Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - CEO Arrested for Fraud and Conspiracy | Brent Cassity

Episode Date: September 8, 2024

CEO Arrested for Fraud and Conspiracy | Brent Cassity

You are always thinking in the back of your mind, I hope everything's okay, you know, because it feels good. You know, you've got the culture, you've got the momentum, you've got things going. It's that blind spot. You know, I look back on that now and that, you know, that thing that just hits you upside the head and you're like, damn, I should have been paying attention to that. I pour myself another drink and I started thinking, you know, how in the world am I going to live as an ex-convect? you know do I want to live as an ex-convict can I live as an ex-convict and my girls I mean they don't need the stain of a dad you know that they're going to have to deal with it's an ex-con and so I just had another drink I you know this is you know and I got out the pin of paper

and I started thinking all the friends that have been friends and supportive put the pin down poured another drink grab the keys of the car and went down to the garage and I didn't know if I was going to go hit a tree or if I was just going to let the car run And it was like, Matt, something hit me. What in the hell are you doing, Brent? You're the glass half fool guy. You're the optimistic guy. You aren't this guy.

And what a fool? And at that moment, I thought, you know, whatever happens, I said, you know, I'm going to be a survivor through this. I'm not going to be a victim. I'm not going to be pointing fingers and doing and feeling sorry for myself. I at least going to try to make my family proud of how I handle this situation. Hey, this is Matt Cox, and I appreciate you guys checking in on me. And I'm going to be doing a podcast with Brent Cassidy. And Brent's got a fascinating story.

And I've heard some of it. I know a little bit of the story, but it's a lot like it's not the typical story. Well, one, it's extremely unique. but not just that. It's not like a bank robber or something where it was, you know, he robbed five banks and the story's over. He's got a long story. There's a lot of different things going on, a lot of moving parts. So it should be super interesting, really interesting guy. Also, he's running a, he runs the podcast. I'm pretty sure. You have a book, let me switch here to this. I'm not great at this yet. You have a book that came out, right? I do, yeah. You've got a book, you've got a podcast, and so yeah, we're going to go ahead and get into Brent's story, and so check this out. So Brent, we talked a little bit the other day, and you started telling me your story,

and I remember usually I talk to somebody and they'll tell me, you know, they'll talk for five minutes or something, but I can tell right away, like the more we talk, the more I was like, oh, wow, this is going to be, this is way, way more. before than typical you know yeah yeah so do you want to start off by just kind of telling me like like where'd you you know where were you born like how yeah yeah so i you know man i thought growing up as a kid i grew up in southwest missouri small town um it's about two two and a half hours three hours from st louis down in uh kind of a hillbilly country but um but um It was good. It was kind of like one of those kids when you're growing up, you know,

you ride your bike around the neighborhood. Everybody, you know, gets picked for teams. You play touch, tackle football and basketball and baseball. And you go home at night when the lights go down and you get, you know, your dinner and you're fed. My dad and mom were actually from a really small town that was about 30 minutes down the street from Springfield. It was Buffalo, Missouri. And so growing up as a kid, I thought we were living a problem. We were living a pretty normal life. I had a bigger-than-life dad in my life. He was one of those guys in his high school. He won the state championship. He's valedictorian. He went on to be a D-1 athlete, basketball on track and college. And then he went to law school, graduated number one in his

class. He zoomed out of there and wanted some big court cases. And then he got into business and became kind of a big deal. But as a kid, all I was thinking, wow, I want to be just like him. He's so cool. And, you know, I was thinking about, you know, seventh, eighth grade, I was a six foot one. I was like a seven footer, you know, being seventh grade, eighth grade, being six foot one is huge because the kids don't, you know, boys don't grow. The girls, you know, get taller, but I couldn't wait to get to high school. You know, I was like, I finally going to be able to, you know, show it all up. Well, dad calls us into the room one night. and says to my brother and I, he says, hey, guys, he said,

I've gotten into a heap of trouble with the bank I own. And I think I'm just going to plead guilty and do a plea bargain. And we're going to start from scratch. And he just lays this on us. You didn't see this. You didn't know there was any. No, no, no. And I think at that time when you're a kid, you've got your own world.

there might have been some stuff on the news or whatever, but he was kind of always a little bit on the news because he was doing, he was an attorney, he was doing cases, he was in business. And so I didn't even really pay attention to that at that age. So there might have been a little bit of that, but totally came out of the blue. So his mouth is moving on.

I'm thinking, how in the world is this going on? The guy that I idolize, is bigger than life, is telling me that he's been tied up and caught up in a bank thing. And then he drops the bomb and says, we're going to start over and move to St. Louis, Missouri. And I said, oh, my God. It's like one of the worst meetings of a family gathering I've ever had.

So we move up to St. Louis. And worst time to move as a kid, summertime, nobody's around. You know, you don't go to school. So I was, you know, my release and escape was always playing basketball. So I went to this basketball camp, my dad got me into. and ended up going that summer. Can I ask you one question real quick? I'm sorry.

I don't interrupt, but so your father, you know, you skated over like he was got in trouble for some bank stuff. Like what was and did he go to jail? Did he get? Yes, he did. That was one of those things where, you know, as a kid, you know, he, he. he ended up getting six months in prison. He got charged with bank fraud and insurance or not insurance private tax fraud. Given a loan to a guy that was on the board of the bank.

I'm not even sure if that's an illegal transaction anymore, but back then it was. And then there was an insurance thing with a mobile home parking on it. He appreciated it. That's all confusing stuff, but that's what happened. All right. I understand what happened. Exactly. So the thing with us as a family was, is that I just remember when it finally came down to it, we moved in, you know, up to St. Louis, and we started going to Marion, Illinois, where he was in prison,

was, man, I can't believe we're this family. You know, we were wealthy, you know, kind of had everything going. And all of a sudden, we are that family that goes and visit. are my dad in prison every weekend. I remember, you know, pulling up to that prison. First thing is, as a kid, you're like, I wonder if he looks okay, you know. Like, he's going to be in prison clothes and all these things that you think that, you know,

you have in movies and whatever. And he comes out and he's tan, he looks good. Okay, that's great. So when I leave, though, I'm thinking to myself, at 15 years old, Matt, this will never happen to me. This will never happen to me. never find myself here. And, you know, there's some weirdness, too, when there's a

statistically, statistically, if your father, if your parents, I know, I fall into, you have like five times, you're five times, five times. That's a scary, scary number. But I do, you know, the other thing that was kind of weird was that you move into a place, because we moved into a new neighborhood, my dad's in prison. And there's, you know, the oddness of it, we, we, we, didn't really know how to handle where's your dad or where's your husband and so we kind of said he's out of town working and that was kind of true because he did have a prison job he was out of town so we got around that but I'm sure everybody in the neighborhood thought what in the world is going on with his family and it was kind of a weird thing to start a new high school and

your dad's in prison and you're not telling anybody that your dad's in prison and then he came back then it was all normal. So dad got out of prison. He lost everything, except for one unsexy business. And it was prearranged, it was called National Prearranged Services, and it prearranged your funeral service. So you would actually, Matt, take, go take and make arrangements, and you'd freeze the cost of that funeral. And you could even fill out a little book that would have your pallbearers and your music and everything. And so everything was taken care of. So your family didn't have to worry about it. The burden was taken off of that.

Not to jump off your page, wow, that's really a cool company. But it really had a purpose, and it really took off because it was kind of a newer idea going into the early 80s. And I got into the company about 10 years after it started, got out of college. I had done some sales and stuff when I was going to go to law school. And that was the other thing. I was a political science major and did theater was a minor. And I was going to be a trial attorney. And I don't know if I've always blamed on being left-handed, but I was so bad at taking standardized test. I, you give me like, Matt, you give me like a thing to be able to have an essay. I could do great. I mean, it wasn't like I graduated with a 3.4 in college. I wasn't on the dunn scale, but if you put a standardized test in front of me, I was.

on the done scale. I mean, I was the dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb scale. So I couldn't get it on that LSAT what I needed to get. And so I did a pivot. And I thought, you know, I think I'm pretty good at sales. Why don't I, I'm going to talk to my dad about this. And so we had a sit down discussion. I said, you know, dad, I think I'd like to go into this, but I don't want, I don't want to be in your shadow on this deal. I mean, you're the guy here in St. Louis. And I said, where can I go to just pass, fail, just see if I'm any good at this. He said, well, you see, you go down to Texas. We just opened up a place down in Texas, and there's a funeral home there in Austin.

I was, oh, sign me up. You know, I was 22, 23 years old, Austin, Texas, you know, drive something out. And so I went down there, Matt, and it worked really great. I found out I was really good at it. Won all the national contest stuff. We were in three states at the time. So I was the new kid. And I had my own thing down in Texas.

And so I was at this time 24, 25 years old. Well, dad didn't have a whole lot of interest in the sales side. We've gotten into owning an insurance company that funded these prearrangement contracts. So if you had a prearrangement contract, we would buy for like $5,000, we would buy a $5,000 life insurance policy. And so those two companies coexisted. I had no interest in that insurance company. my dad loved that world of investments and trading and all that and i hated math um and that was one the great things about political science you didn't have any math didn't take math right so he started

so when you say he he he had an insurance company he started an insurance company he was funding the insurance company himself or was he like an agency of okay so what it when when you start when he first started an insurance company usually have a bigger insurance company and and you grow yourself into the reserves and things that you need in the beginning. So those first few years, I forget what company it was, but as you grow in and you have your capital and surplus and your reserves and everything, then you are able to stand out on your own. By the time I had gotten into the business, it had been 10 years.

We had a standalone insurance company. So he's now taking the premiums that are being paid, and he's investing those premiums. Yeah. And the interesting thing about that, too, Matt, is that in that world, everybody makes a claim. So everybody dies. So you've got to be real careful with how that all works. I mean, and it's a highly regulated business.

I mean, you don't just play around with insurance because in every single state, you have to get approved. Your contracts are approved. Everything goes through. And not every state is the same. same, but every state usually audits you on an annual basis, and you are pretty tied into what you can and can't do. So that's, and that's one of the things, you know, my biggest thing out of my life, you know, looking back on it now after I, you know, went to prison and all the things that happened in my world, my biggest mistake was, is that I had no interest in that. I

I ended up creating a very big company of we went from three states to 22 or 25 states. And I just looked at it like, I'm just putting the money over there. They can take care of that as long as. And the thing of it was, there was never any issue with the fact that we paid for funials. And the funeral directors got paid their growth and they got paid their funeral contracts and everybody got their money. That wasn't the, you know, we went through. 30 years of that being that, our thing was much more complicated and it was drawn out for a lot longer time.

But in the backing up, though, Matt, we got into this and it really took off. The company grew. My brother came into the company when he got out of college. And he was more tech, he was more technology savvy. But we had a family idea. And I think I talked to you about this, Matt, where. We talked about, you know, like when Queen Elizabeth died just a few weeks ago, you know, you expect the highlight of her life. Everything that ever happened, you expect it now, and you want it now, and they already have, it's done.

