Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Too High To Hustle | Funny Stories From Failed Criminals

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Too High To Hustle | Funny Stories From Failed Criminals

They pull us over. I'm thinking, whatever, you know, can we search a car? Absolutely not. Why do you want to? We're not doing anything. We're just driving somewhere. Well, I smell the odor of marijuana heavily. I'm thinking, I got nothing.

I'm good. All right, F it. We get out. They searched the car. And the guy comes back with a tin foil pipe this big. Where did you find that? And he's like, well, you tell me, I get it out of the glove box. I'm like, this not mine.

Did you act offended the whole time they were searching? Like, I can't believe. I would never. Oh, my God. You guys have the wrong room. Listen, I would love to pretend like I did. We had this little closet, and I had this huge flag that had a cannabis leaf on it. But you're still selling it.

When you're an addict, like money doesn't mean you stop. You know what I mean? Like having security of money or a house. Like you don't realize like, oh, shoot, I spent so much of my life as an addict. And especially when you see people that are successful or maybe, you know, go to high school and then go to college and they get this good job and they do all these day. And you're like, oh, wow, I chased a high for 20-something years. Hey, this is Matt Cox, and I am here with Rob Stevens, and he is a former drug addict and current YouTuber, and we're going to hear his story. So check it out. Well, listen, in the immortal words of Christopher Wallace, when he said, never get high on your own supply, me and my friends just had no regard for that.

That was really what started all the trouble for me. Listen, I had a great growing up, you know, well, up until my parents divorced. But growing up was fine. Our house was almost like a hostel, you know, whoever needed any kind of help. Where were you born? I mean, where? I was born in Framingham. I lived outside Boston forever.

We moved around a lot. So we lived in Hawaii when I was really, my dad got into real estate. And listen, a few years ago, I don't know. I don't talk to my family anymore, and it's unfortunate. But one of the last times I seen my uncle, he said, you know, your dad, you know, sold cannabis. I said, I kind of figured, you know, when you're growing up and you go visit your grandmother and she's showing you these 1970s printout photos, remember before they were digital, of like eight-foot cannabis plants in the backyard, you think something's up.

But we had a great time growing up. We lived in Hawaii. We lived in Ashland, Hopkinton, Framingham. So we moved all over the place. But the one recurring theme was that if you ran into trouble, if you needed something, we would take you in. So growing up, we always had, you know, someone living in the house with us, usually parties on the weekends. So the culture was just, or looking back, what was normal for me, just was not atypical. you know what I mean it was just very naturalized into the party scene i guess you could say and my dad

so he started a construction company with him and his brother and they built it up to be something big where you know he wanted to sell it off uh i'll get into what happened later uh because i don't want to say too much about that because it's a really you know it's one of the worst weeks of my life um but so he had this construction company and a few bifit were construction And the guys that do that are hardened, I don't know what to call them. Well, some of them were convicts. That's the other thing. You know, my dad had no issue hiring anybody out of jail, out of prison, giving him a second chance.

He really, he'd give you the shirt off his back. So I grew up in a fantastic atmosphere up until my teens. Once they started a split and there was less supervision, I guess you could call it. Right. um that's when the trouble started and when you're growing up in smaller towns as soon as you get one running with the cops you kind of become marked you know they they like to single people out and we had one cop and no no no there were a few cops in our town that you just couldn't do anything we were lucky though because we had so you know the triple deckers in massachusetts my buddy lived on the first floor

and this guy that had moved into the top floor who is the most inconspicuous I'm telling you if I seen him today he was such a generic white guy I probably couldn't identify him you know what I mean he was like he was like every um drawing that they do for a police sketch combined together it's like you could not identify this this dude was the where's Waldo of white guys and he had someone he knew up in Vermont that he could go and pick up massive amounts of cannabis. And this was at a time again, where in the 90s, you either got brickweed or like chronic. You know, there was no like today, there's all these variations. There's, you know, you can get the, uh, the specific percentage of THC. You can get all, and really it was like when you were going through high school or middle school, most of the time it was like this brickweed that was literally packaged off of a brick still had seeds in it it was flattened it was the most disgusting stuff or you had somebody that had a connect we became that connect because when you're and he was going up to vermont so he was bringing back what was it the white widow purple hey

everything that was like the highest caliber weed today he had access to so this random middle age guy that did not have a connection to any kind of market um me and my buddy basically became that. But again, these cops, now I've got to say, it's going to be different me telling my story than what you probably regularly feature because we weren't criminals.

I'm not a criminal. Listen, 70 to 75% of the stuff I did, if you did it today, it wouldn't be criminal activity. You'd be a medical patient. And listen, if you sold, grew or smoked cannabis you're not you're not a criminal you're practically a doctor right there's there's a fine line now you don't believe me i i i hear you but i've met guys in prison for 20 and 30

years for selling cannabis that's what i'm saying the the the federal bureau of prisons and the u.s. attorney's office and the you know the DEA and you know all of they have a vastly different And they've got it wrong. Hold on. Hold on. Here's the, no, no, no. I'll prove it to you. The problem is that they have the guns and the prisons. They got the power. As much as you're right.

I'll tell you what. They don't have the numbers. We got the numbers. All right. Remember that. When anybody tells you, oh, they got the power. Yeah, we got the numbers. We just need some class solidarity.

Hold on. So if you Google patent number 6-630-507, Do you know what that is? That is a patent that the United States has on cannabis, filed in 2001 by the Department of Health and Human Service. I forget what the department is. And it lists cannabis and cannabinoids as a legally recognized medicinal use. Now, if you know still federally, it's what, Schedule I believe it's still federally a Schedule I substance, which is next to heroin, meaning if it's Schedule 1, it has the least or the highest recognition for being

addictive and it has absolutely zero medical use. This is why the big push right now is like Biden said, hey, I'll decriminalize it or legalize it. And they haven't done anything. In fact, when he did that federal pardon, that does nothing. These people with state charges, my friends who had state charges. It doesn't do anything. I know I would love that. getting out. I'm like the greatest PR move ever. This guy's like, ah, pardon everyone federally. We're like, but there was a thousand state

arrests for cannabis in Massachusetts. No one's getting arrested federally. They're not putting money into it. They're not chasing it down. Or what about another great move? I'm going to satisfy everyone's student loans. People, yeah, six months later, the court goes, he can't

do that. And now he's like, get ready to start paying everyone. Nobody has to pay a car payment ever again six months later the supreme court says what's he doing you know randomly satisfy fucking loans it's so crazy like what goes on so essentially that's what i bring that up all the time and i worked in radio for 20 years and that was what i was trying to push because the government can't have it both ways they can't say like this is the hardest drug there is which is just ridiculous but also in 2001 put a patent on it for recognizing its medical quality quality

right you know so it's frustrating because if i had grown up today none of this you know what i mean like i just would have been uh like a doctor's assistant i would have been like you know a physician maybe it was alternative medicine you know but i would have been looked at way differently in fact when i was on the radio people would go well what we were trying to legalize it here in 2017 in massachusetts and we would talk to the governor and he would compare it to the opioid epidemic And I went, listen, I know people who have died from that, and I know people who smoke every day. And if you're trying to draw a parallel between those two, you're crazy. But, you know, it's more important that people really see kind of the truth behind it.

Like the government knows it's healthy or healthy for some people. They know that it's a solution to certain chronic pain. So the fact that I even had some kind of criminal record for this is just obscene. so getting that out of the way my first arrest right we would we would move I mean how are you young um I just got my license that was the biggest thing when you didn't have a license it was so you had to have people come to your place which was not ideal you know we did not want that to happen and when I got my license I got this old truck it was like a 1980 Chevy custom shortbed deluxe one of these just beaters put a nice paint job on it but and this truck got me in trouble

so many times the muffler would fall off and if you've ever heard one of those loud trucks with the muffler i would rig it up i always kept uh they don't have them anymore you know the wire coat hangers which they just don't sell what happened to the like why did they stop making coat hangers out of wire why they're all plastic well it if you go to if you get your clothes laundered they give them give you the wired ones that's the only place though yeah you try to buy them In, like, Walmart or wherever, Target or whatever, yeah, they're all, they're really nice, or they're really nice. They're wood. They have padding.

Yeah, but the wire ones you could use for anything. So I always kept a couple of wire ones behind the seat. And if the muffler fell, so one time I got pulled over because the muffler came off. And the cop wanted to cite me for a noise violation because that's how loud it was when I was dry. It was late at night. So, you know, it sounded like gun. Do you ever see in the movie, Uncle Buck? Yeah.

I love Uncle Buck. Love that movie. We would call this truck. In fact, most of my cars were an Uncle Buck because you know the backfire, it would just sound like that as you drove. So if you took the wire code hanger and rigged it up so the Cadillic converter would stick to the pipe again, it wouldn't be as loud. But this thing was just, it was not conspicuous. So clearly you knew if I was going around somewhere. And one of the first arrests, so, you know, whatever was, 16 and a half, I forget when you get your license.

It's still in high school. 16. You get 15, uh, learner permit. That's right. And then 16 license. So we're talking right around then. And at this time, we had a few different friends who, I don't know if it was juvie or jail. You know, they were just getting out, but these were different.

Again, you can have them on your, I don't think most of them are alive. But those were more violent crimes. I stayed away from that. again, I'm not a criminal. I just, I was an alternative medicine, uh, pharmacist. I'm going to lean heavily on your medical issue that you were taking it for, by the way. Oh, you tell me. Anxiety. Exxiety, sleep, nausea, back pains, headaches. I could go off. You know, every, everything under the sun,

this thing heals. I'm telling you. But I had already run and made the drop off. And the worst part about all of this is that we never we weren't doing any of this to make money it was all strictly to be able to buy more drugs that's it so it was just always parlaying and that's really where like the addiction came from i had the unfortunate hookup throughout my life where i almost never had to pay for anything it always came from well if i got enough of this sold it at this price i could you know get this much for free that's how we always looked at it So we would basically never have cash on us. It was always just some other drugs stashed somewhere else.

And my buddy wanted a ride from whatever, wherever I was dropping off to the next location. Now, he is a well-known criminal. The cops decide that, you know, they're going to pull us over. I know I have nothing on me. I'm stoked. I'm like, yeah, good. You know, he's out on probation, whatever. He's not doing nothing wrong.

I ask him, you got a weapon. He's like, I'm clean. All right. Let's go. Pull us over. We're fine. Again, the 90s were a different time. The number of times I heard, I smell the odor of marijuana, get out of the car, is remarkable. That was the cop's go-to. That was all they had to say, and all of a sudden, you had no more rights. So they pull us over. I'm thinking, whatever, you know, can we search a car? Absolutely not. Why do you want to? We're not doing anything. We're just driving somewhere. Well, I smell the odor of marijuana. heavily. I'm thinking, I got nothing. You know, I'm, I'm good. All right. Effort. We get out. They run his stuff. He's fine. You know, he has charges that he let him know. I have nothing. I think I'm good. They search the car. They search the car. And the guy comes back with a tinfoil pipe this big. Now, I work, I work construction all through high school, obviously working for my dad's company. You know, it didn't matter if it was like a day off. from school or the entire summer. And do you know how sometimes if they're wrapping a sub, they would use tinfoil? Right. I'm sure they still do that.

So I must have. And this is why I was so just, you know, willing to be like, yeah, whatever. You know, if you're going to, if you're going to search the car, good luck. You're just very confident on having nothing. When he walked back with the tinfoil pipe, you know, my heart stopped because I was like, oh, Jesus, is that even, you know what I mean? Like, where did you find that? And he's like, well, you tell me, I get it out of the glove box.

I'm like, this not mine. You know, you must have put it in there. There's no way. I must have made, you know, this tinfoil sandwich wrapper into a pipe, smoked it at work, stuck it in the glove box and totally forgot because we were very, you know what I mean? We didn't travel unless we had to with anything on us. And we certainly weren't stashing in a car. We would usually keep it on us, try to toss it or whatever it was.

So this is something that had been used? We'll get to the court case in a little bit. So I get arrested. my buddy who's out on parole doesn't they just let them go they're like can you get somewhere he's like i'll walk so i get arrested and this is my first time getting arrested uh not first running with the cause but the first time i had to go to court and fight this and again you know i'm thinking like this is there's no way they're going to be able to pull this off i'm not going to go to jail you know this this is nothing it's a tin foil pipe where maybe some resonant or you know some ash we go to court

and we had a great lawyer this lawyer to this day he reminds me you ever watch the better call saw series yeah this guy i'm telling you he was the 1990s version of better call saw because he hung out with us when i look back i'm like it's a little weird you know a little weird but great guy because he was definitely in his late 30s maybe he was a lawyer he had to go through law school he was much older but he would hang out with us he knew everything we were doing you know and he was are defendant, and I'm talking about every single one of my friends. We kept this guy well employed, always going into court. So he comes out, I don't know what it was, pre-trial, one of the court hearings, you know, the appearance or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, first appearance.

Thank you, thank you. It's been a long time. I'm definitely not close to the 16. And he shows me the police report. And he goes, just go home. He's like, I got this. Don't, don't worry about any more appearances nothing he goes get out of here shows me the police report i read it and this cop writes uh you know strong smell or strong odor of marijuana i don't call out that cannabis it's it's a medicine uh but he writes strong odor of marijuana found a tin foil pipe hot to the touch and i i but i'm young so i was like i don't what he hot to he goes think about it he goes does tinfoil hold heat. There's no way they pulled you out of the car. Search the car in this amount of time to say that, you know, it was hot to the touch. And that's how he got, well, he didn't get

to dismiss. So I go on probation for six months. I don't, you know, there's no time, nothing like that. It's just an innocent probation. The unfortunate part was they gave you like a seven o'clock curfew. You had to do the drug test. So they weren't messing around. Thankfully, I had some cool parents that if I wasn't in by seven, they would essentially cover for me. But this cop at this point just had, you know, we had me and my buddy who were doing this had a target on our back. I get through the probation. Now, mind you, so I'm not even 17 at this point, or I'm getting close to 17. And we're hanging out at the triple decker. But the front stoop had a little side driveway and then there's a fence along it and there was a supermarket supermarket uh there was

something else on the other side and then in the back there was a parking lot that you could come in but there was a a tree line so you couldn't necessarily see so we're hanging out there and if we were hanging out we would never have you know what i mean we would just we would only carry enough to smoke or whatever we weren't carrying a bunch of you know weight on us we just wouldn't be holding it especially on the side little porch where the driveway was at his house. But there was a group, maybe six of us, most had some kind of record. You know, again, I'm off probation.

I'm very innocent at this point. And after about maybe 20 minutes of hanging out, cops busts through the back with flashlight guns drawn, a cruiser pulls up in the front, again, jumps out, freeze, nobody move, wonder what the hell is good we were literally just hanging out outside the kid that had whatever on them i think a pipe and a small small bag just chucks it so go ahead search us we're fine you know more that's what we're thinking again nighttime we didn't realize like oh they got

flashlights they're going to search the whole area and pray that they find something so you guys are in trouble they do they find a pipe and you know a dime bag something nothing they were just you could hang outside and smoke. I'm shocked this kid didn't eat it. Right. So none of us will attest that that's ours. In fact, we're denying it. You found it.

You're planting it on us. There's no way that, you know, get out of here. Where'd you get that? Across the street or, you know, across the property line. We're like not, no one is going to admit to that. And you know how pushy they can get. Well, somebody's going to. They charged my buddy whose house it was.

So they essentially said it was on your. property we're going to arrest you uh and he has to again another court appearance well because a few of my friends already had court appearances and i think two of them were again on the probation of parole or whatever i'm the one that this lawyer says hey listen you're the only one who has no charges no court case no nothing now we need you to come in to testify what happened you know because this is an illegal search and seizure at this point they had no warrant no cause no no suspicion right there's no reason for them to just randomly pull over and grab three kids and and search them like did somebody call like what were we doing that no call no this what i mean

it's like really and and the fact that we were on his property right next to his door and they were busting i mean cops are coming through the back woodline we didn't see that they had parked in that parking lot behind and that they're pulling up into his driveway you know what i mean with guns like It was the most crazy and bewildering thing. But when you're kind of known as the people who are maybe potentially helping medicinal patients again in the 90s. I love how you frame this like your Robin Hood. Well, listen, let me tell you. Help people.

It's about people helping people. I'm the people helper. That's all I am. I'm telling you. It's basically medicine. Well, that's what I was trying to. to tell you about the radio you you try to tell these people like hey it's a medicine they go what are the professionals say and I go who do you consider a professional and they say well you know

the doctors the scientists and I would tell them how many drugs has a doctor or scientist done because I don't do you want to find out about basketball from somebody who read about it in a book no you want to talk to an NBA player we were the NBA players of doing drugs you know so whenever somebody would reference like well what are the professionals writing about I say why would you want to hear from them? They studied it from the sideline. You want the people who were in the drug game. You want the people who could tell you what it's like when it kicks in.

Those are the professionals. Still, there's a stigma on it. People don't want to believe you, you know? Listen, I'm with you. I hear you. I'm preaching to the choir right now. So, okay, so he goes to court, and now it's my testimony against this cop's testimony. And that is the most terrifying thing because you don't realize,

especially at that age. I mean, you know that there's some abuse of power, if you want to call it corruption or whatever. You know, like the badge pretty much a lot. I don't want to say allows you to do anything, but you get a little more freedoms. It holds a lot of weight for some reason. For some reason,

it is many, as many corruption cases, as many times, what's funny is it as many times as judges, see cops, get on the stand, and blatantly lie, they still will take their word over yours.

I got four people and a video camera and the cop get on there and you're actually weighing it. Well, I don't know. It's close. It's close. There's three people that have nothing to do with this that are eyewitnesses and there's a video camera that also helps support his story and you're still even considering listening to the cop.

And the cop can still have a questionable past or questionable behavior in the past, which is what a lot, you know, a lot of times happen. And what did they do? They went to, they went to school for, you know,

the police academy for eight weeks. Yeah, you tell me how they're supposed to enforce the laws when, what do the lawyers do? Eight years to learn the law? That is just, I don't know, that's backwards in my mind.

So, so you know what we're dealing with then, you know? And when you, when you call to testify, well, at this point, I'm like,

I'll do whatever, you know, whatever you guys need me to do, if I'm the one that has to get on the stand because everybody else is a questionable, who is questionable as a character witness, let me get up there. And he testified, too, this cop said, you know, again, I wasn't in the testimony room, but what they were telling me once we got, or in the courtroom, they don't let you in

until you get to testify, or at least that's how it was in my court case. We had to sit outside, then they call you in for the testimony, and then they dismiss you. You're allowed to leave. So they, you know, they tell me after that, it's like, again, it's this odor of marijuana. that can trigger anything. It doesn't matter if it's a raid. It doesn't matter if it's private property. Just the scent of it down the street and seeing people.

They were willing to do, you know, compromise whatever. There's no protect and serve at this point. It was like, we're going to get these alternative medicine heads. So we do that court case, and he wins. They took my testimony and he gets nothing. I'm talking about like whoever was the judge on this. And that was the other important thing. It's weird, you know, that you learn, like, when you want to get a judge, what court you want to go to, what judges, you know, what their past convictions are who you really want to see. That's where this lawyer was impeccable. He knew the court system like no other. And he would say, listen, we want to push it to this date because we can get this judge. So, you know, whatever was the odds were stacked in our favor. He gets off. And it's, you know, incredible because you would think they had us dead to rights. They had us with.

um i forget what you'd call it holding i don't know if this one you just go you know holding paraphernalia uh whatever else it was or that was probably it but still at this age you know they're putting people away for that they're locking kids up i forget it's a class of d misdemeanor uh depending on you know how much you have or how many prior convictions you have so you know carries different weight where you're at in the court sister or if you have previous charges, which that's what a lot of my friends, you know what I mean? You get busted three times and all of a sudden you're looking at a year or whatever it was. He gets off and this lawyer, our childhood would have been so different without this guy.

Remarkable. He goes, we're going to celebrate. I'm taking you guys to Montreal. Now this is like an eight hour, hour drive. We're going to do a weekend away just to celebrate the victory. And this is our lawyer taking us. Okay. this guy is incredible and you guys paid him this is not a okay this isn't like a public defender no no no

no this was a private that's what i'm saying like i don't know what kind of deals he was cutting with parents but you know this dude took on a lot of cases for us every every i mean he must have been in not a court we would see him he would be in with somebody else and we would be coming in the court and be like hey you got us next right but he he loved this and he again i think it's the mindset I think he could see the future and be like, this is not a crime what these kids are doing it. Again, these are imaginary borders that some state made up. They might have the power and the guns.

We got the numbers. They're staying. It's a crime because you have this magical plant. But really, you know, we're guys. I heard that same speech while standing behind a chain link fence with guards with guns and a watchtower. And I've heard that same speech many times. Listen, I'm telling you,

I'm empathetic to the cause. I say release them all. There shouldn't be anybody in jail for a plant. Get real. This is crazy. We need to be adults here in America and these cops need to wise up. Just say, hey, listen, we were wrong. We're sorry.

We're letting everybody out. Do you think that will happen? No. I'm pushing for it. So we go. Okay. So we go up to Montreal. Great week and away.

My buddy drives with him. I forget what happened that I had a drive alone, but I'm going to meet them up there. Now, I realized when you're crossing a border, you don't want to tell them that you're going to meet your lawyer. That's just not the language you want to use. But for me, again, a young, dumb kid. This isn't like a hard and criminal story. This is just the ignorance of youth and learning very hard lessons time and time again.

So we get to the border and they say like the purpose, reason, a visit or whatever and I'm just thinking oh I'm going to meet my lawyer just we just beat a case I'm coming up here to meet my lawyer you're the kind of guy we want in Canada they go can you pull over to the side and I have to pull my car and they I'm not kidding they almost took apart the car searching it for what you know what I mean I don't know what they thought why I would bring anything to meet my lawyer but they wanted to thoroughly inspect and make sure that you know this dude isn't day i mean i'm a kid though again it's so it's so ludicrous that these people would think anything of me again a alternative medicine physician or handler or dealer i don't like

the word dealer distribute yeah that's that's that's not good that's that's that's a i think that's an enhancement oh yeah that might be word i'm telling you the language is everything you have trafficker, distributor, you know. Yeah, I don't want to up the charge of manufacturer or it. Because it's not. Well, when you're growing it, well, and that's the other thing. You know, so we had some friends that there were nurseries by the house, you know, huge, just plant yards. So trees from miles, you know, out back in the woods, really hard to get to, too.

And we learned that if you went to the back section where I don't want to give too much. well no no no it's all legal now so you just grow it at home well depending on your state that's your limitations too so yeah yeah it was very you know it's like five years or something so so if you went to the back where it stopped being you know the the garden section or the the plant nursery and you found the tree line so you could still get sunlight in you know because you don't want the trees block in any kind of light you could grow all along that and for the most part you wouldn't lose any crop you know people weren't when they're when they're taking stuff out of the nursery most of the time it's already pulled to the shop it's not going you know to the back to resource and if it was you could

kind of time it and either you know pull some crop if it was you know the right amount of time or you did it far enough back where you knew these trees were not mature yet you know and that's really what you would look for you'd look for something that was just planted uh they would set up the time sprinklers, you know, so nobody had to go back there unless there was some kind of issue. And you could just grow along the whole whole edge line. And I'm talking, you know, a mini field of stuff back before it was okay to have these gross setups in your closet or whatever people are doing now. But back to Canada. So we go up to Canada. I get searched, uh, meet up with the lawyer. And it's, I think Canada's drinking age back there was back then was

18. I don't know if they've boosted it, but that's what you could do. You just drive up to Montreal and nobody batted an eye. I don't, I wasn't 18, but you know what I mean? Like, they weren't ID and people that were on the 17, 18 year old line. It just didn't happen. So that's, that's essentially why we took that mini vacation, because we were going to go up there celebrate, have some beers, watch the Patriots game, whatever. And the first couple nights go great. I think it was probably Friday into Saturday. Sunday, the Patriots happen. And remind you, we're young kids. And when you start to mix in alcohol, we were mostly potheads. We, the hard drugs hadn't even hit yet, you know, so the alcohol would give you that liquid confidence. Right. Where a whole different animal

would come out. And if you want to see debauchery in New England, come and visit any bar on Sunday when the Patriots are playing, and I guarantee you you can find a fight. Just wear whatever other team's insignia there is, and somebody will start with you. So we were out of town wearing our Patriots. You know, we go to the game. It's grand. We're getting pitches, getting loaded, and we start John with whoever, I forget who they're playing, the Jets or the Dolphins, whatever, Florida team.

