
these immigration judges I've come to learn don't have much flexibility
you know they're
hard and fast statutes about
whether or not someone is considered removable
and you know my appeal is really to the prosecutors
like why are you doing this but then they're following orders
from someone above them that's telling them
this is your case you're assigned to it
to the best job you can
so that kind of shit just rolls down hill
unfortunately
and you know I try not to
I try not to wear this
from my own mental health I'm trying to keep
the empath in me
and check a little bit more because
but sometimes it's difficult like Nelson's case
this case that I'm talking about
the reason I'm not using names in that case
I don't want to alienate there's great people
in the state that this happened in which wasn't New York
that I think actually care
and have shown that
this doesn't seem right
and we want to make sure that you get a public hearing
I'm confident that we will before February
and I like my chances if we do because I think that the story
he's worth pardoning
he's worth saving
but you know I don't
I don't understand
I mean that's what I what I meant by this human mess
it's like I wish there was a more transparent process
of how and why people get pardoned
certainly on the state and on the federal level
I don't get it
well I mean the
the nuttiest thing is that the president can pardon people
that you can just decide
because you're the president
or the governor
you can just decide this person
I like them
it's an amazing
responsibility
and it's kind of an awesome power to have
and how you go about exercising it
becomes challenging right
well it gets real weird
like how about during the Biden administration
when some of them Biden clearly didn't even sign the pardons
it was all auto pen
and he had the most pardons of any president ever
so you have political influence
you have people that would like to get someone pardoned
you know someone inside
you think you can make this happen
well he's pardoned 9,000 people
let's just throw that one in there
I mean I don't think he's
I don't really know the auto pen issue
that well
I don't know if he saw those didn't see them
I don't know what
it's like organized chaos
for every presidency
you know Bill Clinton pardoned people
at the end of his terms
that fucking bananas
when you look at them
Biden did it with his son
you know the bottom did it with his
family members that weren't even accused of pardoned
I don't even know that that was a thing before
it never was
he did it with Fauci
preemptive back to 2014
yeah listen
I don't
some of the pardons that the current administration issues
are like good for him
others are like head scratchers
and you're like what the fuck
but like I you know
what makes
one person deserving
and another not
is a difficult thing to understand
like I have
I've been to the White House
I've advocated for pardons
it's a frustrating
experience because you know
that there are thousands of people doing the same thing
and you try your best to say
this is why this case
means something
but where it goes from there is hard to understand
I think I have tremendous respect for
an admiration of the current pardons are
Alice Johnson
because she's been there before
you know she was actually incarcerated
and pardoned by the president
and she's now in that role as the pardons are
who is she pardoned by
President Trump
wow during his first preempt
and she's
what was she wrongfully accused of?
some drug offense
and she did a ton of time
and she's gone on to become this amazing
not just human being
but advocate for people to get second chances
and he designated her
the pardons are
now I think between her
and getting to the president
and making her case for pardons
is difficult because there's layers of influence
in between
but you know I have
I have cases before
them right now that
have very prominent people backing them
and you know you would hope
that they end up
you know
on his desk
and seeing
getting some relief
I have one client
that I know Mike Tyson
is backs him publicly
privately
he was a childhood friend of his
his name is Spencer Bowens
and you know
he's one of many people
that were sentenced under these crazy
regimes of like
let's weigh
let's weigh the drugs
so what's heavier
crack cocaine
cocaine
what's heavier
heroin or crack
heroin
so they start to weigh
and what's more destructive
crack was pretty damn destructive
and you know
Spencer has been in prison
for more than three decades
and he would have been out
if these nutty drug laws
didn't exist
and if they applied retroactively
since they have been
abolished
and he's a guy that's sitting in there
and I speak to
and I start to lose hope
I don't lose hope
I start to feel his hopelessness
over the phone because
he should have been granted
relief in the courts
and he's someone that just
really really deserves
a bunch of cases like that
where we're trying so hard
and you have to at the same time
at the same time you express
you know confidence
in the people
that are responsible
for this stuff
but you also want to make sure
that you're not offending them
by saying look I know you have a bunch of cases
Emory
Emory Jones is another one
you know I do a lot of work
and Jay-Z we have a found
he has a foundation
I have one and we mentor college students
together in the summer
pay for their last year
of college
and Emory is a childhood friend
of Jay-Z's
and has his full support
rock nation
you know Jay-Z's company
there behind him
and he's another one
that was convicted
for some drug crime
and he's come out
and checked every box
he's a mentor
he's a pillar of the community
he's done so many amazing things
but he's under the weight
of this old conviction
and he's denied job opportunities
and you know
you just got to keep pushing
and keep fighting
and hopefully you're timing is right
and you speak to the right person
well yeah
but the odds are so
the odds are so
I don't want to say stacked
against you but yeah
it's who you know
who has influence at that particular time
but the right person
the administration
what kind of punishments are there
for people like the
corrupt guy in Brooklyn that you were talking about
whatever happened to him
he's roaming the streets
and
and look that's the most
you know the
cop Lewis Carcella
he denies any
I mean in the face of these 21 cases
that have been vacated he denies any wrongdoing
so 21 different people
21 he incarcerated them
yeah and you know
you know one of the things that I'm thinking
might be a good idea
because we can all go on the internet
and look the shit up
internet I bet you there's a Wikipedia page
that talks about his
corruption and lists all the people
we can all go on the internet
one of the things that I think has been
um
underused
and
I think should be
part of people's calculus
rather than reading a headline
listening to me
or you or anyone
you know
you know
I mean
I don't
I don't know what better way there is
if you want to say
well what actually happened
what happened at this person's trial
that you're
and why do they deserve
a second chance
listen there's
a dear friend of mine
who runs an amazing organization
which is called
"The Normal Alliance"
her name is Jessica Jackson
fantastic lawyer
and
I mean as in
is in though
the bowels of the system
fighting for change
and right now there's
a bill that
the president's own polster
forget the guy's name
has found that
and
it's actually a system that rewards people
for when they get out
for doing the right thing
so that if you want
to make sure that you are
you know when you get out
there are terms of your supervision
how many times you check in
when they're
parole or probation officer
how often are you being subject to drug tests
is there an end in sight
this act
actually is a merit system
and it's heavily supported
by Republicans
by Democrats
by everyone in between
and you would hope that something like that
would get passed
and get pushed through
because the Saper Supervision Act
is a way that we can
reward people for doing the right thing
and hold people accountable
that aren't doing the right thing
when they get out
but your question
is this
they have immunity
to one of the most frustrating things
in the world is that
most of the time
qualified immunity applies
I mean I could see
immunity for a mistake
perhaps
but if there's a pattern
and it's clearly corruption
and you have a person
that is taking away people's freedom
how is there not a crime committed
convicted
or at least charged with crimes
well listen
for those
listeners that want to get involved
in the process
and actually make a difference
you gotta get involved
this isn't just like
activists speak
you can make a fucking difference
the person that ends up
in a position
to actually
have a party
executive clemency
whether it's a governor
or a president
you should be a little more invested
I mean I had this situation
I gave this guy every benefit
of the doubt
and I thought I made a breakthrough
and
this is almost sadistic
I think
and I'm sure I'll get a bunch
of hate mail about this
I went through this process
with Governor DeSantis and Florida
and
I think he was actually
fucking with me
to be honest with you
and he listened to the cases
of favor
and there's a public hearing
of
the clemency board
and this guy's name is Michael Giles
and again
read the transcript
as a matter of fact
I brought a passage
to read here
this is another mind-bender
this guy's in the air force
he is in Tampa
he ends up
taking leave for the weekend
and goes up
from Tampa to fam you
in Tallahassee
never been there before
he has a
firearm that he's licensed to carry
he actually went into a police station
to get his carry license
military guy
never been in trouble in his life
goes up to Tallahassee
and a massive fight breaks out
in this club where they're at
literally
zero testimony that he has
anything to do with this fight
the fight spills out
into the parking lot
and it's being instigated
by one guy
and this guy that's
instigating the fight was thrown out of the club
and his own friends testified
in the trial we were afraid he was going to hurt
someone bad
my client Michael Giles
ends up in a car
with the people he came there with
waiting for the person that
had the keys to the car
to come out and emerge
from this melee
and this fight is going on all around him
people testified
they were petrified
and he takes his gun
and puts it in his pocket
he's standing there
like on the outskirts of this fight
after he gets out of the car
and goes to look for his friend
that has the keys to the car
no ignition key
and he gets sucker punched
and the guy that punched him
says yeah
I look for the first person I could
don't take it from me
here's what he said
at the trial
here's what he said
at the trial
first of all
his friends are testifying
that he was
at that this man was acting
quote crazy
that they were afraid he was going to
quote attack someone
he was excited and acting crazy
and talking and cursing
and upset and agitated
were you concerned that he was
going to attack someone
question answer yes I was
or get in a fight
answer yes I was
that's why I told him to leave