You don't do that with your grandparents, your mom, your dad, your uncle, and your aunts. And so we decided we wanted to be the filmmakers of everybody else. And that got us into two different things. We got into a production company, and we started owning cemeteries because we figured cemeteries, place that people go to remember so we would actually go to people who own cemetery property and offer this this would have been in the early 90s okay yeah and it would have been before youtube and yeah yeah i was trying to think about like i was trying to think about you you know putting together because when my mother died last year and you know they put together we gave them

a bunch of photographs and they basically popped it into a format you know you pick what you wanted but it's basically the same thing i can go on like i'm uh anybody can do it now yeah evado is it yeah what's the name of that ivato i i'm signed up for invato and you just plug in the throw 20 pictures and pick some music and it comes up with it for you but you were way before doing well yeah and you know we basically started that and we got into the funeral side of it too for visitations and You know, we would take a little clips out of the life story part if they had that and put it into the music and the pictures and whatever. So we were really at the forefront of that.

I mean, there was so many, strangely enough, there were so many competitors of ours that just said that we were like sacrilegious, putting a TV in a room and, you know, people are. But, you know, the really great thing about it was it was really more of a comfort because it was more of what people were used to, watching TV. bringing back memories, giving things for people to talk of, oh, I remember when your dad used to coach our little league team or you share these memories together instead of that uncomfortable. A lot of this too was because we were from the funeral business. So I was very uncomfortable going to funerals. Now, how can I make funerals more comfortable so that I feel okay being there? So the home, you bought the cemetery. Sorry, I got you off track. You were investing in cemeteries.

Yeah. And what was the process? Yeah. So we would actually go to people who own cemetery property. And we would offer them based, well, more or less to buy another product. And that was to start their life story. And it was sold in chapters. You know, you tell us your earliest memory, your high school memories, your school,

college, when you started your family and kids and whatever. And it just kind of built. And we walk people through. scrapbooks so they kind of warmed up through it and as this got and came through we did about 18 to 20,000 of these live stores so we did a lot of life stores but in the meantime uh we were getting a lot of press because nobody in this arena I mean nobody was doing anything different than you know basically going from a horse and buggy to a car or a hearse you know we were doing something where we were saying, you know, we were wanting to revolutionize the way people remember

a life. You know, there's an African proverb where they talk about when someone dies a library burns. So we were thinking, wouldn't it be cool if we could just become a library of lives for the community? So when you didn't know somebody, your grandmother or whatever, you could go to our console at our cemetery and touch up and pull up your grandmother or great grandmother you didn't know and all of a sudden, there you are. So we were really, you know, We were excited about this. This was something that was, we, you know, we got covered by Time Magazine and Fortune Forbes. Entertainment Tonight picked this up when we bought Hollywood Cemetery in Los Angeles. We were on there a couple of times. So we really got a lot of press. And then HBO came calling and created a documentary that was called The Young and the Dead. And that kind of encapsulated everything that we were doing, except for the unsexy part, which was the part I always told you about, beginning in which we were doing pre-arraged funnels. But that was the big part of our business, actually. So we got this, we got all this going and everything was going great. I, you know,

I met my wife when she was 13-year-old. I was 15 and we've kind of gone through every life stage and we've had three kids now and, you know, things have blown up. Life's great. Got a nice house and Nantucket for the kids and we live in St. Louis. And it's all great. And then one day, and it kind of happens, you know, these blindside things, Matt, when, especially if you're in business and you've got a big company, our company wasn't that big. I mean, it was big enough. You know, we had about 400 some odd people that worked for us. But you feel like. 400 people in 25 states, that sounds like a big company. It was big. It was big, but not. There's gigantic companies. There's thousands, you know, there's people have thousands of people. We were big enough. We were mid-level, but. you are always thinking in the back of your mind, I hope everything's okay, you know, because it feels good. You know, you've got the culture, you've got the momentum, you've got things going. It's that blind spot. You know, I look back on that now and that, you know,

that thing that just hits you upside the head and you're like, damn, I should have been paying attention to that. I was filling up my gas take one day and I get a phone call from the president of our insurance company. We didn't talk much, but he said, Brian, I just got a really weird phone call with the lady from the insurance department in Ohio. And she's in the investigative division and says that she's got information

that's going to bring our company down. And it was like, I was literally filling up my gas tank. And it was like just this feeling of, dread came over. Because I had felt this before with my dad when I was 15, but it was much different this time because we're all in this together. And I'm in this with him. And in the moment of this happening, the part that isn't a surprise is that we had a gigantic reinsurance company. And they're the biggest in the world out of Germany. And for those, I don't want to get too far in the weeds on reinsurance. It's just a smaller company. You got an A plus rated

insurance company and you basically push your liability off and they pay you a commission for your money, basically. And you can use that as a benefit to selling as you go out and sell that you've got this gigantic umbrella that's your big protection. So anyway, we had the largest reinsurance company in the world that we were doing business with, but they've kind of gotten backwards in the market when 9-11 happened and we had cut a fat deal with them and they wanted to come back and renegotiate now on my world i didn't even know about this because i was the stupid one that didn't pay attention to what we were doing in the insurance side my dad way too smart for his own good i think you know when i talked about him earlier i also think dad kind of

kept a chip on his shoulder he's from a small town he always wanted to show everybody that he was a smart guy. So the easy thing to do for somebody like me, who's not the smartest guy in the room, is, okay, you want to renegotiate, what we need to do? Because you know you got a sweet deal. Dad, wasn't in the contract. No, hell no.

So we go into arbitration, and that probably wasn't smart because the arbitration for the company that we were, up against was the size of a country so they could outspend us at any point through discovery and all that. So we started spiraling into, before any of this happened on the regulatory side,

spending seven, eight, nine million dollars on legal fees, hitting our capital and surplus. So that was unfortunate before we ever got into this. And as it went, Matt, and it's kind of hard to explain out there, to the world of people listening to this, but those things can leak out. Those arbitrations are supposed to be private, sealed processes, but they're not. And that started leaking out into all the states that we were in.

Probably came from the company that we were up against because it became an advantage for them to have that happen to us. And later we found a discovery that's exactly what happened. But as it was happening, it was a nightmare. All of a sudden, you have a regulatory world in all the states where you're in asking questions, you know, wanting every document you have of everything that you're doing. And there quite honestly wasn't enough hours in the day. So what happens with me is my dad and our attorney, who's been with us forever,

my trustee of this trust, that's how, by the way, that was how we kept that trust from national premium services as it was in a trust that's why dad didn't lose that it was in my name my mom's name and Tyler's name which is my brother so that's how that company existed and that's how it went on he wants con Bank of America out of 250,000 dollars using nothing but a fake ID and his charm he is the most interesting man in the world I don't typically commit crime but when I do bank frog stay greedy my friends support the channel join matthew cox's patreon so dad comes to me and he says brand he says we we've got to get out there and talk to these regulators tell them what we're

doing our story and back up because we've got a forest fire i said great i said tell me what all we're doing because i'm the ignorant side completely ignored the wrong things in our business. Now, this is the one I need to go talk about. But I wanted to do it, Matt. I wanted to put it on the cape. I wanted to show my dad that I was going to save the day. And I really thought I could. So, and dad said, I can't go out and talk because I'm an ex-felon. I, you know, I can't be at the regulatory table and say, hey, here, what do you think? So I ended up, I mean, I was flying all over the place, Matt. I mean, it was I don't even know how to explain it.

It was dizzy time because you never thought that you could get enough time to get to the next place, to get to the next meeting, to get to the next answer. And they were all mad. You're not getting me this. You're not getting me that. And it was just, it was a free for all. And you could feel it too. You could feel like even though we were still doing business on the real world, it's like you were sucked in a vacuum of,

dark place that nobody saw except you and some few other people where you were trying to save everybody's out here and you go back you were living two different lives you know i was i was flying all around and then i was playing golf uh you know at the two-man deal at the country club and or we were going out to dinner with our friends and so i felt like i was brent in this regulatory nightmare and brent going to the kids functions at the school trying to make things seem normal. Well, eventually things didn't come out normal. I didn't save the day. I thought a couple of times that we were there. And our thing went from an investigation of the regulatory world to started a criminal. And we went through six years. And I was,

I was indicted in 2010. And so I was indicted for three years before we ever got to the part where they were going to go to a trial or there was going to be a plea bargain. And that was a weird time. What was the crux of their issue? Well, it was kind of complicated because it wasn't that we weren't paying our stuff. You know, normally you would think, okay, well, you guys are really bad because you're not paying for the funerals. You're not paying the funeral directors what they're supposed to be paid. It wasn't that. We had a case that happened back in 94 where the state of Missouri, and it came down to, and you might understand this, Matt, because you kind of have that background. There was a, when you wrote a funeral contract in Missouri, it had to go into a funeral

trust. And in that funeral trust, it had, you had to put 80% of the cash in there, and then 20% of it could be done for your administrative and sales or whatever. What you did with that 80% was up to you. You could invest in commodities, stocks, bonds, whatever. We bought insurance policies. So the question was, what is the value of that insurance policy? Is it the cash amount of what's been paid on that policy? You might have paid a month's premium. You might have paid it off.

Or is it the face amount? Is it $5,000 immediately when it goes in there? because from our argument, it was no matter what happens, whether you'd pay in one month, two months, all of it, we were responsible for the payout, all of it. So our argument was it was worth face value, and the states said it was worth the cash value in the trust. Makes a big difference when you're valuing the numbers.

So eventually, it comes down to the, we go to a statute interpretation before a judge, and the judge says, well, I kind of see it like a car wreck. You don't look at it as an investment. You look at it to pay off for the wreck. So once that happened, they went back and they said, okay, we're going to do a settlement. And we were able to do business that way up until 2008,

until the federal government came in, and they had the same argument. So we were fighting over something that was, is this business sustainable? And will this business be able to pay out by the, by the cash that you created from the policies to continue on for the next 30 years. There were some other issues, though, Matt, that were in there that's even more complicated. In each state, who was the beneficiary of the insurance contract?

Even though we went and got it approved through each state that they assigned all the rights and benefits over to the insurance company or NPS, because in the end, And we were the responsible party to pay. You're the one who has to pay the funeral. So you don't have to be the benefits. They take the money and leave. Right. So that ended up to be a huge thing.

That they came back on us and said, well, we couldn't be the beneficiary. And this isn't your policy and so on, so forth. But that was already agreed to. It was already, the people assigning it over were the people who were buying the funeral. They didn't have any problem with signing the rights and benefits as long as it was going to be paid. So those were two big issues that became debatable issues. And the reason I say this gets really complicated is because you can get into a conversation with somebody from a federal government that doesn't know anything about insurance like me, but people who in our company that did know a lot about insurance, and they even said things like, well, you don't have enough money if everybody dies today to pay everything off.

and well of course we don't that's not the way that's not the way insurance company works yeah you have actually a farm doesn't have enough no nobody does but but here's the here's the crazy thing about it is matt is that somebody who's an assistant attorney can say that and then you have to defend an outrageous comment you can't go to the bank and withdraw out all money you know you can't but in in in insurance it's directly set up for actuaries to say, okay, what's your age? Have you had any operations? Have you had cancer? Have you had heart attacks? You balance all that out and put it into this gigantic equation and then you insure people. So an actuary, anybody listening, an actuary is a person that calculates all the death rate who's going to die at what age is. And so how much money

you have to have and how much money needs to be paid in to pay out those policies. Like that's the person that crunches all those numbers for insurance companies or actuaries. Sorry. Yeah. No, that's exactly it, Matt. And so, and I'm saying all that just because I'm just saying how deep it got. There were 12 million documents in this world. Right.