You know, we just start John with these other people, which leads. to kind of falling out into the street, not falling out into the street, but kind of getting kicked out of the bar and a fight ensues. And mind you, we had just beat this court case. So the fact that we're not like, you know, and this is why it's like fun, fun loving criminals who are just morons. You know, we were just young and didn't know any better. We get into a fight and one of us, I think it was my buddy, gets thrown onto the hood of a car, it spills into the street, And next thing you know, there's these two, I'm not kidding, six foot, blonde, dressed like cops, ladies, breaking the thing up. And again, drunk, not assuming that we're going to get in trouble, we start melting off to them, you know.

And they're asking us like, is this your car, you're damaging this car, you're breaking stuff off of it. You got tossed on the load. Do you own this car? And we're like, why do you want to go for a ride? Just mouthing off to them. Next thing you know, we're both slammed against the wall by both of these ladies. I've never seen such beautiful cops in my life. I didn't think cops were women at this point.

You know, all I had dealt with was middle-aged men that, you know, were ready to just give you a hard time. These two ladies, God bless them, because they must have endured so much, so much mouthing off before they decided to cuff and stuff us. And we get arrested. So at this point, we're taken to whatever the jail downtown, Montreal is and because where we were eating buffalo wings or whatever, you know, where we were at the bar, I had some wet naps in my, in my pocket. They thought I was an addict. They thought I was

using wet naps to shoot up. They didn't believe that, you know, I was just drunk and I was trying to convince them. So I don't get to go into the main holding cell where it was awesome. You could still smoke, you know, so if you had a pack of butts on you, my buddy spent the whole time smoking butts hanging out all weekend like had a fine time they put me to an isolation where I guess there was there was a girl catty corner to me who's detoxing off a heroin and I got my own isolated cell as well thank God I don't know how she got them in there but she had a pack of cigarettes and matches and she was using like a kite to throw them under her door to me so I had something to smoke for the week thank God because that lady that girl saved my life I was you know

not being drunk anymore, stripped of all my stuff. Meanwhile, I know my buddy, because I could see him when they would walk him down the hall to whatever they were doing. But we're with our lawyer.

So we think, again, the amount of S talking we did, we're like, yeah, you're not going to keep us in here for long. We're with our lawyer, you know,

piss off. He's going to post our bail. We'll fight this whole case. He's awesome. Was he in just another cell? No. He's actually locked up too in another cell. you got there like no thank god he didn't get arrested but the cops must have loved breaking this to us

they were like oh yeah where's he from is he from canada we're like no we came from the states he go yeah that's our point he can't practice law here they were like we'll get you a public defendant which was dev you know what I mean when you're locked up and you're thinking like we got this we couldn't have been in a better situation there's no phone call we need to make we have our lawyer with us he's probably trying to post our bail outside right now, as confident as you can be. And when those cops were like, he can't practice law, you know, whatever it is, the royal crown court system or I don't know how they do it up there again. Not, I wasn't well educated on the laws back then. But they

broke that to us and we were absolutely crushed. We had to get on the phone with this dude who probably mostly spoke French and very little English as a public defender. And at that point, You're like, you know, we've lost. Like, we're going to be in jail for a long time up in Canada. It was devastating. So it really is no long time in prison in Canada. Like you can do all kinds of stuff and get the jail. The jails were immaculate.

I still couldn't believe like the amenities that my, when we got released and he was telling me about his stay, my stay was very different. You know, I was in one like an isolation. So I was tiny. I could have done this. and touch both walls. And all I had to deal with was this woman or this girl who was going through withdrawals

the whole time. And it was heartbreaking because you're just hearing the pain, the writhing. And I would just go, I would, you know, yell under the door. I'd be like, hey, can you please throw me another cigarette? She threw me, she got me matches and a cigarette while she's going through withdrawals. And about, but again, I'm an idiot. At this point, I should have just like had some compassion, let her keep a cigarettes. But no, every hour, like, yo, please spare me another one.

At some point, she cut me off. But what are you going to do? You know, this lady definitely had it much worse than me. I still can't get why a wet nap. I guess to clean your arm, you know what I mean? I don't understand why they would isolate me like that for wet naps in my pocket. But we have to fight this court case now. And this is right off the heels of the other one.

So it's exhausting. No wonder my parents divorced. They probably would just tie to me. he's your it's your fault well i'll tell you what shortly after this so when my parents divorced my dad moved down to florida right by Tampa um my mom tried to make me go with them i had a buddy down in naples uh where i guess there's some cow pastures if you go inland and um oh is there a lot i only 90% of the state is really everybody's like florida oh beaches bro this is this is this is there's so many pickup trucks and cow pastures and oh it's just 90% of the state is like that that's

really what Florida is the one that he went to inland he would take me he I would wait for him to get out of school I stay at his house we would go back and after the rain on the cow patties magic mushrooms will grow so we would pick a ton of them and back again before 2001 you could fly and as long as you were willing to carry so I had a hat that had an inseam that you know it was like a bucket hat it was a big bucket hat made out of wool so it was like knit so big thick you know you could wear it in the winter nobody would bat an eye and it had an inseam stitched into it so you could stick whatever you want around the entire brim of the hat and if you were willing to just carry something on your person because obviously you know they would have i only saw dogs once

when we had stuff but they would just walk the dogs by the luggage you know and you would see them but before 2001 there was no secure i mean you could walk up to the gate and buy it ticket and just walked through it was such a wild time now when you think about like taking your shoes off and all this stuff it was a different animal flying so going back and forth to florida you could bring essentially whatever you want as long as you knew the risk and as long as you weren't you know through a few times where i was carrying so many mushrooms i was like i don't know if i could eat all these and still survive you know not come out nuts but it was just you could do it you know it's so fascinating to think back on that for all you youngans out there i don't know where the

cameras. So, oh, so we fight this court case in Canada and they don't make me come back. And I guess the lawyer got me a plea deal where I became seven years inadmissible. So I could not return to Canada for seven years because of the, they charged me with criminal mischief. So you get a, they've been devastating. Listen, being being under 21 and that, be in kind of the location where you could, you know, a half days drive to go up and do it at St. Catherine Street. If you've never been there, it's a, well, I don't, I haven't been there again in 20 years, but it's a real good. It's like Ebor City who are not as, not as Florida E. Imagine like a French Ebor City, you know, so they have all the party, party places to go.

I don't know if they've cleaned it up, but it was just beautiful too. So yeah, that was devastating. But at this point, the trouble that kept finding us, can I put it like that? I don't know if it was finding us or maybe just, you know. None of this is your fault. It couldn't have been, right? I didn't contribute to this at all. But again, I was in a shitty area of town asking people to buy drugs and I, you know, and this bad stuff happened. And this bad, I'm telling you, it's these cops, if they would stop trying to do it.

with their job so much, I would have been okay. But at this point, I'm thinking, again, naively thinking like trouble's chasing me. I didn't think I was going to graduate high school. In fact, I had dropped out for a year. I just did construction and working with all these guys who are, I would say, a little more heavy into the addiction. And that's kind of what opened it up for me when you, you know, hang out with these construction workers after work. I felt like, you know my time was limited on the outside if i saw so many friends continually well one of my friends who just jumped off a bridge two years ago he had been locked up from before even getting a license this kid just committed suicide a couple years ago yeah he had just had

his second uh second child who at the funeral i held him three months old absolutely devastating and remind or just so you know this kid we grew up next to each other people used to think we were brothers um so forever i mean when he was on the run one of the times the cops busted in my houses because i was letting him stay with you know what i mean he was on the run so we had such a tight relationship that it didn't matter what was going on i was always there for this kid but the unfortunate part was getting out of jail for him he never felt like there was hope you know being an addict having a record, he was never like, oh, well, I'm going to go on the straight and hour, narrow. I'm going to go get a job now. For him, it was like, I'll just deal more

drugs, hope that addiction doesn't get, well, I don't even know if he was hoping that addiction didn't kill him. I think at this point, you know, because he was, Jesus, 30-something, he was just young, too young. But at that point, well, and this is, the reason I'm bringing that up is because I saw what was happening to really close ransom. It just became this loop, this vicious cycle of you get out of jail, you think there's no hope. So you just kind of go back to what you're doing. You're not trying to, you know, do anything. And again, back then, people weren't considering rehab as like a real, you know what I mean? That wasn't like a real option. There was no real knowledge about PTSD or addiction as much as we have today. You know, people are

way more hyper-vigilant on kind of identifying this stuff. And I think there's more compassion today. Back then, people didn't care. You know, it was just, you do, you're partying. You know, it wasn't about addiction. It's funny. My father, you know, was an alcoholic, and he, you know, he would go on these, whatever, week-long binges, two-week binges. And at some point, he and my mom went to the doctor to talk to the doctor because it was so not an open thing addiction so hidden back then this is back in like the the 50s right or 50s and 60s they went to the doctor and he explained what was happening and the doctor said you're an alcoholic he almost got into a fist fight with the doctor in the in the in the little like patient room my mom like you better

give me a different prognosis so different diagnosis an alcoholic means you're you're like a bum you're you're somebody on the street that can't you know you're you're a drunk you're a drunk and he basically i mean that was just like a huge insult he's i'm a sick i'm successful i make good money i've got you know i've got you know two kids like what do you talk i mean we eventually have there's four kids but at that point i think he had like two kids it's like what are you saying what do you know furious just immediately blew up because but now you were to say that no the stigma right because back then it was to be uh an alcoholic it was you know somebody who is on the street begging for change so that could go by their next 40

yeah but that didn't even lift i mean we're talking about into the 90s where that stigma still stuck you know and and unfortunately even with into the 2000s and we'll get into that when oxy broke onto the scene you saw people who would go to the dentist and get prescribed, you know, Vicodin, and then it wasn't working. So they would go to OxyContin. And all of a sudden, they're full-blown addicts going to heroin. And again, because I watched this happen to people I know, they went, well, I'm not an addict. You know, I did high school sports or I go to college.

You know, it was all these like rationales of like, well, it can't be me. Right. Trust me. Nobody wakes up and they're like, you know what, today I got to get. to be an addict. I'm going to go out. Aren't you selling your TVs right now? Your heroin addiction?

Yeah, but that doesn't mean I'm an addict. Say your third time at the Pontchop today? I'm pretty sure. That was, oh my God, and that was another racket that friends would do,

just dealing with the Ponchop. So I forget where we were. Oh. Oh, so now I remember. So, again, I don't think I'm going, to college. So I apply to the farthest place there is. I apply to Hawaii. One school, that's it. I go, I'm probably not getting in, but I want to shoot my shot. I want to get as far away

from here as I can. I don't want to get. I thought it was like the situation. The situations that I was in kept leading me to trouble. It wasn't that I was seeking it out. You know, it couldn't possibly have been me. And if I move far enough away, all this stuff, it evaporates. you know no they don't have drug addicts in in hawaii there's no drugs there absolutely well we'll find out so i get in and you were mentioned in student debt earlier i'm still paying that student debt 20 years later i paid it over one and a half times but because of the interest i still got uh two-thirds of the principal i thought biden was paying that what happened with that the whole you know he's cheap let's be honest he was like i was going to do it but then i seen the

shit. Then he was like, I've seen the numbers on the interest and we cannot pass that up. We're going to squeeze these people for it. I don't know if I'm going to pay. Let's be honest. And you got a big audience. So let's do a student debt strike. Nobody pay. Oh, we have the numbers. Tell them that one. That's it. That's what we have. You don't have to believe me, but we got the numbers. They might have the guns and the weapons, but the guns and the prisons. The prisons. But we got the numbers. So anyway, so I go out to school in Hawaii and I start working at a radio station. And that leads immediately into me getting connected with the local community, which by the way is devastating to see what happens to a lot of the locals out there. There was one

encampment that was right on the beach. And it was all people that essentially were priced out of land that generations had lived. You know what I mean? Like generations of their family had lived there until it kind of got gentrified around it. And then once that happens, you know, people are coming in to bulldoze. That's why with the Lahaina fires, you see there's a real concern that developers are trying to swoop in and buy everything, right. I had it all up. You know what was the funniest part about that?

Oprah's going on saying, hey, can you please send us some money? She has 2,000 acres on Maui or in Hawaii somewhere. I'm like, hey, Oprah, how about you just give them $199,000? Or she has 2,000. So why don't you give them 1,999 acres? And I think, you know, we call it a day. Right. I was going to say, listen, she's got a private security making sure nobody skits on her land.

She's got, she's got a private, what was it? They said during the fire fighters, she had a private firefighters coming to protect, you know, her land. Are you serious? Yeah. That's something, that's one of the things I heard. I also heard another guy breaking down. he went and got a copy of the the um the filings the the um the filings that he and the she and the rock filed so they actually put money in they did put money in but one of the first things that

happens is they get their money back they get a obviously they get a write up because it's a it's a it's a tax free whatever you call it trust right so and then they also get paid for managing the so you're going to one get paid because you need the money. Two, you're getting all the money you've put in to show that, hey, look, we've got money in this, right, but you get paid back first. And so they've got the whole thing set up so that they're going to get all their money back. And their real contribution is starting it and doing these promos. But the promos have all backfired on her. Well, yeah, because especially that one after she released with the Rock, I think really upset people.

They were like, wait a minute, you're pulling out the other richest Hollywood guy to say like, send us money oh that's so so anyways working at this radio station there were a few different locals who were on the show and we would it was amazing i'm telling you still to this day the best cannabis on earth is in hawai there is no the conditions it's just like they say what like the best coke is in columbia the best coffee is wherever it is i'm telling you columbia no brazil columbia i don't know i think it might be columbia well there's india i think it's india i think it depends what that's tea oh all right yeah i love tea too that's in india i don't know it's all you know what i mean but it's it's like that the ripe conditions however you can grow that

in hawai there is nothing better it is it is magical that that's the one time where i was like wow this stuff might be like too i might have to dial it back a little bit but so through that I get connected with a little bit of a local community where, again, I can get, it's not my fault. All right. Let's just be very clear about that. At this point, it is not my fault. But I get connected and I have an entire market at the dorms. Easiest way to make money and to be able to afford more cannabis is he start moving it. Yeah. Little did I know is the one thing you don't want to do is sell it to girls that guys have crushes on because when they start hanging out with you coming to dorm all the time these guys will they'll actually make a few phone calls and that's what

they did i thankfully got tipped off i moved every i had a buddy who lived near the campus it was just one bus ride down bring everything to his place they basically search raid my room find nothing i got i got i forget what so they was so livid that they didn't find anything because whoever this kid was that ratted me out, you know, had enough evidence. I think I might even sold to him at one point. So like it was very, it was a verified, uh, investigated. They, they, they could have had me if I didn't get tipped off by again, these girls. Um, I had to, did you act offended the whole time they were searching?

Like, I can't believe. I would never you, what, listen, I would. I would, oh my God, I, you guys have the wrong room. I don't know who told you that. I would. So listen, I would love to pretend like I did what I didn't do. So we had this little closet and I had this huge flag that had a cannabis leaf on it. Now, I didn't know, again, I tell people all the time, if you're not informed of your rights, you don't know where to stand your ground, right? That's the most vital thing in dealing with the police, dealing with any kind of authority. As soon as you know your rights, you know where you can stand your ground and where they're pushing too far, where you can push a little more. more. I did not read the school conduct code or whatever it was to live in the dorms. So immediately when they came in and saw this huge cannabis flag, they were like, we're flagging you for that. And I got written up and whatever it was, you know,

my first strike on the record. You didn't tell them, you didn't tell them like that. What? That's not, that's a firm. They didn't. That stands from pot. Oh my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I'm so glad you said something. I am devastated. Nobody's more offended than me. my mother would be ashamed if she do someone gave me that i thought that was the national hawaiian flower which basically it was there's four or five guys in the dorm that have those as i've seen people with tattoos i thought they were hawaiian listen if you drive on some of those roads like the uh i forget one of these roads that goes deep into the jungle there will be people on the side of the road holding huge sticks of cannabis and i mean just you could just you could

just pull over and buy it. It was remarkable. I'm telling you, that's a different land. It's magical. I wish the people, if I ever hit the lottery, I'm buying Oprah's farm and I'm giving it back to the people. So I, at this point, I'm starting to figure, like, wherever I go, there might be a little bit of trouble following me. And I came back to Boston from Hawaii. But when I came back, this is just early 2000s, and Oxy's starting to explode on the scene. Now, within a year or so of me coming back, one of my close friends overdosed and died. And again, it's horrifying for me

because I watched, you know, leaving, there wasn't much hard, well, I shouldn't say much hard drug use. We would deal in ecstasy too. I don't know what you can say on YouTube and what you can't, so. I think you've already said, you've already gotten this probably demonetized,

but at least limited monetization, 18 years plus, but that's fine, keep going. All right. So before I don't look out for me now. We were dealing with, I'm trying to help you, man. I know how tricky YouTube is. YouTube, figure it out. Again, all these powers that be that can't figure it out, write a list.

Tell us words we can't say. You got to talk about your Mr. Beast rant. You got to do your Mr. Beast rant again. I'll go off on him. That guy's got it coming. Your time is ticking. I get 962 subscribers. I'm coming for you, buddy.

So, well, so we had always dealt in ecstasy, too. I think that's also why the cops, you know, maybe kept a closer eye on us. But again, we never did this for money. It was just so when we showed up the party, I don't know why you think that means something. Because we didn't deal in cash. That has ever been a defense that has worked. Nobody's ever gone to trial and be like, yeah, yeah, your honor. Admittedly, admittedly, we had, we were importing.

4,000 pounds a month, but we weren't making a profit. It was not, this business was not what you think. There was no accounting, okay? It was strictly all going back into the fold so we could show up at the party and never have to pay a dime. And that was a great way to work it out. But again, it's so weird to me that I listened to Biggie and heard those words or he said, never get high in your own supply.

And I thought, no, you're wrong. You know what? I think that's the only way to get high if it's paying. for itself. But when I came back, Oxy is just exploding. And around, I don't know if it, I know Florida got devastated because I had friends that were taking buses down there to get, you know, however many that they could get and come back up here. It was just, it's really super easy to open up a pain management clinic in Florida. Very easy. Is that why it kind of like just boomed and that became almost like the epicenter of all of this.

Oh, absolutely. And people, people would come down from, you know, from Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee or they would just, they would load up.

Rhode Island. I'm telling you, I, you know. Yeah. They load up buses and, and bring people down. They'd go in once a month.

They'd come in. They'd get their scripts. They'd go back. They'd hit three or four. And there was no, there was no reporting system at the time. So you could doctor shop. You could go to three or four different clinics and get.

Yeah, you can't do that now. now that no no i'm telling you you cannot that's it ain't happening so so after my buddy died um i'll never forget because i was talking to my dad and i said this is well plus you know the drug use at this point for me was way beyond you know when you're surrounded by people that are doing oxies you're not avoiding it for long you know especially when you see like wow that is a magical thing that is happening and you don't look at it as like i'm ever going to be the addict again my grandmother told me at a wedding one time she's she's passed away but

she said there are families that have cancer there are families that have you know diseases she said ours has addiction but again she told me that point blank and i was like yeah not me you know it's like no way you know like i'm and that was the dangerous thing you know i i could work construction work night time at a radio station go party till two three sober up for a little bit and do the whole thing over again. So and when you typically or, you know, with the stigma, you think of an addict as someone who is pawning stuff or doesn't have a, you know what I mean?

Like just can't function within society. And that's not the truth. You got functioning addicts everywhere. And that's, I don't want to say more dangerous, but it's more dangerous to that person because that's how you excuse it for so long. You know, you go on your whole life. Well, and that's the thing. If something doesn't break the, if you don't have these moments where you're like, oh, wow.

And that's right now is where in my life when I started having those moments. When my body died, that was devastating. Because we just didn't, when you're 20, 20, 21, I think I was. And somebody dies like that. You're like, wait a minute. I thought we were invincible. You know, like you don't see somebody that's 20 years old because he was a year younger than me.

So you don't see somebody like that all of a sudden overdose and die. you know and especially at the amounts we were taken you feel indestructible and you're just not you fooling yourself so i spent that entire after you passed away i spent that entire summer again working construction then night times i had a job at a radio station saved up and said i'm getting out of you i'm not doing it i can't stay around here with what's going on i felt like you know my it was only amount of time before my number was pulled whether i died or something happened where driving around with enough stuff on you, you're going to prison. That's why I say, like, I know you've dealt with people who have gotten serious charges. I luckily, you know, never had

to face that. And I got close friends who are still locked up today. In fact, one of the reasons I never changed my phone number was because my buddy said, you're the only person that hasn't changed this number since, what, 2000, 2001. He said, you're the only one I can remember when I call from prison so just no listen i love i say call me all you want i'll take the charges that's fine and so i leave and i go to san diego within i forget three months i was doing like this door-to-door pyramid scam sales thing it was horrible i i knew it at the time and you just kind of feel it we were selling i forget if it was paintball uh it's like paintball brochures i'm telling this was a racket. I don't think any of it was legit. I had a car so they would force me to be the driver.

We would go around to these industrial parks and we would sell these. They were literally pamphlets and they had a book of like coupons to paintball shop and we'd sell them for $50,100. And we'd come back to this place and you just get more pamphlets. But for everything we made, the guy who was sponsoring you or whatever they called it, you know, was getting like 70%. So I was taking 30 he was getting 70 or no no he was getting something and then i think the top guy there was one guy above him because my my sponsor would drive you know forced me to go around basically do nothing and be like you're going into this one and because we went to industrial parks we could basically the way it was positioned is like you want to take the company on a big outing you know we'll sell

this two of your 100 bucks or 50 box and it's really like a 200 dollar value so we were trying to get these companies to buy in on essentially nothing, but the allure of like, you know, some great morale building at a paintball park. But just doing that, you know, you get a grimy feeling doing that long enough. And you're like, you know, I can't do, I can't look these secretaries in the face, these front office ladies, and try to do this pitch. So the whole time I'm trying to get a job at this radio station. And I'm talking about I would just go and show up. And I'm And I had this secondhand suit, so it, like, didn't fit me. I don't know why I was wearing a suit either because it was a rock station.

Like, I could have just shown up regularly, but I really wanted this job. So I had like this oversized suit that didn't fit. I looked ridiculous. And I would constant, any event they had, anything where you could, you know, meet them if they were doing a broadcast outside, I just showed up. I was like, you guys are not going to not hire me. It's happening. I can't do this other stuff that I'm doing. You guys are going to hire me at some point.

They had a competition and on-air competition where I'm, you know we had to just do like radio stunts how to eat uh african hissing cockroach dog food disgusting but it was like howard stern esk you know to get the job i make it to the top three and of course my addiction kicks in the night before we're going to for them to pick you know like places one two three i spend the whole night out doing drugs and miss it i just don't show up so they have to pick this other guy and the most beautiful again fate intervened for me they picked this what is this name levi something like that they picked this guy as the winner strictly based on like i didn't show up in fact they my phone is blown up all morning they caught

they call me before the show and they were like you know we were going to pick you to win we we were forced to pick somebody else only because you didn't show up you're unreliable you know and again i'm like it's not my fault i'm telling you it's the drugs the you know it's horrible i had a hard time with accountability um so they picked this guy and within a week so i i basically tell him i'm like listen i'm miserable i can't do this other job i'm pretty sure it's a pyramid scheme i can't prove it but i cannot do this anymore you know i'm involved in a pyramid scheme i'm like yo the stuff that is happening and it felt like that movie boiler room you know because they rented this office that there was nothing in there you went in and there was a bell on the wall that if you

made enough sales they were like you can ring it and i was like what the is going on, man. I'm like, can I just buy my own bell? No, they made that the special thing and it was kind of cultish. They're like, everybody that was higher than you bought into it enough where like,

you were like, yeah, okay, I guess this is it. But I'm telling you, with the lack of furniture, I, at one point I started to wonder if they were even renting the place or

squatting, you know, because I was like, this is not, this just doesn't feel legit. Right. Everything about it. So that's why I was so like dead set on getting.

this radio job when i lost it it was absolutely devastating i basically told them like stay in touch if this guy messes up i was like problem promise you'll never have another issue i'll be there every time uh they hire me to do uh board hopping it's not on the show they wanted to help me out they hire me to do like open it so i'm working midnight till seven in the morning um and i'm not on the air or nothing. You're just running. Basically, everything's not syndicated, but it's already recorded. So you're just making sure you're sitting in the studio, just making sure it sounds like it's live. You know, that's a great illusion of radio. And within, I forget, it was within the first couple weeks, do you remember? I think his name is Edwin McCain. He did that, I'll be. I don't

want to sing that song, but you know that song, I'll be, you're something hero. I think so. Listen, it was big in like the mid-2000s, but this dude was not for a rock station and this guy who they just hired called whatever venue uh edwin mccane was playing at and said hey listen um you know i'm a hire up at this rock station i want personal tickets for the edwin mccain show that's a big no no you know you can't just request tickets from you know like outside of some kind of deal being made or like pay promotion you don't just like call up and go yeah listen i i work at a rock station. I'm going to request, you know, this backstage. And he did it for Edward McCain out of all

people. God bless this dude, but I don't know what he was thinking. And they fired him because he was just taking. Now, mind you, he was not on the show for any amount of time. He was basically like an assistant to the producer, you know, like a tertiary role where he wasn't on air. And this is within a month of them hiring him. And as soon as they fired him for that, they took me on. So I get this job in radio but I'm telling you that was that was almost my demise because once you get on a morning show and you get that little bit of like you know it's very local celebrity I know guys that it's especially in Boston where it's really gone to their head but being 21 and getting access they would pay us to go to strip clubs and do you know events there they would pay to go to the bar

and just drink and hang out it was lethal and through that for an addicts. my heart goes out for you too it was great but at the same looking back listen with the hindsight that i have now is more of an adult i went wow that was like a dangerous position and plus the people you start to meet so i once i got on the air it turns out a couple of my buddies who were from massachusetts had moved out to san diego and they were huge into the meth scene now which is the most dangerous i don't know if you ever seen the movie spun with john liguizamo brittany murphy the last it stopped with was uh meth yeah So they were huge into that scene.