and that's why he was told to leave the club
because he was wanting to fight
someone isn't that correct
witnesses testify
quite question
you saw Courtney Thrower
this is the guy that punched
my client
jump on the individual
with the plaid shirt didn't you
the guy with the plaid shirts
my client yes I did
your testimony is Courtney Thrower
leapt and attacked Mr. Giles
from the front
that was the thing
Courtney then leaps toward Mr. Giles
and takes a swing at his face
and it goes on and on
and on that he took a running start
left his feet
and punch my client in the face
and look there's a melee going on
so he's on the ground
after getting punched
and the person that punched him
didn't hold back
he was asked at the trial question
Mr. Thrower is at your testimony
that you ran with your entire
body to strike this person
answer yes
question so you at a full runner
a sprint use the weight of your body
to impact this person in the head
answer yes question
was it your intention to knock him out
answer yes it was
question
and is there any doubt
in your intention answer no
question had this person
actually done anything to you
at any time whatsoever
answer physically
directly
no
question was it your intent to hurt
this individual answer
yes that's normally what you do
when you punch someone
so on those facts
as my client is laying on the ground
and there's a melee going on
where people are getting punched
and kicked
the fight at that point
to take his gun out
and shoot himself defense
he shoots this guy
in the leg
and fragments of the bullet
hit two other people
that's the case
that's it
he is sentenced under Florida's
mandatory minimum
to 25 years in prison
25 years
he's been in for 15 years
I have gone to visit him
he is the only client
that I've ever represented
that has never got a ticket in prison
what is a ticket
you know
didn't listen to a corrections officer
and they said get against the fucking wall
you didn't have
you know
you didn't follow the rules
you didn't do that
not a ticket
so
various powerful people
that know the governor
finally got him to listen
now before I got involved in the case
the family was told
that the governor was prepared to grant him clemency
and traveled to Tallahassee
the day that they thought he was going to get released
and were told on that day
he changed his mind
so
I knew this all going in
I went
and I appeared at a clemency hearing
and
I was as
what do they say
your
words escaping me
when you're not subservient
but you're
I'm trying to think
articulated the right way
I mean
I was not only respectful
but
you know
I understood the gravity of what I was asking for
this is a governor that has never granted clemency
commuter dissentance to someone that was currently incarcerated
and
you know
he went through a laundry list of things that he would like me to do
his parents live
Michael Giles parents live
he's that's the name of my client
Michael Giles
his parents live in Georgia
could you con the governor
could you get in touch with the state of Georgia
I mean this is all at a public hearing
it's online
and see if their governor has any problem
with abiding by the terms of release
you want me to contact the governor of
okay
submit a supervised release plan
that is exhaustive
and runs all the way through the term
that he would serve out his incarceration
so that he should be on supervised release for another 10 years
contact this one
contact that one
so I learned on good information
that the governor
was like he'll never be able to get all that done
I got it all done
I had people help me
went to the governor spoke to the governor in Georgia
he said yeah of course
we'll abide by it
there's something called the interstate compact
states have to abide by each other
as supervision requirements
when someone goes from one state to another
this had the support
of John Ashcroft
Mike Mckit right-wing Republicans
that otherwise wouldn't support this sort of thing
it was like
I had a list of like 40 people
former U.S. attorneys
it got so much that the
the head of the Florida commission of offender review
they gave him a positive
recommendation
to get out super rare
the attorney general was in support
everyone was in support
a week before I was told
we're going to
grant him relief
they actually had me
speaking to the prison
to transport him up to the clemency hearing
we were down to whether
he would be able to change into a suit
because at the public hearing governor
DeSantis said I want to actually look at him
eye to eye
and at the last second
for no fucking articulated reason
he said you know what I've changed my mind
that's
that is
brutal
it's evil in my opinion
and it's precisely why
you know sometimes the king has to show mercy
and it's precisely why this
this guy is not very popular
I don't think
and I ask this because it's relevant
does Michael Giles
get prosecuted if he's not a tall black man
I don't think so
the prosecutor
that prosecuted him
I'm not calling him anything I'm giving you the facts
the prosecutor that prosecuted him
went through a DOJ investigation
because
something was found in his office
he's been in a panic
residence for harsher punishment
a whistleblower took a photo of it
it was a memo
hanging over a water cooler
it's all over the place
it's all online you can read about it
and he had to enter into some agreement
with the department of justice
how's it phrased
how's it phrased
how's this the determination to
if prior criminal history
or Hispanic
oh yeah you can pull it up
his manual history is the same
as just being in his head
oh yeah this is this is the south
I mean it's it's out there
his name is his name is
jack Campbell
I mean
that is so crazy that
there's a
there's a prior criminal history
is equal to being
I don't think it said equal
I love to see Hispanic
there's a whistleblower that took a picture of it
and then he
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this is a global operation
it's an international state
LAPD has agreed to help the FBI
track down their risk targets
last thing like a day in the job
to remind you how quickly life can change
the situation
and then you can see
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and then you can see
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there's no humanity there
and you know the craziest part about it is that
you know the craziest part about it is that
you know the craziest part about it is that
you know the craziest part about it is that
you know the craziest part about it is that
you know the craziest part about it is that
you know the craziest part about it is that
you know the craziest part about it is that
you know the craziest part about it is that
you know the craziest part about it is that
you know who you'll meet
and why this is all
to me human rights issue
the only person that gave me a sympathetic year
when I would go to Florida
before I lived there
before I lived there
in the last gubernatorial election. And she's like, the fascinating part about it is that this is like a woman that dedicated herself to public service. And she's a major marijuana advocate.
Legalizing marijuana has been her mission for so many years. She's on the board of normal. She'd be an awesome guest because she became super unpopular in Florida.
Because of her stance on legalization of marijuana. And, you know, she was attacked over it about how weed is a gateway drug.
Somehow in the minds of, you know, people that don't get it, that it's some like pathway to heroin addiction.
And, you know, medicinal marijuana, you know, cannabis for healing, all of those things, she's been a major advocate for. And she told me, you're being strung along.
After she was out of office, she's now the head of the, I think she's the head of the Democratic Party for Florida.
Wonderful woman. She's like, you're gonna get strung along. I said, no, watch, watch. I'm gonna be the first one to get a clemency from someone. And he still can do it.
Why won't he? Fuck knows. And it's, you know, I have to talk to Michael's mom. And I have to talk to him. And it's like, you know, you run out of words.
And, yeah, it's not, not just is this a dirty business heartbreaking, you know.
It's, oh, that's gotta be particularly hard for you. You are a very sensitive guy. It's, which is odd. You're a very empathetic guy, which is odd for a lawyer.
You know, usually lawyers eventually develop some sort of a show just to don't let enough in. You get hurt too many times. Even if you start out empathetic, you eventually develop a thick skin.
Listen, I'm a cryer. And I don't hide that. And...
That's why you're able to do the kind of work you do because you still are sensitive to this and you still are empathetic despite all the shapes seen.
Well, I mean, look, I have to be, I don't think you're good. I used to think that it was something to shrink from. In other words, that because it becomes, it becomes a heavy cross the bear when you start wearing other people's hurt and emotions.
And, you know, I've found myself sometimes inferring the people feel a certain way when they don't. And I have to make sure that I'm careful about that.
I mean, my son Carter is like, he's 13. He's going to be 14 in April. And I sometimes feel like... I have to be careful with the empathy because sometimes I'll be reliving some traumatic event from my childhood.
And I'll think, oh, he must feel this way at this point in time at 13. And I'm imputing an emotion to him that isn't there. And sometimes I'll do that with a client or their family.
And I've gotten better at it, but when you have to deliver hard news or bad news because there's so many, these exonerations, the commutations, the pardons, they're like each one of them is its own miracle.
Each one of them is, it's so hard, so hard to get it done. I got a pee, we're back.
So today, right before we started this, Trump rescheduled marijuana. So it's now schedule three. So it's in the same category as Tylenol.
Which is interesting. That's a compromise, right? It should be legal and regulated. That's what I think.
Isn't there been a stain on Tylenol though under this administration?
Yeah, sure. It's been a seed of benefit is responsible for at least 500 deaths a year. I read a horrible case about a lady who had COVID and she was struggling in pain, really hurting.
Keep taking Tylenol Tylenol is with coden coding. That's the schedule three.
Oh, okay Tylenol with coding Tylenol three. That's schedule three.
That's different. Different Tylenol, different regulars. So a seed of benefits.
How do you feel about it being rescheduled as a?
Well, it's better, you know, certainly it's better. I believe if it's rescheduled, what does that mean? It could be prescribed now, you know, and it can be prescribed state by state.
Even in Texas, there's some medical uses.
I feel like it should be like alcohol.
I think you should be of a certain age to be able to use it and I think it's not for everybody.
I think that's important that it isn't for everybody.
There are people that have very particularly vulnerable psychological states, mental constitutions, whether they have a history of mental illness or whatever, especially like high dose marijuana.