Of, I mean, we're talking about something that just got so big. And in the end, when you're fighting this and I, you know, six years of fighting the federal government, whenever you know this, Matt, you went through the federal dude. seeing United States of America versus your name, there's really not much more anything I can think it was more intimidating than that. That's like, you know, one of my friends said that was on one of my podcasts, Jason said, it's like saying, okay, you get to play the L.A. Your soft, your beer softball league gets to play the L.A. Dodgers. You can play it. Right. Just probably. Not even close. Play that well. You get to get on the same field.

but anyway going past all that i had three daughters i have three daughters three beautiful daughters very accomplished daughters uh they're in their 20 well actually court is 30 now um but my kids were teenagers then and one of the thing is we were getting just i mean so lacked by the media it was a big story and we just i and i was very open with the kids what what we were doing how it was going and and they had really supportive uh friends, they were really great athletes and the coaches were very helpful. And so we just kind of cocooned ourselves. And we're not, we're not reading anything. We're not looking at all this stuff around. And we got through that. But one of the things when it finally got to it, you know, my

kids were like, dad, you can't, you can't go to trial. I mean, when I looked at my thing that I had stacked and you know this how they do it matt with with fed charges is you know we had a charge of wire fraud so any wire we would have made over the course of 30 years mail fraud any mail you would have sent out over the course of 30 years money laundering anything that you would have done or bought would be from the fruit of the poison tree and then my my charge that was something It was crazy that I couldn't even thought of because I didn't know about it. I allowed an ex-felon to work in the business of insurance, which the company started in 79 and dad.

In 1994, Congress passed a law that an ex-fellant couldn't work in the business of insurance. And he did. So that carried a five-year sentence. But how they stacked those charges, I got the drinking one night just looking at my papers. And I got them out. I was looking at 938 years. I was thinking, man. you know, I could beat maybe, let's say I could beat almost all these charges,

and maybe two, then you're looking at 40. You know, it's like the, the weirdness of what you do and how you look at things and what seems totally unreal and outrageous becomes part of your world that you really have to contemplate, like, my God. Anyway, the, and when we sat down after six years, you know, I didn't have any money left and going to trial was seemed like a I don't know what I would have thought that going to trial at that time but I was worn out I was it was just hard to give up after fighting that long but I told my girl that I get it I said you know dad take the

plea the plea my plea bargain was was from zero to five years and so what they offer your dad. His was zero to 10 years. And there was, there was six people indicted. It was my dad. It was me. It was our attorney, who happened to be my trustee, our investment advisor and our CFO, and my dad's secretary or executive assistant. Those were the six people that were indicted. And it was, they, you know, they basically crafted it into it was a conspiracy of all people. And once you have a conspiracy, you have, you can tie everybody into everything and everybody has to defend everybody else's. Even though you're just selling policies, you don't know what the decisions are being made. You're now responsible for everything, all the conversations that your father and the advisor and the lawyer had for 10 years you had nothing to do with, but you're lumped into the conspiracy.

And as a result, you're now guilty of the things that the decisions that they made because you were in some. some way of beneficiary of those. Exactly. And, you know, and I look back at that, Mark, and I think, well, that's my fault because, you know, when you own something, you should be making sure that I had a good friend of mine that owned a gigantic. He had the largest insurance company in the United States. He was 10 years my senior. And he didn't like insurance, but he loved real estate and investing in real estate and just making things look great and hotels and all kinds of stuff. He was a really smart guy that way, but he didn't like insurance. And he told me one day, he said, you know, Britney, he said, I know you don't like

that. He said, just go out and get the very best there is and put them in. That's what I did. And he said, when my dad got sick, he said, I just, and he told me, and I went out and this guy, he says, he's fantastic. I took that advice in, and I thought, that makes a lot of sense, but it would have, it would have been complicated. Family businesses are weird. You know, that was, that was dad's world, and my world was over here, and we didn't walk in each other's territory, really. I didn't walk in Tyler's territory. We kind of worked around, and, you know, not that dad and I didn't talk a lot.

I mean, I talk to him all the time, but we didn't really cross into, If I would have gone to my dad say, hey, listen, Dad, what I'm thinking, I just had a conversation with a friend of mine, and we're going to hire a, just a cool, fantastic do-it-by-the-book guy for our insurance company, it would have been a kind of weird conversation. So if I had to do it over again, we definitely would have had that conversation. We definitely would have set down it. But, you know, at the time, all that was going on, it really didn't seem like that we had very many problems. problems. I mean, that's the, you know, the strange part of it, Matt, is that sometimes these things could come up on you when you think every, anymore. When I think everything is going pretty good, I started thinking, okay, what am I not paying attention to? Because that's the

blind spot thing that kind of scares you is, is that when you think things are going really good, take a step back and make sure that you've got all the boxes checked because that momentum thing can, can cross over some things where maybe you should be making. a better focus on what you're doing. But going back to what you said, Matt, my world was I should, my name was on the line. My dad's name wasn't. I should have definitely. And to this day, you know, I look back and it was so complicated in what they were argued and all these fancy people that were arguing fancy arguments. We were sloppy, clearly sloppy on the insurance side. We might, we should have been much better. But we did have an in-house counsel that I, you know,

I believed a lot in, I thought it was, you know, handling the audits and doing the things, but we could have done it a lot better. Were we criminal? I certainly don't think there was any intentions on that, because if there was, I would have taken a whole scoop of cash and put it somewhere and lived a different life. But yeah, I know multiple guys that when you hear their case and what went wrong, it's like, okay, well, that's civil. Like, that's the threat to make that criminal, you know? So it's, but that's how the government does it. It's always like these guys that end up starting a Ponzi scheme. Yeah. Oh, he's all con man. He's always been a con man. It's like, well, if he was a con man from the beginning, he wouldn't have opened the company

in his name. Exactly. He wouldn't have run it for 10 years. And then what happens typically something goes wrong. And they try and cover it. Something else goes wrong. They try and cover it. So they started lying about things. Before you know it, they're so far in the hole, they're now realizing what I've done now is I've now, now I'm running a Ponzi scheme. And I can't turn around and go to the auditors and to the regulators and explain it because I'm having, I'm going to have to have to for the last six months. I've been lying to the investors and lying to on all the statements and continuing to take in money. And as a, and I've lost money. Right. And I'm going to go to prison. So what do they do?

They just continue to run a Ponzi scheme, hoping they can someday dig themselves out. Yeah, hit the big one. Five years later, it all. And I think the other thing that's kind of complicated about Ponzi schemes is, is first of all, Ponzi schemes aren't supposed to last very long. You know, but I know they do. I know they do. But it's also, it kind of blurs the definition because, I mean, if you take the Social Security setup for the United States,

It's only a Ponzi scheme. But it's legal because it's the government's doing it. They're taking all new funds to fund past and current liabilities. But all that being said, the thing of it is, is once you get into the spin cycle, man, it's a tough one. I mean, what is it, 97% of the people that get indicted plea? And then if you go on from there, the people who go to try. trial. It's a tough. And that's the thing that people really don't realize, not very many people go to trial. No. The government doesn't want to go to trial and our, you know, the attorneys that we

have represented us, they're not used to go to trial because they're used to going into the dark room back there and cut deals and then go to go play golf with the judge or go to the Christmas party with their people. But so you're, you're, but let's go back to your daughters were telling you take a plea. Yeah. Because they said, you know how many guys? I mean, trust me, they made the right call because here's here's the reason I say that is you know how many guys I know that were offered three years went to trial and ended up with 15 or 20 right right no I really I didn't do anything stop it yeah that does it stop thinking it's fair you've watched too much law and order exactly not how it works and the thing of it was too is man I was guilty um for sure because I allowed

my dad to work in the business of insurance there was no getting away from that those jury's instructions would be that I was in a position. I should have known that as the president of the company. So that one had me dead to right. The other things that happened, I got to tell you, the thing that the thing that's so discouraging is, is that we had a really great company where a lot of people worked for a long time with us. You know, I had created this division where we were kind on the cutting edge, kind of like a pharmaceutical division that had really grown quickly and really, you know, we were the talk of the industry. And so there was a lot of fun things going on. And then we had our stuff that was going on with making our life stories. So it was an environment

where I think people liked working for us. We liked doing what we were doing. And I think, you know, the struggle is, is to be living the life I live now looking at all those people's lives were affected. Everybody's. And the, and we got a black eye. You know, the, the company that they loved and that they, you know, spent, you know, 15, 20 years with us, it's, you know, was by the narrative of the world, was run by convicts and people who took other people's money. And it just, it just, that's the part that sticks to me that you can't quite shake off, except there's no way that that didn't affect people's lives. There's no way that all those people weren't having to figure out what were they going to do

and where were they going to go. And, you know, it's, I think the other thing you've, and you've gone through this too, man, is, you know, finally when you get to that point where you realize, okay, I'm in, you went fugitive, but you then you got, you got caught and they brought you in. there's that feeling of okay now this is my world now what am i going to do because it's the unknown you know how do i make this work and you know prison was for me you know we i went to leavenworth and leavenworth was kind of a different you know they have the there used to be usp then they made it a medium and then they've got the camp and so you know we went um

I remember I had my mom and my brother and my wife when they, and we, you go to, everybody gets processed at the big ugly place. 1879, I think, is one level worth was built. It looks like Shawshank Redemption kind of. It does. I've seen fit that in Atlanta, they look so, really look menacing. Horrible, just terrifying looking. They are.

And, you know, I, you know, and I had had had this pity party for, of myself. Like once I realized I was going to plea, I was by myself. And we just got a family call. And you know, my mom and my brother said they were going to help with the girls and help with like whatever and college and, and help Julia out and whatever. So we got off the phone and the deal was, okay, we're going to plea and dad and I are going to go to prison. Kind of a heavy conversation of a family call. And so I started, you know, I had already, I already had a, you know, poured myself a drink and kind of one of those just total poor me, how did this happen to me, how in the world could this have been, you know, just pour me. I poured myself another drink

and I started thinking, you know, how in the world am I going to live as an ex-convict? You know, do I want to live as an ex-convict? Can I live as an ex-convict? You know, should Julie, who's been a warrior through this and is just, I mean, been, you know, she should have worn a cape as far as how she kept the glue of the family together. She needs a fresh start. She should, she should go with somebody else and be with somebody else. And my girls, I mean, they don't need the stain of a dad, you know, that they're going to have to deal with. It's an ex-con. And so I just, I had another drink. You know, this is, you know, I got out the pen of paper and I started thinking all the friends that have been friends and supportive and here's your fatherly advice to the girls and

here's what you need to think about and julia you need to get a fresh start put the pin down and poured another drink and grab the keys of the car and went down to the garage and i didn't know if i was going to go hit a tree or if i was just going to let the car run and it was like matt something hit me i mean literally just like a bolt what in the hell are you doing brent you're the glass half full guy you're the optimistic guy you aren't this guy you aren't this guy and what a fool and quitter your kids would think you were by doing what how a horrible way to go out Julie would think you were the weakest of the week and at that moment I thought you know whatever happens and it didn't look good I mean whatever I was stepping into was the ugly stuff I said I'm

I'm going to be a survivor through this I'm not going to be a victim I'm not going to be pointing fingers and doing and feeling sorry for myself, I at least going to try to make my family proud of how I handle this situation, even though it scares the shit out of me because I don't know what the next situation is. I just know that it's scarier than what I know. But it really helped me.