And as soon as they heard, I was on the air, they reached out. And that is a terrifying drug. That is one of the drugs where you would think people were maybe schizophrenic or, you know what I mean? Like had some kind of other goings on. Mental condition or something. Well, because I mean, one of my buddies, so they ended up buying a goat and that was their pet. Terrifying. When you're doing a bunch of meth and he's feeding the goat.

with a with a um a bottle nipple but he would boil the beer bottles to put the milk in it you think you've gone crazy you think you've gone insane that there's a goat in this guy's house and my the other body would be like mowing the lawn at three in the more you know what i mean just like stuff where you're like maybe it's not the drugs maybe there's like you know some history some genetics of like something else going on but no let me tell you it was the drugs and again the most dangerous thing for me was I could do these drugs until three, four in the morning, say I'm going to sober up for a little hour. I'm not going to drink some beers and I'm going to stay away from whatever, you know, is going up the nose. I'm going to go into work. I need to be able to drive. You know, I need an hour to claim my mind. And I would go in. And even, you know, you go to the bathroom, do a couple bumps and you'd be fine on the air. You know, you almost be, I don't want to say funnier, but you know what I mean? Whatever outlandish stuff that you had to do, you inhibit, Inhibited. You're not, what is that word?

Inhibit. Inhibit. Inhibit. Uh, so essentially, you know, that's where I look back and I go, wow, the snowball effect, destiny really had me where she wanted me. And so at this point, you know, my addiction is bad. My brother came out to see me. I didn't even go pick him up at the airport.

I was outside of a strip club, you know, snorting whatever and hanging out with people who, you know, we all needed to get clean. In fact, one of my buddies, he just died a couple years ago, too. He finally went to rehab. He got out. And I think it was within a week. He relapsed and died. And he had four kids. And to watch this stuff happening to these young parents, you know, that is the heartbreaker because there just isn't like the infrastructure for people who when they decide like, hey, I want to get clean if you don't have health insurance or a ton of money right good luck getting a bed good luck you know there is no like oh yes immediately let's get you in here we'd love to get you off the street and that's really where like the dehumanizing part of drug addiction comes in and it's weird because

if you think about it right if you had a dog i don't know if you have a dog if you have a dog right and you live in the cold weather and you left the dog outside all night you're going to get arrested if somebody calls on you, right? Animal abuse. You go into jail. We can leave humans outside homeless to suffer through the winter and nobody bats an eye. So it's the same thing with drug addiction. It's like these people that really need help, want help, and I'm talking like personally, my brother's been homeless for over a decade now. I lost touch with him about three years ago. The last time I talked to him, he said, I'll never go back to prison in Texas. I guess Texas is one the worst places for him to go because he was right went wrong that's where he went wrong so i think

i'm guessing he's somewhere out in the west coast i have some friends who are comedians and they said randomly they would text me and go you got a little brother right and he go yeah he goes i was doing a set out in l.a and i went outside and he came up to me and said hey if you see my brother we just tell him you know i'm all right and that's kind of how we kept in touch and it's heartbreaking because he's oh man what is he 34 now where he would be i don't know if he's alive and be honest i told my middle so i have a middle brother then the youngest brother and i told my middle brother i said i just can't count on him being alive right you know for so long you go through this well especially so let me get back to the san diego part so just as many drugs as i can do and most of the time it's

for free uh that's what i'm doing my brother came out to visit it didn't even pick them up i mean i was the worst human uh that i could possibly be at this point just no disregard for you know addiction it just totally consumed me as long as i could get to work that was like my main focus that's all i cared about getting into work so i could get out and whether it was from friday till sunday i stayed up and that's the scary thing about this drug you know you can just do whatever and time kind of blurs that's what i was saying if you ever seen that movie spun it's john liguizamo brittany murphy and the way they shoot it like the cinematography of it it's almost dizzying but it's a movie about meth uh mickey rourke is the cook in it or the chef

whatever they call them right and it's a great movie because if you've ever lived in those familiar circumstances you can really relate to like the uh the pacing you know because day night everything kind of blends together you don't know when you're when you're doing these drugs. It's just kind of a blur. You know, you could be inside for what you think is an hour and come outside and it's three in the morning. So you kind of lose track of everything and all you focus on is that. My brother leaves. And like I said, so my dad's living down in Florida. And I was so again, a stupid arrest. Party in one night. I leave this girl's place and I get pulled over. I guess I'd blown through a couple stop signs. I don't know.

and the flashing lights go on and the cops saying, can you pull over? Because I think I blew my age. So I blew like a 2-2 or a 2-1 really high up there. I mean, it was pretty good for still being able to drive and not hurting anybody, thank God. And in California, they got a law. My buddy went to jail because he got into a car accident where he broke his own leg

and they charged him with whatever it was. He didn't injure anyone but himself, but he had to go to prison because there was an injury. so I thankfully didn't have that but when the cops pulled me over I guess I just stopped like you know it didn't pull over just kind of stopped on the yellow lines where I was and at that point there's no defense you know what I mean when when he goes up and he goes I see you pulled a couple of rolling stops there and I said yeah well I'm from the east coast you know that's just kind of what we do we do it oh and he's like I think I'm going to need you to step out of the car

And so I do that. And at one point, I forget what he was having me do. It was the letter, the pen, you know, like all the sobriety test, I just said, listen, but you and I both know, I'm going to jail tonight. Can we just like, let's just do this. I'm excited in the back of the car. I'm like, I'm not going to be able to stand up much longer. And that's how I knew when I, when I blew that amount, uh, it's just dangerous, man.

It's so stupid. So I get arrested. And this is a Sunday. night again I had an impeccable performance attendance at work never missed today it didn't matter and that was I think the the hard thing for people to address with me because you almost go does he really have a problem you know like if you can make it a work is it truly a problem and it almost makes people question you know there was a couple times where yeah my boss would sit me down

and go hey what's going on but if I showed up to work what did anybody care. I was still making people money. It just, it wasn't of that effect yet until now. So it's a Sunday night. I get it or sat I forget a Saturday, Sunday, but I'm spending time in jail until work. And at work, I don't show up. I don't have my, you know, I'm not, I don't have my phone on me. I'm in a holding cage in a drunk tank, whatever it was. The prison guard, or the jail guard, recognized who I was from on the air. And when the, you know, half the morning show was, where is he? You know, is he dead? Did something happen to him? We don't know. We haven't heard from him. We've called his phone. So they really have no clue. And on the request line or on the

call-in number, the jail guard calls in. He goes, I know exactly where Rob is. I'm looking at him. He's over in our holding cell. So thankfully, my work was so, you know, this, that was the other thing. Like my job kind of saved my life because I had something. to look forward to. You know, I wasn't hopeless. I wasn't an attic with no job having to steal or having to sell stuff. I always had an income. I was always employed, or for the most part, you know, I always had some kind of steady stream. So they just worked that into the morning show bit. Hey, we're sending somebody over there to get them out right now. Well, if you can imagine hearing that on a radio show, they were like, this is gold. And that's the other dangerous thing

about it. I'm hitting rock bottom and they're like, we're making this a bit. I had to do, I had to do like the highway cleanup. You know what I mean? Like when when you get sentenced to like not jail, but you get to just show up every weekend. Yeah, yeah. That's what it is. And everything was a bit for the radio. You know, that's all they wanted to make this. And I'm like, guys, I'm going through hell right now. They were forcing me to try. So I didn't realize that like they revoke your license right away. Like there's no messing around. They just take it. But I had no idea, and I still had a car.

So I just had to drive to work every day. And my work would be the one to, like, send me to do stuff. And mind you, I didn't have that knowledge when this first played out. Nobody told you, by the way, you can't drive. Nobody tells you that. And I mean that. It's not until, like, you meet with a lawyer. And they're like, how did you get here?

You're like, I drove. And they're like, you know you have no license, correct? But so, so I get suspended from work for a week, though. they did they had to enforce some kind of punishment i think to set an example and it must have been that week or the next week and on that wednesday or thursday so halfway through the week and mind you this is how like you know idiotic i am i'm just going out and doing drugs and party in the whole time i'm not thinking you know in my mind of well i'm like i got the week off this is awesome you know like i don't have to deal with nothing i can just go out and party i can finally you know not have to worry

about getting up at four or five to go in but halfway through the week i get a call for my brother and that would just at this time it wasn't like we were talking a lot again i told you he came out and i just looking back you feel so horrible because the people that like love you're the most you almost treat the you you can hurt the most right so the fact that he called me was just weird but i pick it up and he's like hey dad's gone and i'm like what are you talking about he goes dad And I was like, aren't you with him down in Florida? What do you mean? He's gone.

He goes, he killed himself. I said, what are you talking about? He goes, we just got home. We had run out. We had just got home. And the youngest brother, he goes, he cut him down out of the tree. We tried to revive him, but he's gone. And that was like, that was the moment.

That's why I kept saying through my story, I'm like, I'm witnessing people die. And I'm witnessing people go to jail. But again, I just didn't learn. It was never enough. for me to go like, oh, my God, I got to stop. And your dad had an addiction problem or just? Yeah. Well, and again, well, so it was growing up, it was just always like parties drinking.

And in Massachusetts, the culture of drinking is like, it's very European. Let's just say it like that, you know. It's like, we're very European when it comes to drinking. So that was normal. But he had, so he got rear ended in Florida and something happened with his back. Again, this is like the trickiest thing about these 2000s because when Oxy comes on to the scene, they don't think twice about giving it to you. In fact, it was kind of promoted as like a less addictive substance. I think that's what it was being pushed as.

You know, it wasn't the truth, but that's what they were kind of pivoting is like, hey, don't worry. This one, you know, can't hurt you. I don't think it was exact. Again, I don't know. Was it controlled. They were pitching as being it was a moderate painkiller. was a controlled release formula they had so you take two pills a day and you know every 12 hours and it's it it slowly releases it and it you know it helps the pain and it's not you know

of course but anybody taking it would tell you like that's fucking are you serious like that's nuts well so so i know that at some point he had you know these different addiction problems but when you coupled that with so he was flipping houses before flipping houses was a thing you know, like a long, and I'm talking about when he was growing up. That's how the other part, I think he made a lot of money. He would buy these old ratty places, live in one end of it, fix up the other, move to that, you know what I mean? And fix it and flip it. Now, I don't know what had happened. Again, his girlfriend at the time was just a monster. She still is. I call her a black widow. Her husband before killed himself, apparently. Again, I say that very loosely because

I'd like to see the proof that she didn't have something to do with. I don't know. what I could say, but, but this lady did not like me being around him, but at the time he had died, he had put everything in her name. So basically he was finalizing the divorce. My parents' divorce went on for a decade. I don't know, maybe even longer. They were fighting over a ton of, well, it just wasn't amicable. They couldn't be in the same room together, you know, and families got involved. That was the nasty thing, you know, like even at my father's funeral, This is why I don't talk to my family now, because my aunt said some stuff when we were lowering his casket. And I was like, what kind of human does that, you know?

And I didn't think it was appropriate, but apparently my family thinks otherwise, or, you know, they just, we just see eye to eye. And that's kind of how the whole divorce was. It didn't just fracture them. It fractured like both sides of the family. So it got really, really tricky. So I think my dad was trying to just keep stuff out of his name. But you got to remember, he was probably flipping three, four houses in Florida at the time. He would live in one, fix all the other ones up, and flip him.

Right. So I don't know if it was like a fine. Again, you never know. Like I told you, my dad was the nicest person. And I feel like they say this about everyone. Chester Bennington, Chris Cornell, Anthony Bourdain, all these people that have taken their own life. if you talk to any of the family members you go never suspect it greatest guy in the world you know maybe there was some addiction there maybe there was maybe some money trouble you know

you can't pinpoint it and you never know what i always say because when i would talk about this on the air this one kid would be like ah they're cowards you know they're taking the easy way out and i would always say yeah maybe they're cowards in the fact that they didn't want to face whatever they had coming you know they did they just couldn't feel like there was there was no hope they couldn't face it but I also have to consider it's one of the bravest things and I know this is a twisted I've been dealing with this for 20 years now and I still can't wrap my mind around it and you don't get to talk to these people you know what I mean everyone I know that's taking their life it wasn't like they called me and we're like hey this is going to be the last conversation it's

just not how it works right you'll you'll left with a lot of questions and you never you just never get answers. You can have all these assumptions. You can think this, think that, but you're just never going to, you know, you're never going to truly know. That's why even when you're asking me, I'm like, yeah, I know there was some addiction thing. I definitely, we definitely had addiction in the family. And it was totally normalized. So like, you know, your father dealt with. It wasn't, you could tell him, oh, you're an addict. And he'd be like, nope, I built this construction company myself. I do this stuff on the side. Like, not me. You know, and who's going to challenge that? Any has to come to that realization on their own.

So when he took his life, you know, I think it was many things that played a part of it, but I'll never be able to tell you which one it was. But that's really when, for me, because I was so deep into my addiction at this point, you know, and being able to fund it and having connections where, you know, people want to hook you up or help you move or just whatever it was, you know, it was never an issue, and that's very scary when you got that addictive personality. And so after he passed, it was basic, I didn't think, you know, like, I was like, well, I know what my fate is, you know, like my fate is sealed.

You just feel, and I forget, at some point I looked up the stats, but if you have that happened in your family or, or with your parents, like the statistics for men jump dramatically for that to be kind of your route. so at this point I'm kind of pulling out all the stops this is where I got real heavy into oxies and California it was I don't want to say

it was as bad as Florida but it was really easy to get a hold of and because there was no infrastructure you could basically have anybody go and kind of pill shop for you and it was dangerous I'll never forget what started me to realize I was an addict

because that's what you have to have this realization this whole time I'm like, nah, you know, like it's not, I'm fine, you know, I go to work, I come home, I might party a little bit, I might do whatever in the, in the background, but look at me, I'm holding down a job, I'm success, we were number one on the radio, you know what I mean, like had success, you're like, there's no way that I'm the addict. Right. When I had the realization, my buddy would come over and basically, he would spot me whatever,

I could move it and I could pay for everything with what I was pushing it for. You know, so again, just you don't have to pay for stuff if you can sell to other people for a little bit more. It's always covering your costs. So you're on the radio. You're making decent money, but you're still selling it. Of course. When you're an addict, there's no like, hey, I have the money.

Like money doesn't mean you stop. You know what I mean? Like having security. money or a house because at one point after my dad passed we had gotten kicked out of our apartment i was living in a car while i was on the radio so i mean there are things happening where again you're never like well i just should stop doing drugs you know you have to come to the point where you're like oh this is destroying my life this is ripping everything away from me and it's not going to get better and that so the day that that kind of hit me where i was like wow like i'm so deep into

this. He came over with maybe 500. It was close to 500 pills. And I had never seen like that much at once. It was usually like 50 or something like that where you could just move it. And the bag scared me. It was terrifying because what I didn't see money. You know what I mean? For me, it wasn't money. For me, it was like death. I was like, I'm not going to be able to hold on to that say I could. Well, why did that? Why did that? I mean, you were connecting that with all of these suicides or is that everybody who i'd lost okay so this is where and i'm talking about i was so at one point my family was going to stage an intervention with me because i was i stopped picking up the phone i was doing so much that i thought i was going to die my boss god bless him said

i'm going to pay for you to get into therapy i couldn't afford it you know any kind of money i had was going to a certain addiction right and so everybody was trying to reach out But again, it's really hard. Like, I had not, uh, I had not messed up anything so bad where it wasn't, you know, irrevo, it wasn't redeemable. You know, like I, I just had not crossed that line yet. But watching this kid come over and at this point, he was smoking it out of a, he had like a tinfoil little sheet with a straw and he would light the bottom and smoke it.

And I just, it was like watching his soul get ripped from him every time he did it. because you just kind of, I saw this dude fade away. You know what I mean? He was the one coming over being like, here, whatever you can move. I just need some cash. The new BMO ViPorter MasterCard is your ticket to more, more perks, more points, more flights, more of all the things you want in a travel rewards card, and then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO ViPorter MasterCard and get up to $2,400 in value, In your first 13 months, terms and conditions apply.

Visit bemo.com slash the iPorter to learn more. I had to pay these other people. And that's when I was like, yo, I'm not going to be able to do. Like, if you give me that, I'm probably going to do it all. You know, like at some point or another, like, I got a death wish. I'm watching all these people die just right in front of me. And I'm not, like, I think that was when it hit me. When I was like, oh, this is not like, circumstance.

substantial. This is not like outside forces. This is very deliberate like the choices that I'm making are leading me here. And that was a horrifying moment because at that point you have to realize how deep you've gotten into your addiction. And you and this is where I think like a lot of my friends maybe just lost hope. You know, and I think that's the that's what led all the people I know that have taken their life to that point. That's the one thing that I can firmly say like that is an answer. I'm uncomfortable giving when people were like why what do you think happened could it be addiction money whatever i say it's hopelessness you know when you feel like well there's nothing that i can do that's going to fix this where do you go you know what i mean and when you really think about that that's a heavy question to ponder and that's where i was you know i was at the point where it was like how do i don't even know how to start to get clean i had never witnessed that i knew kids in high school. When we were getting arrested, they would sometimes send people to like a rehab, but it turned out to be like a 30 day thing. You'd get out and you weren't, you know what I mean? Like you weren't

rehab. You had basically gone to, you would basically have been Jones in for 30 days and could not wait to get out. Right. And that's really how the system is kind of broken. When my brother finally got clean, not the one who's homeless. He's still, I don't know where he is. I don't, we don't talk. It's horrible. If you're watching this, you know what the saddest thing for me, is there are some YouTubers who go on Venice Beach and like talk with the homeless and stuff. And I watch those channels to see if I can identify him. And it's horrible to do that. But it's like that's the only, you know what I mean?

Like that's the only way I can kind of figure out is he still alive? Is he out there? What is he doing? Do you know any of your other family members that maybe know that are in contact with him? No, he burned a lot of bridges. Right. His addiction. I don't want to say it was worse than mine.

but his addiction so um he was the one that who cut my dad down and tried to revive him he went and stayed with my mom in statin island after and uh she went to sleep and just died she died in her sleep they said it was a pulmonary embolism i think that's what long after your dad died a few years oh okay and again so my brother was 15 when my dad took his life so then he was like 19 you know what I mean he was just out of high school um or maybe a little bit older again like it felt like it happened back to back you know it was just like one devastating moment after another but after because i'll never forget he called me i was on the air on the radio and when i saw him call me i went you know what does he call me at this time for i'm out in california you

know like he knows what time it is i'm definitely working and when he dropped that he was like i try to wake up mom she's not waking up i think she's gone and i was like what are you talking about what do you mean she's gone you know i was like bro don't mess with me he was like you got to go home and tell her other brother so you know he had to endure all that and at such a young age how do you how do you mentally overcome that you know and it's so sad because this kid was talented, you know, he was so sweet. But I think for him, too, again, hopelessness. He was like, what is my future entail? You know, like, he's like, this is what happened to my dad. This what happened to my mom. I found both of them. Yeah, he probably just gave up hope. I mean,

again, I've never got to talk to him about it. The last few times I saw him, he would beg and plead. He'd be like, can I just come get a meal and take a shower? I just need. And I would say, I'll do anything for you if you let me help you get into a rehab you know and i would take we got i forget a few thousand dollars during my mom's funeral everybody was helping us just support because i couldn't even fly out that was the most embarrassing thing so i was so deep in my addiction i told you i didn't have money you know like all my money it wasn't like i was making money off anything it was going back into my addiction so when both of my parents died the people on my radio show bought my airline tickets so I could go back to these funerals.

I was just such a mess. But that's why, like, I'm forever indebted to these people because it was just out of their good humanity. They were like, we got to get this guy back. You know what I mean? Like, they understood. So, yeah, so I don't know. I think with my youngest brother, it's just,

what do you do? When that's your story, you don't have much hope. And there was no health care for, he had nothing. fall back on. This is really when I like argue with people. I've argued with these people online. They say, oh, you just live with your parents and so you can afford to buy a house. I go, what about the people who don't have parents? And they, they would be like, who doesn't have parents? You know, I go, all right, this conversation isn't for me.

You know, you're not living in reality. Okay. And so with him, it was like, and I watched it. And I, you know, that's what I was saying. We would take thousands of dollars that people would try to help us. And I say, I'm just going to throw, I brought him up to this one place and like, Laguna Beach looked like the best rehab ever. I said, this is all my money. It was like nine grand. You know, everything that people had donated, collected for us. And I said, I'm just taking it all. And I want to invest in you as a human. Within like two days he had left. I was like, Jesus, you know, and that's been every interaction I've had with them. And still to this day, I would honor it. If I could get him into a, you know what I mean? If I could do anything for him,

I would. But it's all contingent on like him wanting to get clean. And that was most of our relationship before we kind of lost touch he would beg and plead at one point my neighbor god bless her our downstairs neighbor at this triple decker she goes every morning i go outside and there's beer cans in the driveway and i was like i don't drink you know i'd be like oh shit i know exactly who that is i was like don't worry i'll figure it out and my brother was coming and sitting outside of our house just drinking in the driveway waiting to catch me at some point to be like hey can i come in take a shower can i just you know get a little bit of food And again, the only way I'd let him in is if he had promised to do some kind of rehab.

Now, maybe that's foolish on me because you can lead a horse to water all you want. They're going to drink if they don't want to. So, yeah, so after my, I forget where we were in the story, but basically after my dad died and that kid came to me with that amount, I was like, this is where I have to try to do something. I was really lucky because at the time, too, I think the addiction wasn't at its peak, but there were doctors offices who started to set up with like the taking in like, it wasn't rehabs. It was like doctors that were trying to help get people off of oxies. And I showed up to one of them. I made the appointment and I thought I was going to this place where like a doctor could get me on methadone or send me to a rehab, you know, like it was the first step to whatever program

they could get me into and I go in I sit down on the doctor's thing and he's like what are you here for and I explained it he's like oh that's across the street I'm like you got to be care I started crying in his office I was like you got to help me I go if I go back out there I don't know if I'm going to die I was like I have to go and use I'm not used you know like I didn't use anything this morning I was like I'm not I was bawling in his office I was like please don't send me back out there and he was like no no he goes we're like partnered with them he goes but you want the appointment across the street and I was devastated because I basically had a call from that office and make an appointment with the right with the right guy who is dealing with rehab patients

right he was like it's a week out and I didn't I was like I don't know if I'm going to die what's going to happen I just couldn't control anything at that point you know you have to when you're getting that sick and that's the like that feels like it's ripping your soul out of your body because when your bones are aching when you can't you can't do anything unless you have that fix there is not you can't focus you can't you know and that was the only way i could operate i could go into work you know what i mean like always constantly have another have that but at some point you know you're going to take a little too or at least what i witnessed you know is like people just take a little too much or and they just never come back but i made it that week get to that

doctor's office and he was amazing i mean he helped me for so long he made sure that you know every step I took. And it was like really working with him, a therapist, rehab, getting into the program, AA. I don't know if anybody does that. You're not supposed to talk about it too much, but all of those things. But that one I did, you know what, that one, I get it works for some people. Wasn't my favorite. It definitely works. It's definitely a good program. I just, I think I couldn't stick with it because I was too hard headed and they want you to like kind of come to the realization you're an addict. And still, I was fighting a tooth and nail. up until you know basically i stopped everything um and that was like that was a hard awakening

moment because when you actually kind of get clean you're like oh damn this is what everyone was talking about like when my grandmother was telling me we got addiction in our family or my dad died when you know how many of my friends died i'm like oh so this is addiction you don't realize it till so much later you know or or you realize it when you're getting clean but it's not really like you don't realize like, oh, shoot, I spent so much of my life as an addict. And especially when you see people that are successful or maybe, you know, go to high school and then go to college and they get this good job and they do all these things. And you're like, oh, wow, I chased a high for 20 something years. That's all I did. And I fooled myself into thinking like, oh, I was on a

successful radio show. I did all these different things. No, I was doing one thing the whole time. Everything else was tertiary you know everything else was like yeah i did that but really what was my focus on the whole time it was just the next high it was devastating you know that kind of have well i'm like man where could i be now look if i just put that energy into something else jesus even learning the piano i could have done anything but youtube is such a weird world can i just talk about mr bese for a second mr bese now that i have your attention you are screwing things up can i just just be honest go and watch go and watch the latest mr beast video this guy talks about i watch a lot of podcasts that he's on or interviews and he talks about how he's going to perfect the algorithm we watch

the metrics where children's eyes blink every half millisecond and we're gonna and he talks about like these metrics like you're like jesus what is going on and he means it so i've been following his videos for a while I tried or I interviewed twice for like his company not with him not with him but they're really like they are looking they don't care if it's globally they're looking for the highest caliber of whatever it may be research YouTube metrics you know what I mean like these are the PhD candidates of the YouTube world and you got to respect it I'll say that Mr. Beast I respect your game now let's get into it this guy I just fall just go back 10 videos and watch it okay and do that first and then watch his latest one and you'll see the editing has become so I don't even know how to describe it it almost feels like he should have a warning you know the warnings on certain videos where they're like this this flashing lights could cause a seizure I'm like bro you need to run that before your videos because the edits are so quick but you'll hear him talk he says I can't talk for longer than 10 seconds

without like you know B roll footage cutting away cutting back to me and because of the YouTube metrics because people's eyes will look away which when you think about the technology we got cameras on our phone if you're watching and they can watch you and see what you're blinking at I mean it's it's not far away I know that sounds crazy but let's face reality here they got the technology to see when you look away when you scroll up from a video it's all there it's just a matter of time that they can make it a metric this guy can controls YouTube right now, right? Tell me who's bigger than Mr. Beast? Always. Nobody, right?