I think I'll experience and wrote about this in a book called, I think it's called Tell Your Children, and he highlights the instances of people that have schizophrenia breaks from high doses of THC.
And whether or not they would have had those schizophrenia breaks anyway, you know, we don't know.
There's a certain percentage of the population that just schizophrenia causes it. We don't know or we don't know clearly why something can cause it.
But you should be aware of those things, you know, it's not for everybody. I know a lot of people don't like it.
But I know a lot of people who do. A lot of people that enhances their life, it makes times more enjoyable, makes sex more enjoyable, and food more enjoyable, and fun times with friends.
It's like anything else. You can abuse everything, including exercise, you know.
I know a lot of people are addicted to exercise, and they overdo it, and people take CrossFit classes, and they go too hard, and they wind up getting robbed of my losis.
What is that? That's some kind of thing with your kidneys or liver or something.
Yeah, yeah. You literally, your muscle tissue breaks down faster than your body can heal.
I remember reading about it when I did CrossFit 15 years ago, whatever it was that I was like, "I'm not going that hard. I'm going to get that."
What's for psychos?
The David Goggins is the world. You know, I think he got robbed, went to the hospital, got out, and then completed his race.
Well, he's not human.
Yeah, he's a psycho. He's amazing.
I wonder how he runs and speaks at the same time.
Well, he's in sane shape. I mean, he does it every day. He runs 13 miles every fucking day, and then on top of that, he does a series of very rigorous workouts.
He does two or three workouts every day. Yeah.
I mean, he's a fascinating guy. He's awesome, but he's a great guy.
Stay hard. Great human being though. He really is. He's great to talk to, great to hang out with. I love him.
But point is, like, you can get addicted to video games, you can get addicted to gambling.
The gambling thing is a big argument. People use all the time, you know, because we, one of our sponsors is DraftKings, online gambling.
I think you should be able to gamble. I don't have a problem with it. Me personally. I don't have a problem with gambling, but I know a lot of people that do.
They shouldn't fucking gamble. You know, gambling is an evil addiction. You watch people get gripped by it. It's kind of crazy.
I've known quite a few people that have had gambling addictions, especially from my pool hall days.
That was just always around hardcore gamblers, and the boy, man, it might as well be heroin. It might as well be for those fucking people.
But I think you should be able to gamble. I know it devastates some people's lives, but their choices devastate their lives.
And there's help, and there's, you know, you should learn how to manage your mind.
I think you have to learn restraint in anything.
Yes, you can't in any state the whole fucking world. You know, you can't nerf every hard edge on the planet. It's not how it works.
I love that. I'm gonna steal that.
You know, listen, I do things that you can get hurt doing, and I think you should be allowed to do that.
I know people that have been very badly hurt doing martial arts, including competing. I did a lot of that. You should be able to do it.
You should be able to ride bulls. I don't want to ride a bull. You should be able to ride a bull.
I think one of the things about being a human being is much freedom as you can give people the better.
And also inform them about the dangers of whatever choices they make.
And inform them an informed ability to make a decision for themselves. This is what it means to be a free human being.
And you're gonna make some dumb choices and you're gonna make some dumb decisions. And that's okay.
That's how we all learn together collectively.
And I think marijuana is far better for you than alcohol.
It has legitimate medical uses, legitimate psychological uses. It relieves stress for a lot of people.
You can't criminalize something for something you don't agree with. It's crazy.
Also, the LD50 of it is off the fucking charts.
Literally, the only way to die from marijuana is it would take about a 50-pound package hitting you in the head from a CIA drug plane.
That's how you die.
What's an LD50?
Lethal dose at 50% of the population. It's very high. So if you're saying like for people's, if you're saying that marijuana should be illegal because it's dangerous.
Okay. Dangerous how?
When there's so many things that like we talked about Tylenol, which I fully support Tylenol being legally, you should be able to, if you're in pain, you can go get some Tylenol.
Cinnamon if it fucking kills people. Like I said, responsible for about 500 deaths a year.
And I was telling you about the COVID story. This poor lady, she was hurting because she had COVID. She kept taking Tylenol and didn't understand that you can't, there's an amount you can take and you should never take more than that.
And she had liver failure and she fucking died.
You know, of something that is, you know, it's horrible. So, but I think you should be able to take Tylenol. Just don't take enough to fucking kill you.
I think that's, that should be the case with alcohol. Same thing. I'm for legalization of alcohol.
When you make things illegal, all you do is prop up illegal people to sell those things to people that want it.
There is a demand, they will supply it. You know, this is the situation that we live in in this country when it in regards to heroin, regards to cocaine, regards to so many different things.
They're being supplied and they're being supplied and you're propping up these illegal cartels and these motherfuckers are killing people and they make it ruthless.
It's ruthless. And it's what happened during prohibition of alcohol in this country. What did it do? It propped up the fucking, the mafia.
And that's what they did. They sold alcohol. They propped up organized crime.
Yeah, I mean, we could learn something from countries in Europe that decriminalize not just marijuana, but other drugs.
Yeah.
And if you look at the statistics on, you know, the rate of crime, the rate of the incidence of overdose, it plummets.
Plummets, Portugal is an excellent example. Yeah.
But you know, the problem is when you all of a sudden make things legal that didn't used to be legal, that didn't used to be legal, you're going to have a bunch of people that abuse it.
They're going to say, oh, it's legal now. Let's go. And a bunch of people are going to do it. They don't do it. You'll have problems, but you know, you're taking the bandaid off.
You put a fucking bandaid on this country in the 1930s for something that doesn't hurt people.
Which is what?
Marijuana.
Oh, they did that in the 19th century.
And there was a vast conspiracy, by the way, the marijuana legalization thing, the illegalization of it is a vast conspiracy.
I don't know much about this backstory.
Okay. Well, I'll fill you in.
William Randolph Hearst, who owned Hearst Publications, also owned paper mills.
So popular science magazine on the front page, hemp, the new billion dollar crop.
And the reason why hemp was problematic before that was because hemp fibers.
Like a friend of mine used to grow marijuana and he had a hemp stalk on his desk and he's like, pick that up.
And you pick it up and it's hard like oak. It's hard like this table.
It's an oak table. It's hard like that, but it's light. Like Styrofoam. It feels like balsa wood.
I was like, this is crazy. He goes, yeah, it's like an alien plant. There's nothing like it.
Hemp fibers, incredibly durable.
And it makes a period of paper, it makes a period of clothing, canvas, all the great paintings were all made on hemp.
Oh, that's what canvas was made out of.
Light but very strong. Very strong. Very strong.
The first draft of Declaration of Independence was written on hemp fiber on hemp paper.
So hemp was used to make paper, was used to make cloth. It was used to make so many different things.
It was very difficult to do. Then Eli Whitney came out with the cotton gin. Well, cotton replaced a lot of the things that we made with clothing, replaced a lot of that.
It was a, it was an easier textile to process. Well, in 1930s, they came up with a new invention called the decorticator.
And the decorticator allowed them to effectively process hemp fiber much more easily.
So then popular scientists as Maxine.
Is it a machine? Yes. It's a machine. It's like a steel cylinder that has all these protrusions on it, and that would grind up the hemp fiber more easily.
Because before, it had to be done manually, and it's very time consuming. But the process was an incredible and very superior product.
So William Randolph Hearst recognizes this as a threat to his industry, because he owns paper mills, he owns forests that he's using to make paper out of.
Also, also, you should say that to make paper out of a forest, you have to chop down all those trees. It'll take 20, 30 years for them to grow back.
With hemp, you get a new crop every year. The same amount of land, you're processing four times as much paper, and you're, you can do it every year.
It's way more effective. So he starts demonizing this plant called marijuana, this new drug.
No, marijuana was not a name for cannabis. Marijuana was a name for a Mexican slang for wild tobacco.
So he just tags this name and starts calling hemp, which is just just the leaves on the hemp plant.
It's just the flower. The flower on the hemp plant. Yes. But it's also you can make and grow hemp that has no THC in it as well.
I believe it's, is it the female that contains THC and the male doesn't? Anyway, point is, so he, they sponsor all the refer madness films.
All those propaganda films, the 1930s, they start printing these stories about blacks and Mexicans that are raping white women after they take this new illegal drug.
So they pass laws on this drug, not even really understanding that they're making the, the textile, they're making the commodity hemp illegal or making it very difficult to regulate.
And so William Randoff hers gets together with Harry Anslinger and they, they do this. They also take all their police officers that, and all the people that they had used to process prohibition of alcohol and go after alcohol, you know, illegal alcohol sales.
And now they turn it to cannabis cannabis. And that's, we've, we've been stuck in that same horse shit since the 1930s.
So, self-interest plus profit incentive, add a dose of hysteria. And you have prehistoric lobbying that leads to the demonization of, I don't fucking get it.
I mean, this also nylon nylon was involved because, you know, they're using nylon for ropes because hemp was always used for ropes and now they have this new product.
So there was a lot of people that were involved in making sure that hemp was very difficult to acquire so that their, their commodity could thrive.