It kind of steady to me. I kind of hit the whole rock bottom, Matt. The whole, you know, I'm here and I don't want to be, and I'm never going back at that. For a limited time at McDonald's, enjoy the tasty breakfast trio. Your choice of chicken or sausage McMuffin or McGrittles with a hash brown

and a small iced coffee for five bucks plus tax available until 11 a.m. at participating McDonald's restaurants. Price excludes flavored iced coffee and delivery. And even standing at the gate of Leavenworth, you know, I've got my mom, my brother, Julie, I just told him I loved him. I knew everything I knew and everything I loved was behind me and everything that was beyond this fence was the big, dark unknown. But I had already dealt with and hit that rock bottom moment. to i'm going to survive this whatever it is i'm going to walk into it and you know one of the things i think you learn i think matt you probably would agree with me nothing is as bad as your mind makes it out to be nothing it is as bad as your mind makes out not even prison you know not in prison

you know walking through those gates did it scare the shit out of me absolutely very menacing looking ugly place and you know how they process and prisonize you through you know and make you feel you kind of just feel it like the freedom's shedding off your skin And, you know, moralizing. Yeah, it's just, you know, you just feel it. I mean, it's just, I don't know what that is, but whatever that is, it works. Especially the position that you have been in, like you, I don't think that you or myself, I had ever been in a position where someone was able to talk to me like I was subhuman.

A dog, yeah. Yeah. And I don't even a dog. I treat my dog is great. Like you said, subhuman. The first person that says it, it's always like, or talks about you. And then the next person and the next car, and then you realize like, oh, that's right. I'm this guy.

I'm supposed to be talking about. I'm a piece of dirt. Right. Oh, wow. He's not wrong. That's actually how. That's right. That's what I would have expected you to talk to someone.

Did you worry, did you worry, Matt, about, because it was one of my big worries is like becoming. part of that prisonized institutionalized mentality because that was one of my big fears was is I don't want to I want to stay me I want to do whatever I can do to make me whatever Brent would think and do out there I don't want to lose that in here because I saw a lot of guys that's the one thing about Shawshake Redemption I think is interesting is like some of those those key phrases they say that you know get busy living or get busy dying there's there's that's kind of the two things you have in prison the guys that give up and they're basically in a fetal position and then you see them laying and doing not anything and then you see the guys that

are working out they're reading they've got jobs yes yeah yeah you see two totally you see guys that are in shape and you see guys that get fat and there's like not really in between there's it's it's either one or the other and for me it was like man I got to do whatever I can not to become that. Can't, you know, don't fall off that. And so I use like five different strategy tools in prison that kind of were what I used when I was building the company, but I found that they worked for me in prison. You know, like if, like the first one was if, if what I, especially when I got there, because you're like looking around thinking, well, what's, what's everybody doing? Like, what do I, what's everybody else doing? And I, I started looking around. So I

really humbled myself not to say a whole hell of a lot just look around what's going on and then i i saw people out so you know like you're doing this like how did you seem like you're doing your time really well like tell me about so i i talked like two or three people and those people like help me get a good job or to help me kind of learn the prison rules and stuff and i think that's important not just in prison but generally now if you humble yourself and you see somebody doing it right go and talk to them because it's like getting the answers to the test before the test. You know, get in, no, but first look around you and then seek the people that you need help from. And it works.

Yeah. You know, it's good routine. Setting up your routine and getting a solid routine as best as you can. Yes. It is crucial to keeping your mind. Feeling like you've got your mindset. Yeah. The second thing that I had was like, it's kind of like the whole Shawshank thing with Andy

DeFran, you know, he chips through that wall every night for 19 years. But the reason why he does is he's got the Zaywan Taneo that he's thinking of. It's the bluest of the blue waters, the widest of white sands, the little place that he wants to put in the boat. He wants to take people on fish. He's got all that plane in his mind. And I think that Zaywantaneo thing of what is, you know, what do you got? What keeps you going?

What fuels you up? even in prison i think you need that uh while you're living in that environment and when you get out to me i i just said you know to me i it boiled down to purpose you know i had to have a purpose once i got a purpose yeah that changed everything for me like everything became better and i stopped hating being in prison and it started being i don't want almost almost like a blessing because I suddenly had enough time to work on something, on things that I loved. And so what was your, so. Isn't that interesting, though?

It is, it took, it just took me a while because I'm pigheaded. You know, first I, of course, blamed everybody. And then, you know, that's easy. I mean, when you go through a lot, it's, it's easier to blame somebody than to turn on yourself and say, okay, what, what I need to work on. How stupid is that? how stupid like especially in my case yeah i'm totally guilty yeah there's nobody to blame but me right took me a year or two to figure that out to sure like what do you yeah when you see guys like could go through bad marriages or whatever and they might have been just total dicks

and they they can't come to it until they finally realize that that was really their fault it's just like it's the same thing but you'll feel better you'll feel better about yourself yeah and i you know dad and i had to go through kind of our own relationship struggle and uh you know he strangely enough he died uh he got out right when the march 17th when covid hit which i always think that had to be like the weirdest time to get out of prison like the whole world had shut down i went to pick him up at the airport and it was basically vacant i was thinking how weird it was for him to walk into this world after he had a 10-year sentence and more or less it was shut down. And he was only off for a couple of months and died, but he wasn't well.

But, you know, dad and I never had that, you know, that conversation. Because our thing was really, like I said, I idolized him. I thought he was a brilliant man. And I wouldn't be the person I am today without him and what he taught being in life. The thing I struggled with was is that I never could quite figure out if I was being used or if he just had that much confidence in me. You know, it was like, because he was a great, and I say manipulator in a positive way, because if you're in the business and the world business, you have to be.

And he was very good at finding people in their talents and then building that up, just like a good coach, you know, that's, you know any NFL team or baseball team whatever you find those people you build them up your good coach that was dad and so one of the things that that I struggle with as a son as we as we kind of got through this this ugliness was is that he had gone through this before and he knew which I really didn't the danger of putting yourself running yourself into a burning house and so we had this kind of a weird dynamic of you know i think you know i've kind of tyler my brother sent me this uh podcast it was really interesting in how i you can be two people

you could be somebody that um loves you unconditionally and could use you know that it could be it can be both and he doesn't have to be one or the other and he can be that person and he can so for me once i came to that was it wasn't one or the other dad was a really good dad but did he think that i'd be the best person to go out and speak to the regulators yeah he did and and i thought it was too so you know um you know looking back on it would i do it again probably would isn't that weird i went to prison, basically putting myself into that burning house. I just made me now feel like maybe I could do it better. But at that time, the weight of the world of the company was either going to crash and burn or we had to figure something out. And if it was slim to none, he went for

slim and he tried to make it. And that's the weird thing. You know, you go back into these weird big cases and like, what would you do now? And I don't even know if Julie would agree with this, my wife but I would probably go back out in there and try to save the day even though that's probably not the smartest thing to do because you just there I think you just wired a certain way but I certainly don't blame my dad for that but I think about it on my terms or my own daughters would I put them into a burning house going into it if I was if I had brought them into the company and I don't know I don't think I would I don't think I would but that's the difference between and maybe it's a difference between a father and a son and a father and a daughter i don't know

it's kind of complicated though he once got plastic surgery because he didn't like the photo on his wanted poster his legend precedes him the way indictments precede arrests he is the most interesting man in the world i don't typically commit crime but when i do it's bank fraud stay greedy my friends support the channel join matthew cox's Patreon. Well, if it had all worked out, you wouldn't be asking yourself this question at all. True. You know, in his mind, he may have, he may not have even for one second thought it was an issue. It's just like, oh, this is going to work. Yes. That's a good point because that's exactly how he thought. He was, he wasn't a naceer and never thought it was always this. And for the

most part, and your points very well take it, so many times it did work. You know, as a family, we were, we did a lot of things and overcame a lot of things and did bigger things than I ever thought that we could have. And I think a lot of it had to do with just, you know, he always told me as a kid, Grant, you see, you got a good plan and you take action with it. You can accomplish anything. And I think that's, you know, his mindset, his mindset was, we'll tackle this. We got through it before.

I mean, he, we, in the 90s, I told you, we went through that and we got through. And I think he thought, I thought we'd get through it again. Well, so I was just thinking, listen, a lot of the CEOs of these companies that start massive companies and, and, you know, like the, the visionaries right now that are out there are really just con men that it worked out. Sure. Like Elon Musk, you know how many times he was, he almost went under? If he'd gone under and lost all the investors money, he'd do this piece of garbage, con man, don't trust him.

He's a scumbag. Instead, this guy's a visionary, you know? And so things just, you know. And you see that I've read so many books and God, I don't know how many book. I've read a book a week in prison, but all those different stories of people who made it, they did it by the skin of their teeth and got through it.

And that's all that. taking the risk the problem with like you and me now is how many times I have people talk to me and I'll say yeah you know you just think about doing this think about doing that and they're like yeah bro you ought to help like would you be interested in coming I'm like no not why and I was you know and and there was like why I don't understand it it sounds like an amazing idea like why don't we do this I'm like because at my age and with my background I can't fuck up again yes and if this goes wrong with you it's civil yeah and maybe you can't worst thing you you maybe get sued maybe you just claim bankruptcy most likely you just walk away and the company goes under if i do it and i take people's

money to invest in a company and it goes bad i go back to prison even though it's civil i don't i'll never be given the benefit of the doubt that you're given and i just can't take those risks anymore. Yeah. And they don't realize that, you know, normal people. It's a different life. I mean, I think a lot of people. Yeah.

And I think, man, a lot of people don't realize that, you know, when you're in the position that we're in, it's a life sentence because you have, you live as an ex-felon. It doesn't go away. Yeah. Like, okay, you were released. We are released and we are out of prison, which is fantastic. I not want to give that out. but you have to work really hard to get yourself even with everybody because we're the last of

our breed. You can legally discriminate against an ex-felon where you live or if you want to get a job. It's legal. So you have to work a little extra hard to get that job or get that place, whatever you're trying to do. And I'm not saying that as like, oh, poor, poor ex-felon. It's just that beginning out, that's one of the things you've got to be equipped with to know. I've got to be mindset-wise, no, then I'm going to have to tackle that. Yeah.