PewDiePie, I think, was like the other contender, but he's, he's got like a kid or something now. God bless him. He's like still kind of in the game. He's like, I'm a dad. Does that mean he's found God or something? No, no, he's just he literally had a kid. So it's like, I know when you have a kid, you're not like, oh, I'm going to make a video. You know, you're like everything is falling into place this comes first you know whatever i do is kind of just for fun so he's not competing not my family that wasn't how my dad was running things you're like listen youtube is the first born here and all you will come second but but so mr b's but you'll hear him he wants to chase down pewty pies he probably surpassed him i don't know i haven't paid attention to this

Wow. I just know the last video I watched, I was like, I'm, I might have a seizure watching these edits. And it pissed me off because this is a guy who is there's nobody bigger in the world. YouTube adores him. He just made a video where he just crushed a Lamborghini. Right. That was it. It was like a Lamborghini versus steel press or I forget. And I'm like, Jesus, this is what the content is now. Okay. This is your competitor, Matt. He's brushing Lamborghinis. I'm like, this is what he's doing. Like, think about the things he could do. Think about all the people. I don't, I don't feel like he's a competitor. He is. I'm telling him.

Like, I don't feel like Mr. B stays up at night and says, what's Cox doing? He's watching. What do you do? What do you do? Jesus, get me on the phone with Kobe. He interviewed a prostitute. What will we do?

Get me a Lamborghini. Somebody get me a Lamborghini out here. We better. be careful he might start crushing prostitutes and presses just for the views that kind would do anything i'm telling you he scares me okay once you start knowing he's manipulating the the the attention span of children there is no line he won't cross okay what do you mean nine year olds are looking away cut don't what do you make don't you know what cross it i paid 2.6 million for that car and i'm crushing that thing they're going to stare at it so i i buy that so the

during this conversation, I had mentioned to you that I saw like a something, like a short or something where they were talking about Mr. Beast or it was Mr. Beast. And somebody said to him, so how could YouTube improve? Like, are there anything in any improvements you'd like to see? Yeah. In the, in the algorithm or in YouTube. And he goes, no. He goes, they're, they're doing it perfect. He had no complaints. He was like, no. Bro, out of, I mean, there's a litany of, you know what I mean? Yeah, it was like. Yeah, it was like. Well, apparently he must have something. Like, when you get to a certain level, there is someone you can call. Like, they give you a personal person. So he's got an office there. Because, like, to me, you know, my videos get demonetized or they get, you know, like 18 years or older. And by the way, that's huge.

Like, if you were going to make, if you were going to make $100 on a video and they said, hey, it's 18 years and older now, like it's limited, you just drop to about 30 bucks. They're cutting the feed. Well, we're not cutting the feed. but they're, they're restricting who's going to see it. You know, and that's the whole thing. You want those impressions. So as soon as they do that, as soon as they restrict the audience, and there's YouTubers who go into this in depth,

you know, like what that does to certain creators when they do what they're doing to you. But so think about that, right? You've been in the YouTube game for how long now? Two and a half year, a little over two and a half years. And I'm guessing we could do a whole show on like things that you think critiques, not not to take away from what youtube is doing this is a great medium but i'm sure just in your short time mr bese is what 10 years 12 years right at least i i i don't know i'm guessing at least a

decade you know he's not overnight he's yeah yeah well over that yeah so for that long and he's like nothing it's perfect i i mean is that a little bit ask i if i if i'd had his experience i would be saying it's perfect give me a break see and that's what's wrong with the world today i'm going to be the old man yelling at the cloud it doesn't matter because he's he's not immune to hearing you know what i mean for a guy who studies youtube who this is his craft he's not you know learning to play the guitar in his free time this guy is all about the metric and what youtube's doing like you said i bet he has more than a handler he's got you know a team from YouTube probably that's like you know most of us have to upload and then we like you know delay the

publish so we could go through restrictions right he's probably got like a live team that watches it from YouTube like he's got a crew in the room a team of YouTubers who are like all right no no no it's all good no restrictions I mean that's where he's at right and for him to say that to just ignore and this is really what my issue with this with him it's he's at the pinnacle there is nobody bigger he has so much power and that's what he does with it think about tomorrow if he just wanted to do a collective right a union of some of the biggest youtubeers and again i'm not up to day with i know like there's the market pliers there's the like the h3 podcast there's um the russell brands and the joe rogan i don't know rogan specifically he's got

that spotify deal but all the big people that are on youtube and he collectively said hey god i'm sure anybody that's getting a phone call from mr beast is taking it right yeah you're not ignoring that call so he has the access he has the ability he has most of the youtube power and this guy isn't kind of fishing for like some kind of constructive criticism just to help smaller creators and that's really what like bugs me because if you hear his i think it's sam and ameer they did this whole life story pot, how you got into YouTube. And he talked about having a group of creators where they would bounce things off of each other. Right. He can be that guy for so many people right now. Not just the big creators, but he could basically turn the platform into some kind

of instructional. Right now you're uploading and you don't know if it was a word that got you demonetized or a whole segment. And for an editor, that's, you know, it could be a week long journey to try to figure out where you went wrong. Yeah, I, my, so if I had, like, if, if I had a complaint, it would be like, look, if you, if YouTube said, hey, listen, we're going to age restrict this, you know, or we're going to, you know, whatever, we're going to demonetize it. Like, if they would just tell me why, like, hey, it was this one section where you guys talked about, you know, the manufacturing of whatever it was.

and it just honestly was a little bit too much and we felt like it was almost instructive and that if you could remove that one part i'll cut it i'll cut it like just tell me like this one section tell me even if it's just in this general area here this whole two and a half minute part felt funny we're not sure but this just narrow it down just and i'll go in and say you know what you know what i like to say about a lot of these companies a lot of of these companies it's just a small startup one day matt they'll have the money and the resources to be able to give you that kind of and this is coming from a company who can tell you metrics of like when people look away at what how many seconds into a video and mr bese talks about this he's like

three seconds in if you don't have 70 percent you've lost you know what i mean this is what they do how can they not tell you at this moment of your video you got flagged They can. They choose not to. And that's my biggest gripe with Mr. Beast. It's like if he just wanted to help the people, everybody on this platform, which, by the way, in return, wouldn't it make YouTube much better? If everybody knew the specifics of where their video went wrong, I don't think most people are being like, no, I'm going to fight to keep that in. They would fight to be on the platform. Even if you read, you know, they always refer to you to like, oh, we're referring you to the, even if you read all of it, it's so vague.

I did. I can not. Right. No, I can speak specifically. They pulled down one of my videos and said, we're going to give you a warning on this. And they sent me a community guideline violation. I read it. And it just listed like things that you could do on you.

And I'm like, where in my video does any of this apply? So I had to go to Twitter to say like, guys, I'm fighting this. This is so vague and abstract. Technically, it could be the whole video or technically it could be none of the video. like what do you like you remove my video what do I correct and right well I I think it's like a time to response where they like go away for a little bit and then it's just an automatic like oh here's your response sorry you lost and they sent me the same thing and I was like that was my problem what you sent me was this community guideline violation a few paragraphs that did not

explain anything in my video which I thought that's why I'm fighting it and then your response was to send me the same thing right like Listen, I've got you got a two and a half hour interview with somebody like you got to tell me specifically what it was. I mean, I can't, I don't know what it was. We talked about all kinds of. Or the other problem is this is the second, if I had a second thing. Second thing is it will be, my video will be uploaded. It will say fully monetized. Three days later, we post it. It's up for two or three days. And then suddenly, boom, limited monetization. It just changes. And you go, what happened? You ask for a manual review. They come back and they go, we've reviewed it. And after having an in-person, person, review it. Now, I have a hard time believing that they had a real person watch a two-and-a-half-hour video. But let's assume that, I'm assuming that at the very least, the algorithm said, hey, here's the one part we have an issue with is this four-minute section.

Yeah. They give me the four-minute section. Tell me what it is before you allow me to post it. Because if I take it down now and close it so much, my people will fucking lose it on me. Well, but not only that, but technical. Technically, when that happens, you're, it's like restarting the video and you've lost that, whatever that first audience was. Oh, you just lost 10,000 views or 8,000 views or whatever it is. And those are the initial impressions with yours, if you know anything about YouTube, that's what boosts it.

So that's what's going to send it flying if you get a, you know, so for you to remove that, you just basically killed your own video. So that's like, just real quick, because that's what is. So just hearing this. And Mr. Bees is not immune to hearing this stuff. buddy if you're listening look out for the little like this is the whole thing right at some point i mean what is you got 200 million a billion subscribers bro when do you turn around and go like here's what i've learned youtube you know you need to give us because if he put his foot down and he collaborated with a few different people and i mean this is like the hot labor summer summer of the strike and he was like yo i'm withdrawing and me and these creators are going to stop you know

on your platform they would listen i don't know if anything was get done but just to be able to bring something like you're talking about these clarification things it's not big it's not like youtube doesn't have the resource you know like this is very doable and it's infuriating that he's just like i'm going to edit quicker you know like we're going to smash the ferrari everything's perfect and you're like bro you know i'm paying attention you know yeah it's perfect for you like what you know look here this is probably the wrong thing to say but you know i've definitely notice that there are two kinds of, you know, with my vast experience and being a con man and being out of prison and having a keen understanding of human nature, I have come to the

conclusion that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are those that climb the ladder of success and invite everybody else to follow them. And those that climb the ladder of success and kick it out from underneath them so no one can follow them. And the problem is, is that amongst those people, the thought is this. Like, if there is, if you're getting a piece of the pie, you're taking from my potential pieces of the pie. That's what those people that kick the ladder out think, they think, well, I don't want you to have any pie because I may need that pie. That's my pie. Yeah. There's less pie for me. But the truth is, as massive as YouTube is, as massive of an audience as they have, and as huge of a population,

and as quickly growing as the internet and the collectiveness of just humanity on this planet is, there is enough pie for everyone. 100%. Well, I mean, and, well, to speak to that point, if you just look at YouTube 20 years ago, right, in its infancy, I'm sure there were, well, there were people that had that vision where you're like, we can all make it and I'm sure there were people like no only a few of us and if you look at it today there are so many people making career you know what I mean YouTube is like to you YouTube never thought they'd be this big no absolutely 20 years ago they were they were like when

they were like that weird looking website and it was like a couple people's home videos they were like oh this is fun you know they were like we're competing with America's home videos this is great and now just make enough money to pay my bills that's it okay that's what they I think you should tell you a story for real like you're not well previous to getting on YouTube is so fascinating but your growth through YouTube people die to hear that because you might you know well one like I said I mean it's growing but it's very much although it's paying all my bills it's still very much a grind and it is a job and you know and I get like when I first started I thought you know what you know I still

think everybody should be doing this, but I'm coming to the conclusion that not everybody can do it. They just, people are super self-conscious and, and they're worried about what people think. You know, they're, it's, it's kind of difficult. It is kind of difficult, but I do feel like everybody should be doing. But you even went through that. I definitely did. And you know what, funny enough, this is what Mr. Bees talks about. I don't know if it's true, how true it is, but he says, most people will quit on themselves. So they'll do it. for whatever, two years, three years, and then they go, it's not working. And they don't know if like year four is where, you know, they find the niche. Everything clicks and it explodes. He says that was

like the secret to his success. He was like, I didn't care if it was only 500 people every year, every two years. He said, I wasn't going to stop. This is what I was going to do. Right. There's only, you know what I mean? It's like it's a, it's a weird thing. Because as someone who's been doing YouTube for a few years, you go, is that true? You know, am I, am I starting to, kick my or quit before like i hit my you know the peak so i think everyone goes through that but like you're saying you've been grinding it out and you can attest to that and that's what that's what i's saying that's what people need to hear they they don't need to look at your subscriber count and go oh he's made it you need to be like yo this is a fight every day to keep there it is and i tell

everybody what i do like i know guys that are like well i don't have any subscribers it's not growing i'm not getting any views i'm like i got like 14 views on my last video and i'm i'm like bro you do you tell everybody that you have a video they're like what do you mean like you don't know like 30 people that you could send that video to and they don't like well they don't send them to anybody no i know they don't even send to their wife it's like i would fucking drown my friends in this video and say and then i'd call them all and say did you send this to four fucking people yeah call me you're dead to me you're dead to me like i bro i would be and everybody i started yeah and then i would celebrate bro i would get two subscribers i'd be like a win for the month. You know, I would be so excited just over the littlest win. You want to hear something funny? The other day, I was looking at my subscribers. Like, well, like, I actually had checked it and I noticed that it was just over like 150, 152,000, right? Like, it was like 152 and like nine. And then like 20 minutes later, I happened to open up the thing and I looked. And I noticed and it was 151 and like set I lost like 250 fuck it because every once in

while it updates yeah yeah yeah removes people suddenly and it dropped like 200 and I mean my heart I don't know if I'm cut out for this I think I'm thrown in the towel guys I was like but listen like it was funny because like within within a day it had gone up like 350 or 400 and I was like and I remember you know, I told my wife and she's like, it'll be all right. You know it does this. I'm like, still it, it. Yeah, but that's the other weird thing about YouTube.

It does that. Why? Like, have they not figured this out yet? I've heard, well, I've heard some weird, again, we can talk about this a different time, but I've heard some conspiracy theories on that, you know, the subscriber count being such a weird fluctuation. And especially because with me, so I'm at a very small number. It's finite.

I know if someone goes, hey, I'm going to subscribe. I see that immediately. and it's been weird because like where I live I'm real close to Salem so I would go out and film videos around there and people would stop and be like what are you doing and I would go out I would tell them I would get on there they would give me their phone I would go okay let's go subscribe and after a day getting like 10 15 subscribers I go home and I'd lost like 13 I'd be like how you know what I mean like that none of this makes sense I I knew my numbers there was you know what you do take your YouTube um your YouTube link get a QR code put it on your fucking thing and say please join my day and just be an asshole go through a drive through hand them fucking two cards yo bro i got a true crime channel whatever the channel is i got a session on channel please subscribe that's just brilliant yeah yeah no i love the QR code because if you make it so simple for people it's hard yeah you have to because with you know 99% of those people are gonna you don't know what guy's going to do it and and trigger that thing that makes youtube

go start jamming this fucking channel out just start doing it pumping it out. You don't know what it is. No, no, that's like the whole camp. It's like, it's like gambling. You know, you just don't know when that hit is going to come. Well, the nice thing is too, I was going to say, I mean, we can go, bro. Like, I like doing this. So to me, it's, it's a job in the world. Right. The fact that it's actually paying my bills every month, like it's the moment it did, by the way, I went from, we were posting three videos a week. The moment it did, we started going four and everything ramped up. Like, I was like, okay, I'm going to stop doing this, stop doing it. I don't need to do these things for money.

anymore now i'm just doing this that's awesome you know you got i want to come back on to interview you about that story well what should do is we should get you me we just probably get two or three guys who all have youtube channels at different do like a once a month come on and just do and then post that same video in all of our channels yeah that is just talking about everything from money to what's working what's not getting shit taken down well and can we please start a rolling list of like what YouTube needs to fix, and then I'll petition Mr. Beast every short I make. You ain't going to hear the end of it from me, pal. When we were discussing suicide earlier, usually the biggest thing I hear is people say it's

a coward's way out. Right. You've probably heard that. It's a, I think it's an easy way to dismiss this subject. And I've said that it's also brave, but I have to really be careful. saying that. I just feel a responsibility, especially as someone who's lived with the tragic consequences, the destruction. I mean, this completely tore apart my family. Like I've said, my brother's been homeless for a decade now. I think we're going on it, very close to a decade. So I just feel this ultimate responsibility to clarify. I don't mean brave and like it's a courageous, heroic act. Let's be very clear on that. And I think, everyone can relate. Like, you know, olden times there were bravery acts where they panned out. And then

there were brave acts that were maybe foolish or they were these acts that took bravery, but they were a permanent answer to a temporary or a permanent answer to a temporary problem. And it's really hard. I mean, I've lived with this for 20 years, right? still not got to wrap my brain around it. And that's kind of the biggest mind F when this happens. And it wasn't just my father. Many of my friends have chosen the same route. But in all of my time dealing with grief, the anger, whatever the stages of grief, I think

that's what it's called, when you go through them, there's been only one person that I felt truly accurately described what they you know what somebody in this mind state is going through and let's remember when people dismiss it as cowardly they're they're using like their rational judgment anybody that i've known that has been in this scenario or fought off depression you're coming from an irrational state of mind right you're not thinking clearly you've been battling thoughts it's been like a mental war So the one person that I've found, and I just want to read a quote. I don't know how many people have read a quote on this channel,

but it's the only way to truly give some good context when I say brave. Because, again, it's not brave in the way people are thinking. A lot of people misconstrue that when I say it. So I feel this ultimate responsibility. And the person who gave this quote, I don't know if this would be on it. ironic, but they did the same thing in 2008. They took their own life. It's the author David Foster Wallace. In the 90s, people were saying, like, he was the voice of a generation. He wrote the 1,000 page, 3 pound. Everybody, when they talk about his book, Infinite Just, they always

mention how heavy the book is. It's like 3 pound, 3 ounces. So that gives some literal weight to how much he wrote and what this book was. And I believe this is a quote from the book, I'm not sure. I haven't finished it. It's still sitting on my bookshelf. So David Foster Wallace says the so-called psychotically depressed person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of, quote, hopelessness or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debts do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level, will kill herself the same way a trap person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high rise. Make no mistake about people who

leap from burning windows. The terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window, just checking out the view. i.e., the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other, terror. The flames fires. When the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of the two terrors. It's not desiring the fall. It's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk looking up and yelling, don't or hang on, can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling. And that was David Foster Wallace.

And that's what I mean. It's so difficult to really explain or like take it from my head and put it out there. I feel like he does the best way of doing that when I say like it's brave. Again, brave in like the worst kind of bravery, like a stupid foolish. That's what I was saying. Like in war, there are definitely people who do brave things that maybe save people. And then there's people who do brave things that are just foolish. And you go, ah, you know, yes, it was brave, but it was so dumb.

So that's what I mean when I say brave. It is nothing that is honorable, courageous, any of those synonyms that go along with it. It's just this act that you go, wow, it's stunningly, shockingly, something unimaginable. And again, it's nothing, it's such a permanent answer to life's temporary solutions. But really, and I mean, I fought this off. I'm not sure, like, before you went to prison, you probably had a bout of depression. Again, I'm not sure. Everyone is different.

Yeah. Yeah, there was a moment. There was a moment. This may not be the highlight of my life. And even those first few days that turn into weeks, that turn into months, that turn in for you, years, right? Yeah. And to keep that, I always say hope is like the most dangerous thing in the world. because when you have it, life seems like anything.

Yeah, right? But when you lose it or when you're struggling to hold onto it, life becomes so dangerous. Every day is a battle. So you got to remember that. And I'm sure there's people out there fight. I mean, look at society right now, you know. And this isn't like suicide rates have dropped.

In fact, I believe they keep going up, whether they're just ticking up, but just that fact you really have to consider and I just feel a weight on me at all times when I talk about this and unfortunately I have to talk about it more than I'd like because it has always affected my life. In fact, just the other day it was, you know, all these anniversaries come up and I try to not ignore them, but I don't like to acknowledge them like I have to. Again, part of the grief, grief is a weird thing. But when you know people are out there struggling, you really want to address it in a delicate way. This isn't, you know, our society makes people want to man up or, you know,

you just got to tough through it. But unless you've really been in that building where you're feeling the heat of the fire. And this isn't like a small thing. You know, I know for my dad, he was feeling the heat for a long time. But unfortunately, he grew up in a generation where you just, you know, you kind of kept quiet. They rub some dirt in it. Right? That's it. Rub some dirt. You'll be fine and you're not. I mean, look at people who come back from war. My brother-in-law is special forces and there are things that you have to address. You know, you cannot rub dirt in these wounds and expect them to heal. It's just a, it's a false mindset and it's really a cultural norm that we need to shatter because once we do that, then I think some progress can happen. We can save some

lives. We can get people to know that, like I always say, it's okay to not be okay. So I really just, always feel compelled because it's shocking sometimes when, even when I was on the radio. This kid, I don't think he understood my family history and all that I deal with with friends. And he dismissed, you know, anyone who had addiction as a junkie and they weren't worth the time of day. You know, they didn't belong in society. Even people would call in and say, why would I want to take advice from a junkie? And it's really just bringing the humanity out of that situation when I think after the Oxycontinent, pandemic, we saw that. It wasn't just certain people. There weren't just certain sex of society

who this happened to because of four choices or whatever. Like this, drug addiction, let's look at coffee addiction. It could affect anybody. You know, I work at Starbucks, man. You would not be shocked to see the same people in there every day once you understand like, yo, they're addicted. This caffeine is something that they can't control anymore. They here seven days a week or in the same thing. So with drug addiction, it's nothing that. that people are choosing, well, maybe some people are choose, but a lot of the people I've encountered that personally have been affected or that I've personally had the unfortunate experience to lose to, they weren't choosing to go out like this. You know, they lost hope. They were

in that burning building and they jumped. And it's unfortunate, but, you know, I think addressing it differently, and when I call it brave, you know, it's brave in the most hideous way you could be brave. It's brave in the most cowardly way you could be brave. And here I'm talking about my dad. Remember, these are all, you know, this isn't some abstract thing. And that's where I really find a lot of the people who deal with it in this abstract, like, oh, you know, they were a coward.

And it's so easy to say that. But when it's personally affected you, like it has me, and I say, you're right. It's the most brave thing a coward can do. and it absolutely like a dropping a stone in a lake the ripple effects go on you know until that shoreline so i don't know man it's just it's such a hard topic to tackle but i think addressing it head on you know and especially if people are dealing with this or they know someone dealing with it don't shy around it that's my biggest regret you know what i mean like the the thing i always wonder is like what if i had asked what if i had

you know, brought, if, if I knew that there was difficult circumstances, and I didn't know the extent, but what if I just, straightforward, just said, are you doing okay? You know, like, nothing stupid. And again, there was, there was mind-altering substances involved. So it's, it's really hard when somebody is in that state for prolonged periods of time to really get, you know a genuine answer because maybe they think oh it's just because of that you know a substance or i'm really fine and it takes some work on your own behalf you know even even i can speak over the couple of decades since this has happened i've fought that battle daily you know i've felt the flames of the burning fire and wondered like well is this just destiny for me is this my genetics

is you know you wonder all those things but addressing it head on and especially whether you're feeling like that or you're pretty sure you know someone who's feeling like that not beating around the bush you know getting right to it if you love them and you care for them and you feel like you can address this with them doing it um but again i don't think i think i could talk for hours on this and we'll never figure it out like i say it's an irrational action there is no rationale behind it it may seem like oh it's solving problems but when you consider in the wake the problems that it causes It's not. You know, it doesn't solve anything.