And then how many people suffered because of that? How many people were jailed? How many people died? How many, you know, how many people were incarcerated?
You're dealing with literally 90 years at this point. 90 years of bullshit. I don't know. And I, I, I do believe that there are some drugs that are so addictive that you start to lose your sense of free will.
I don't think weed is one of them. It's not to me. I wouldn't say it's not, it's one of them, it's not one of them to everybody. I don't know. I don't know.
I hear horror stories about people that are addicted to weed and can't get off of it. You know, I do sober October, pretty much every year. I didn't do it last year.
But we take off everything. We don't do anything. We usually do like a little fitness challenge with it. I've never had a problem. Stop doing it.
I got on these nicotine pouches. I like nicotine pouches during podcasts. Keeps my mind like popping. It's like it's a, it's a cognitive enhancer. And I was like, man, maybe I'm addicted to nicotine. When I vacation didn't bring any nicotine pouches. I had no problem.
You know, I'm happy I smoked a lot of weed in high school. A lot of weed. It was different though. For me, it was at least. It wasn't as strong.
Oh, yeah. And I've, I've got scientists involved now. His botanist know what the fuck I guess I want time smoked weed with Lennox and Jamaica. Oh, no.
And, and that should be the song. That's like a by the time by the time that blunt was being passed around four people when it came to me the second time I was like, the room when sideways on me, I could not fucking cope.
The furniture seems re-adjusted. And I've had other times where for me, I got to a point where I could not function on it. Yeah.
And the last time where I was like, this is just not for me anymore. Maybe I smoked too much of it in high school. I mean, almost every day was 15. But then I was at a casino. I was at the aria one time. And this must have been 15 years ago.
And I was playing craps. And I had taken like one or two toks. And I convinced myself that the guy at the other end of the craps table was an undercover officer that was going to frame me for something.
Fucking the lady next to me was stealing my chips. This guy was going to have me fucking hatcheted. And I ended up in the corner of the casino for literally two hours trying to collect myself.
And so you went too deep. I went. I mean, I was I was just too strong for someone who doesn't use it. See these there's a lot of people like my friend B real from Cypress Hill.
I can't I can't even watch the podcast because my blood pressure goes up when I watch how much weed these guys smoke him and and every last.
Yes. Yeah. Well, B real lives in the cloud. There's a lot of those dudes they call it living in the cloud. Like they're just high all the time. Well, B real has his own weed business.
And I did his show the hot box where you sit in a car. He has this dope like car that's set up as a studio. So there's like cameras inside the car.
And you just get obliterated because they're just constantly smoking in the car. I got out there. I just sit down for like two hours afterwards.
You were okay. I was okay, but I was just like cheese boys. You guys go fuck it. But that's the but the problem is for me with weed is that sometimes I've smoked it and been talking about as an adult.
Yes. Post 30. Yeah. Sometimes I'm been like, well, that was really great. And other times I've been like, I don't want to contemplate my existence tonight.
I've done that enough. I've done that enough. And it's all unanswerable questions. And I'm going to have a panic attack. Yeah.
Yeah. And one time I was on the platform at Penn station. And I started to like, you know, you get to that point when you're thinking about dying.
And we could talk death dying. And we could say it and talk about it. But I got to that that point where that fifth dimension wall crumbled.
And I was like, oh my god, I'm not going to exist one day. And I started to have a panic attack where I had to leave and go up on to eighth avenue and get some fresh air.
And I'm just like at this stage, I can't. I would have to be like, so what kind of weed is this? And how do you know? And I don't want to interrogate someone that just wants to get me high.
But here's the thing, if you don't get high a lot, and this is my message for everyone out there, if you go months and months and months without ever taking it, one hit, a small one, don't get crazy.
Don't get crazy. What if that one hit leads to nine hours of being high?
It shouldn't. It should for me. Well, it's like how much are you smoking? Like you must be taking a giant hit.
It also depends on like what kind of joint you have. Like there's crazy people like in California, they'll sell you a joint that's like a $50 joint. And this joint has key in it.
So it has all the resident, all the, you know, you'll give a grinder at the bottom of the grinder. There's a filter. And you have all this sticky CHC crystals.
They take those THC crystals and they put it inside with the marijuana and then they wrap the outside of the joint and they roll it in the THC crystal. It's like it's on the outside of it. And it's just a pathway to paranoia.
It's just a rocket ship to your inner monologue screaming in your ear.
I can't talk about it. It's scaring me. But it doesn't have to be like that. Have you ever got paranoid smoking?
Oh, yeah, it's part of the fun. I don't mind it. I like it because there's always some sort of a revelation that I get on the other end of it.
Like if I'm paranoid, there's always like a reason that there's a thing that's bothering me. Like what is that thing that fucked with you during that time?
And maybe there's a thing in your head that you need to address. But generally, if I'm in a good place and I get high, I feel great.
I must have been in a great place at like 15, 16 years old because get an eye back then and listen into Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and hearing the lyrics for the first time.
Be like, oh my God, someone else had that thought that I'm afraid to say and they put it down in lyrics and I'm not alone.
And you feel profound, you say profound things that aren't really profound. There's benefit to it. And I think that when you're young, also you don't have bills, you don't have obligations.
You just have to go to school. Your burden is so much lighter. When you're an adult and you have a family and you have business and you have things you have to do all the time and you have conflicts and all the stuff that's in your life, like kick it fuck with you.
But I think generally like for a lot of people, not for everybody, but for a lot of people, those moments of paranoia of just dropping the veil, it's probably beneficial.
Oh, I think that I think that in the long run, it opened the third eye of my mind at a time when and foster creativity and I think changed my perspective on the world, smoking that much weed.
I just got to a point where I was like, I can't parent on it. For me, you just have to know, you have to be mature enough and introspective enough and self-aware enough to know yourself. For me, it just didn't work anymore, just like drinking.
At some point, I was like, it's not worth the fucking pain. It just got too painful.
Right, but that's the decision that you should be able to make as a man or as a woman as an adult. Make that decision for yourself, decide what you want to take into your life or not, including all sorts of other things that are bad for you.
Like fucking processed food and sugar. Do whatever you want to do as long as you know what you're doing and which we should educate people on what these things are.
And the problem is with marijuana, there were so many years of lies. There were so many years of misinformation and it was just constantly put out there as propaganda.
And you know, this is your brain on drugs. Like, shut the fuck up.
Well, listen, I remember those commercials from being a kid and I remember one in particular where there's a father that finds weed dating myself in a son's room.
He said, where did you learn to do this shit? And he goes, I learned from you, dad.
And I remember thinking, my dad's a mother fucker. He's a bad guy because my dad was a big weed smoker.
And I would find it all the time. And I'm telling you, I think in my mind that commercial led me to thinking, Dad, you're a moral and look, you know, they poisoned a lot of people with those commercials.
But you know, me while your dad could be sitting there watching TV with a cocktail, you wouldn't think a damn thing about it.
My dad on weed was like an alcoholic with a whiskey bottle. Oh my God, that's it. That's it.
I do this stuff. You are right. I learned it by watching you.
Parents who use drugs have children who use drugs.
Jamie is a fucking wizard. Yeah, I know.
You know, my favorite one, though, is the girl in the dog starts talking to her.
Wait, before we get to that, you know how a song or a smell can have you tumbling back in time.
I'm like, I'm drunk on the stowager right now, like in the wrong.
Oh my God. This is my favorite.
I wish he didn't smoke weed.
You're not the same when you smoke. And I miss my friend.
I'll be outside.
How would you tell a friend like who fucking knows that one is evil signed off on that commercial.
First of all, I've never seen that is not on marijuana because if you were on weed and your dog started talking,
you would be like, what the fuck? You can talk. The first thing I thought when that started a roll.
I looked at Jamie. Why not? What did you put in my drink?
The dog is talking. The only other time I saw that was Mr. Ed.
Yeah, right? Well, or what's that movie zookeeper? All the animals talked.
Wow. Come on. This fucking ridiculous.
You know, when you peel the layer back, I had never known.
That one slipped through the cracks on me, the criminalization of weed and the backstory.
The backstory is really crazy.
It's crazy. And I remember, I remember a, um, a science teacher in high school telling me.
You don't think that they can make a tire that doesn't wear.
And then he told me this story about how all the big tire companies bought the patent for a tire that can't wear.
It has the same composition as same give and composition as rubber when it came to handling.
But it was a material that doesn't wear it. I just thought it was fucking crazy.
And now I believe that that's probably true.
It's probably locked in a vault somewhere because what would happen to good?
You're in firestone in the rest of those tires. You're telling me we could put a man on the moon
and hear conversations behind the walls of the Kremlin,
but we can't make a fucking tire that doesn't wear.
Well, I think one of those is true. But the other one, the thing about tires is that
a tire has to have a certain amount of softness to it in order for it to have traction.