Listen, I have, because of my podcast, I have guys reach out to me all the time asking me, you know, extremely inappropriate questions. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. It's like, listen, I can't answer that. I'm just saying hypothetically. I'm like, I know that you think hypothetically somehow or another absolves you or me, but the truth is I said that's something that your idiot buddies told you. I said, I can't even have the conversation.

No, but you wouldn't do anything. It doesn't matter. The fact is they will simply go through your phone, get my name, add me to the indictment. I cannot go to trial because I cannot get on the witness stand and explain this guy asking these questions, and I didn't tell him anything. I said, because as soon as I do, they're going to say, Mr. Cox, how many felonies have you pled guilty?

How long did you do in prison? How many times? How many frauds have you committed? And then I'm going to say, yes, all that's true. But this time I'm innocent, I said, I go straight to jail. And I get one of the harshest sentences out there because I'm like a category three or four on the criminal history level. You know, and none of these things, when you're telling this to the guy who's asking you this silly, inappropriate question, are they thinking about at all?

And I have to think about all those things. If I have a button to steal weapons permit, you're not getting in my car. Right. I'm now, they're going to say constructive possession. He had the gun. Yeah. Because. It's a lot of that, too.

Right. And it's like, well, okay, but I didn't have the gun. He has a, it doesn't, I don't want you in the car. I don't want to have to be in trying to explain that to somebody. I'm in a bad spot. They'll lock me up in jail for six months. Even if they drop the charges and let me go, I'll lose everything. And people just don't realize the position you're in for the rest of your life, for the rest of my life, it is yes, sir, no, sir.

Absolutely. Yes, officer, I was speeding. Thank God you pulled me over. Can I please get the ticket? here's my license i mean i'm the most polite person i've ever been in my entire life because i have to be actually concerned yeah yeah no that's such a good point because that's that's something that just your your life is forever changed in that because you do have that that chip has been inserted into your head that this is different now yeah this my life as i think through

things and how i do things i have to factor that in because i know what i'm what that whole thing was and i know i don't want that because that is a terrible that's the that's the worst you do anything you can to avoid that yeah i'm thankful i mean not i'm not complaining i'm just saying i'm just and honestly i'm extremely thankful to even be out of prison you know like it it just like in your case what if you'd go on to trial because you're hard-headed and yeah you felt like i really didn't do anything wrong and you said you know what i'm going to go to i'm going to go to trial listen you'd have gotten 10 to 15 years sure you'd still be you'd be in prison right now you're you'd be hearing about your daughter getting married and you're not going to be there or

your daughter having a a baby your grandma you ain't going to be there you know and i'll tell you matt the other thing that i think about is you also have different moments when you get out where you have this feeling like, I've got three daughters, so two of them have gotten married. Courtney just had twin boys. And there's moments that I share with myself because I think it's that I don't know how to express it to anyone around me, but my thought is, God, just thank God I'm here. Yeah. Think that I'm here.

Like if we go on a family trip or something and we're all together, there's a moment where I just think, God, I'm here because what a difference that is than not being. Because I know what it's like when I've had of the things that have gone on and I wasn't there. And there's like that feeling of just complete loss of not being a part of that. And then when you do get out, because you were just talking about the other things or the chip in your head, there is a chip in my head that is I do appreciate some of the littler things just because I know that I'm here. here and not there. And I don't know if that goes away or not. I don't, I don't know. I've been out for six years now. I haven't gone away yet. No, I was going to say, sometimes I have to remind

myself, like, somebody will cut me off when I'm driving. And there's a second of anchor. And I think, whoa, whoa, listen. Well, you know what I'm saying? Like, the line's too long. And I'm like, you spent six months to a year just standing in line in the chow hall and to get your laundry and comments. You're like, you can wait. I used to. I used to. get so upset if I would go to a restaurant and they said oh it's a 45 minute wait I'd be like now my girlfriend who was also in prison for like four years you know we get there and we're just like and you'll watch three couples in a row believe 45 minutes oh oh no I'm leaving oh 45 minutes oh can I sit at the bar can I this can I oh no I'm gonna leave 45 and they're leaving and we're

like they're like 45 minutes I'm like give me the thing you know you're saying or here's my phone number like i always said that prison was like a disney world nightmare because you everything's lines in disney world this was in prison you know i want to make a phone call stand in line i want to take a shower standing line i want to get on this uh true legs core like stand in line it was just everything you wanted to do with stand in line unless you went out to the yard you know did whatever well oh even then you want to watch uh go to the they had a movie room in colvin at one point you want to go to the movie room stand in line you want to get You want to get something out of the wreck, out of the wreck equipment?

You want to get your laundry standline? You want to go to commissary? Commissary is three hours. That's two or three hours of sitting there. I try to avoid commissary like the plague that you had to go at some points, you know? Oh, yeah, at some point, you know, like, yeah. I was going to say, so how much time did you actually get? Was it three years?

No, I got a five-year sentence. Oh, did you? You said it was zero to three years. No, zero to five. And then I ended up, Matt, luckily enough, I was able to get into ARDAP and that knocked a year off. So I really did three years. What did you think of ARDAP?

You know, it's fascinating because that thing actually goes on in prison. I've got a couple of different opinions about ARDAP. One is I think that the program could be good because I think the guys want to adhere to certain things that are there. But I think that the people that are instructing want to be cops. And so for the majority of people that we had, and I'm not saying everybody was. There was a couple of good people that were in the program that were instructors. But for the most part, you had guys that are trying to set people back. if they said something or did something, they gave them two more months or they tried to kick them out of the program, all these different things.

So it was, you know, but as far as a nine-month program that could be good, I think they have some recidivism thing that's a little bit better by people going through it. But I think it could be better. But I think rational thinking and all those things are probably things that should be taught probably in high school, you know. Yeah, well, I mean, but it's not. So I would like to say that what, you know, one, you do not get to the top of your field and end up working in the Bureau of Prisons. So for, you know, nobody graduates college with a, you know, a medical degree and says, you know, what are you doing? I'm going for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, you know, medical position. So, you know, or for a drug treatment specialist or whatever they are.

like so you're not going to get top quality people um so you know i understand there's always that guy there's always a jerk here a jerk there um but overall i thought that ardap was was for being in prison i thought it was a great program i think the the concept of the of the program maybe they're not run all that well the concept of the program i thought was great and And honestly, I think, because, you know, let's face it, it, it wasn't about drugs. No, it's about thinking behavior modification. And honestly, and really, like, to me, I think it should be offered to everybody. Like, I totally agree.

I totally agree. And, you know, there was some really, ah, what am I going to say? There were some things that happened in our little group that would never happen outside of that prison. They'd never be, they'd never be in a position to have to really look at themselves and categorize themselves and, and admit to their behaviors. One thing I was thinking was when we did those readiness statements, you know, that one of the guys got up and he was like it was the first time that it just really hit him. What all had happened. And he just broke down. And nobody cries in prison.

I mean, not usually. I just remember one of the guys got up. and right beside him and read his readiness statement. I thought, man, whatever just happened right there was pretty cool. I mean, we're in prison and this is all happening right here in front of us. And I think that was the other thing, Matt, that talking about prison, so many people say with so many different things about prison, but somebody asked me the other day, like,

what was your biggest surprise about prison? I said, quite honestly, I met a lot of really good people. You know, there were people that weren't good, but there's people that aren't good on the outside. But I was surprised how many people helped me. How many people, you know, were smart that, you know, really figuring out how to get strategies through their dark places. And for me, you know, that's one of the reasons I started my podcast was,

it was, you know, nightmare success is in and out was to talk to the guys, not about like, you know, why did you do the crime? how did you get through it? What did you feel? What were you thinking? How did you get to the next step and your strategy of what you were doing at that time? And, you know, the guys' stories are all, we all of us, just like you and I can sit here and talk, Matt, we've got a common thread. We can sit here and talk about our dad because we both want to start. We can talk about prison because we both went to prison, but everybody has a different story going into prison and then how they handle prison and then how they get out. So I think that's what makes all those things unique.

with the podcast nightmare success and and i think what happens too is is that when people go through dark times and they have strategies of how to get through that how they adapt and how they survive i think people listening to that think huh god hell that could have been me or i'm in that spot right now how do i step out of this because everybody you know my thought on nightmare success on coining that phrase was everybody and like you said matt all the the the visionaries and these books so that you read about built these gigantic turn-of-the-century companies that are that are changing the world had to walk through their own fears their own unknowns their own nightmares to get to where they wanted to be to set themselves free to whatever success that is so everybody has that

everybody builds up prisons in their own mind and how the question is how do you step how do you take and step into something that's not comfortable and we saw that in prison so often where you know, somebody would get so institutionalized that their ugly routine, the one that they did every day because it made them feel like they were in control, got so much into who they were that they got scared of freedom. They got scared at the outside. And I think that happens. You know, once you get out of prison, you start looking around. You see that all over because you see people that, okay, the guy's in a bad marriage. Why didn't he get out of it? You know, he's in a bad job. Why does he step out? He had a health crisis. He can step up. So you see people

all over the place what what is it and it's usually stepping into the unknowns because it's scary but it's the only way to get over to the other side so that you and there's somebody i saw the other day that was talking about there's two things in life that makes it difficult staying in your comfort zone or getting out of your comfort zone right right yes either way yeah i i remember it's funny the people that i found that were the most miserable prison were the guys that were to blaming other people for being there and two complaining about the conditions you know and and you know they just complained about everything and they were miserable and nobody wants to be around you you're miserable and you're not like like that

especially in prison you know that in the environment's not going to change you're not going to all of a sudden they're going to oh you don't like it here. here, well, we've got a better place for you right over here. You just should have said something. You just have to adapt to it. You've got a plastic chair, a locker, and a bunk that get used to it because that's going to be the way it is. Right.

You know, it's funny is, you know, I always hear these guys. Like, I'll see, there's a lot of these prison, you know, podcasts and stuff, and they'll do a comparison on what prisons are like in America and what prisons are like, let's say, in Scandinavia. And it's like, they're amazing. Right. And those prisons are great. But you go, wait a second. Like, what are prisons like in, you know, in Venezuela in, you know what I'm saying? Like, you know, you guys are saying like it's, oh, poor, poor me. It's like you committed a crime. You went to prison. What did you think they were going to treat you like? Right. What do you want to be like? I get it. Yeah. Time is outrageous. But the environment's not that bad in prison. It's not great. it's not great the there's a ton of things they could do better but well i think i think too mad it's it's interesting to me because you know i live three years without air conditioning at leavenworth

and it gets it gets pretty hot kansas but i'll say this though you know the guys knew how to handle it like before there was ever air conditioning first of all there's probably like six or seven days that are really, that's horrible. I mean, it's like 100 degrees. It doesn't get cooler at night and you sweat and bed and that's, but really there's only like six or seven days. And what they, what we would all do and you would get your ass kicked if you didn't do this, you let the window open at night and let whatever cool air there is, if it's, you know, it gets down to 75 degrees, that's going to be as cool as you get. And then you shut that window in the morning. It captures and it keeps that in.