And, I mean, life is just a bunch of stories. You know this. I'm talking to a guy who went to prison for how long? 13 years. 13. Roughly. And look at where you are now. You know, your storm happened to be for 13 years.

You sat underneath that storm for 13 years. And now, my man, has got a lot of subscribers. Make sure you subscribe, like, hit the little bell notification on this because he's Do a good work. You know, I was going to say, so I used to tell the story when guys would say, you know, man, bro, how did you, you know, how did you get through all that time, you know? So then there's multiple different stories I tell about, you know, different times that things happened. And but, you know, and of course, we always, my first thought is, you know, hope. You know, I always say, I know, I say that, you know, I'm like, oh, it's hope, hope gets you there.

You always think, well, this motion's going to help. this will knock my sentence down this will do this you know i'll if at some point they'll move me to a camp and i'll walk away you know because when you get to be able when you get when you have 10 years left to do they'll and your points are low enough they'll send you to a camp you typically just walk away um so i would think about that you know little things like like that and then there was so and this this used to happen where it was like, I would wake up every morning, almost, not every morning, probably almost every morning, I would wake up and I would go, like, you know, you wake up and you're like, oh my God, I'm still

here. Like, oh my, and this went on forever. I was just feel like, like, and I would sit there and I would think like, you know, how much dental floss do I have to buy to like weave a rope and where would I do it. And if you go in the stalls at night, if you go in it like right after, let's say, two o'clock count or something, they don't count for a couple hours. Like, there's almost nobody in there. So if you were to go in there and there was this bar over the, um, over the handicapped stall that would definitely hold you, right? I'm, I'm so short, easily, easily. I'm not touching the ground. And, you know, once you jumped up, like, there's no way to get yourself out of that situation. So, and I would sit there and think, fine, then you have to sit there and you'd be

choke into death and you know because it's not going to break your neck you know you're gonna and I'd be like okay well if you did the loop but I would sit there and I would think and then I would of course I know it's irrational and I'm like no no bro just just stop thinking about that's not rational and then I would think where um you know I think just stop stop stop bro get up get up get up and get some coffee if you get some coffee you like coffee get some coffee that'll make you feel better get some coffee so I get up I push will myself out of bed go get some coffee and I think you know what just good you got to go to the library you told Pete you'd meet him at the library so then you drink some coffee and I think okay just just get through just get to Pete safe you like Pete you like talking to Pete

get to Pete and then I go and I talk go the move would happen and I go to the library and I meet Pete and then I'd be think the whole time I'm depressed and I just don't want to do this anymore I'm sick of this and I'm never getting out of here and I'm going to die here and it's And then I'd think, okay, you know, it's not that bad. It's not that bad of a place. You'll be okay. You can get through this. And then by around noon, you eat.

No, they're having chicken today, fried chicken. Nobody can screw up fried chicken. It's good. Okay, so one of the better meals and you eat the meal. And you go, okay, this is not so bad. It's not so bad here. And then by two o'clock, it's like, you know, there's some good guys here. Like I like John and I like, I like, you know, I like so and I like, you know, Donovan's funny and Pete's funny and Frank's.

You know, let me go talk to those guys. You talk to those guys. And you know, I got to finish this story. You got to meet this guy at 5 o'clock. And then by 6 o'clock, it's like, this is a good place. You know, like, this is not a bad place. Like my chemicals in my brain throughout the day would change. And then so by 5 or 6 o'clock, I'm thinking, this is all right.

This is not a bad place. Like, if you had to spend the rest of your life here, this isn't the worst. You know, you could be, it could be worse. You could be in the 1850s in, 1850s in New Orleans being. and be a slave and being sold as a slave or you could be picking cotton you could be on a plantation you could be you could be a jew in in the in the 1940s in germany you could you know what I'm saying you start telling yourself you could be you know all these how horrific things could be and this is not a bad place even if you were locked up it's not bad and then by seven or eight o'clock that night

I was like I'm getting out of here I'm going to this is going to be okay I'm going to win this motion. This is going to happen. This is going to happen. I'm going to get out of here. This is not that big of a deal. And listen, by the time I went to bed, it was, you're going to get some books published. You're going to get out of prison. You're going to start your life over. You're going to look back. This is going to be one of the best parts of your life. This is an amazing place. This is, you're going to turn this into something. And then I'd go to bed. You know, I'd fall asleep. And then next morning I'd wake up and I'd think, you know, how much dental floss do I have to buy. And it would start completely over. And I remember telling that story on a podcast one

time. And this guy goes, bro, like, how long did that go on? And, you know, when did that stop? And I, and I told him, I said, I'll let you know. Because I mean, even to this day, because when I went to prison, I wish to take Paxil. You know what Paxil is? No. It's for anti, it's an anti-anxiety drug for like social, you know, it's real bad. social anxiety like I didn't like being around people so you could imagine me going to prison and they pull me off it and then they tried to give me well butron and then they tried to give me zoloft and then they you know it's like basically what happened is the insurance carrier because they have like HMOs right the carrier just stopped giving telling them them hey we're not paying

for Paxil we're going to here's other brands that do the same thing that are cheaper but they're but listen but they don't do the same thing because well Well, Buceran certainly doesn't do what Paxel did. Like, I was on Paxel for 10 years. I felt great. Nothing bothered me. You set my house on fire. You could, you know, everything.

I was like, it's going to be all right. That's not a big deal. I'm going through this. Right. So, yeah, I'm okay. It's all right. I got money. We'll fix this.

No problem. You know. But yeah, it's so, but when I got to prison, they took me off Paxel. Like after a couple years, they said, look, you know, we changed this and we're taking you off and we're going to move you to Welbutrin. Well, after about two, three weeks. three weeks. I mean, I couldn't even hear what people were talking to me. They couldn't, I couldn't hear what they were saying even. I was like, what? Huh? Like, I was so in and how. Then they said,

oh, Zoloff, we'll put you on Zolov. Put on Zoloff for a couple weeks. And I said, no, I'm done. You got to get me off. I can't take this anymore. I'll just go cold turkey. So I just stopped. And that's when in the morning, that whole thing started happening. Yeah. And, you know, I explained that to the doctor. And he was like, well, I mean, I could put you back on Zoloff. I was like, I'm not doing that. I was like, it's Paxil or I'll just deal with it. He's like, well, you're not getting back so wait so you didn't get it again no i know for for about 10 years that's was my my daily routine i would wake up and just feel absolutely suicidal and by but by that night bro i was getting out this was not a big deal this was i was good things are good this is good place these are

some good guys i got some good friends i'm going to get out of here at some point i'm going to start my life over again i got plenty of life left in me i got so that so that That is so fascinating because, well, number one, well, butrin, like I took that. They said that was a smoking cessation drug. They used to have commercials. No joke. Like, it would stop smoking for you. But it was funny because if you listen at the end of the commercials, it was like,

make how suicidal thought they're interviewed. Oh, yeah. And it was like this real long thing. So when the doctor was like, oh, here's how you stop smoking, just be careful, you know, because it might send you like to life-ending mind thoughts. And I was like, you know, like that ain't happening. No, you have to understand that, that the Bureau of Prisons, like, first of all, you don't get the top of your field and end up working for the Bureau of Prisons or the federal government for that matter. So the doctors that are there, like they barely speak English, most of them aren't doctors.

They would have one doctor for the entire complex. And he doesn't, he doesn't work there. It's some local doctor that works in. town that signs off saying he's the main doctor. And they have all, it's all PAs. So you have P.A. So you would walk in there and they'd say, okay, hold on. All right, Mr. Cox, what are your symptoms? And you'd say, oh, I feel this. My stomach hurts. And they would click a button. And they do it all in the computer. They just click, okay, stomach. Stomach pain where? Okay, lower here. And they'd be clicking pictures and what's this and what and it would diagnose you on the computer and then they say boom

this is what the problem is a lot of times guys would go in and say look i have a hernia i i know guys that i knew one guy that said i had a hernia like this is killing me i was doing what's called the wheel you know what the wheel is when you work out there's like a wheel where you it's kind of like a reverse sit-up right you oh yeah yeah yeah so he was doing it and he said look i i pulled something i'm in real pain i pulled something and they were like, okay, hold on. And he told him, look, I know exactly. I have a hernia because there's another guy that has a hernia.

And I have the same sensation. And I was doing the wheel. And right after I did the wheel, this is how I felt. And it's, it's killing me right here. And it's the same thing. So it's a hernia. And he even knew the name of the hernia. So the doctors, at first, so they listened to him and they said, no, no, it's, you need to

to change your diet. So they gave him a list of foods that he could no longer eat. And he looked at the list and he said, this won't be hard for me, Doc, because I've never eaten any of these foods. Yeah, they're like, you know, we're in prison, right? Right. He's like, I don't like hot sauce.

I don't eat the hot sauce. I don't do this. I don't eat this. I don't, you know, he's like, what do you? Bro, I just told you, I have a hernia. I'm telling you. I have a, what's called it. It's like, it's like, they're like,

right? What? Like, the hernia is you have to have surgery. There isn't like a medication. Right. Right. And they don't want to do the surgery. So they told me it was this.

he went this went on for 18 months it was so bad his nickname was slow motion because he he walked around with his hand pushing against his stomach and he would walk around like real slowly and they called him slow motion so at some point his mother complained so much to the governor finally got to the governor's office they said bring him in for a wasn't like a cat skin whatever they do in your upper g i lower g i whatever they did that they came back He memorized the doctor's name when he was in there, like Dr. Gupta or whatever. And he's like, oh, okay, okay. And he told him what his symptoms were. And he said, it sounds like you haven't heard you. And he's like, I think I do. So he did the whole thing. And he said, I'll let you know.

He said, the prison, he said, I'll have you back here in two weeks for your, for your results. Well, of course, he knew being a prisoner, they're not bringing me back here. like that's not what the doctors always think this is the way it works you're one of my patients I'll tell them to bring you back here and they just blow the doctors off so they brought them to a hospital did that stuff but he remembered the doctor's name so he went two three weeks later they brought him down to medical he said hey I'm supposed to go to see the doctor they said oh no no no we got your results uh you have a um what do you call it in your stomach when you have you have an ulcer in your stomach you need to I told you you need to stop eating these foods

He said, I don't eat those foods. It's a hernia. He said, no, no. He goes, okay, well, can I see the results? And he said, oh, you don't need to see the results. I have. And he had it typed out on the screen. This is what the doctor said it is.

Keep in mind. This is what he said. So he goes to his mother. His mother calls the doctor at the hospital. The doctor at the hospital sent her a form for him to sign off on. They fax the form to the doctor. The doctor gets the form. The doctor sent the mother, sent the mother the results.

now he had the results from the doctor at the prison right the doctor it's actually a PA yeah his mother sent the results from what the doctor at the hospital said and what the PA said PA said you have an ulcer put it in writing this is what the doctor's result the results were but the actual results were you have an inguinal hernia he actually had two and he needed surgery oh so she said that how was this going on for oh 18 months so he then sent he then sent that to the

they sent that to the governor governor made a couple phone calls next thing you know he's scheduled for surgery so he gets surgery so I knew another guy who actually one time had been in a fight and actually tore like his eye socket

and so he went no big deal that that happens and it can be months and months before something happened so one day he wakes up and his eye is literally shifted sideways like in the middle of the night it just broke off right like it had always been broke but it was still there so it broke and it's sideways he wakes up he's flipping out he goes to the hospital they waited a week to 10 days to bring him to the hospital he's like look at my eye i have to go to the hospital they're telling him it's something else completely um what is it some some type of paralysis with your face oh uh when you have a stroke

no no it's not stroke it's something like you can get this paralysis and they said it goes away well it didn't go away so when they finally bring him here a sister throws such a fit they finally bring him to the hospital the doctor says oh yeah you i can see you broke your whatever off if they brought you here in a couple of days you'd have been fine but now i can't save the eye no come on so what happens did they remove it what in that scenario that eye out he's got a fake eye to this day so what of course he turns around and he you know that you can't sue the federal government especially if you're an inmate you have to go through the process of filing different notices right um so you file those notes and if you get to the end of it if you don't get a resolution by the end of it you can then file a federal lawsuit but you have to file these notices and it takes a year or so to file all of them um which of course what they're trying to do is kind of run out the statute of limitations like they keep going back and forth like so i don't know um i think he eventually did well and usually what happens is before you leave the prison, like if you're, if you're going to be in prison for 20 years, they'll just run out the statute of limitations. You can file a lawsuit, but they'll quash it because you're basically property and they're saying, no, you don't get anything. If you're leaving, and this guy was leaving, they'll typically come to you and offer you a settlement just before you get out because they don't want you to get an attorney. And it's hard to get an attorney any way to represent you on the outside because the federal government will drag it out so long and there's so many

law is protecting the federal government. And the attorneys know that battle. They know that. And they're like, look, in the end, we almost never, these things are almost never worth anything. So you have to pay me up front. Well, you just got out of prison. You have nothing. Right. Listen, bro, I could go on and on about medical. But, I mean, medical will give you, listen, what funniest thing was there was a doctor that was in prison. And he, oh, I've known tons of doctors. And he went in one time and to be for something for medication and he said man this it's bad he said i walked in and they were like okay

uh mr so-and-so and and he said doctor so and they were like and they were like well you don't have a license anymore and he said no i don't but i still have a degree that says i'm a doctor and he was like and so the dot so when they're going through that he's like yeah yeah my back is hurting right here he's oh you mean your l-7 is no my l-7 would be just above my hips and he looked at him and he was like, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't see where you were pointing. Yeah, yeah. He goes on and on, and he's like, yeah, you need to prescribe me this. And he's like, oh, that's a narcotic.

I can't do that. He says, no, it's not a narcotic. And he said, it's this. And so he sat there and had to explain to the doctor and argued with the doctor on what he wanted to prescribe because he was like, no, that wouldn't help me because I'm suffering from this. Like, he had to explain to the doctor. Did he get the doctor eventually get?

Eventually the doctor got. frustrated and gave it to him. But he was trying to argue. He was trying to argue with him. What? That doctor must have been so valuable in prison, right? Oh, listen, I saw him way more than I ever saw the medical staff. You would go and go talk to him and say, hey, Doc, you know, forget his last name.

Hey, so-and-so, can I talk to you for a second? And he goes, yeah, yeah. Listen, I've known pulmonary specialists in there. I was friends with the guy that was a pulmonary specialist. The one doctor was basically, he was... who's just a general practitioner? I'm not a couple of them. I knew,

do you remember when Jeb Bush's daughter got busted for, and there was a friend of hers that had died of opioids? Yeah. So the doctor that prescribed that medication was in prison with me. Oh, really? They called him Doc. I forget his, God, my buddy Zach would remember his name because he was, he was Sellies with him.

He used to have night terrors. and he would wake up in the middle of the night screaming. And I remember Zach one time got off his bunk and was like trying to wake him up. And he's and he thought to himself, if the guard walks by right now, I'm a large black man holding, shaking this frail old white man while he's screaming. He says, this is not going to look good for me. But he woke up and he would have these vivid dreams that was like someone was shoving him in an other. and oh he it was yeah it was it was it was rough uh what was his name anyway he he was he was super smart guy and it's funny too because he was dying and he knew what he was dying from

and he had gone to medical uh for something else and they were like and while he was standing there his hands were turned blue right his feet were turned blue his hands because his heart had some kind of a disease or something blood right so he would have to stand up and move around and his hands were if he just sat down for even a few minutes, his hands would slowly start turning blue. And they were like, hey, your hands are.

He's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I have mild such and such and farkshund, such and such. And they'd be like, oh,

okay, well, you know, we can give you something for that. And he was like, no, I don't want anything for it. He's like,

if at its current rate, he said, I'll be dead in about five years. And they were like, well, we should give you, well, don't you,

you don't want us just treated? He said, man, I got a life sentence in here. Oh, did he? Yeah, he was like, and he was already 70-something years old. He's like, I don't want it. Like, I want, this is how I want to slowly, eventually one day I'll just die of a heart attack at my sleep.

He was totally okay with it. Hey, can we talk real quick about how you described that day in and day out once they took you up? Was it Paxil? Right, Paxil, yeah. That was so well described about the mental battle. because I mean essentially you were in prison but also but literally but then metaphorically your brain was in a prison we'd have to combat those thoughts every day and regardless of you know what people's circumstances are that is something I've experienced you know where you wake up and I'm not being in prison just being like oh

you know this again and then you have to but But the way you were talking about, like, just getting up and going to do whatever, coffee, whatever that first thing is, some kind of motion. I think this is why Tony Robbins, let's be honest. That dude's a fraud at this point. He had some street cred until he started going with Dean Graziozzi. He's in your field, too. I think he had like a settlement for some kind of million in real estate scamming.

He had like a real estate pyramid where he was selling it online where he was like, you'll make money, but really I just make the money. Right. I think you're going to make money. And as soon as Tony Robbins started partnering up with him, I think Tony's hopeful street cred or whatever, life coach street cred went out the window. But I think that's, you know, why people are so attracted to like a Tony Robbins. Because I did his free course. I did a whole video about it on YouTube because I wanted to see.

Like, is this really a scam? And when he talks, he does talk about things like that. Like he does this weird thing where he's like, you got to do it. posture stance for three minutes and he's like MIT proved my theories they didn't have my tools this is literally what he says you know and we're like your tools what did you clap like you're trying to chop chop bamboo but he talks about just the physical motions that you can make during the day kind of changing like you said the brain chemistry so really like what you describe you should be saying that more because for anyone that's feeling depression or in that mental battle however far along

been dealing with it. You did it for what? A decade? That's, you got to be exhausted after two days of doing that. Never mind a decade. You know, that's some real resilience. But just the fact that you convinced yourself to get up and do that first action, you know, that's going to snowball into the next whatever it is. And that's really, you know, part of getting out of it, I think. I don't know, just hearing that. I was like, wow, I can relate. And, you know, I didn't have to do 13 years, It was just, to me, it was, it was just baby. Like, most of the things I do in life are just, like, baby steps. Like, I don't, I don't typically see, like, I don't typically think of, you know, I, I, I know that this is the result I want is way down here, but my all, I don't really focus on that.

I think about the baby steps. Like, what's the first step? This one. And so I just focus on that one little tiny achievable step, getting coffee. That's not hard. I have a bag of coffee. I have a creamer. I have some sweetener.

I can go heat up the water. You know what I'm saying? Like it's right down there. They already counted. I can get out of bed. I can waddle down there. You know, with my coffee and do the whole thing.

And I like coffee. Coffee's good. It's one of the only good things here. It's, you know, and so you just keep talking to yourself for the next five minutes that it takes. And then once I get the coffee, of course,

you smell coffee and you drink the coffee. You're like, oh, like a little bit better. Yeah, a little bit better. Okay, you know what?

Wait, I'm supposed to go get, go talk to Pete. I'm meeting Pete at at eight o'clock. What time is it? Oh, I got to get ready. You know what I'm saying? Like, just little baby steps. In the next hour, I have to complete this task and this task. I think that's why have you heard when they say like the first thing you should do when you wake up is like make your bed. I think that's in the same vein. It's like something that's achievable, which I think it's stupid because it's like, okay, we could do that. But that's, you know, I think there needs to be more to it, whether you say it's coffee, you know,

like something a little bit further from the bedside. I do make my bed every day, too, by the way. Yeah, of course. Because the guard, if you don't, then the guards will come and flip your mattress and they'll write you a shot. Oh, really? Yeah. So I don't, you know, we make it, we make our bed every morning.

Jess and I kind of fuss over a little bit. I'm like, no, pull your side. Pull your side. She's like, my side's fine. I'm like, no, no. You don't know what you're doing. I did this 13 years. I don't know where you, I don't know what prison you were in.

but at Coleman we got hospital corners let me show you what a real hospital corner looks like you know somebody's gonna come in here flip it oh that's great people always like

bro you get up at like four in the morning why I'm like well that's when the guards turn on the lights oh really four in the morning no it was like five but still still it was like you know I was always just tell him I'm like well that's what I have to I have to get up at five or at four

they're like why I'm like that's when the guards turn on the lights you're like I'm sorry? Where do you live? Oh, listen, listen, I did, we do CrossFit in the morning now. And I say we like, like she and I have been doing it for, you know, six months, but really we've been done like three times.

But they were doing burpees. Do you know what burpees are? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the guy was like, you know, here, you know, you're going to start with burpees. And he was showing us how to do burpees. And I, I only to save Jess. the embarrassment, I stopped myself from saying, listen, that's not how the black guy's in prison

do them. But I stopped myself because I thought, and then later when we were getting the car, I told him that, hey, I almost said this. And she goes, you should have. That would have been hilarious. Right. You put him in check. You're like, let me get in the front of the class. So wait, is it live? Are you doing CrossFit like in a class? No, we drive out there. We drive out to this place. It's a 10 minute, 10, 15 minutes from here. Listen, I always thought the greatest racket was the people, what was it, P90X, and do you remember that one? Were you locked up? P90X was like this big, bad, that was essentially, I never did it.

It was like a CrossFit thing, but everyone I knew did it. But you just got a set of DVDs. And I thought, that is brilliant. You record this once. You just tell people, like, you know, it's some weird workout, you name it something odd. And then, I mean, I guess you got to be kind of good at it, or at least have the perception, you know, the body type. to sell it and you record that once and people everywhere it's just like those uh you've seen the new bikes where you ride in place and they just got a screen there that does the class yeah

with peloton peloton all the rich people got those i'm like that's got it because there's no one live on it right those aren't live classes i'm pretty sure that's a recording DVD slip in and something what a racket you could run one of those you could do the prison work you could call it this is how the black guys did perpies in prison and just sell the DVD. I need some intellectual property on that, though. Honestly, have probably the best conversations before the podcast and after the podcast. You got to just start rolling. You got to start rolling.

Well, that's how, like in radio, you know, people would come in and they would usually go into the producer's studio behind and you'd go in and wrap with them. We're like, as a producer, you'd go in and be like, hey, what do you want to talk about? you know, especially comics. They want like a setup, you know, like, hey, have you traveled lately or whatever? A lot of comics don't do it anymore. They'll just talk to you. But for a while, you would have to just go ask, is there anything?

You know, like any lead-ins. But before, like, or when they would give you that, then they would tell you, like, the most crazy stuff that was happening, you know, like crowd-wise or their true interactions in the city. And you just feel like, God, talk about that. You know what I mean? Like the most human. We had Scott Weiland on once, right?

And he just passed away, what, a few years, maybe a decade ago, I don't know, feels like, he's the lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots. Okay. So he, I forget what year he overdosed, but he overdosed passed away. And he called in. And at first it was very much like typical radio interview, right? But the host of the show had been through recovery and started to talk to him about that. And then at some point, you hear him talking to his kids, you know, saying something like,

Hey, no, no, no, one second. And he's really, you could tell the, the radio aspect had kind of left him. And he got very, very comfortable. Right. And he just started talking about his rehabbing process because I think he got clean many different times. It just didn't stick with him. You know, it was one of those were like, it was a real struggle. And some people, it's really hard.

That's why the healthcare system and the rehab system, you see these rehabs popping up everywhere because they're spitting people out in 30 days, which just doesn't work. But he really got comfortable. And at one point, he went, oh, wait a minute. I can't be talking like this on the radio and he just abruptly ended the interview. But you knew because some of the stuff he was talking about with drug use, you were like, oh, wow. And you always hope people because you want, you don't want to see these people as like these icon superstars, you know? Right.

And when they become more human and just talk about their follies or, you know, whatever it is. it almost makes them more iconic because you can just relate, you know, that wow, this guy has these struggles that are this deep. And ultimately, he lost his life to that struggle. So it was even more, you know, when I look back. Because we talked to like Chris Cornell came in studio. Anthony Bourdain, I mean, geez, all these people who either took their life or overdosed. And those were sometimes like the realist, you know, they weren't afraid to shy away from touching that darkness you know it's it's always don't you know you don't don't ever meet your heroes you know what I mean like and you know you've heard that saying you know don't yeah you know

because you're just bound to be disappointed listen every single person ever in and two really more like three years that since since probably three three three and a little over three years since I did that podcast with a with shoot um um um um with Danny on Concrete. I'm trying to think of Concrete because he changed it from Concrete. Now it's Danny Jones. But with Concrete, like I had people reaching out, wanted to talk to me, wanting to, you know. And I would have guys like come, like they're driving across the state just that have lunch with me and have me sign a book, that sort of thing.

So listen, I had a guy who flew in from Texas one time, flew in, hung out with me for the day. Yeah, just, oh, I've had this happen multiple times. And we talked all the time. Another time I flew in, he flew me out to Texas just to hang out and talk. And actually, I did kind of like a little presentation in front of his mortgage company. And I've had these types of things happen. And every single time, you know, of course, they're like, wow, bro, you know, it's so great talking to you, this and that. And I just always knew, like, we just talked everything.