When you have softness and then you have a rigid surface like asphalt,
you're going to have some of that tire is going to rub off on that rigid surface
because one is hard and one is soft. Just like when you take a file and you rub wood,
you're going to make sawdust.
You know, you would know about fucking tires.
Yeah, more I go given an example of something that I think is so out there
that there's no way this guy's going to, and you know about tire work.
I know a lot about tires because the softer the tire, the more traction you get on a racetrack.
So with a really good tire, you only have a certain amount of laps on a racetrack.
So the science teacher was bullshitting me basically?
The scientist teacher probably was right directionally that there are things like that
where they would hide patents to certain things and hide certain compounds
if they found out these compounds would compromise.
Like if you had something that people had to buy all the time, like light bulbs.
Here's a better example, light bulbs.
So there are light bulbs that have been in continuous use, like on continuously,
for 50, 60 years, and they don't burn out because these are original light bulbs.
The original light bulbs, they made the filaments much more durable.
And then they realized like, why would we do this?
Well, we could have these light bulbs just burn out and then you have to get a new light bulb.
And the filament would pop exactly.
Yeah, so I have a thread about this.
See if you can find those old light bulbs.
I think there's one that's been on continually for an extraordinary amount of time.
Decades.
120 years.
120 years.
Let's see that light bulb.
So if you look at the light bulb, and you see the filaments of that light bulb,
you realize, oh, they could have just built light bulbs like this from the beginning.
And instead of paying $5 for a light bulb or whatever a light bulb costs, maybe it would cost 10 bucks.
I got a firehouse in California.
Yeah, interesting.
Look at that beautiful filament.
Yeah, see how thick those filaments are?
So that's a light bulb that's built to last.
These motherfuckers, they figured out, well, we'll just make it real skinny and eventually it will wear out and pop.
That tire pattern is sitting in a fucking vault somewhere.
It might be.
But the problem is it doesn't make sense because it has to be softer than the ground.
And whenever you have something that's softer than a very rough, hard surface,
the softer thing is going to give.
Something has to give.
Like if you have metal and you drive around with metal wheels on the asphalt, you know what gives?
The asphalt gives.
You have scratches on the asphalt.
Let me ask you this.
So going back to the weed.
Okay.
Because I got us on this divergent tire.
I want to find out the tires eventually.
Well, I got something for it.
Okay.
Okay.
Let me just do it now.
We got.
We got four on the diver.
Oh, but this is different.
Yeah, no.
This is the way longer.
Well, there's no air in this fucking tire.
Yeah, this is an airless tire.
But that's, that this is something that people have said forever.
Like why would you have to fill up tires?
Can't they come up with something where, you know, it just gives.
And so Michelin has done this.
You're telling me that there's nothing out there about tires that don't wear.
I don't think so.
It doesn't make sense.
So watch this.
I have a question.
I don't know.
So weed is criminalized by some self-interested industrialist.
Right.
Before that, you bit what it's used for centuries.
Right.
Including in churches.
So cocaine, you can make the same argument for.
You could.
And then you have the Clinton administration comes along and dubs people.
So in other words, what is the moral inequivalency between someone that is selling cocaine?
Selling cocaine.
A lot of it.
And someone that's selling a lot of weed.
Now, I understand the common retort as well.
cocaine is a lot more addictive, destructive.
There's a physical pathway to addiction.
There's a physical pathway to addiction.
Yeah, it's a different kind of addiction.
I think there is an addictive quality to marijuana.
But I have a feeling it's same or similar to the addictive quality of a lot of other behavioral addictions.
But I guess my bigger question is.
So the the with the advent of the quote unquote super criminal.
I think it was who was Hillary Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton.
They came up with this term or Biden.
Yeah, I know he's a big supporter of that bill as a senator.
And you know, without going down the rabbit hole of private prisons and the prison industrial complex,
what bothers me about these old drug convictions that we were talking about earlier?
Is it's just a perspective shift that somehow has in the psyche of America writ large.
That you hear cocaine or crack equals someone that should be locked away and forgotten about.
That was why I mentioned Spencer Bowen and you know, other folks that I mentioned because I just I feel like.
But there's no what's the right way to explain it.
There's no rhyme or reason to why we're leaving old people that have not much left locked up.
You know, and you know, I don't look.
Larry Hoover is a good example.
Larry Hoover was pardoned or a sentence was commuted by a president Trump.
And he was then put in he was in the side of a fucking mountain for decades.
The man is 75 years old.
He's been in prison for over 50 years.
He has renounced gang life.
He has renounced any affiliation with it.
And then he was his sense is commuted and he's put in state custody on some old tenuous homicide charge where the person that actually pulled the trigger is out has been out for like 30 years.
So Larry Hoover is sitting there in Colorado because he was in the side of that supermax facility, the side of that mountain in Chicago.
And since Colorado or Chicago known Colorado, he was in Chicago.
Well, he was then I misspoke.
He's from Chicago.
He was the leader of the gangster disciples.
You're familiar with Larry Hoover, right?
Yes, sure.
Leader of the gangster disciples in Chicago.
He gets he's in prison and state prison.
And he goes into while he's in state prison, they have a CCE conspiracy against him.
And he gets a continuing criminal enterprise, talking lawyer speak.
And then he goes into federal custody and he's putting the side of a mountain where he's unlocked down 23 hours a day for decades.
The man's 75 years old now.
Since he's been put in state custody, he's had three heart attacks doing prison work.
And what is the utility in keeping someone like that in because governor Pritzker could just say, you know what, enough's enough.
There's interesting stuff out there about what they call sea criminals.
So it was like before February of 1978, I believe it was 1998 where people would get indeterminate sentences in the state system in Illinois.
You know, you'd hear these sentences of like 100 years, 200 years where there's no hope.
And there were like thousands and thousands of them.
There's only 30 of them left and he's one of them.
He's got an indeterminate sentence isn't 50 years enough.
So like that's another one of those cases that bothers me because, you know, if we're a society of reform, deterrence, rehabilitation, he's it.
And what better message is there to say, you know what, you've done enough and now let's see what positive you can do.
The proposed terms of his release are like the script is supervision.
He just wants to live out his life with his family.
He's got a great lawyer backing him named Justin Moore.
I helped, you know, advocate for his pardon to President Trump.
So he was pardoned.
He had sentence was commuted by President Trump, his federal sentence, but he had some crazy 200 year sentence in state court.
Look at this as it.
So it was 1978.
He's one of just 35 people still incarcerated under Illinois's pre-78 indeterminate sentencing system.
So the case was from 73.
Oh, yeah, he's been in prison for 50 some odd years.
And you know, I just feel like at this point isn't enough enough.
And you know, they didn't even do the killing.
No.
And the person that did it is out that the allegation was that he ordered it.
And I don't even believe that.
And Andrew Howard, the guy who killed him was paroled more than 30 years ago.
Yeah, it just doesn't, I don't understand.
And what, what's going on, I think, is that someone like Governor Pritzker is just they don't want the political cost.
Right. Right.
Of taking a chance like this.
And you know, this is another one that keeps me up.
You know, some people would say, why care about that guy?
Because I know his wife.
I know his son.
James Prince knows the family so well and has supported them on this journey for over a decade.
There's so much public support for this, the guy 75.
So why are we wasting taxpayer money and why are we keeping someone incarcerated?
I mean, in the most.
So I understand if they commuted a sentence, how he's not, how he's not out.
He was his federal sentence was commuted.
So as soon as he was released from federal custody, he was taken into state custody.
And they didn't even take him from Chicago, Chicago, excuse me, from Colorado.
His state sentences in Chicago where he could be at least closer to his family.
And Colorado state system said, we'll keep him here.
So he was transferred from federal to state custody.
So that's one that's just like, you know, there's one heartbreak to the next.
And I, and look, I'm super, super, super careful.
You can help people with second chances.
You can't help them with what they do with it.
But I'm now at a point where I really want to think long and hard about what people do with their second chances.
And you know, I just wouldn't get behind someone that I didn't think was, I just,
it's an indictment of society that we have these disparate sentences that are dulled out.
And a lot of it is driven by what is considered worse behavior.
Is it worse behavior that you sold cocaine or marijuana?
I guess the argument is that cocaine was more destructive, more dangerous.
And is that cocaine was more destructive, more addictive?
You could die from it.
Well, same thing with alcohol.
Alcohol is legal.
So I just don't, I have a hard time grappling with what is considered a controlled substance.
Yeah.
Because alcohol, if abused, if put in the wrong hands, it's highly addictive.
It's highly destructive to your body if you abuse it.
If you abuse people's life, I mean, how is it that alcohol is legal?
It is weird.
And the real problem is history.
So we have a long history of all these drugs being illegal now.
So you have a long history of people that are criminals selling these drugs.
So it's got this criminal history attached to it.
If you were to make cocaine legal in the United States,
you'd essentially put the cartels out of business, right?
That's probably their main business is probably either fentanyl and heroin,
or heroin pills, you know, oxypils, or cocaine.