Anybody who opened up a window, they did go searching for you because it was like a furnace that had come through there and made a hotter. But the only reason I brought that up is that I found that even with that you can adapt

and get used to it. I got used to it. I almost think that you get used to it because you're outside a lot. In fact, I thought it was more, they didn't turn the heat on until the week before Thanksgiving. giving and in the Midwest, it gets pretty cold, like in October, November.

I thought that was worse than the heat, but my whole point is, is that you make a really good point is you don't want to talk to somebody who's whining about that because it's not going to change. You've got to just figure it out. He's got to, you know, all of us are dealing with this. So it's not just you. You go figure that out. We don't want to talk to you until you come back and you can hang out.

Yeah. I remember my ex-wife. I would talk to her on the phone and she would say he was complaining about having to spend $1,500 because her husband's H-2, her, you know, the Hummer H-2, the transmission had just gone out and the warranty had just ended and there was $1,500 and she was pissed off about that. And I was like, well, do you have the $1,500? Well, of course, I was like, $1,500. And she was like, even if I didn't, I put on my credit card, I this, I that, like,

you've got multiple kids in private school. You live in a half a million dollar house. You guys are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. You have to spend $1,500. You just got back from a week long vacation. And I thought, like, you don't have problems. Like, these are problems. Spending $1,500 on your brand new Hummer isn't a problem. A problem is they gave me a locker that has that has three shelves in it. And one side has no shelves. And so I bought new shelves and now the COs are going around searching for that to see who has more than three shelves. Yeah, it was contraband. My shelves. Like, that's what I'm down to. Yeah. And, you know, and so, you know, I would get thrilled when, you know, they would come out with like the movie schedule on Wednesday nights they showed movies. Like what are they going to show?

And it was like, oh, my God, they're showing the new planet of the apes. Like, yeah. I would talk about that and think about that all we'd work. Or I would get a book that I love. Like, I just came. I just got the new Tom Clancy. Exactly. Oh, it's so good.

It's funny you talk about the movie thing because it was, movies were huge at Leavenworth for Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night. And we all go into that gymnasium with our plastic chairs. And man, it was a big deal. And you know what the funny thing was too, man, is they say people walk around like in the yard and whatever, you're going to the movie tonight? Like there was a choice. Hell, everybody was going to the movie.

What else were you doing? You got to go to the movie? What's the movie? I don't know. Of course you're going to the movie. The other thing I always thought that was funny at Leavenworth was that, you know, people stole food and made like the pizzas and all these different things. But it was funny because like when we went down to the gymnasium,

there were people on both sides in the hallway and they all had their goods. You know, like this little brownie thing was like two stamps. And this was, you know, the pizza thing that they'd made with the whatever, the tortillas and whatever, that was four stamps. And so you kind of watch, somebody made popcorn. So you just walk in, it was really actually like a movie. You would pay your stuff and go in, you grab your soda out of the, the mop bucket, you know, and that was two stamps. But it felt like, it felt like we were walking in, man. We're walking into our own movie, man.

I got our own stuff. I got my candy and I've got my soda here, and we're going to watch. but there was a big deal i mean that was i guess that was probably one of the biggest deals that we had and it was really was a good move or bad movie it was an event for sure i uh yeah it's what you were saying too about uh the people you met which was shocking to me

uh was that i did i met some of the best people i've ever known yeah like it was uh it was And I think that's one of the things that, you know, going through the experience that we've gone through, you wouldn't know that unless you go through the experience that we've gone through. The overall society impression is that everybody is bad in there because that's where they are. But, yeah.

There's no doubt there are. No doubt there are some bad people. Oh, yeah. I certainly don't want to get that impression. No, but for a lot of reasons, there's people, you know, in the very first day I got there, the guy, Romo, who was a Hispanic guy that was a boxer, and he just immediately said, man, you don't look like you've ever been here before. You're going to need a lot of help.

And, you know, he immediately starts helping me while in my locker cleaning it. And he says, you know, we've got to make this bad military style because the warden comes through on Friday. Let me show you how to do that. And I just literally had gotten introduced to him. And he within that, you know, minute or two, he had plugged in and was helping me get to the next step. They're the guys that will come to you immediately and say, hey, I have a locker for your lock. I have shower slides for you.

Which is huge, by the way. Yeah, of course. Right. Here's a huge, or here's a toothbrush. Here's this. Just give me the shower slides back. Give me this back. Yeah.

Buy your own lock immediately. immediately. Just give me the stuff back and you're like, well, what do I owe you for that? Now, you don't know anything. Just give me it back. And, you know, here's a couple soups and here. And it's like. Yeah, it really opens your eyes. And it happens immediately. Because if it doesn't happen, it sucks. That's hard time. It's hard time until you go to, until you go to comest here and get those things. If you're lucky enough to have somebody that puts money on your books right away. Exactly. You know, like it could be, you know, so yeah, there's there's some there are some great great things that happen it's funny now thinking about how

small they are it sounds small when you and i are talking about it but when you're telling me when you're telling me that i can't even imagine if somebody wouldn't have given me shower shoes yeah you know what would i have done i mean i don't know i mean other than just in general the filth but not just that it's it's that you know you could get staff you could yeah who knows And there were guys that had stuff. That was another thing that was really scared of him because we had a guy when we were in Ardap. And that was the other thing you were talking about, man, it was great living in Ardap. I mean, we had all the rules and stuff, but man, it was so much cleaner, you know.

That was, I would rather have the rules and stuff and be in a clean place where the bathroom was just, you know, totally clean. I loved it because it was quiet. And quiet. You could read. It was like being in a library. Yeah. It was the best thing. That was great.

Yeah. I would, and I think, I think it's surprising to that, that they have that in the BOP. I'm surprised that that was able, that whole program was able to get, because I do think that's the best thing that the prison system offers, and I'm totally agree with you, I don't know why they don't teach it to everybody. Yeah. It's in the prison. So did you write your book when you were locked up? I didn't. I did it when I, I did it when I got out. And I think one of the things was I was thinking, Matt, when I was in, I don't know, you know, I was more just like focusing on, you know, day to day. And I probably could have started writing my book then, but I kind of wanted to write it once I got out, just to have maybe a different perspective of what I was doing and what I was saying. But no, I wrote it when I got it. out and I think I waited like a couple of years before I started writing and you know when you get

out you were you were you six years six years had what do you mean how long did you how long were you in prison 13 years 13 years I just doubled it on me so I can't imagine what 13 years feels like because for me you know I just did three of those 13 but it takes you a little bit of while just to kind of get, you know, it's almost like you get sea legs and you've got to kind of steady yourself. It's like you're trying to jump in a moving car. Yeah. What do they miss? What's going on? How do I fit in? Am I still me? All those things that happen when you get up. I can't imagine 13 years because 13 years, there is truly a lot of things that happen. You know, there was, what years were you in? Keep in mind, there were no smartphones when I went when I went in prison.

Yeah. I'd never seen like an iPhone. I'd never. be crazy no Wi-Fi there's no I remember when I first got out like when I went in texting had just come out you couldn't you couldn't watch YouTube on your phone you couldn't that was all none of that was going on and when I when I got out I got out in 2019 I was I got hired I went to a gym work a buddy mine own a gym went there and I remember my probation officer had emailed me something saying, you know, you need to print this, fill it out, sign it. And so my buddy goes, here, give me your phone. And I said, and he said, I go, how do I print this? And he said, well, I got a printer over there. He said, we print it right now.

I said, do I go to a kinkos? Do I, yeah, there's no kinkos. He said, he said, it got, he said, it's UPS. He said, well, I got a printer right there. And I went, yeah, but I got to print this. It's on my phone, it's on my email. And he goes, here, give me your thing. And he goes, hold on.

He did, did, do, do, do. And he goes, all right, I printed it. And now the printer's 40 feet away. Yeah. And I go, no, seriously, bro. I said, I need to print it. Magic. And he looked at me, he goes, I printed it.

And I went, how? I go, how? Like, I'm like, like, like, I'm not stupid. Like, I'm not going to walk over there. You think it's a joke? And he goes, I go, seriously, bro, I need to print. I need to print it. And he goes, come here.

We walk over and show. Sure enough. He printed like 12 pages. And I was like, how? And he goes, it's Wi-Fi. I go, what's that? And he goes, oh, man, man. This is going to be, I'm going to go. Yeah. I mean, I just can't, you know, for me, in just the short amount of time of three years, I noticed that when I went in, you know, phones didn't have all the notifications and stuff on it. And so when I got out, I noticed that, like when I was with my daughters and like we'd be watching TV, they were constantly looking at their phones. I'm like, what are they doing? Why are they watching? Why are they watching?

Why are they looking at their phones when we're watching TV? That was one of the weird phenomenons that I saw was like, people went from having the phone in their pocket or a woman in their purse or whatever that they just constantly are looking at their phone. Yeah. I was like, what is, what are you doing? And what's happening is they don't even realize that that phone all of a sudden has

notifications on it all the time. and you're just constantly looking at it with whatever you're doing. You could be watched TV or movie or whatever. Everybody's just looking with the phones. That was a weird thing because that wasn't that way when I went in. That was just in three years. In 13 years, imagine I went into, we would go to a restaurant or anywhere we would go. And there would be, there's like, you know, there's 20 tables and 95% of everybody is sitting there with their spouse or three other people.

And all three of them are just staring at their phone. they're not even talking yeah and i was like people are walking by and i i thought people had to freak you out oh and people had earbuds in yeah that's around talking having conversations looking like they're talking to themselves i'm thinking people are talking to me mm-hmm so anyway i saw i told them and i and i'm like what what what what but they just have earbuds in they're having conversations on the telephone and i don't know that took me a couple days to realize that i was i wasn't crazy And they weren't crazy. They were, you know, they had earbuds and what do you think, what do you think getting

out was your biggest, was it just technology? Was it technology that was like the big piece that was like? Yeah, the technology because nobody, because it's hard to, it's hard to ask people questions because, you know, younger people, they think you're, you know, you're an idiot if you ask them. Because it's just they've done them since they were born. Right, they have no idea. And then even other people that understand the situation, they still talk to you in such a way that you're like, okay, you're still, you're talking French right now. Like, I don't understand.

You're telling me to air drop this and you're telling me, well, go to your set. There was AirDrop. Right. What's Dropbox? Or go to your settings and turn on AirDrop. Yeah. I don't know what you're saying. I don't even know what settings mean.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know anything about it. And, you know, so it took, it took time. But I got buddies that have been out, you know, the whole time now. And I'm not showing them how to do things on their phones. And I'm explaining to them to do that. They're like, bro, like you really adapted to this very, like, you know, I edit my own clips.