I knew you were a cool guy. and I felt like we'd be friends and this and that. Every single one of those guys, we text for a few times back and forth, back and forth, and then it's over. Then it's over, it's on. The one guy, the guy from Texas, his name's Ian.

He, um, wow, hold on. I just, I don't even know what I just said. Guy from Texas. Ethan, Ethan, is it Ethan? Ethan. I don't know. Wow, sorry. I knew I said it wrong. Hope he doesn't see this. Ethan, so because what's so funny is I was talking to him all the time. I haven't talked to him in months. And even then, now it's me. Because this is probably over a year ago that I flew out there. So it now it turns into me saying, because he's a younger guy. He's in his like 20s, right? In his late 20s. And I'm saying to him, now I'm texting him going, hey, bro, what's going on? You know, what happened with your girl? Like I feel like, I feel like my kids. I feel like, I feel like my kids. I feel like. I feel like my kids. I feel like. I feel like. I feel like.

like my kid moved away. He's not calling me anymore. And so even Jess is like, she's like, what happened with Ethan? Like, whatever happened? I'm like, I don't know. I texted him like a few months ago. I said, hey, bro, what's going on with you? He said, hey, man, I'm going into a meeting. I'm going to call you as soon as I get out. I said, never heard from him. A couple days later, I sent him another text message. Never heard from him. He did. She was, God. She said, you know, like he was all over you for months. And I was like, I know. I said, and I remember I kind of leaned over and tapped her. I said, never meet your heroes. Yeah. And she said, yeah. She said he found out you were just another douchebag. I said,

that's what I'm saying. I'm just another fucking douchebag. People think, man, he's so cool. He's so this. He's so. Then you meet me and you hang out with me. You're like, ah, you're just the fucking Schmo. Just like us. What? You got issues? Listen, that's what. I don't know if Joe Rogan was bullied when he was younger, but we had him on our show a bunch of times. And I know he's huge and everybody loves them let's be honest he's just good at asking questions he's very good at asking questions but it's not like he's spitting out firefax and you know like right i i understand it really is like in art of dialogue not to shout out that youtube channel but he's very good at it you know but when he was coming on our radio shows there was one time we went to a ufc fight right

after i mean this guy had just come in he he was doing his stand-up circuit i don't know like before he was the podcaster. He was doing stand-up. I know he did some acting. But really, he was heavy on the stand-up circuit. Like, he almost fought Carlos Mancia on our show. He called and was like, yo, Carlos stole my jokes. Get on. And we let those two kind of go at it. And I think Carlos Manzias disappeared. I haven't heard nothing from him. But so anyways, usually when people come on enough, you start to not form a relationship, but you know them. You know, Like, if I saw you out, you came on our radio show, we wouldn't pretend like we didn't know each of. Hey, what's up?

Maybe even plan as a producer, you'd always be like, hey, listen, next time I'm here in San Diego, you know, we'll get you on the show. What are you doing? What's your tour? And this dude, we had talked to him. There was a UFC fight, I think, like that weekend. So we go to Vegas. He's staying in the same hotel like getting the elevator. I'm like, Joe, what's up?

And he was like knuckle dragon like, hmm, you know, like totally like didn't know. me and I was like oh okay you know like I'm so sorry he's the great Joe Rogan he was doing the announcing too you know and it just sucked because it was like man such an opportunity to just be decent you know like just say hi and I don't hold it against him I know he's very occupied with Spotify but it's one of those moments you you never know what here's the thing I try and give people the benefit of the doubt because you never know what's going through what's going on in their life at that moment. And listen, that's true.

These people at CrossFit, we were driving home this morning. And I said, I kind of feel, like told Jess, I was like, I feel this is my wife, Jess. I was like, I kind of feel bad. I said because I'm so depressed and irritated that I'm even at that place. Like, I don't get that way at the gym. When I walk in the gym and the people of the front desk get to say, hi, I'm like, hey, what's going on? You know, like, hey, what's up? And I keep walking.

And I'm like, I'm in better spirits. because I don't mind the gym. I hate CrossFit. So when they're trying to explain the, okay, so we're going to do the burpees, and then we're going to do this, and we're going to pull up this, then we're going to do what we call it a hack split. And so a hack split is, and I'm looking at them like, just mentally exhausted. And even I can't even pretend to be, to be enthusiastic.

And when they're like, look, I know it's hard, but once you get through it, you're going to get muscle memory and it's going to be way easier. And I'm just looking and I'm like, I don't even pretend it. I'm hating, in my, in my, in my, mentally in my head, like, I'm, if I had a club, like, mentally, I'm picturing myself clubbing this person club. He's going back to prison. This is going back to prison because of CrossFit. Because they're so peppy and so hyper and so excited. It's disgusting.

It's part of the experience. Oh. Right. Experience of CrossFit. But you're right, though, because people are, I feel bad. Joe Rogan, I'm very sorry. You don't know. He could have a fight with us.

what wife or you know it's that's true listen that's true and especially like you know in our culture we uh famous people are supposed to just be these uh i hate to say like you know that old like dance monkey just dance for me what you know like it's supposed to be these things these objects that are for our entertainment and it's again it's like such a dehumanizing thing um but for me it was just weird because like I was like yeah we just talked to you we have you on the show all the time he was like very familiar you know so I was it I don't know that's my ego talking again because I was like come on Joe we're both from Massachusetts shout out Natick what's up man you're too good I know you news radio you the funny dude but just say hello you hear me Joe

next time I see you listen Joe Rogues is not watching this program you know I mean of the people that watch my stuff have have written him and emailed him and I was what's his name what's his name uh jody what's the what's the producer i know what you're talking but the one that always needs to throw something up yes um listen how many people have sent him email saying you got to have this guy on your program you got to have so you know he's if if all those people that there's no way he's ever watched my program he has no idea who i am although you listen to this i hold on i'm gonna tell you you never know what he's going through he could have just had to fight with his wife for the past few months so i'm waiting in six months you don't

know but listen to this here's what's funny when he you know soft white underbelly which i was on oh really yeah oh soft white underbelly is love love that dude that mark later yeah he's great so i went to l.a for just for a but i was meeting with some producers and um and i was doing a couple and so i scheduled bunch of podcasts that was one of the podcasts i scheduled so i did soft white underbelly. Well, Joe Rogan, like eight months or a year later, came across soft white underbelly. And he's like, I've been watching it for like four days straight, five days straight, whatever he said. And then he said, man, this guy, he does homeless people, drug acts. He interviewed this con man on there. He interviewed and he starts naming, well, I was the, at that time, I don't, I probably still to this day.

I was the only con man that he'd ever interviewed. So I, I, people in the comment section were blowing up, blowing me up, going, bro, Joe Rogan just talked about you on the podcast. And I was like, what? And then I went and I watched it. Somebody said, hey, time stamp, you know, one minute, 12, whatever. I was like, I watched it. And I went, oh, yeah, yeah. He probably definitely didn't mean me. He probably watched my thing. Well, for a while, soft white underbell. He only had a certain amount of video. I know he's doing more now. But for a while, like he, there was not a regular upload schedule. I think something happened where he, he, you know obviously it's a little more flooded with content oh and now it's he does it like it's almost every day listen that guy's on a mission yeah but he's doing god's work let's be honest yeah yeah no he's well here's the thing about if you were to go out and meet him like he he he had this very lucrative career and made a bunch of money and when he got to the point where he was like okay i'm i'm retiring this is and he kind of kicked back and thought what do i want to do with the remainder of my life, this is what he came up with. He said, I want to document as

many, the lowest people out there. And it was an evolution. And he explains it. First, what he did was he actually did something for like National Geographic or something where they had him go around the country and take photographs of different people, right? Oh, was he the dude that put, he like won an award for that, right? I'm not sure. But, but what happened was that was the spark that started him on there are these people on the fringes of society that have a story that nobody tells and so he said you know what i'm going to do i'm going to start telling those people's story and he told me he he's letting them tell their story that's right right i interview well he kind of he'll he'll say stuff that spark it along but yeah um yeah and he'll interview i didn't know

this either because when i went and i interviewed with him like i sat there and i just did this whole whatever an hour long interview 50 minute interview and I did the whole thing and when I was done he said wow man that you know thanks man that was that was great he said I'm definitely going to use that one and I went what do you I said were you ever was that ever a question and he goes oh yeah you'd be shocked I used I interview four or five people a day I only end up using like maybe one and I was like can you say why yeah because he said most of the people that he interviews are typically just incoherent. They can't tell a story

or stay on topic long enough that he said the ones that I can, I'll listen and I'm like, okay, here's you go, goodbye, thank you. And he's like, they just don't, you're like, there's nothing I can do with that. Because he said some of these guys stories will be an hour long, two hours long.

He said, I'll trim it down to like 20 minutes of a coherent interview. That's why you ever noticed they'll fade in and out and he'll do the transitions. He's usually chopping out places where they went off on a tangent or just but the people he's talking to you got to figure out you know there's probably a lot of mental illness or just so much the addiction has worn on you I mean the brilliant thing about him

is he kind of just lets there's no narrative you know it's there yeah I mean that's what I'm saying is he actually trims it into a narrative you know you don't see that editing so yeah he's real slick yeah he's he's good at it he's you know and genuinely just a nice a nice guy um and he does follow-ups now which is awesome right uh i had mentioned to him that i might was gonna i was thinking about going to l a and like bringing a couple people with me to l a and i asked him if hey do you want would you want me to have me back on and he was like yeah he's like you know yeah let me know and i never we never did go but wait wait when you did were you fresh out of prison when you had done

that or were you already doing? Yeah, I've been out maybe five or six months. Oh, wow. So you hadn't, you were not here on YouTube doing your own thing. No, listen, that's one of the things. Like, for instance, I did concrete that got a couple million views. The one soft white underbelly got a couple million views. Like I had, I had three videos out that literally all of them got like two million views.

And I had no content. So if I had content at that type, if I had a channel said, hey, this is. is my channel and I had if I had five videos I probably have half a million to a million subscribers right now but I didn't do it I didn't do it because that was when remember I told you Danny Jones told me that first interview he said this is going to be big he said I can't promise it but I feel like this is going to be a big video you need to start a YouTube channel and I was and I was like no I don't have the right equipment I don't this he's like you take your phone and start making videos like oh no it'll be bad and this is a phone I said

an iPhone video I don't even know how to upload you know and he and so instead of him really sitting down say listen to me motherfucker you don't know what you're talking about yeah telling you right now what I'm telling you he didn't so I didn't he didn't push it he just went okay I get it and you know knowing now I realized like yeah it wasn't his responsibilities like I told you just gave you some good advice go fuck yourself and I did wait wait wait hold on so because when you got out of prison if you did 13 years did you like what What was YouTube to you? Nothing.

I'd never been on YouTube. I don't ever recall being on YouTube. I tell people, I must have at some point, because YouTube had been out maybe a year or so. 2004, right? 2005 or maybe before that, but. So I got arrested in 2006. Yeah, so, wow. It wasn't on your radar, right?

No, no, like people weren't using this. People were uploading, you know, they're uploading like, you know, like their, their, They're barbecues. Yeah, they're kids' birthdays and shit. So, um, you know. So wait, when you got out and you're doing these interviews, because for me, working a radio for so long, the, the people who thought like, this is my avenue to make a career, I thought we're brilliant, because that never occurred to me.

So when you were doing these YouTube videos or interviews, were you like, and what does this go on? You know, were you like, so I was in the halfway house and, and, and people had been telling me you know you got you could go on youtube you can make a podcast on youtube but keep in mind too there was no such the word podcast didn't even wasn't even created until like 2009 or something or 11 or something so there was no podcast that's a made up word that came yeah you know so you know people were trying to explain to me you can do it you got to do new guys you got to do a true crime podcast bro I read some of your stories you're amazing you could do a great true crime

podcast and I was like what is that and then people people started giving me articles saying, bro, when you get out, you're going to be getting out a year or two. You got to do one of these. Look, the top true crime podcast, these top 20, none of them are done by actual guys that were in prison. And I was like, and none of these were written by guys and you're writing stories. And I was like, okay, I, I, you know, like I don't, okay, I understand. Like, I get it, I guess. So, you know, they were like, people were trying to explain to it. It's kind of like a radio show, but it's like a, they like, remember the old radio shows in the 20s? They do it, and then they leave a cliffhanger.

They're like 20 minutes long. And I was like, okay, well, and you do what, you upload it, upload it. I don't know what does that mean, upload. You go to YouTube on your, you go to your YouTube channel. How do you get a channel? Oh, I don't really know, but you, you figure it out. And you can go YouTube, YouTube will tell you how to do it. Okay, I don't know.

What does that mean? Like these concepts that people take so for granted now, you know, oh, just go to YouTube and watch a video and it'll tell you how to do it. It's like, what does that mean? How do you even get there? How do you even get like, none of this existed. There was no Wi-Fi. You're saying Wi-Fi was that came out while I was in prison.

Oh, really? Yeah, there was no, there was no, like, Wi-Fi and all this. And it was, you know, you plugged into like, you know, my computer would plugged in to the wall. To a phone line. Right. Yeah. That was it. Like, that's, and you go, you know, this is, this is so fascinating because people forget, like, all my friends that came out of prison, you would update them really.

quick, but their stinks were never ad duration. 13 years. You can't. And literally, I had some, my probation officer emailed me something one time. This was when I'm in the halfway house working at a gym. I go to my boss and I said, listen, man, I have to fill out a financial like affidavit thing where I have to all fill out. It's like 20 pages. And he goes, okay.

I said, well, I have to print it. I don't know how to print it. He goes, well, what, what happened? She sent you an email? I went, yeah, she sent me an email. And he goes, okay. He said, where, he was here. forward the email to me and I go okay so I forwarded it to him and I how do I do that he goes here look see this

grab my phone boom boom see that that's my email here see the see the little arrow see the little the little the little um airplane yeah hit that okay okay okay I said okay he sat there he goes okay wait a minute he goes all right hold on all right go over to the it's on the printer I said no bro I said no bro I need to I need to print it and he goes no I know it's on the printer I said it's on the printer what you're talking about bro i just sent it to you i didn't say what printer and he goes it's on the printer i just printed it it's in the office and i went and i'm looking at i can see the printer it's like 45 feet away right maybe 40 feet away and i looked at it and i went now bro i sent it to you like you didn't plug it in or anything you didn't plug your phone into

you got to like you got to go to the office and go on your email and he goes bro it's my phone is connected to the Wi-Fi. I just printed it off the Wi-Fi. What? What? He goes, come here, bro. It walked over to me, and sure enough, there was fucking, like, 20 or 30 pages of the thing. It was magic, bro.

I almost felt like one of those Indians where they land in the helicopter and they think they just came out of like a metal devil and they kill all of the pilgrims or something in the Amazon or something. Like, they show them a picture on their phone and these guys are like, oh, my God, those are pictures of people in his phone black magic kill them all i thought i thought i was it was like magic i literally thought oh my god he's the devil kill him um you know i just yeah so so i've always thought only because when people i loved came out of prison there was no adaptation moment it was almost like you're dropped in this world that you don't understand stepping into the future i was

stepping i used to say it all the time it's like i've stepped into the future it's insanity Do you understand? This is like, this is like the most powerful thing. And look, you know what I do? You know what I have on here, by the way? This is funny. And so many people take this for granted. I have Hal from 2001 Space Odyssey.

How? You know, 2001. Yeah. So that's what that's a great explanation. But so I've always thought the prison system does no justice, especially for people like, Remember, there are a lot of people that need. It's a punishment. You're supposed to be there.

Whatever. Let's, we can all acknowledge that. But what I'm talking about is, let's say, in your last year, right? And at what point did you know? Like, you were like, I'm 100% getting out. There's nothing in my way. This is happening. Like a year out or?

Probably a year after I got out of prison, I stopped thinking they were to come get me and tell me they'd made a mistake. Oh, really? Yeah. I literally at 4 o'clock, I felt sick to my stomach every day because Because if for four o'clock count, you have to be in your cell to be counted. You have to be standing up in your cell so the guards can count you. And at four o'clock, anybody who spent more than five or ten years in prison will tell you,

four o'clock every day for about a year or so I felt sick to my stomach. Like, I need to be myself. I need to be what is going on. Like, I felt so uncomfortable around three, three, between three. Yeah, it's just, it's sickening. So that's, I was super aggressive when I got out, too. Like, very aggressive to everybody. even though I say well I'm assertive like I'm not going to attack anybody they're like yeah but the way you behave the way you respond to people you know that hey man you're going to eat that you're going to eat that bro can I get that let me get that that's the culture that you had to exist in and there should be some kind of like you were talking about earlier in prison there was so much more base in my voice what's up yeah what's up like I wasn't it wasn't it wasn't

I wasn't, you know, even with your voice, base in my voice, I was still a soft-ass cracker, right? But in prison, I was like, yeah, what's up, man? What do you mean? What's up? The high ends were taken out. Any kind of laughter or hitting those high tones is just erased. No, amen. That's over.

That's what I've always thought, like how, and I get it, you know, why they don't do this. But in those final years, especially with people who don't have a long time, how is there no adjustment? program like you said you can get down to a camp but this is for real because if we want people to be able to serve their time their punishment and then be able to readjust to society you just explained it perfectly you're getting out and you're way more there's a whole dynamic that people miss that like we can't expect people to live in that culture for in that prison for so long and then step out into a world and just go all right what so what oh we're always We have iPhones and Wi-Fi.

Oh, yeah, yeah, no, I'm fine. I can totally operate around this. It's like there's nothing. There's nothing to teach you. There's nothing. It's spitting you out. I got, so I got an Android because it was cheap, right? Well, yeah, the iPhone is.

Right. So I got an Android and I was, it kept getting viruses and shit. Like these guys were, these guys at the, at the halfway house were like, bro, download, you know, Redbox. You can watch any movies for free. And I was like, oh, okay. I'm downloading stuff with viruses. on it. And everybody's always like, oh, you must have been going on porn sites. Bro, point sites weren't even on my, my radar.

Listen, there are so many, like those mock-up sites that look exactly like, you know, it says like, hey, you logged out, log back in. It looks exactly, but you got to notice one and they get your password. I mean, everyone gets scanned by that. But yeah, my thing is getting shut down. And I'm asking guys to help me. Nobody wants to help you. Nobody, you know. So at some point, I go to, I'm at the gym one day, you know, I said, man, my, my, my phone is just, I, I have to shut it off every 20 minutes and restart it and reboot it and how do you this? And he looked at me, he said, man, come on, listen. He said, do you have any money at all? I paid you this much money. You have some money. So, no, I got a little bit of money left. You know, I got some money had come in. And he said, we're going to go get you an iPhone. And I was like, well, what do you mean? I said, how much are those? And he was like, now you can get one that's like, the older model, not the new. one. He just came out of the newest one so you can get one that like the old one. They're giving them away. He said, it's going to be a few hundred bucks. He said, and they'll finance it for you. Oh, I don't really have credit. He said, it doesn't matter. You have my credit or not. You have no credit. They'll

finance it. And he's like, they can't give these things away. So I was like, okay, I was like, well, why do I want? They said, let me tell you why. He said, Steve Jobs knows. He knew a long time ago that most of this country is made up of idiots. He said, and you're an idiot. Right now. He said, you're a smart idiot, but right now you're basically a tarred. He said, and even a tarred can use the iPhone. He said, look at me, Matt. He said, I could barely read. He's, I didn't graduate high school.

I could barely read. He said, I can use the iPhone. Yeah. Steve Jobs took away all those choices that don't mean anything. He said, and simplified it to the point where any moron can use an iPhone. He said, you need to use an iPhone. I was like, all right, bro, I got to learn a whole new thing. I can't even, well, you don't have to learn.

anything new is you can't figure this fucking thing out yet he said you listen within four or five days i was doing great on the iPhone wasn't getting huh apps that must have you out apps i'm doing this i'm swiping this way i'm learning that close out all these things i'm doing this i'm dragging shit i'm making copies i'm sending stuff i'm using the wifi i'm you know i'm walking in places going, hey, what's your Wi-Fi code? I mean, I was like, you know, people are like, wow, it's easier on it. You know, I'm showing other people of the halfway house. This is how you do it, bro.

You got to better get rid of that thing. You know, listen, that thing, it's, and, you know, so it, that helped me. I don't think I could use an Android. Well, that's, well, yeah, I mean, iPhone definitely dumped it down for, like, the lowest common denominator. But that's what made it so dangerous because now you see a whole generation of kids. And, I mean, these kids at, like, two years old. can access and utilize, you know, all these apps.

It's really, I don't know, man. I get that it's a wonderful thing, but it's dangerous. Oh, yeah, I feel naked. Like, if I put my phone down, like, I'm definitely one of those guys who wants to grab my phone constantly, constantly. Who isn't, though? I mean, I challenge you to just go outside in a city atmosphere, walk down the street and see how many people are actually looking around.

Oh, yeah. It's insane. Look, can you imagine coming out of prison? I'm coming out of prison and people are walking around talking. I think they're schizophrenic because there's schizophrenics inside prison talking to themselves. Yeah, they're like walking, looking at you, walking by, going, yeah, man. So, no, I told the guy. I told the guy.

I'm like, what I don't know what I said. What happened? What happened? And then they walk by and I realized, what happened? I don't. Oh, and then I see this little white thing. You're trying to fight everyone. He's talking to me?

Yeah. What? And this is a little white thing. Who's going to a meeting? Yeah. well I won't be there um so yeah it's it was insane it was insane and then I realized okay all these people aren't crazy they just have like earbuds in and then and then I noticed too like I would be in a room and there'd be 40 people in the room and 38 of them are doing just looking

down people I notice the people you know you go to dinner and there's 20 tables and 15 of the tables are people sitting there there's three people all of them on their iPhone not even talking, maybe four or five people talking and periodically doing, you know, periodically picking up their phone going, whoever said, uh, what's the quote or just, oh, nice, nice, right? Yeah. Listen, now's the time. I live in right next to Salem and it is a bastard getting in and out of the city. You can, I think we get like a million people. I forget over the course of a month, but it cannot handle it. But,

You know, whoever said about the phones, it's like it was a, or the internet where they say it's like the thing that was meant to connect us all, but turned out to be the most isolating device there is. You know, it's so crazy because that's all you see everywhere. Not so much in Salem, though. I get to say, when you go down to the haunted happenings and, you know, all the stuff that they got going on, we're going to some parade tonight. But they have stuff throughout the time. yo it looks like the back of your phone everywhere we would take the kids when they were little right because the main historic street is you know million dollar homes fully done they all look like haunted houses professional hollywood i think i even did some videos on my youtube channel

just because it's so remarkable i asked the people i said what do you do for a living where you can afford they had this house where they emptied out all their rooms okay and they had these glow in the dark skeletons that like would move like animatronic and I was like how did you afford that Jesus just for 30 days for 30 days there's so much what's so funny is around us you know the complexes around us houses going 800,000 a million you know and you know the house I live in in Florida is probably worth about whatever 400,000 you know at least 400 maybe maybe more now so but the houses you know they're and these are kind of cookie. Cutter. Like there's other places around us that are insane.

You know, 800,000, a million. And I don't, and it's not like there's like a hundred of them. There's thousands and thousands of them. And I was like, the amount of money that is out there, the amount of these people that are probably millionaires. And there's just tons of them. Tons of them. It just boggles my mind that I'm struggling to come up with my rent. everyone and this guy's got three cars he only drives one of three cars his wife's got another car his two all of his kids have car i'm like what does this guy do you ask him i always ask people i'm like i don't ask i don't ask because they don't want to talk to me oh i mean ever really if i was your neighbor man i'd be picking your brain i'd be like oh how do we listen all my neighbors well the neighbors on my street they're all like cops and they're their sheriff's deputy there's like three sheriff's

deputies. Some guy sells insurance and other guy is like a retiree. There's like all of them in the um what's that Florida I forget with like the county. Have you seen they hold live broadcasts on YouTube to announce like criminal activity. There is some sheriff. Have you know? Yeah, yeah, you mean Grady. Sheriff Grady. Is that him? I'm not in his, I'm not in his, uh, no, that's, I think that's Polk. I'm not in Polk County, but I love Sheriff Grady. Really? Oh, he's great, bro. That dude is like an entertainer first cop second.

I watch his, like, when they do a live stream, I'm like, yo, this guy's about to go off. He just like, he likes these criminals. I love the one where they say, he goes, the, the, the reporters like, well, why did your share, why did your deputies, you know, fire, you know, 300 rounds into the house? He said, because we ran out of bullets. He's like, he says, listen, make no, make no, make no, you know, qualms about it. He said, evil cannot be dead enough. And he's just like.