And you would have way less accidental overdose deaths because a lot of it is not people overdosing from actual cocaine.
It's getting fentanyl.
Or whatever, or whatever else there.
Fucking mixing.
And all sorts of different endphetamines.
We have a long history now dating back to the thirties of alcohol being legal.
People are accustomed to it.
It's normal.
You're accustomed to growing up, being able to have a couple of beers with your friends,
go into a party when you're a kid.
There's a Keg party.
People know how to handle it.
It's been around.
Cocaine has not.
You get scared.
What's in it?
How do I know where it came from?
You know, you get a fucking beer.
You know, it's a beer.
You know, you crack open a bud light.
It's a bud light.
It's what it is.
Cocaine is unregulated.
It's crazy.
If you think about it, if you're someone doing cocaine these days and you're trying to think,
like, am I going to die?
You dip a, what do they have?
Fentanyl strips that you can test it and see what's in it.
But if it was regulated and if people want to do it, you know, let them go bang their head against the wall and do it.
Yeah, and then the problem is people would be profiting off of that.
And then so you'd have instead of, you know, no one has a problem with anhyzer bush selling beer.
Right?
But meanwhile, there's alcoholics and it's going to ruin their life.
But if anhyzer bush all of a sudden started selling cocaine, the social stigma that's attached to it because of all the years of it being illegal would be a real problem.
Um, we would have, like I said, it would be like ripping the bandaid off.
You're going to have a lot of problems initially for quite a while, I would imagine.
There's going to be a lot of people that do cocaine that would never do it previously because it was illegal.
But if they found out that there's, you can go to the cocaine store and buy a certain amount of cocaine and go do it.
But you also would be getting pure cocaine.
So you would be getting this experience that people have used way back to the fucking, you know, who knows what time.
I mean, there's Egyptian mummies that have tested positive for cocaine.
I mean, look, I don't converse, yeah, I'm not advocating for it one way or another. It just seems like anything that I've looked into and read about in countries that have legalized or decriminalized or decriminalized it at least.
And you could get it and not have to worry about it being adulterated in some way.
It seems like the statistics are overwhelmingly yes pointing in one direction.
But those are smaller countries, you know, and it don't have the consumption problem that America has.
We uniquely love to consume drugs.
And we are propping up the cartel by doing that.
And if you want to go to war with the cartel, if you want to really stop the flood of illegal drugs in this country, unfortunately,
one of the only ways to really do that accurately is to both stop them from bringing in illegal drugs and then give people access to legal air quotes, safer drugs.
It seems like a problem.
It's a politically it's a suicide.
You got to swim uphill through or upstream through a river of shit, yeah, in order to pull that one off for a long time.
And I just this this has struck me more lately and dealing with these old drug cases where these people have spent decades and decades in prison and, you know, you know, you hear them on the other end of the phone.
And he's like, look, I was a kid. I was in my 20s. I'm 50. I'm 60 years old. Isn't it enough?
It's getting to the point where it's putative to the point of harmful and barbaric.
Yeah, and then they don't want to let those people back on the street. It's more convenient for them to keep that person locked up forever.
You know, if you saw like what's behind it?
You know, this is an interesting update on the Ohio 4 case. We don't have to go back into the whole thing again because people could watch the last time.
But you remember we had the former prosecutor, JD Tomlinson, on at one point with the case in Ohio, where these guys did not need to assume the burden of being demonstrably innocent, but we were able to prove it.
And, you know, JD Tomlinson agreed to vacate their convictions. And then when he left office, you know, a few weeks later, the new, the incoming, their equivalent of the district attorney overturned it, right?
Since coming on this show, JD Tomlinson has been under attack for a previous exoneration that he granted by this same sitting Lorraine County prosecutor who just filed a 300 page brief, saying that he committed fraud on the court and all kinds of nonsense over a crime that never happened.
And this is why he was so reluctant to ever speak to me in the first place because he knew he'd be targeted.
He knew he'd be targeted and they're trying to undo an exoneration for this poor woman that's already been exonerated.
And I thought, you know, I would talk about it publicly and say, I trust him. I made a presentation to this new prosecutor.
I got myself along with the Ohio Innocence Project public defenders. I got a bar complaint filed against me by the original prosecutor for standing up to exonerate someone that was summarily dismissed in Ohio.
But, you know, and what, and the question becomes like, what can you do? So Derek Hamilton and I are, or John, do we go to the city council and raise awareness? Don't you care that you have a prosecutor that is seemingly more interested in settling personal scores and vendettos than he is about letting innocent people go free?
And I have this guy, you know, John Edwards is one of the Ohio four. And I'm, I feel like when I see him calling from prison, I'm running out of things to say to him.
Like, I'm so desperate for help. And, you know, if anyone is living in Lorraine, Ohio, or Illyria, I mean, you got to take a look at your local elected officials.
I mean, demand to know what happened in the Ohio forecast. I mean, we have it online. You can read about it. You can read the trial transcripts. I just don't get why people can't let go and say, maybe I made a mistake. Maybe I was wrong.
I mean, these guys are, are so demonstrably innocent, where you have the person that claims he witnessed the whole thing, you know, came, went to the FBI and said, I made the whole thing up. You know, it's just.
It's a horrible case. It's horrible. And, and no one wants to admit it.
Nobody, no, the problem is, I think if they do admit it, someone's going to start digging into their past. And they're going to find out these motherfuckers have been wrong a bunch of times.
Well, I'll tell you what, one thing that's different about me and why I hang around Derek so much is I want his superpowers to rub off on me because I realize that if you don't get.
Stay aggressive, keep the pressure on the truth will eventually what would it, what was the truth crushed earth shall rise again? Was that like an MLK quote?
I always think about that because at some point, at some point, the truth comes out. It's a stubborn thing. And whether it's old files of an old case and who you used to hang out with.
And if you have photos sitting in a vault, some whatever it is, it's going to come out. And it just seems like you're doing so much more damage to hold on to these old beliefs rather than because one thing is for sure, I'm stubborn.
And I'm growing more stubborn as it as time goes by to you have to have the resolve and the where with all that every time you get to know and every time you get rejected, you're like, all right, all right, I see you.
I'm going to get my beast on now and keep coming back and I'm going to bring people with me. And we're going to make as much noise.
But one thing that people don't like is to have the light on them. And, you know, we now have the ability to do that not only through this platform, but, you know, I was talking to someone before I came here today that works at the center.
And I said, you can't be afraid to speak to the press. And I said, as long as, you know, you have some control, some control over what you're saying.
And then I like quickly stuff the words back in my mouth. And I said, forget about that. You got to be very careful to speak into the press because it gets edited and chopped up. You know, I just did an article with the New York Times about something recently.
And I told that reporter, lose my fucking phone number because you took one sentence of a throwaway quote and disregarded everything else, you know, and that's why I'm really careful about it.
That's why nobody wants to talk to them. Everybody knows the game now. Like they're, it's just, they have a long history doing that. What they care about is a juicy story. That's all they care about.
And they're offering cells and human tragedy cells. And I would really love to be able to tell like the triumphant stories that a prosecutor did the right thing on the front end, right?
On the front end rather than after 20, 30, 40, 50 years. So, you know, all of these cases that we talk about, we're going to do something a little bit different is I'm going to set up a repository where people can go in and look at the public records.
No one's really ever done that. This way you don't have to rely on my word, a headline, a clip from, from a video where, you know, there were people that started to consume the Ohio for case and are writing in and are saying like, how are you letting this stand?
Eventually, enough drips of water fills the bucket and the bucket overflows. And at some point, something's got to give, right? Yeah. I mean, if you believe in what good over evil.
Yeah.
I don't know. I mean, something's got to give.
I mean, if you really believe in good over evil, I mean, we all believe in good over evil, but sometimes it doesn't work. And is it for lack of trying? Or is it just the world's not fair? I think it's both.
Well, you know, and I think there's, there's a lot of people that have a lot of power that will keep good from winning because it would somehow another derailed their life or their career because they have done something evil.
This is a sick, this is a sick trait that we possess as, as mammals as humans, whether you're a safety patrol as a fourth or fifth grader or a bouncer outside of a club or a TSA, there's something about that authority, something about that power.
Sure.
They get, they get, it's almost like it courses through their veins to the point where they're like, well, I like this. I'm going to exert this. And it's, it's like, I just, I understand it, but I don't, I don't understand how at some point your conscience doesn't kick in and say, all right.
Devilom this shoulder. Let's do the right thing because I always feel like bound by some sort of social contract, right? Did it ever feel good to harm someone? I don't know. Never did for me as a kid.
No.
I mean, I could look back at my child and be like, that was a shitty thing you did. You know, I still feel guilty about things I did as an elementary school student.
It's like, is your good person? No, no, I don't think that I really don't argue. No, I don't think that that's what it is. Well, that's part of being a good person is when you do make a mistake or do something bad, you feel something.