I edit all kinds of stuff. I make videos. I do. So I've really jumped into it. Yeah, you picked up on a quick. yeah i don't think i'm great but you know but you got to be you got to be willing to learn and do it too and that's a lot of people are really scared people especially older people are really scared to try something that's that's that's they think that's going to explode or something

that you do something on the computer is going to explode or the phone will quit working if you do something it freaks about yeah i get it i'm a little bit like this i started hitting buttons i get frustrated i get yeah the anxiety is overwhelming but i'm i'm also Also, just like you said, I'm like I think most people, you know, I'm sure you've heard this. Like most people have like, you know, they have their other life. They have multiple multi-million dollar ideas. Sure. The problem is most people are just unable to pull the trigger.

And I'm big on pulling the trigger and I'm okay with failing. Yeah. Like I've failed. You have to fail. I think that's maybe one of the biggest misunderstandings for people where they think, oh, man, I don't know how he did that in business. Well, most of it is just doing it. And then you figure out, oh, well, that didn't quite work.

I'm going to have to readjust that. That's not a failure. That's a mistake that you don't want to repeat. So in business, you know, a lot of times you get ideas. Like I love getting, especially when I was in my 20s, looking at something and say, oh my God, I can take that and implement it over here and maybe tweak it a little bit. And then I don't even have to try to figure it out. I've already got it.

And that happened like two or three times to me where I called somebody. They talked to me and they gave me their stuff. And I was like, oh, my God. And all it was was reaching out to him, creating a conversation. Like, you know, one time it was reading an article about this one guy and he was just blowing things up. And I called him and I said, man, you're doing this really cool stuff. And I noticed down at the bottom here, they kind of buried it, but you're doubling market share where nobody's doubling market share.

What are you doing? He said, well, young Cassidy, so nobody's asked me that question. Why don't you fly out here and see me? I flew out there and saw that guy and it changed everything in this one division we had. And if I could teach anything to kids who would be to do that, don't be afraid to go and talk. Because usually somebody who's doing something that they're really good at, they'd like to talk about it a little bit because, you know, they're good at it. So they might want to say, yeah, this is how I did it. But if you don't ask them, they don't tell you.

So to me, that's like one of the secret formulas. Like when we blew up and got big in our company, a lot of it was other people's, we had some unique ideas. But a lot of it was taken from other people's ideas that we implement. into our business and we were able to take off with it in a different industry. And I think, you know, if there's any tips out there for this old guy, 55 years old, is keep your eyes open because a lot of the answers to what you're looking for are in the market. You can take those and then go back to what you said, Matt, do it, engage, take action with it

because you're going to make mistakes. But as long as you're taking action, that puts you like in the 20 percentile, everybody else, the 80 percentile, they're sitting there watching you on the sidelines, wishing they were in the game, but they just don't have the guts to get out there on the field. That's the real secret sauce to the whole thing is

so many people are just afraid to go out and say, I want to play, let me in. And if you do that, you start gaining confidence. You start saying, well, how? I belong out here. I don't know. Well, these guys aren't as tough. as I thought they were. I can play with this.

And I think that's the secret. But you've got to step into it. And that's the thing that just scares the shit out, people. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I, it's, it's, oh, I, I, I don't want to go off on a tangent. It was just, I was just, I was, there was multiple guys in prison. There was a guy in prison. The short version is, like, he'd never had a driver's license. He'd never got, I got arrested. He was like 19 years old. Like, he, he just, he was a hacker. And, um, I think he got in trouble when he was, I think it was 19 when he got, 19 or 20 when he got arrested. Yeah, heroin addict. He did like six years, didn't know what he was going to do, had never had a real job, just, you know, and I was like, yeah, but you like, yeah, but you like, I can't do that. I said, yeah, but there are legal ways to do it.

Yeah. And I was like, you know, you ought to, you ought to get, you know, I'm sure there's, there are certificates you can get. No, I can't work in that industry and I can't this. I'm, I got, I'm in here for hacking. And I said, right. I said, listen, let me explain something. At that point, I'd been locked up like 10 or 11 years. I said, I've been locked up like 11 years. I said, you know how many hackers, how many guys have been locked up for the charge of hacking? Yeah. He goes, no. And I said, almost nobody.

Right. Almost no one. I said, that is specific. If I was you, I would lean into that. I would tell everybody that's what I was locked up for. I said, that makes you dangerous. It makes you brilliant. It makes you interesting.

The federal government mounted an entire task force to catch. you because you were so smart i said and they gave you six years for a crime that most of these guys get 18 months for and i said listen i said you need to lean in that so he he found out there were multiple certificates you got had to get classes yeah did that he took all when as soon as he got out he did those things he then got a job working for you and i had told him this like yeah you're not going to be able to go work for like ibn but there's a lot of these companies hire sub you know sub companies you could probably one of them that's what he did he went and got a job working for a small company that was that their services were were um you know highly sought after

what he was doing right huh it's highly sought after what he was doing it and people pay big money for that this kid's making like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and he's only been doing it like four or five years like with it that's cool in the first year he was making a hundred thousand second year it's a little over he's now making 150 to 160,000 dollars constantly has headhuners calling him and he's a felon and everybody knows everybody knows and I think a lot of that too is you know first of all you helped him out you kind of that you helped him get focused on what he had that was his his magic he used to his magic one I always tell like I get tons of guys that ask me questions you know got young young kids that I you know I don't know

why like to me i bumbled my way through life but but i got a lot of experience well and i tend to give them they're like well what would you say about this i'm like you know i'm going to give you the same advice any thought like i'm not going to tell you anything amazing but then when i tell it to them i realize that well i don't know you know that i don't think they they don't have anybody to tell them these things it's yeah i guess maybe that could be it too is they're hearing it for the first time sure find something you love that you're interested in that you're not going to mind doing the rest of your life and lean into that and find a way that make that pay you and don't do it for the money because if just try and be the best at it because if you're the best at it then the

money will come yeah and i think another thing i was thinking while you were talking there matt like another thing that i used in prison was is to try to win the day and i had a my daughter had a calendar that she gave me every year. They had like our family pictures and everything. And so I filled out that little box every night on the calendar. I was trying to find something that happened, even in prison, like what happened? I can say it happened good today. Here's what happened today.

What happened good? And one of the things I did to try to keep myself from falling down into a slippery slope was not fill out too bad boxes that I win the day, you know, one day at a time, don't get too far ahead of yourself because like with you, you had, you know, a much bigger sentence than me. But for me, a five-year sentence, you know, looking at that, you know, five years out, that just seems overwhelming. It's, you know, day-to-day, and then don't fall down the trap.

Day-to-day, don't fall down the trap. So that's one of the things I used was is that try to find something. And then if I did have a bad day, I wasn't trying to win all days. If I had a really bad day, I went all the way down. It was a really shitty day. And I went all the way down with it. But I didn't want to go down two days with it, because that, And I knew that that could turn into a week, that could turn into a month, that could turn into a year.

And I became that guy that was in the fetal position over there. And that's what always scared me. So that was a strategy of mine was don't fill out too bad boxes. Don't do it because you get slippery slope there in prison. And I always thought, I mean, because you see them all around you. You see the good ones that are trying to make it work. And you see the ones that have given up. And you think, oh, my God, I hope that had never happened to me because that can happen.

Yeah. get a bit of bad news and bad news in prisons really bad news in prison feels that much worse so so when you did get out you went to what a halfway house yeah guy went to a terrible halfway house you know and the thing the thing about not that there's hey there's a great halfway house the one of the one in st louis is the oldest halfway house in the united states of america and it is as they all are not in good areas and this is in a horrible area on coat brilliant boulevard in the ugliest most crime-ridden street in st louis i mean the things that happen around that halfway house are only drugs and shootings and whatever else you can come up with and then we're

all there i mean before i got there the guy you know he must assist on somebody and he came out of the, you know, the front glass door and they just moating down in a drive-by. So you always thought about like when I'm leaving that front door, it was, it was weird though, because it was so locked down. We were like with 150 guys and they had this big class area that you couldn't get out of, you know, it was all locked, locked down. And it was, it was worse than prison. That, that, and I had, I spent eight weeks there. I have no idea why I had to spend that much time there because I had a place to go. My wife, you know, I had a job and I still spent eight weeks there. And it was like the dirtiest and strangest and worst place I'd ever spent. Well, no, Warrington County Jail is the worst place

I've ever spent. But this one, this one was dirtier. But it was, I was glad to get out of there. And it's certainly, they're so bad. They get written up about all the time here in St. Louis. And they got their contract taken away from them. And they were supposed to open a a new dismas house a new halfway house and they somehow didn't get the contractors done and so it reverted back and so now they're they're uh year by year at dismas house so they're still alive still going on so you you were there for eight weeks did you go home on hang on uh like ankle monitor or yeah i did and that was that was kind of unique because the the um before when i got there they had just got a new contract uh renewed and that ankle monitors was

part of the new contract. And so they'd never had ankle monitors ever. And so the month before they get these ankle monitors, so I get an ankle monitor stripped on me, tacked to my ankle. And I thought, because always what they had done, I don't know if this happened with you, Matt, but they made three phone calls a night,

starting from 9 o'clock to 6 o'clock in the morning. And he had to have a landline. And if you didn't answer it, then you had to come back to the halfway house. well, they didn't stop doing that, even though they strapped us on with the ankle monitor. So I had the ankle monitor, and I had three of those contacts a night, which just was like, you wake up and like, holy shit, okay, okay, I answer it. Because your thought is, if I don't answer it, they're going to send me back.

And then I had a defective ankle monitor because they were all these old anchor monitors. They didn't get new ones. And I had a defective ankle monitor that wouldn't hold a charge. And if it doesn't hold a charge, that also sends you back. So I kept telling my case manager, hey, my ankle monitor, oh, no, you just need to charge it. And so I finally, you know, after a couple of days, they kept ringing that I was escaping. And I said, no, it doesn't charge. And so they finally cut it off of them and put another one out.

So it took a little anxiety off of the situation. But it's so hard to tell people like what kind of anxiety that is because here I am at work. And, you know, I'm back into this new job. and this damn ankle monitor is going, and it's flashing red, and it won't, and that means it's going down to the big panel down there that I'm escaping from my BOP world custody. It just, it was crazy. But after that first week, I was fine. So what was your, what was the job you got when you got out? Well, it's funny because I, I went back to, there was a friend of mine that had a dealership. There's a GMC Buick dealership. And, um,

It's when I got back, they were having problems and it was with the floor plan lender and it was kind of getting worse and worse. And that only lasted like a year, but I was almost had like PTSD because, you know, you had these state people coming in and they were trying to see if this is good. I was like, I want to, I don't feel good. And then it went under because of the floor plan thing. And so I went out and found another job with a friend of mine whose dad had spent time in prison. and he really we'd stayed in close contact and so I went to work with him and that's why I've been since it's it's a real estate company and I work with people on more or less coaching them the agents that you're not a salesperson you need to set up your business and have a plan

and how you work that plan and get a system and processes going so that's what I do which is kind of second nature to me so it's I don't have a license to go out and sell real estate I don't know if I want a license to go and sell real estate, but I like what I'm doing. You could probably get one. I could. I could. I actually have been co-defendants and people I know that have fraud charges,

and they've ended up getting real estate licenses. I think I can do it. The only difference is when you're an extra fellow, especially here in Missouri, you do have to go up before the board, and they have to make special consideration all that. So you do have to take the extra steps with it, but maybe one of these times a bit.