It's the same dude. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. He'll pull out the picture of somebody and be like, now this guy, listen to what he did. Oh, he's, he's like, look, he's like, you know, we found this guy who had, was a burglar. He's burglarized like five houses or been arrested like 10 times, you know, what I've been in jail, five times, 10 different burglaries. We found him running from a house.

He had been shot. He died at the hospital, said he was burglarized. He was breaking in somebody's house and the guy shot him. But we don't know who that person is who shot him. He said, I want them to know you're not in trouble. He said, we encourage our residents to have guns and shoot burglars. What we want you to, why we want you to come down the sheriff's department, not because you're in trouble, because we want to give you a free shooting lesson because you should have killed him. You shot him three times. If you get a few lessons, you could have shot and killed him the first time.

Do you watch this dude on YouTube, too? Hilarious. Because they do like, I was kind of shocked at how. Florida is very conservative. Well, just this guy alone. He is alt-right. Like, when you see his press conferences on YouTube, you worry about what this dude is like at a dinner party.

You know, because he's... I've talked, I know guys that know him. Really? Yeah, they say... He's going to have him on the podcast. He's exactly like he is in real life. Listen, all the sheriffs down here are super, super conservative, super right-wing, super...

All of them, they want, they want, the citizens to have guns. They do not like criminals. And I'll tell you one thing, whenever I have ever been pulled over by a police officer in the state of Florida, I've been very polite. Yeah. You don't see me saying, would you pull me over for? I'm like, hey, bro, I'm thank God you pulled me over. I was speeding. I'm surprised it took you so long. I'm embarrassed that you had to pull myself over. If you didn't do it. Would you like to search my car? I have, I feel. feeling, I'm okay. He's out there. Yo, but you know what concerns me. I don't know. Did they legalize cannabis yet in Florida? Or is it still like a medical? You know, you go to one of the things

and you say, you know, I have anxiety. Oh, you need marijuana. I do need marijuana. That's what terrifies me. That you don't have that medical license. They're like, yeah, we'll shoot to kill. It's very, it's a very much a law and order. And listen, keep mind, too. I interview criminals. I hear the excuses. I, but the truth is, you know, and look, and absolutely, there's, there's corrupt law enforcement in Florida everywhere. But, you know, this is the way I look at, listen, it, you have a, you can divide it, you can put together the perfect system, right? The perfect system.

And then you have human beings run it. Yeah. It all broke down. No, no, it's the perfect system. Eh, who's going to implement? that system. Well, we're going to have judges and police. Okay, it all fell. Are these humans? They're going to find a way to be corrupt. They're going to manipulate it. They're going to be. You have that in every facet of life in every single country. Is it bad in the United States? Yeah, but it's bad everywhere.

Well, especially when you're talking power dynamics. As soon as you give somebody enough power and corrupt. Some people shouldn't, some people just shouldn't be police officers. They should not be in a position of authority, period. Now, I've been lucky, you know, that most police officers that I've ever dealt with have been very professional, probably the most unprofessional. Did you say lucky or a white guy? No, I'm just lucky. Listen, the people that were unprofessional, I've only had one or two people be unprofessional. Really? And that was really the FBI. That was like one FBI agent. All police officers that I've ever talked to have been super professional. fashionable. But then again, I'm, I'm super, very polite, very nice, very, you want to see my

ID? Of course. You can see it. But the truth is, if we were walking down the street and you stop me and said, hey, bro, can I get, can I see your idea real quick? What's your name? I'd be like, I probably pull my wallet. I'd be like, well, yeah, my name's Mac Cox. What's God? I'm not going to let you walk off with it, but I might hold it up. Be like, my name is Mac Cox. Like, I don't see that I'm not, you know. Where were you dealing with the police most of the time? I know you're talking about Florida. Where else? Or was it strictly Louis. Nashville, I've been pulled over in Nashville, South Carolina, in South Carolina and North Carolina. I mean, I've gotten tickets. Ever Massachusetts? No, keep in mind. I drive like a maniac because I'm typically not driving on my ID. If I'm driving on your, if I get a fake, if I get a driver's license in your name, I'm probably doing 95. Probably driving a sports car in your name with full coverage insurance and I'm probably doing 95. So if I get pulled over, I'm, you know, I'm going to be polite. Yeah. But I don't want to go any further. Listen, I've been pulled over, been polite, and these cops have been, you know, like screaming.

At one time, I got pulled over because he said I didn't have a license. He said I owed, what was it, excise taxes, which I was like, how do you even know that? You know what I mean? Like, how is that coming up? And my wife had to- Would you like that in cash right now, officer? No, listen, this dude still had braces. He was with the state police.

And it wasn't until my wife pulled out her phone and started recording that. like that is out of change you know that will really just put that power dynamic in check there's some douchebags out there yeah no doubt like listen there's definitely and you know the problem is is that you know somebody ends up getting the brunt of that and eventually the great thing about cell phones now is you know is that they're catching all that and these guys are all on their peas and cues now so they're all like you know much more which has to suck for them that you know those guys probably go when they get fired or resign from the police department they probably become prison guards or you know or they go to the next town and become cops there how many times

you heard of that it's like there's no it's so weird that like the police get to police the police you know like that's such a um like you said fault in a system fault in a perfect it's one of those things where you're like you know this can't be how it is but unfortunately And especially when those dudes, you know, like the ones that need to be fired or need to resign and they just cross a county line and they're hireable again. So I interviewed a guy, I interviewed the sheriff of Okechobe County and the head of the, it's in Florida. And the head of the task, the former head of the task force, the drug task force there. One, they knew I had gotten out of prison. This was for a story I was writing.

They knew I'd gotten out of prison. And they were both fairly condescending, you know? To say the least. You know, and I sat there and I, you know, and I just, but I didn't get offended, you know, they, he made it. There was a couple of cracks. And then when it, when it eventually, even though I had told them I need about an hour, at least an hour. you know even when it got to a point where you know he was saying little snide comments well you know these guys they get on that on that you know on that you know ice or methamphetamine

you know I'm talking about you you know how you all get or you know so the little things that I was thinking yeah I was in prison for bank fraud I've never been on method but okay but but I didn't say that I was like I was like right right so I'm just taking my notes and I've got a recorder and he was like and I can't you know and I'd ask a couple of questions and he said things that were clearly inaccurate. He said things like, for instance, like he said, you know, we couldn't get, because of the age of the records and the case, we weren't able to pull any of that information up because of the age, we no longer have those records. And I said, well, that's okay. I said, I have the records because his own Freedom of Information Act officer who sits in the next room gave me the records.

So I could pull them up, but he couldn't. But he doesn't have access. He basically blatantly lied and said, we no longer have those records. you do have the records I pulled the record but I didn't get confrontational like hey bro like I'm trying to get something out of you trying to get on with the you know so I'm like right I understand that I said well it's fine I've reviewed the records and I just kept going you could see it in his face like that that where he realized like oh he just he didn't say anything but she must realize I just lied and then at one point he's like I asked him the same question probably three different ways because he just wasn't responding he wasn't respecting let's be honest right and and I so finally he goes listen and he kept call me Bubba. Listen, Bubba. Listen, Bubba. He goes, he says, listen, but he goes, well, what's your name again? And I said, Matt. And he goes, okay, listen, Bubba. He said, let's try and get through this. Okay, so you can get the stuff you need for your little article. I mean, I don't think anybody around here is going to read it. He said, but maybe it'll help somebody. So let's get through this as quick

as possible. So let's wrap this up. And I said there. I said, absolutely. I apologize. You're right. Sorry. Let's go ahead. And I said, And my next question is, and I asked him the next question. And, you know, the problem is he's used to being interviewed by the local, you know, Okechobee news for a 300-word article. And I'm doing like an 8,000-word article. And I'm asking more, you know, intrusive questions that he doesn't want to, doesn't feel comfortable answering. Even though I told them up front, this is what we're going to be talking about. Yeah, but you also probably have like a history.

of understanding the law and all those things that he's not normally dealing with. Well, yeah, and I'm also used to dealing with people that are not super friendly, bullies, and I don't get offended easy, right? No, no, I totally, but before you ended the interview, did you tell him like you're very grateful he's the one protecting our communities? No, I didn't, but here's, but here's the problem. You really need that kind of attitude around here. So here's the problem.

And this is a problem where we're going to differ. As aggressive and bullish and, you know, arrogant as he is, he's also the guy that I want showing up if I'm in trouble. He's going to grab the bad guy by his hair. He's going to fucking cuff. He's going to chase him down. He's going to, you know, he's going to be that thick-necked Neanderthal that you want showing up and grabbing people he doesn't you know that that person that shows up and says what's going on let's talk about this oh I'm so you did you realize this wasn't your house when

you climbed in the window you know like that feel good fluffy guy that shows up and and and is all concerned about everybody's feelings like I prefer the guy that comes and even if he has to put me in cuffs while he's investigating I'm okay with being in cuffs while you figure out what's going on. You know what I'm saying? Like, you don't have to be... Listen, this is where we're totally going to differ because I got... That's why I knew that. I got too much he was being him being a little bit aggressive. You know what I'm saying? Because I need that guy to chase down the bad guys. And that guy's probably not a nice guy. But you're also going on the premise that like he's going to chase down the bag. There are some dudes and I'm not saying all of them. But in

your hypothetical, that aggressiveness translates into like heroicness, you know, getting him for jumping in front of the bullet. And we've so. I think most of the time it does. What I'm saying is that's what you think. And from my perception from where I'm standing, there's a lot of people that like to bark all day long. But when it comes to push comes to shove, it not, you know, because technically, isn't it like technically with police officers, they don't have to, you know, get in harm's way. You've always heard that, right? Like that police officers necessarily aren't, we saw it with, What was the shooting in Texas? We're like,

they weren't. The guy doesn't run in. He doesn't run in. I feel like, by the way, I feel like the two officers that, that, the two officers that I interviewed,

as they're going in that building. Okay. Pretty sure that, pretty sure that Grady, Judd is going in that building. He might end up shooting a couple of innocent kids along the way. Well, he's going to get that shooter.

So, Matt. He might hit a teacher. She looked, He looked cock-eyed at him, but he's going to get the shooter eventually. So you're leading into my second point, because I'll give you that. You met him, I didn't. Maybe these are the dudes that are barking and, like, they're ready to go off the leash. He's ready to yank me around.

I didn't even do anything. But that's my next point is like, listen, if there's a confrontation, right, if there's something that is already heated, you can feel the electricity in the air, normally the last person you want is going to be someone who's going to run in and escalate it more, right? Or I don't know. Maybe you're like, I'm telling you're thinking, I'm not saying. I'm not saying that, I mean, trust me, I like, I love the officers that come in or matter of fact, just here's what's going on. And they deescalate and they're polite and appreciative. But I also see when people start, you know, they're yelling back and they're getting it. And you're like, look, this is what's going on.

And then they, they can't seem to get themselves under control. Yeah. Then I don't, you know, I've watched some of these videos. You obviously watch the First Amendment videos. You've seen some of these first Amendment auditors. And you get some of the over the corner from me who does. I see him out all the time because he's always, I'll say he's a little bit of an instigator, but he's always there. Right. So to me, I've seen these guys and you see the officers. Every once in a while, you'll get an officer that is just off the chain and saying you think he shouldn't have a badge. He shouldn't have a badge. And then you see the other officers that pull up and say, hey, we've gotten some phone calls. What's going on? And they go, well, this. And then they go through their little

thing. And they're like, okay, hey, you have every right to be here. You're right. You don't have to give me your license. Well, why'd you ask for it? Well, I asked for it because I ask for from everybody. Usually they give it to me. But you don't want to. I get it. And, you know, look, I'm just saying, we got a call. We had to come out. I can see that you're just videoing. I get it. I know what you're doing. I hear you. And leave. That's great. Like, I agree with you. You know, like that's how I would love for most officers to behave. But I think it's a lot like narcissism, right? Like, you have these guys that are CEO's and presidents and congressmen and almost exclusively, 95% of these guys are also narcissists. Yeah. And so you think,

so the guy that gets things done that pushes the envelope, that climbs the ladder of success, you know, these guys are typically narcissistic. Yeah. Like, they may and I be great human beings if you're dating them. Like, I feel complete pity for my wife. This chick, God knows what she's going through. But I'm saying, in general, you know, narcissistic becomes CEOs and presidents and stuff, where they go to prison. And then they get out and they do, they kind of become a little bit humble and they do a YouTube channel.

So, I mean, I hear you, there's, there is the perfect officer out there. I just think that a lot of times that you just don't get those guys for very long. I never, I'll tell you, listen, I be very polite because I don't want to get dragged out of a car ever again, but I seem to run into those guys. Maybe it's a Boston thing. I was going to say, because I also see the times when you'll see a YouTube video and this person is going nuts. And the officer just keeps letting them and they're trying to explain and trying to explain and try. And I'm sitting there thinking, I'd have yank that dude out of the car.

car by now, like I explained it four times and you keep arguing and twisting and you won't get out of the car. Like at this point, I'm going to grab you. I'm yanking you out of like I gave you a chance, bro. Like, I'm not going to have a 20 minute argument with you. That's where we can agree. There's a line and people can be idiots. You know, people can, whatever it is, they're almost acting more entitled. But I just think at the end of the day, that line is is so better off being pushed, I hate to say a little further, but the whole thing on the side of the car is protect and serve, you know, like it doesn't, like the, the escalating, the shooting bystanders, 300, you know, that's the part where I go, man, it's not working, you know, it's not a crime deterrent. It's just

not. And especially when you look at what the prison system has become and, you know, the repercussions of all this stuff. It's just, I don't know, I think it's cyclical in that it's creating more of that attitude than what we need is these de-escalators. And I'm sure there's a million people that are going to be like, I'll come to this neighborhood, come to that. But I mean, then that dives into more of like, I promised you there's not a million people that are going to watch this. I'm hopeful. Thank you.

If you get 10,000, listen, if anybody in the video gets to this point, I feel like I owe them something. and if they watch any of the the commercials oh that's yeah what commercial are we coming back from who knows we you know throw up your drink again we got to get a sponsor i've got to get a form and and answered all these questions for for these guys you got to send me one i can't keep watching that creamsicle drink and not know they don't sell them up here they're great yeah so have you not seen nothing are you do you watch youtube like regularly or are you not like a consumer of the product you're up?

Not really. No? I mean, I watch, like, I watch, I watch stuff on, I watch documentaries on World War II. I watch things on going to Mars. I watch, you know what I'm saying? Things like that. I'll watch. Yeah, yeah.

I utilize this for like history stuff. People are brilliant with their history collaborations. Exactly. So those are the kinds of things, you know, the Apollo. missions the so i'm more interested in history and you know things of that nature as opposed to watching you know like mr beast you know up a car give away a car or you know i'm sure wonderful a Lamborghini bro let's be very direct and clear on this right he put a Lamborghini and a press and crushed it this kid yeah i don't i don't watch like i don't watch my own stuff like i never i don't

think I've ever, a matter of fact, that's not even true. I'm not going to say that. I know I've never watched an entire video of mine ever. Really? Really. Oh, yo, Kobe, you can do whatever you want. That's why I'm saying every once in a while, I'll watch like a minute or two and I'll be like, what did he do? Yo, Kobe, I encourage you to put a video of yourself in between all of our edits and this. Just slip yourself in, being like, hey, it's Kobe. Jones Mediting. So sometimes I'll watch it and I'll be like the I'm my lips are I'm going and it's a completely different dialogue I'm like this what did you do what did you do like it's not and then it'll start hooking up again it'll link up again I'm like I don't know what is happening here like I need to start watching these

I uh so I did all the production the radio station they didn't tell me that was part of my job when I negotiated the contract to come from San Diego to Boston. Oh yeah you have to sweep the the drive we have to sweep the parking lot every night too what these dudes were so um like just it wasn't even not clear it was like they were very direct in like this is what job you had and then as soon as i signed the deal and got here they were like oh yeah by the way you're this this this this you know and i was shocked because i was like oh man i should have got a lot more money but one of the things i did was all the sound design so when i left i had i knew it was coming from the day I began just because

who the host was that my contract wasn't getting negotiated. In fact, I went to the big boss and I was like, I want $200,000 to work with this dude. He threw mantrums every day. And the big boss like, you know, inside he was laughing at me. He's like, we ain't paying you that much. But what he told

he was like, I get it. You know, he was like, it must be brutal to work with that dude. By the way, this dude is still on the air. He's still a racist sack. He's just an insecure 60 year old that like hangs out with you know, a 20 year old girl. It's just, it's kind of pathetic, but I didn't know if they would still use all the music I made or not music, but the intro. So at the end of every intro, I would

slide something in that was like way inappropriate, but I was like, if they ever get here, if it ever runs out, which we knew they wouldn't because it was like three minutes long, but all my guys that I hired who all kind of had the same general feelings for, you know, what, what was happening, they, I would show them all. I'd be like, look, if it ever get, if you're ever here, When I'm gone, I was like, let it get to the end. Let this play. But that was, Kobe, you can take that out. Actually, I don't care because that dude, I do podcast and stuff.

I criticize them all time. I'm still trying to get a job there. He won't hire me. I know he's scared of me because I'm one of the people, everyone he has around him kisses his ass because they think he's the ladder to climb to get rich. But what I don't realize, like one dude was like, you know, you don't play the game. You don't kiss his ass. ass and that's what he wants and I'm like bro and he's like look where it landed you you got fired in

2017 where they didn't uh re-up your contract in 2017 and he's still working there and I go and where's it gotten you you're no worse position than when I had hired you you know you're making almost no more money and I'm like so what you've kissed his ass you bit your tongue you've become this almost punching bag where they lie to you you know they tell you hey we're bringing you on here we're going to get you some more money and it's just been a facade so at least you know they knew what they're they were dealing with when they got me, you know, he's in this just predicament where I just told him he's, I think they finally offered him something. I said, I'll be your agent. You know they hate me. Let me go in there as your agent. I'll hardline him for some cash. He don't want to do

it though. I don't blame him. Um, what are we going to talk about Tupac? So that, oh, so listen, YouTube, right? Once Elon Musk bought Twitter, it's, it's validity to get news because we Before, Twitter really, like, they're trending, their hashtags and stuff, were pretty accurate to what was going on, whether it was locally or nationally. And it was great because, like, in a tragedy or in a news situation, you could get this real-time info from people who were maybe on the ground or, you know, it was really like this vital utility that people could use. Once Elon bought it and he fired everyone, it got real funky. And this is the person who I use it daily. And I was using it daily for news or even when I was working radio. You know, you could, I got so many contacts through that, you know, just direct messaging people because you know that's their account.

They're the person behind it, celebrity, whatever it was. Once he bought it and he gutted everyone, it became this, it was very noticeable too. It wasn't like, oh, is this real or, you know, what's going on? It just overnight, it almost kind of shot the bed and it just became this thing where you're like, I can't trust. It's not working like it used to. So I kind of shifted my focus over to YouTube and YouTube has almost become that replacement. I don't want to say fully because, again, you know the algorithm works real funny. Right.

But if you know what you're searching for, like, for instance, I don't know if you've heard anything about the Tupac death investigation. They raided in Las Vegas, what was it over the summer, they rated this dude, Kee Fee D, his house, in connection to the Tupac shooting. Right. If you don't know the backstory. Tell me the backstory. Real quick. So KP.D got in trouble for drugs or something in 2008. Keefei.

His name is a real name? No, no, no. It's Dwayne something. Okay. But he goes by Keefe D. Keefee D. Wonder why. Keith because like Keefei coffee? I have no idea because his name's like Dwayne.

It doesn't even relate. It's not like, oh, Kifie is short for Dwayne. You're just like, how did he get this? But anyway, so he gets busted, I think, for drugs. And part of his deal, again, I don't know all the specifics. I try to follow along as much as I can. But some of these interviews just get hard to watch because you feel like they're more talking out of ego

then sticking to facts and what really happened. Right. So he had a plea deal. And he made a proffer agreement. Right. You know what that is. I was just kind of learning. Yeah, it's a proffers.

You basically explain what you did and it's covered under whatever deal you've got. Yeah. But it's not immunity, right? That's a completely different thing because it's just they can't use what you said against you within those confines.

Right. Typically what a proffer has, though, it will typically exclude espionage and violence. Like if you come in and say that, you know, like if you come in and say that, you know, I murdered somebody or if you come in and say that I stole government secrets or something, typically it doesn't, it doesn't exclude,

it typically excludes those types of omission, of admissions, not over that's so his his proffer was detailing uh the murder of tupac okay so he probably didn't i mean did he admit during the proffer that he murdered him or did he kind of say there he didn't do it but he still put himself there he put himself i forget in the front seat of the car there were four people in the car he detailed who it was he detailed that he had the gun that he gave to you know his nephew that had shot tupac all the other three people what yeah yeah exactly it exacerbated murder right okay so but that so i guess that

he was protected from being charged with that right okay then he gets out of prison i forget 2014 or this is when he writes his book 2014 uh tales of a compton street legend or whatever the book is named and in it because this is being repost all over social media it's really being documented on youtube that like he details essentially the proffer agreement again in his book where this is not protected right you know like they weren't like oh if you ever write a book and do I always thought it's funny because it's like

OJ kind of did the same thing but OJ did it in a fashion where he was like if I was there maybe this is how it would have gone down because it wasn't his whole book like if I had committed this crime I forget the title but it was something like right a hypothetical so he never once like says like I was there

merch for the real killer he was shorted book ever written was that the title no i don't know what it was no something like where you're like oh my god and he basically details everything but saying it in like not third person but kind of like this hypothetical of like you know if i had been there that night and if you know had heard me and if so he did it in this really almost clever way you'd say it but to profit off it this new kpd did not do that and in fact he went on

many different YouTube channels. Right. Art of Dialogue, which is a huge one. Vlad TV, which is even big. I mean, some of the biggest YouTubers. I was not Vlad. I went on Blat. Oh, really?

Yeah. Oh, so you and Kiki got like a six degree of separation than going. Sounds like a degree of separation. Or no degrees. Probably the next one in. So he went on Vlad and like, and you can look all this up. He's talking about two-pie. In fact, my feed is like,

all shorts of the times he talked about the Tupac murder and like, just, you know, weird stuff, no regret. Very much cold to the fact that this was a beloved icon who spoke for the people. The history of his family is, you know, I can't say enough good day. I love, I love Tupac. And he went on and just ran his mouth for what has it been since 2014. Even in the book, if you read the excerpts, he talked. about locking eyes with Shug Night. I mean, you can't get more specific. You know, he was like,

I looked in Shug's eyes and like two bowls locking horns, two Brams locking horns. You know, Shug had that look like, oh, no, it's going down. So it's very specific. And you're wondering, like, is he dumb or is he, like, did the ego? Yeah, he feels like he's, he's, he's felt like he's covered. Right? Yeah. But you would figure he must have talked to a lawyer at some. point maybe mate like we obviously didn't because of what has happened you would be shocked how many of these idiots talk to their friends so your friend that works at walmart told you this is how it works and then they'll go around telling people this is how it works how why do you think that oh i know how do you know because my friend you know jimmy that works at walmart told me and is jimmy got a law a license

license in law? Was he a prosecutor? Was he no? How does he know? Well, uh, uh, he's smart. Well, maybe. No, it's, it's the web MD. It's the diagnosing yourself, right, you know, through web MD of the law realm or the criminal court. So essentially, he has done all this talking up until this summer. And I think what sparked it, or what people are saying is Tupac's biological father went on oh i forget one of the youtube channels and basically said like you know the cops have known who has done this since the killing they've never done anything and they won't because you know tupac shot off-duty police officers his family was black panthers and you know there's just this long history where they're like the cops don't care they know and then kvd's house gets raided

over the summer and then what was it last week this it was it was very recent they arrest him in connection with the shooting the murder of tupac and he's being held without bail in Las Vegas I guess in in Nevada they can hold you if it's a murder charge you know they can request no bail if there's some kind of violent crime I forget what the specifics are again I don't want to be one of those dudes or claims I know of a lot right so either way he's locked up and you don't have bail yep and everyone's talking about how Or at least YouTube is kind of broken down from the cops. Greg Cating, I think that's his name.

There's another police officer, the chief or the sergeant that was on the bike that held Tupac. Have you heard about Tupac's final words? No. Okay. So when Shug crashed or not crashed the call. What was the dispute? Listen, I don't know anything about Tupac. I have painted two paintings of him.

Really? Yeah. Where do we find those? Are you serious? Yeah. No, I'm very serious. Yeah, bro, on Instagram. He's always in Tupac and you know nothing about him.

No, I don't know anything about him. I mean, I saw a movie he was in. I saw a movie. You're not putting all eyes on me when you're painting? It's a double album? No, I don't know what that is, but no. It's priceless. Like, what is this dude talking about?