I don't actually, I appreciate that, but I don't actually think that's what it is. I think that, that we all know when we're saying something hurtful or harmful at some point, you know it or you're doing something harmful.
And it's just, I don't understand, I guess, the disconnect between having that realization and just saying, fuck it or actually taking like a pause.
Right.
And I guess if I could solve that, I'd have the key to many of the world's problems, but I guess I'm just dealing with these in the meantime.
Well, you would have to completely rewire the way people think and there's ways to do that and all those ways are illegal.
That's where psychedelics come then. You know, it's one of the things I had a conversation with my friend Jesse Michaels the other day.
And one of the things I said is, one of the things that's really interesting about psychedelics is there is no criminal cartel that sells them, even though they're illegal.
That's true.
There's no criminal mushroom industry where there's a bunch of like evil assassins selling kids mushrooms.
It's such a uniquely beautiful experience that it's really only connected to like kind people who sell it.
Well, let me let me ask you the same thing.
Let me ask you something in reference to what you said earlier.
Do you think you have to have a particular mental constitution to take psychedelics?
I think you should. Yeah, I don't think it's for people that are very vulnerable.
I think there's a lot of people that does regular reality is difficult enough to manage.
You know, I'm, you know, I'm saying this objectively, right, because it's not me.
But I don't want to be arrogant and say I can do it. You can do it too. That's ridiculous.
There's a lot of people that shouldn't be doing anything. They shouldn't be drinking.
There's people there that shouldn't do caffeine.
People have very different biological vulnerabilities or some people that I believe are biologically vulnerable to alcoholism.
Their whole family's alcoholic. It might be a genetic trait.
It seems to be like some, there's something wrong with them and their ability.
And then there's also genes that like this was the issue with Native Americans when we introduced alcohol to them.
They didn't have a history of alcohol. They didn't know how to handle it. They got wrecked.
Like there's alcoholism to this day. It's an enormous problem in Native American tribes and reservations.
It's a major problem in Canada.
It's the first nation people, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because they were given reparations.
And my experience with it up there is that they, you know, there's a serious problem, especially in Western Canada with it.
But the reason I ask about it with psychedelics is that it's probably the lowest point in my life.
You know, I was with you and I remember you recommending ketamine therapy or thinking that might be something I should look into.
Yeah, this is something that I've never done, but I do know quite a few people.
My friend Neil Brennan, he went to a doctor to get ketamine therapy.
Yeah, so when I raised it with my therapist at the time and she was like the body of research on this is so overwhelming that I would be remiss if I told you don't try it.
Something we should talk about and think about and, you know, it helped me tremendously in a way that very, very low dose.
But it's like, you know, I mean, I thank you for even like suggesting it because it was something that I had always associated with like my roommate in college in the fetal position in his bed.
And I was like, yo, what's wrong with them? And someone said he's in a K hole.
What the fuck is that? He's in a K hole.
And it was always like, oh man, I'm staying away from that.
He looks like he looks like he could expire any moment.
He was not a lighter shade of pale. He was like translucent.
And that was like, but then, you know, it's a, it's a super vision that's under supervision and then with the correct dose.
And I think that would probably be the case with most psychedelics.
And it turned, it would turn the field of psychiatry on its head and there would be such a lobby against it and the drug companies that make all these great drugs that rewire your brain would hate that shit.
Yep. Yeah, they would. Yeah, they would. And I think they're wrong.
Yeah, I mean, I think humans throughout history have been using it and, you know, to various degrees of success.
I think for some people, it's not good. It's like a lot of other things.
But it's up to us to figure out what's good for you and what's not good for you.
This is part of the freedom of being a person, you know?
I mean, there's a lot of things that you could easily protect people from that we allow people to do.
Here's the one that I saw a documentary about this and the one that I can't make a decision on.
What's the one where you take it and you're fucking puking? You're wretching to the point where you're like puking out of your eyeballs.
Yeah, I was. Yeah. And people are like fucking, how could that be good?
Well, the reason why you put what here's what I was is first of all, I was is orally active dimethyl triptamine.
Dimethyl triptamine is an endogenous drug that your body produces. Your brain produces.
It's produced in the liver and the lungs. It's a natural component of the human body.
Terence McKenna had a great line about it. He said the thing about DMT is everyone's holding.
I mean, like you're everyone has if it's illegal, it's it's like making blood illegal.
So what's your body has? So what does I wasca do chemically?
So I wasca so dimethyl triptamine, which is the active drug, the active compound dimethyl triptamine exists in thousands of different plants.
It's in a bunch of different grasses and plants. It's not orally active because your body produces something called monoamine oxidase and monoamine oxidase breaks down dimethyl triptamine in the gut.
So that if you consume things like these grasses or different plants that have high levels of dimethyl triptamine in it, your body breaks it down so it doesn't become active.
What I wasca is is the one plant that contains dimethyl triptamine and another plant that contains harming, which is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
So you take the MAO inhibitor and then the dimethyl triptamine they brew it all together and then you have a slow release orally active dimethyl triptamine.
That's the mother fucker with the orally active dimethyl triptamine.
So that is what it is. So you take it orally, it takes a long time because it has to go through your digestive process, it gets in your bloodstream, you have this trip.
And when you're puking and shitting and all that stuff, whatever the fuck this is, it's not good.
But the result of it, the end of it is this extremely impactful experience that leads many people to quit alcohol.
Many people quit cigarettes from it, they quit destructive behavior, they release trauma and learn to get over things that have happened in their life and move on.
It's, you have these experiences where you are in contact with what seems like entities and incredibly wise loving entities that connect you to nature and to the earth.
It, you know, and I'm sure people have bad experiences. I'm sure it's a very powerful psychedelic.
You shit yourself too.
Yeah, you could shit yourself, you could throw up. Yeah, I mean, some, it doesn't happen with everybody, but it happens with a lot of people that do it.
But that's not the case with smoking dimethyl triptamine or with IV drip dimethyl triptamine.
We had a guy on recently that they're doing and a clinic. Where was that island they're doing that?
They got it legal in some place. And so you could fly to this place and do an IV dimethyl triptamine experience without the shitting, without the vomiting, and it's even more intense than ayahuasca.
Unless you have like a really high dose of ayahuasca, but like this, the pure smoking of DMT is much more powerful, but very short experience.
Your body brings it back to baseline very quickly, because your body knows how to process it, right?
Your body doesn't know how to process alcohol nearly as well as it knows how to process DMT, because DMT is natural in the body.
Yeah, but you don't shit yourself.
Well, that's not true, but you don't with the IV with the IV, you don't, you don't with smoking it, you don't shit yourself.
Like that fucking witch is brewing in the forest. You know, you know, you know, it's interesting hanging out with hippies.
You could do all these forms of psychedelics that lead to some sort of resolution or peace on the other side.
You have to still, even if you do it in modern and psychiatry, like I did something called EMDR, are you familiar with that?
I think it stands for eye movement, desensitization, EMDR, yeah, I don't know what the R stands for.
But it is something that, I mean, you have to go through a similar amount of suffering, and it's the deal with past traumas.
Eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing. All right, so I went through this and it helps you, you could do it.
There's some, sometimes you're doing it with your eyes, but you ever, you ever use flones?
No, you know what it is?
Yeah, all right, and it has like a green cover on it.
You hold onto these two paddles the way I did it, and they're hooked up to this little transistors, little box, and it's like it buzzes your hand.
You hold onto them and it'll buzz your hands. No more than like the buzz of a cell phone in this rhythmic, this rhythmic pattern.
And before you do it, you really set up what the trauma is.
So I went through months of trying to identify like, what were the things from my childhood that were haunting me?
And once you do, you then relive those moments with this rhythmic buzzing, and you do it again, and again, and again.
And after each session, which could last anywhere between a minute to 10 minutes, or your eyes are shut, and you're getting this rhythmic pattern, and you open your eyes, and you explain what just happened.
But you start in that place, you're 12, here, and I have to tell you, it was, it was one of the most painful, agonizing things I had ever done.
And it was the most religious experience I had ever had, because you're almost in a, you're almost in a trans-like state, and your mind is going, and you then explain what happened.
And it's almost like a guided daydream. And then when you explain it, you then go back again and start. And when I was first doing it, I was like, this is just torture.
Just straight up torture. But then you start to see an improvement in your mood, and an improvement dealing with that particular.
And I learned more about myself, my childhood, my behaviors, than I did doing any drug, any psychedelic, which I did in my youth, and it literally saved me.
Yeah, and it, and it, and it sounds to me, I just had this revelation, as you're talking about, like, you know, it's almost like you have to purge the pain, you have to relive it almost in order to get rid of it.
And you're, the theory behind EMDR, as I understand it, is that you don't have the same physiological response that we're calling the trauma. You know, you could think of something that happened you 10 years ago, and you can still get the heart palpitation, and the adrenaline rush, and the, you know, the other, whatever is being released in your body, whatever hormones get activated, and it doesn't happen anymore.