Like if you haven't violated, if you're not a multiple, multiple offender and you're not, and you know, and you've completed your probation, you get it. Yeah. I'm a pretty boring ex-fellant, I guess. Yeah. Which is good. Yeah. That's what they like.

Yeah. But in the meantime, in the meantime, I do that. I like doing it. I like doing it because it's something I know. I feel like I'm not wasting what I, what I use to build our other sales company. I kind of get to use that as something that I know. So I feel good about that, not wasting that. But then one of the things when I was walking that fence in Leavenworth, I thought, you know,

what am I going to do now? You know, this is really bad. You know, all this time I thought I was making a difference in building this company and felt really good about it. Now I'm in prison. What am I going to do? I thought, well, I got, I'll use my experience. I'll take this experience and I'll write a book and take.

and talk about the journey because a lot of it's good you know a lot of it's good and this gets really really bad and then it gets good again so but uh i want people to know that it's okay that you'll survive you know it's okay it's like i said there's nothing as bad as your mind makes it out to be you will make it just i want to encourage people to take that step out of whatever they're in so that they can do what don't stand on the sidelines you don't want to be the guy the 85 year old rocking in the rocking chair thinking god i wish i would have done that i was so good I wish I. So that's really the reason why I wrote the book. And as I got writing that book, I thought, I was doing, you know, guessing on podcast. I thought, I had to do a podcast. And I thought,

gosh, I got 50 people on my phone on my Facebook. I just talked to people about, you know, life before prison, life in prison, life out of prison, all guys was with Elevenworth. And then it kind of expanded out. But it was all about how'd you get through it? You know, what happens when your worst fear becomes your reality? How do you adapt? How do you survive? How do you survive? and then what and so we got into all those crazy unique stories that was about a year ago and i love it it's it's really a passion of mine and i think there's like two or three things that come from it um one is is are we prison creatures i mean i don't think so now i think we're we can have normal conversations with people but people don't know that because they don't really know people

have gone to prison the second thing is is we talk about that really like dateline that person did the crime and this is how they did it. This was more about what were you thinking. How did you make it and what were your strategies to get through it? And then what were you feeling? And then what did you do? And those end up being things that people can relate to and use those strategies. And the second or the third last thing is, as you know, a lot of good guys are trying desperately to get a second chance out there. And I hope that when they listen to these stories, they see the narrative, the ugly narrative that they might have read or whatever that's in their community, this guy just wants to get back out and make it. And maybe by listening to this and you see the

commonalities that you'll give that person a second chance, if you run across somebody who's been in prison, give them a shot. Because, you know, as we all know, the percentages are so horrible. You know, is it two thirds and go back in three years, three, four, and five? There's all kinds of reasons for that. But if we give, if we have more avenues for people to understand a little bit more of people who've been in prison and give them a second chance. I think that those people will fight like hell to keep their job. Well, how long has the podcast, you said one year, is it on, is it on, it's on what, Spotify, it's on Spotify, Apple, Odyssey, yeah.

And you put it on YouTube? I put the people on YouTube that I've done just like we're doing today. well if they come into my studio thing i i don't have the camera to film so i'm going to that's going to be my next step i actually just want to film everything uh not just the ones people that aren't but most of them are actually on youtube because most of people aren't in st louis they're all over the place right oh okay that's good that's good what what i'm but i'm not as i'm not as uh worldly with you as you are with youtube youtube's like a whole another world i think and you know there's something about youtube i read the other day is that you know you like on um

instagram or or facebook you're scrolling you know you're scrolling youtube you're searching it's a search engine and so how you market and how you brand and how you do that it's a little bit different so right well you still have a i'm always learning you have a feed like that they'll still recommend things to you like yeah go to your home page you haven't put anything in it it will tell you like hey here's here's some stuff you might like yeah scroll sometimes you do that and you haven't on the side or anything they're they're telling you they're you know there's what you like yeah these are they're suggesting to you hey this is this is what's going on in ukraine i noticed you looked at 30 videos yesterday you know you still want to know right here's

something on world war two you watch a lot of these documentaries on world war two you know so um i know that my the great thing too also by the way and i don't know what it is with spotify and all these things is is youtube um and you probably know this you have a channel but like the analytics are great really good analytics yeah like for for free like it's you know well i i don't know that people really realize how much they use youtube i mean youtube's the platform for to go to yeah between that and google people send me stuff like hey you ought to read this article on this guy like listen i'm not reading i'm not reading a 30 minute article so i immediately go to youtube and punching the guy's name and then

somebody within it the article came out two days ago somebody's already made a video yeah or i watch something on it or somebody starts talking or there's six videos on this rapper that got shot that you wanted me to read about well i'm not going to read about it but i can listen to these four podcasts so yeah it's a it's a i mean i it's a great platform especially someone like me who you know hates to read did you know i read all the time i read for about three years straight like you were saying probably a book maybe two books a week yeah um and then i got burnout on that and then i started writing yeah and then i wrote my memoir and then i wrote a memoir for a guy named ephraim devoroli i don't know if you ever saw the movie war dogs i you know what

i think i saw that a while back um but i that's a great movie right yeah jonah hill plays yeah joan they're the guys they're the guys that do the uh the uh the uh gun and stuff over yeah the ammunition ammunition yeah yeah well guns be in ammunition but yeah yeah so i uh the that the main true story i know the guy that the guy that um jona hill plays yeah uh the fat guy yeah his name's effron dev roly when when i was in prison i wrote his memoir okay and that was published and then i wrote i got a couple i got some guys in rolling stone magazine and i uh wrote a book on that one it's called generation oxy uh it got renamed by the publisher like you know when you sell your publishing rights you know they do whatever they want right i called it um i called

it oxy rush they changed it you know the article ended up being called um the dukes of oxy and that got option the film rights got option and the kid's life rights got option and you know of course i got a piece of that and then i were you writing though were you writing matt like early in near life like i wrote a book when i was outside but never got it published like i wrote a manuscript and put it in my drawer at work because once i started my mortgage company you know i had like 12 guys working there and then you kind of stopped being a mortgage broker i was started being just like a manager i'm like it's all i can do to pay the bills yeah train people to look over their documents to you know i have to get approved i had you got to get approved as an fHA lender a v8

lender, subprime, you know, with all these different companies. That's a lot of paperwork. And it's a, it's constantly being updated and, and just doing the books and the taxes. And before you know it, it's like, like I don't close loans anymore, you know, but I did have downtime. And so I started writing. I wrote a book called The Associates. I never got it published. So it's like a Grisham book. It's so funny because I, that's really what it was. Huh. He actually came out with like 10 years, 10 or 15 years later. he came out with a book called the associate okay i probably read that yeah but i came out with the associates and it was about a mortgage broker who got in trouble and so i write about this mortgage

broker that gets in trouble and then of course i then i get in trouble right and then i go off and then so the media you know somebody had given the FBI that book and the media you know the some of the reporters got the book and they were like this guy wrote about his crimes before he even committed then and it it's a memoir and it's a how to and It's like, it's none of those things. That's fiction. Yeah, it's, it to me, I would say, look, it is, the lead character was a broker. I was a broker.

But it, it is as much an autobiography as the firm is an autobiography because John Grisham happens to also be a lawyer. Like he's a lawyer, writes about lawyers. These books are not all autobiographies. Right. So, but that, you know, it. It added flame of the media attention that was involved in my case. But yeah, so when I went to prison, I just started writing these guys' stories and their synopsies. And I started, you know, optioning the stories.

And then I got out, of course, and I optioned more stories. And, you know, so it just, it just turned into something. And now I've optioned a bunch of stories. And I've got some of them being turned into, you know, being, we're getting documentaries done. And yeah, that's fun stuff. It sounds good, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. In the meantime, none of it's paying my bills.

No, it always sounds good. It does. It sounds awesome. Things are happening. Like, they're not really happening that fast. Right, right. But yeah. So you've been doing the podcast.

You're working on it. You're going to transition a little bit more to YouTube and start video. Yeah. Yeah. And actually working with some guys out in L.A. that we're talking about possibly taking the nightmare success. idea in expanding that brand to TV and form of streaming. So I don't know what it all happened, but I really like what I'm doing.

I've really kind of created a new passion for finding these stories, interviewing these people, going out and speaking about it. And like I'm going down next week to speak to the University of Missouri Business School. I went spoke last year. and I actually, I like all that. So, you know, I really thought, you know, walking that fence, will anything really, will I really ever feel like myself again? I do. I really do. I feel like, and I think you said this earlier, man, is find that passion, find, find the thing that gets you up, that you feel like it's not working. And that's, you know, in this last year, I've really felt that.

I just feel like I've kind of hit what I know. You know, this, I don't have to, you know, What you and I said around talk about today, both of us that can talk about it probably six hours or more because we know it. We know it. We lived it. And, you know, that's bringing out, you know, more of that so people can become familiar with it and not have such a stigma to it. That can be a good thing. And there's a lot of people doing really good stuff. I mean, there's people. I think I've interviewed almost 50 people now. And they're like some of the people I'm talking to, if we could just put an umbrella over the top of that so that we could do that kind of good. stuff everywhere for what's going on. Yeah, it'd be great. Well, I mean, that's, yeah, that's, that's great. And I appreciate you, you know, taking the interview. Oh, I love it. I appreciate you having me on that. And Tyler, you know, connected us up. It was great. Yeah, Tyler's great.

He's, yeah, he's, he's been helping me out for like a year or so now. Well, Okay, so you've got the podcast. I'll put all, well, I won't, my video. Colby will put all of your links in the description box. Perfect. And there, you know, he does upload these things to like, I forget, I think he uses anchor. And then yeah, it's it on spot. I use anchor. Okay. So, you know, for for people that are listening to it, then, you know, obviously it's, it's the nightmare success. nightmare success in and out yeah yeah nightmar success and the book is night well not book

is nightmare success loyalty betrayal light behind bars adapting and finally breaking free in memoir i have to read that because i always forget the second you're going to say that's a hell of love yeah it's a hell nightmare success the name of the book but the subtitle thing i just kind of look at um okay so yeah uh we'll put all the uh all the links in the description and i appreciate you uh taking the time and you know talking with me and is there anything else you can think of no man it's been great i i appreciate your great interviewer and a great show and i like your stuff man you're doing good you're doing good stuff listen i barely i don't know when i don't know what i'm doing i appreciate you guys watching and uh that was my interview with brett cassidy and check out his podcast

also if if you guys like the video do me a favor and hit the subscribe button hit the hit the notification bell also leave me a comment in the comment section i try and respond to as many comments as i can i you know i don't know that i get them all but i i definitely i definitely read almost every comment that's out there well probably 80 percent um and so i appreciate you guys watching and thank you very much and if you like the channel and you want to try and support the channel i have a patreon and i appreciate it and check out my patreon all of the everything we've talked about and anything related to me and Brent will be in the description box and I appreciate it. So thanks a lot. See you.