Show it. Yo, so wait, are you like a fine art dealer? You paint stuff and... I mean, I have a degree, this is people, when I say this, but I have a degree in fine arts, yes. Yeah, oh, that's all. Listen, I almost went to art school because my buddy's older brother blew glass. And it was the most fascinating thing I'd ever seen, the stuff he would make, it was mostly bonds and pipes. And there was this great school up in Vermont that I wanted to go to the blow glass.

And someone said something to me, and I was like, yeah, what does that look like in 30 years? you know like where does this where does this pan out for me if I just blow glass up in the mountains of Vermont feel like it does really I don't know I was young and maybe just thought like that will never happen because I was going to art school for in high school I was taking like these college art classes because they're painting whatever uh oh so I don't think I can play the music well I'll play oh yeah yeah Colby will probably have to remove it he'll be so pissed that's fine don't do it don't do it too

you can't just show a picture I can show well I can here I have a whole I have a whole video so this is me this is wait a minute is that another channel well it's my Instagram

and I put up so I put up like I've got stuff of me painting paintings and this is this is this is like an iconic photo of Tupac from what I understand and so that's me I knock it out whole

it's almost done it's only a minute so we've been we're about 30 seconds in so have me painting wow so hold that how are you not doing this for a living or are you too i have done this i mean when i first got out of prison this is what i was doing for a living i was so i would got somebody would order like a painting of two puck and i would paint it and then i'd put it on instagram and then guys would buy the paintings so like all those paintings are and then i'd say hey this is matt and thank you and there's the painting and you know that is from that is wait i got another one i got another one here's wait here hold on oh oh no i got to get the music i got here's the i show the picture one more time we'll do one more

and this is him with a i actually cut and pasted this one together i actually put an AK-47 in his hand yeah i was going to say i don't think that's a photo of him no it's a i mean it's a photo it's just a photo of a skinny, you know, guy from Africa and Tupac's head superimposed on top of it. Yeah, that's what I met. He took a picture like that. So, but

somebody asked me yeah, so I got the whole thing. It's pretty cool. And that's in that like, uh, warhol style. It's exactly where the pop art. It's pop art. That's the name of my, my, the channel is, um, it's it's Cox pop art.

And so. you know how much of those two buck ones i don't have the money oh they were like 11 i just one for like 11 1200 bucks damn yeah you make me a small one they were good here's one look here's one i did of um key uh i i this is the joker oh the best joker ever right yeah yeah doesn't top that that series that that these i have tons of i make a bunch of uh maryland minrose

mhm no so wait do you only do it in the style of pop art or do you have other because that's like super realistic. Yeah, I got pop. I just do pop art. Here's Biggie. Yeah. Like this one, I got Biggie.

Two Biggies. I'm about to do two biggies and then boom. It's so wild to me that you have like no relation. I don't think I'd ever heard one of Biggie's songs before somebody told me, hey, bro, can you paint a Biggie? I was like a what?

Can you paint one of Biggie with like an AK? And I was like, a what? I was like, big and I was like wait biggie smalls I've heard the name so he said yeah yeah can you paint I said sure you're I'll come up with something so I came up with something this is what I came up with so wait then what's your uh like what's your wheelhouse before you were doing the hip hop icons um before that let's see when I first got out of prison I first I was just they were Marilyn Monroe's and I was painting like bubble gum

girls that's what I was painting bubble gum girls and like uh here's one I painted or these guys I painted like a, there was like a bunch of, a guy owned a stockbroker firm. He'd seen me, right? He'd seen me on concrete and asked me if I would paint a, paint some, something for the conference room in his stockbroker firm. And so I painted these three paintings for him. I forget what he paid me, a couple grand or so. They're not very big.

And there's, this all pop art. Super cool though, watch. They end up. like they end up looking really so wait do you have a gallery online where people can go and purchase this not to like make a shameless i i mean i have a i have an etsy account that looks like joe jonas that third dude him that was listen i was just out of prison like i don't know who these people are like i just grab

some pictures like in a boy band that it just looked like and that middle dude kind of looks like matthew mccane you know who you look like in those videos so wait that was a few years ago have you ever seen the movie blood in blood out yeah here's super blood in blood out no I don't know what yeah oh it's a movie um it's like a very legendary uh blood in blood he's L.A gang movie about the batos locos and you look like the white dude who's who he says I'm a coconut or no no no he said what does he say he's like I'm brown on the outside why no I'm white on the outside brown on the inside bro because he speaks Spanish and you look like him in that young thing.

I'll put you in all khakis. That was probably 15 pounds lighter then, too. Well, it's all that cross pit, bro. No, now I'm heavier. What are you talking about? I'm heavier now. Muscle gains. It's not muscle gain.

Some of it's muscle gain. Most of it's just fat. So listen, so the Tupac thing, right? You have no. Tell me first, real quick, tell me first, what is the, what was the beef? There was a beef between him and who. Orlando, the dude that shot him that night,

which is confirmed by Keefe D. Okay, so what happened? They went to Vegas to the Tyson fight, right? The Tyson fight, I guess, like went around. And Tyson, even there's a documentary on Hulu called Dear Mama, which is great because they talk to all the people closest to Pock. They even have his mom before she passed like a lot of footage. They talk to his aunt.

and they really go through this meticulously where you can kind of feel like that inner circle. And Tyson talks about how, like, the fight went so quick that once you're in that atmosphere, and, you know, if you've been to a USC fight, there's electricity, it's testosterone flowing. So they get out of the fight that ended too soon. And you see the video Tupac when he's leaving. And he's, you know, being very typical Tupac, you know, talking Tyson, knocked them out, this, that, the other thing. And when they're in the casino, they point out that there's the dude, Orlando Anderson, that tried to steal the death row medallion off one of their crew's neck.

And Tupac wasn't going to let that happen, even though he, you know, at that point, he's Tupac. You know, don't get, don't get involved. There's other people that can do that stuff where it. And he goes over and they jump him and there's the infamous security footage of, you know, Pac-doing whatever in the fight. It was just, it was really, really just didn't need to happen. But you feel like fate ordained this. So, of course, this guy, Orlando Anderson, is a south side crypt, I believe.

You know, it becomes a gang thing very quickly. And backstory to that, the reason he was trying to take the death row medallion allegedly, I'm going to just say that, allegedly, is they said, puff daddy, pee ditty, whatever he goes by now, was the one who said, you know, 10 grand to whoever can get me a death row medallion. So that's kind of where the East Coast West Coast thing also gets

inflated a little bit because Pete Diddy had some beef with whatever. So after that fight, Tupac and them jump this gang-related member. They leave. There's a lot more to the story, too. That's why I highly encourage, because it's just a fascinating,

really sad tragedy that happened, but there's so many moving parts to it, like he didn't have his security, he didn't have his bulletproof vest on. You see that infamous last photo with Tupac and Shug in the car before they leave. That was like minutes before he was killed. And when they leave, it just so happened to pull up next to that crew of gang members where Keefe De is in the front seat. He said this. This is not alleged anymore. he's put it in writing, he's been on YouTube, or whether Kee-D and his car found Pock. I don't know how it happened, but they end up next to each other. Shots ring out, Shug speeds away, and the rest is, unfortunately, hip-hop history,

where Pock is shot up, I forget, how many times, a lot, though. And the story with the chief of police who was on a bike that night patrolling, you know, there's a Tyson fight, so he's got to be very accessible, mobile, you know, know, so he's not on the car because Vegas strip is just weird. You can't get around. He rides up very unaware of what just happened, you know, because I guess they had made it to the strip at this point. And he pulls up with his gun, everybody get out, everybody gets out of the car. But Pock, not knowing that Pock was shot, doesn't get out of the car. So he approaches the car, opens the door. And I guess Pock kind of, you know, falls to the ground. And the chief

goes to pick him up and he's like, hey, who did this to you? And he tells this story on YouTube. That's why it's like so compelling because you're listening to a guy who had the final moment speaking with Pock. And when he goes, who did this to you? He describes it so vividly. He's like, I could tell Pock was trying to gather his last breath. You know, he's like gurgling, there's blood everywhere. He's shot up really bad. And I'm holding him saying, who did this to you?

Who shot you? And Pock gets the last breath and goes, F you. And he said, then his eyes are all back. and he was just unconscious. So Pock was just real to the end, you know. But everybody kind of knew. You know, once the chips fell where they were. Right.

And then you get to today where 27 years later, there's an arrest made. And it came from, that's why I thought it was fascinating to ask you your thoughts, because this is a dude who was there. The police knew. He had an agreement and ended up talking. himself into a jail cell, which I don't know what, what evidence they have and how much they'll use of YouTube and his book against him. But this could, he's 60 years old. This could end up what for him being a life sentence, correct? You're sure. So it's possibly if, you know, if he's been saying like

he gave him the gun, like he obviously knew he was going to fire the gun and shoot Tupac. Like if he's saying, look, you know, like, I was holding the gun. I was holding the gun. because, you know, for whatever reason, or I handed him my gun or he asked me for a gun. I gave it to him. We saw Tupac. We knew that, you know, like, that's, that's going to be, that's going to be, you know, conspiracy to commit murder. You know, you're, you're definitely in the conspiracy. So, you know, you can get as much time as the guy who actually pulled the trigger. But let's say even if he pleads guilty to 20 years or, you know, whatever it is. Like, you're dying. There's about a 95% chance you're dying in prison because you've got to rely on medical to kill. keep you alive. And what do you think like, so will they be able to take? This was my question because on YouTube, technically you can get away. It's just like Fox News, right? They technically, when you look it up, they claim to be an entertainment organization.

That's how they get away with saying certain things under the guise of Fox News. Right. You know, so they're not held liable. I forget what, there was like some case where they were somebody was suing them to be held liable. And they were like, no, we're entertainment. You know, like these are opinion pieces. They're not true news. It's, yeah, look into this.

It's fascinating at how they can position their media coverage of things as entertainment. So you're not truly supposed to be reporting on facts. It's wild. You know, and being in the media for so long, you also had to be very careful of like how. That's why I'll always say like allegedly or whatever, because you don't want it to come back. But I'm saying entertainment, you're probably your moral, you're moral, you're more liable you know if you're saying it's news and you're saying i'm just presenting the news i'm just presenting not right right they're saying it's a very skewed like if that was the news there are very

easily disprovable things or the way they omit it's almost like lying by omittance you know where it's like you just take this small segment and kind of present it as a fact so that's why with entertainment If you do that, just like my YouTube channel, it's like satire and sarcasm, you can kind of go anywhere. Well, that YouTube allows, they'll rip whatever they want off YouTube. But that's why I was wondering with this dude, Kee-Feed-D, is that going to be, could he even try that as an argument? I guess not because he wrote it in a book, but all these interviews, could he try to? If they present it, look, whatever they feel comfortable presenting to a jury, right? You present to a jury that he wrote this.

I got an interview of him saying this. I've got the, we've got the footage. We've got the chief of police saying this. We've got, you know, all these bystanders saying this. We've got, they probably have one or two other people saying that he told them this. He was drinking one night, told me this. He told his celly, his celly stands up and says, man, he admitted it to me. He told me this.

Like, these guys don't do things like this. and not tell 50 people, right? Or go on YouTube and tell a million. Right. So it's like this is something that's known. And so for him to them turn around and say, hey, this was just entertainment. I was just saying it so that I could, so that Vlad would pay me $1,000 to come on his show and tell the story. I was just doing it for entertainment.

It's certainly, okay, that's fine. I get it. And I understand that. But you understand it was presented as being true. Right, right. So we're going to charge you. And you could tell the jury that and explain that to the jury. And maybe the jury believes you.

Yeah. Well, what I present everything? The nail in the coffin, though, is like his book, I believe, is an auto by a graph. I think he published it himself. You know what I mean? Like he was like, these are my stories. This is my life. Right.

You don't, you can't wiggle out of that one as like, no, no, no. It was meant to be entertainment. That's why I thought when OJ did it, it was very clever, as heinous as it was, that he presented it in this like fairy tale of like how I would imagine this went down and then it's like find details of you know it's specifically what happened but yeah it's funny because I'll do that sometimes in an article I'll say something like you know look like like like I don't know that this is what happened but based on you know based on everything that I've read this is how I imagine it happened and then I'll do you know and I'll throw one or two like I don't get too explicit like

you can only say so much. Like if you say, I can imagine that Blaine stepped into the first class cabin, ordered his favorite drink, and I know what his favorite drink was, you know, wearing one of his famous, you know, Bouchachi suits or whatever the suit, his favorite suit was, you know, and flew to Perth and got off the, and by the time he got off the plane, he'd been indicted, you know, all of that's kind of magical, right? Like, it's like I'm painting a scene based on things I know, but nobody told me that's what happened. Like, I don't know he was wearing that suit.

I don't know that he ordered that, that drink. You know what I'm saying? But I can say that based on the things that I know about him, this is probably how it went down. Well, and that's like the clever way to present. Right, to paint, to paint something. But this guy is not saying that. This guy is saying, I got in the car. Well, he's like detailing what the look Shug gave.

That's where I'm like, bro, these were like when you watch any, does he, maybe he's never seen a crime drama show or any documentary on YouTube because they're like, oh, the suspect knew details nobody else knew. And I'm like, bro, you're writing them, you're printing them in a book and publishing it for the world to read, you know? So that's, I don't know, I think that was like the nail that couldn't let, I don't know, we'll see, right, because he's going to go to court, they're holding them. They already had, I don't understand what the grand jury thing. They already had a grand jury because they were listing some of the people that were

speaking to the grand jury. So that was just to present this so they could arrest him, correct? Yeah. That's just to say, is there even enough evidence for us to bring the charges? It's very unlikely that after a grand jury has been convened and agreed that there is enough evidence to bring the charges that they would drop the charges. At this point, they're going to move forward. You're either going to take a plea or we're going to move forward and go through because they very, they almost never, if a grand jury was shown the evidence and says, I think this is probably enough to convict them, then they're going to going to go through a trial at this point. It's like a 99.99% chance they're going to go, unless something super compelling, unless his lawyer comes in and says, listen, bro, here's his alibi. He wasn't there. We have him here. This is what. And it would have to be like super, you know, and they say, look, obviously he was lying because we've got this alibi. He was taking money out of his ATM. We've got photos of him. He's just a pathological liar. Like unless that happens,

which isn't the case in this, I understand. But I'm saying, unless they came forward and presented some overwhelming evidence that they would be like, wow, we can't go to trial. There's no way. He's going to present this evidence. And it's not like his mom's going to say he was at home watching the game, you know, watching the fight with her. So he couldn't have done it. You know, that's not, they're going to be like, yeah, okay, well, mom can come say that on the stand then.

Well, they already had, what, the first hearing or something about bail. And I guess his lawyer didn't even show up. They were like, oh, it was last minute so he couldn't show. But I thought, that's a little telling. You know, this is a huge, I don't know. how you could miss that this is coming up, you know, unless you're living under a rock and for his lawyer to not even be there.

I was like, oh, man, we might see somebody quit from this case. Maybe not. You know, you should watch, because, so, what is it, law and crime YouTube channel, they're playing a lot of this stuff. I don't know if it's real time or like, you know, when they do a press conference. I wish Sheriff Grady would,

can they send him out to do, is that out of his, a picture of him out? This guy. You're not going to believe this guy. Yo, he should, they should be able to, I don't know if it's like out of his district or authority, but he wrote a book on it. He could be able to rent him out so he could do all the press conferences because that dude is ruthless. We wish all criminals were this stupid. I would love each criminal out there that's done something this stupid to write a book and put it on Amazon.

You know what he would do? That sheriff would read the excerpt from. his book to start that that would be so hilarious oh well so the law and crime network is you know basically playing everything that's going all they are very in in rhythm in step with anything that's being broadcast on this two-pack thing probably because it's you know all of the viral trending stuff but you should if they i don't know if they'll allow cameras in the court or you know how that goes from state to state you usually do a live stream and watch that thing go down, break down these moves.

And especially with like the stupidity of like this evidence is going to be hilarious, right? If they're bringing in YouTube experts, if they're playing clips from Vlad TV and they're like, you know, here is the evidence. It's an interview. It's a part from his book. I mean, is that not going to be hilarious? Has there ever been a case that has gone down like this where like YouTube is the biggest? you know what's so funny about that is that there's tons of guys that will say like you know vlad is a fucking CI or Vlad is the police like they always say that because apparently people have gone on his channel before and they've been indicted like they'll go on and start talking about some some murder or being somewhere and they get indicted like they're a big guy you serious oh absolutely so this isn't going to so for Vlad like this is not good at all there's already a whole slew of people that are that that can't They end them because they're like, Vlad be the police, man.

Vlad's the police. He's been, you know, they'll say it in the comments and all kinds of stuff. Oh, yeah. You better believe what I'm doing later is writing that in the comments. I can't believe that this has happened before and people still, maybe they have no idea what his channel is, but the fact that they're still going on there and talking to him like he's Oprah is incredible. You should read the comments on my, on my Vlad comments.

I've one too so bad, though. they're they're vicious these guys did not like like some of them were like this guy's a genius and the other ones just hated my guts yeah but i guarantee you if you click on any of their bios they got one subscriber been a YouTuber for 10 years and they have you know just a million comments no videos listen it's easy if you're watching you're still a fan you know that's true whether they hate you or love me or love me as long as you're watching as long as you leave a like subscribe hit the little bell right in the corner right under here make sure, hey, that's the truth.

But I'm telling you, if some people blow you off for interviews and that court case is going on, you should be live stream and have the little thing in the corner and just commenting because this is going to be outside of it, you know, finally bringing some justice and some closure to a 27-year-old case that I think everybody in the world is at least somewhat knowledge. You know what I mean? like you're aware that the way Tupac's life ended, but the fact that the last dude living in that car

talked his way into a, I mean, this dude was living free doing interviews, well, doing interviews incriminating himself, but just living off, I'm guessing, doing interviews, I don't think he had a job, you know, he wasn't working down at the Kroger or whatever they got in Vegas.

You know, he wasn't back in your groceries. This dude was, you know, live in a life. And if you seen the footage when they did the race, he had a nice, like, it's confusing. I don't know why he would do it, but here we are. Nah, probably just thought it's so old, nobody cares. They're not going to put it together.

It doesn't matter. It doesn't. And probably thought, you know, I say this all the time. It's the guy that goes to the police and says, listen, man, I know about these guys robbing banks. Really? How do you know? I've been driving the getaway car. And they're like, so you've been robbing banks.

No, no, I'm just driving the getaway cart. No, no. I'm like, let me explain conspiracy to you while I slipped these handcuffs on you. Yeah, it is wild. We got to figure out what's the term for like the web MD diagnosis for criminals that think, you know, well, my buddy says that you can't get in trouble because X, Y, Z. Yeah.

Probably what it was. I have so many. people that tell me like you know that will tell me about prison no you can get parole though they parole you after doing 30% of your time you don't know what you're talking about it's like wait a second bro i understand that you're stocking shelf somewhere you know and i get it you know god bless you like middle class america like thank you for doing your your part you're what makes this country run i'm not knocking you but if i if i need someone to drive a forklift like you're my guy But just because you watched a lot of law and order, guess what?

There is no parole in the federal system. Now, prior to 1986, after doing one third year time in prison, you were eligible for parole. You would go in front of the parole board, and they would say, okay, you have done three years on a nine-year sentence. So you're eligible for parole, and you would plead your case, and they would say, okay, you've done a bunch of programming, you've got a wife and kids. get out there. We know you messed up. You have no criminal history. We're going to give you parole. And they put you on parole. But after 1986, there is no federal parole. So these guys that say, oh, we got 10 years. Well, in a couple years, they'll put them on parole. No, he went in the federal system. Now, some states still have parole system. There's difference

between the state systems. Every single system is different. Every single state system is different. and the federal system so people don't realize that they'll be like oh you got to do 90% of your time for violent crimes this guy's lying no now maybe if you're in nevada you see what i'm saying like it maybe in your state that's how it works or maybe if you're in this state maybe if you're on road island you do you know two fists of your time if you but this guy went to the federal system or this guy was in georgia or this guy was like people and listen they'll argue with you they'll call you a piece of shit liar you're a scumbag this guy's a liar you can't believe anything he says and it's like bro look at how angry you are right you really think that you know something because your older brother went to jail for 18 months and he knows how it works you might want to ask him how does it work in the federal system or hey bubba guess you know i know you were in you did a state time in ohio what about florida he'll probably say oh i don't know how it works in Florida. Yeah. And they'll be like, I spent two hours arguing with someone on Cox's channel.

You can't do it. Don't do it. But there's people going to do that, though. Yeah. Because they had a 10-minute conversation with somebody. Now they're an expert. Or I'm telling you, that's the other thing that's misleading about YouTube. How many people are doing these? I don't want to say true crime. But like you, when you were saying, you had got out and true crime has always been a hit since podcast existed day one. But mostly what I noticed started that bad was like these NPR people that, you know, like they came from this like totally different background, but they wanted to examine these cases and they maybe talked to secondhand knowledgeable people and that's really what the true

crime was or they were ripping it from the headlines and just kind of reading as they went. So that false illusion of like people who think or maybe Googled something that they knew how it worked differing from you're like, no, listen, I lived it. And I know people who lived it and this is, you know, actually how it's working because that 1886, you should be doing videos like that breaking down the laws. That's important stuff, man. I'm not trying to, I'm trying to make money not do important stuff. So what's it, you know, that Danny Masterson. yeah yeah you know any guys are out there prison guys talking about how how like you know he'll get smashed and he's this and he's going to this and he's going to that and all of that

is probably is true like in in you know in a state prison in california he's probably going to have a hard time or they're going to put him in protective custody yeah that's right yeah yeah he'll still have a hard time but eventually he'll probably just put they'll put money on some guy's books and they'll protect him and he'll be okay Um, but, but, you know, guys like I would talk if I'll do TikToks or something, they'll take a little excerpt out of a two hour interview. They'll take like a one minute excerpt. And guys will say, and I'll talk about, you know, the, the, you know, I'm going to call them ESOs. The ESOs in prison, right? Or, you know, in, in prison. And how yeah, yeah, you know, this guy said this guy. That's a lie because they don't mix with other people and they don't this guy's piece of girl. He's flying and he's, it's like. No, no. I was in most low security camps or low security prisons in federal prison, about 40 and 50% of the people that are there have SO charges. And there's so many of them that you can, the inmates will restrict them a little bit. But not completely. Like a lot of inmates will be like, look, you can't be in the, you can't watch TV. You can't be in the TV room. They set the boundaries. Yeah. And they'll try. But what happens is,

If you have 2,000 people and 1,000 of them, or 800 are SOs, and one day they say, hey, we're going to go walk the track. What are you going to do? The first of all, you guys are really, think about it, all these guys are segregated. You've got like the blacks will have five different gangs. The whites will have two gangs. The Hispanics will have, you know, one gang. You know, it's like, it breaks it up. It's like, you know, you guys can't even get together, really.

can't really do anything. We're at a low. Most of you guys are close to home. Most of you guys do not want to go anywhere. Yeah. So they'll just let them do what they kind of like what, you know, they'll bitch and moan. They'll call them names, but they won't really do anything. If you say that, there will be guys in the comment section who will be calling me a liar and that's not true. And why? Because your cousin went to prison in, in Arizona. He went to an Arizona state prison. He wasn't a federal prison. It wasn't like they're all different. It's weird on that. Because you were just talking about the division in the prisons and I know you always say uh what is it we might have the numbers but they got the they got they got the they got the prisons and the

chain the guns and the barbed wire why do you think they love having those gangs in the prisons because if they're so busy divided fighting against each other it's the same thing like you what you would just describe it if these gangs could form some kind of rainbow coalition like The Black Panthers won it back in the 70s where they said, it doesn't matter your color. I want everybody to join together because then you really have the numbers. I mean, the guards quickly become outnumbered and they can make some demands or movements.

They need a prisoner organization like a union to get their demands met, you know? The moment somebody tries to organize, they get shipped. Trust me, they're not stupid. They're monitoring everything. Look, it's the same thing with TVs. They'll never take TVs out of. prison you hear i'll hear people they should take tvs out of prison they should listen bro those TVs are babysitters the moment they shut the TVs off and they say you guys lost the TVs for the next week

it lasts about three days and then the cops are like we're giving you the TVs back you guys are being good we're gonna be no the truth is now we're a problem yeah there's no there's no babysitter for us to sit there and just there at the box now you got the numbers the power yeah they don't like that hey i appreciate you guys watching the video do me a favor hit the subscribe button hit the bell so you get notified. Check out Rob's new channel. We're going to leave the link in the description, and I really appreciate you guys hanging with me. Please consider joining my Patreon. Thank you very much. See you.