I mean, it's, the way that it was introduced to me was that my therapist did it with combat veterans, who could get triggered by a grain of sand on the beach, because they were in desert storm, and spiral.
So I find it interesting, because it seems like the same methodology is at play, but it's just a different way of getting there than such.
Well, there's other ways that they do it without the psychedelic drug that induces psychedelic experience, like, holotropic breathing.
What is that?
Put that into proplexity, young Jamie.
It's a particular style of breathing that allows you to achieve an altered state.
I don't want to misspeak on exactly how to do it.
It's an intense structured breathing technique designed to induce an altered non-ordinary state of consciousness for emotional healing and self-expiration.
Typically involves prolonged deep rapid breathing while lying down accompanied by evocative music and guidance from a trained facilitator.
Developed in 1970 by psychiatrist Dennis Lov-Groff and his wife Christina after LSD assisted psychotherapy became restricted as a way to reach similar therapeutic states without drugs.
Wow.
Yeah, so there's a bunch of different styles of breathing that like James Nestor writes about some of these in his book Breath.
Was it Breath or Breath?
It spelled the same way, man.
Breath doesn't eat.
But the point is, like, there's ways of inducing a psychedelic state without drugs.
Obviously, the best one is the sensory deprivation tank.
That takes you to a very psychedelic place and it's completely natural and safe.
Float tank.
Yeah, done that, which is invented by John Lilly who also was a ketamine guy.
He was really in the ketamine.
Oh, I got you got me into that float tank.
I was in there one time and I was like, I didn't know if I was facing north or south.
I didn't know if I was submerged in the fog of water.
You feel that you're flying through the universe.
There's so much the salt content keeps you so buoyant that you go into this trans-like state.
I highly recommend that.
Have a question for you off topic.
Who the fuck wins this fight Friday night?
Oh, God.
Okay.
If you have money to bet on it, you're betting on the Olympic gold medalist who's a multiple time heavyweight world champion
who's one of the greatest knockout artists in the history of the heavyweight division.
That's Anthony Joshua.
What's fun is you don't think Jake Paul can win.
And so the underdog rudder in you is like, well, let's see.
Let's order this.
Let's see.
I mean, the size difference is insane.
Anthony Joshua was 245 pounds was the weight limit that he had to reach.
He had to drop down to 245 pounds.
It's probably a little heavier.
But that's normal for him.
That's fine.
It's not like he's going to be dehydrated or anything.
He weighed 243 and Jake Paul weighed 216.
So I mean, that's a big gap.
It's a big gap in weight.
It's a big gap in experience.
I mean, you're talking about a guy who fought Usich twice and wasn't stopped by Usich because one of the greatest heavyweights,
if not the greatest of all time, one of the greatest boxers of all time.
You're talking about a guy who beat Vladimir Klitschko.
Again, fantastic.
Great fight.
Great fight.
You're talking about a guy who, I mean, just knocked out Francis and Gano like it was nothing.
I mean, he's fucking dangerous.
Anthony Joshua was still in his prime.
He's still one of the best of the best.
And Jake Paul is a guy who's been fighting guys like Ben Askerin and Tyrone Woodley, who was a great MMA fighter.
But, you know, he fought Nate Diaz and had a tough fight with Nate Diaz.
And now he's going to fight Anthony fucking Joshua.
Yeah, I mean, I got to say the reason I asked him.
He's got balls.
He's got balls.
And Shakor just went and sparred with him recently.
Yeah.
And all these kids, I don't think I've ever wanted two people that are fighting each other to lose more.
So I don't know which one I want to lose more.
Because Anthony Joshua is great as he is.
I don't know.
He beefed with Lennox.
So I got to, you know, I got to kind of like be with my guy.
Of course.
And the other guy is just like so smart in the way he's playing this from a marketing standpoint, I think.
Brilliant.
You know, he was supposed to fight Jervante Davis, who's 135 pounder, who's tiny in comparison.
And then he flips it.
But he's taking a lot of heat for almost fighting Jervante, right?
But Jervante had some legal troubles, he got out of that.
And then his response to that is, okay, I'll fight the biggest, baddest fucking heavyweight alive.
Which one of them?
Yeah. And it's almost like a parallel universe.
Because two guys that I manage in their professional career are both calling the fight.
So Lennox and Andre are both there.
And I was talking to them last night, because they were dinner together.
I said, how are you taking this, isn't this fucking nutty to you?
It's definitely nutty, but that's the Jake Paul show. It's a side show.
And all the young kids, like Shakur, they want to be around them, they think he's brilliant.
And they're right in a way, right?
Oh, yeah.
No, he's brilliant in his marketing, for sure.
Look, he's made an extraordinary amount of money, right?
So he's doing great, and he's young.
And he's super dedicated to boxing.
I mean, you watch him train, I've watched many highlight reels of his training.
He's very dedicated to boxing.
And the box is ass off, but he keeps getting better with every fight.
If you're Anthony Joshua, and you don't knock that fucking kid out,
how do you show your face again?
Are you okay?
And look, he might knock him out.
I mean, that would probably just show that Jake Paul is legitimate in his ability to take a very difficult fight.
You know, that he's willing to not just fight guys that he could beat, like Ben Askerin,
but fight guys that no experts picking him to beat Anthony Joshua.
I mean, I'm, I think I'm going to go.
I think I'm going to go.
This is the first, that's in Florida.
Yeah, it's the first time that I'm like, I want to see this shit show.
I want to say I'm an easier to, I mean, Anthony Joshua for all bullshit aside,
for all his shit-talking links, a big moose of a man.
He's fast as fuck.
He's built like an adonis.
I mean, you got to, like, if you're betting, I mean, I don't know what the odds are,
the odds have to be heavily in Anthony Joshua's favorite.
Are they?
They have to be.
He's an Olympic gold one.
What are the odds right now?
It's a two-time heavyweight world champion.
I mean, let's both get hooked on gambling right now.
Yeah, let's put that in draft games.
Why not what the odds are if you bet on to win?
Let me guess.
Ten to one.
Ten to one seems reasonable.
I'm going to guess it's 17 to one.
Yeah, that's even more reasonable.
I'm trying to be polite.
Maybe it should be 32.
I mean, what was Buster Douglas when he beat Mike Tyson?
I think it was 42 to one.
Jamie doesn't gamble.
Yeah, I don't know.
I definitely don't.
It's not allowed in Texas.
He is a minus 1,000 favorite.
You're right.
Yeah.
So it's 10 to 50 for Jake Paul.
Ten to one, right?
Yeah.
Holy shit.
That's a great bet.
You got to bet 1,000 to win 100.
Yeah, but you got to feel like you're going to win.
But if everything is normal, Joshua's chiny though, man.
Is he that chiny though?
He fought in Ghana.
There's a minus 10,000 favorite on that card also.
Who's the minus 10,000?
You know, Marley versus it's the very first fight.
Oh, minus 10,000 and say number.
Well, listen, my feeling is who knows what's going to happen?
It's a fight.
Fights are crazy.
But if I had a guess, I mean, you got a lean towards the guy who's a two-time heavyweight champion.
You got to kind of respect this Jake Paul kid, as much as a pain's me to say.
He takes two guys that he beat and puts them on the card together.
Well, he's the right bow.
Listen, he also supported Ben Astrum.
And Ben Astrum needed multiple or double lung transplant.
And his insurance didn't cover it.
He footed part of the bill for that.
I'll tell you what's going to be a great fight.
But Shakur against Tfema Lopez.
That's a very good fight.
Yeah, it was a very good fight.
Jay, Prince and I were, you know, here's a kid that'll fight anyone, literally.
The only other fighter that we've managed over all these years that was like,
I don't care who it is, put him in front of me, I want the best, was Andre Ward.
Everyone else's chess playing Shakur is like, I want Jervante Davis.
Tfema, get me the biggest name you can.
And I just think that's going to be an awesome fight.
That's a phenomenal fight.
That's at the garden.
When is that?
January 31st.
I would love for you to be there.
That's a really exciting fight.
Yeah, we were just excited about that.
We were just up there for the press conference, me and Jay.
And yeah, it's going to be a good one.
Yeah, two guys in their prime, I love it.
I have one other thing I want to throw in here.
Jelly Roll received a full pardon today.
Wow!
This is Tennessee.
Fuck yeah.
Good.
That's amazing.
Yo man, that moment on the show, what was it last week?
Man, I was a puddle.
That was so cool.
He's an amazing person.
Dude's lost 300 pounds.
Let me see that picture of him again.
Look at him.
He looks like a different fucking man.
Bro, there's different hands.
He's got a different face, different body.
And we worked out together, man.
He ran 2.6 miles on the treadmill out there.
And then we got in the sauna together.
He's fucking great.
That moment when he said, can I hug you?
Yeah.
Oh, it's beautiful.
He's a beautiful person.
Really is.
You are too, brother.
Good for him.
Thank you, Brian.
Thank you.
You're awesome.
Appreciate you, Brian.
Appreciate you too.
Goodbye.