The Joe Rogan Experience - #1993 - Josh Dubin & Bruce Bryan

Episode Date: June 1, 2023

Josh Dubin is the Executive Director of the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice, a criminal justice reform advocate, and civil rights attorney. https://tinyurl.com/4kb2y5hm Bruce Bryan was recently released from prison after nearly 30 years and receiving clemency. Follow Bruce : @bruce.bryan24 Donate to Bruce's GoFundMe: https://gofund.me/a1f61da1

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. What's up? What's up, man? Good to see you, my brother. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. And thank you for bringing Bruce, and thanks for coming out last night. That was a good time. I had a great time, man.

For everyone to, like, guys started realizing while you were there, your story. Like, the word started getting around the green room, and it was one of those things, like, guys started realizing while you were there your story. Like, the word started getting around the green room. And it was one of those things like, what? He just got out three weeks ago, wrongfully accused for 30 years, and here he is having a good time. It was a crazy experience to, like, be sharing the green room with you. Because you could see everybody. Like, you became, like, the celebrity of the green room. You know what I'm saying?

Like, everybody wanted to hear the story everybody wanted to talk to you everybody was blown away by it and by the the grace that you displayed like the fact that you could be wrongfully accused spend 30 years of your young life in in a cage and then come out and just be this wonderful fun guy having a good time everyone's laughing having conversations it was beautiful it was beautiful um i look i'm standing next to him last night you know worried most of the night because you know we had got on a plane and that was his first time flying in over 30 years. There was a lot of stimulation. And, you know, I could tell you that I'm still in shock, even sitting here now, that we're sitting next to each other.

Because I spent the last several years visiting him at Sing Sing, which is, you know, not a great place. Sing Sing Prison in New York. But I don't want to throw cold water on anything. But, you know, there there's a lot of stealing yourself for the moment last night going on that people didn't see? From you? I think for Bruce. I mean, there was one point where we were sitting in the balcony watching Attell. And by the way, congratulations on that amazing club.

Thank you. It's just an amazing, the comedy mothership is really a dream for the comedians. Love it. The crowd was amazing amazing it was just so awesome to see so congrats on that thank you very much how fun is David tell he's he's my side hurts he's a master he's a master but um we were sitting there and some other folks came in and at some point you know Bruce kept looking over his shoulder and you know I realized that he was uncomfortable. And he switched seats very quickly so that he would be side to side,

shoulder to shoulder with them. I know, I think I know why you did it. Yeah. Why did you do it? Well, I think in prison you become accustomed to not wanting people behind you, right? And then I got this scar in prison from behind. So you're always conscious of what's behind you. Of course.

No one goes through that experience unscathed, right? You come out with these idiosyncrasies or these quirks that you, these defense mechanisms that you develop while you're incarcerated. You know, you're in an abnormal environment for decades. It's going to have an effect on you psychologically. How old were you when they put you in? I was 23, just turning 24. And tell us the whole story. What happened?

Well, I was arrested back in 1994 for homicide. I think that everyone knew that I didn't do this case at all. Everyone knew I didn't commit the crime. I mean, I literally woke up that afternoon because my girlfriend wanted to change her niece's costume, and she also had a taste for chocolate cake. So just imagine waking up to change a costume for Halloween, a child's costume, and then disappearing for the next 29 years of your life, right,

and being charged with a homicide while the prosecutor involved in your conviction has a history of misconduct, and it wasn't until some 27, 26 years later that he finally gets arrested and gets convicted. Former Queens prosecutor John Scarpa, he gets convicted for the very same misconduct that I've been telling him about, that he's been doing for decades. So he would just find someone, pin it on them. Yeah, he would concoct a story,

a theory, as he did in my situation. And he did this just to convict someone. Yeah. Anyone. Yeah. So it wasn't that he was targeting you, he just decided it was you? Anybody that he felt was involved in a criminal lifestyle or in

drug dealing, it's easier to get someone that has a history of being involved in the streets to put a case on them than it is someone that doesn't. So, you know, once they find out that you have a record, it's easy to say, all right, well, he did this homicide. What kind of a record did you have at the time? I had a drug sale prior to that. So that's enough for him to say, OK, he's a part of a drug crew and, you know, let's arrest him and lock him up. This particular prosecutor, his thing was bribery. He would pay off witnesses. And he ended up not only getting convicted but went to federal prison for it.

getting convicted but went to federal prison for it. You know, I should give some context here because to the extent that Bruce is going to be guarded about certain details of his case, I want to explain why. Last time I was on with Derek Hamilton, we were, you know, sort of previewing the center that we would open. So I left the Innocence Project. I was the ambassador of the Innocence Project. And I think that there was a real need for work being done on cases that didn't just involve DNA. So we deal with cases that involve all manner of what we think is junk forensic science that we've talked about, ballistics, arson, bite marks, and so on. But we also want there to be an aspect that dealt with clemency for people that we think got over-sentenced and deserved a second chance. So Bruce was our first client at the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice at Cardozo Law. And I got a call

from a guy named Steve Zeidman that runs a clemency center at CUNY Law. And Steve said, you know, congratulations on the new center. I have the perfect guy for you. His name is Bruce Bryant with a T at the end of his name. That becomes important in a minute. And he said, I'm going to send you some information about him. So he emails me this list of accomplishments. It was more than most human beings can accomplish in seven lifetimes. From the degrees that he achieved to starting a gun buyback program from inside to starting something called Voices from Within, these community, these galvanizing sort of community outreach programs. And, you know, I went to go visit him with the mindset that I was going to support his clemency application and getting clemency in New York ain't easy from the governor. And, you know, clemency is supposed to be all about rehabilitation and transformation.

And historically, especially in New York, you have to express contrition and explain to the parole board, if you are granted clemency and it is a commutation of your sentence, that is a shortening of your sentence, you have to explain to the parole board, here's what I have done to transform myself and accept responsibility. So keeping that in mind, I went to visit Bruce for the first time. And I said, nice to meet you. He says, nice to meet you. You know, I wrote you four years ago, he said to me. And, you know, I felt ridiculous. It was at a time where I didn't have the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice, and I sort of was doing one-off cases, sometimes with the Innocence Project, sometimes by myself.

And I was really struck by his presence, by how articulate he was, one of the most well-read human beings. presence by how articulate he was, one of the most well-read human beings. He was telling me about, you know, how he finished the Viktor Frankl book, Man's Search for Meaning. And we had this amazing conversation about meditation and yoga. And we turned a half hour visit into three hours to the point where they told me I had to, you know, go. So I went back and I looked for the letter because I keep all the letters that I get. And I find this beautifully written, super articulate letter. And I'll never forget how he signed it because it stuck with me. It said, Oceans of Gratitude, Bruce Bryant.

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

But Bruce got clemency a couple of months ago by Governor Hochul in December, and he got to stand before the parole board. And it was a scary moment for me as one of his lawyers that when they asked him, did you commit this crime, for him to say, no, I didn't. No, I didn't. And to be granted clemency and to be then granted parole on an innocence claim is extraordinarily rare. So I think it spoke to both how powerful his innocence claims are and his accomplishments. The only there's only a few other people. One of them is Derek Hamilton that went before the parole board and said, I'm not going to, you know, admit to something I didn't do just to get out of here. So I just wanted to give you that context because details of the case, specific details of the case are going to be difficult to discuss. And I think what, what's amazing about Bruce is what he has been able to accomplish from inside in the face of his innocence is mind-blowing. A lot of times when we're on the show, we get inquiries about how people can help and how do people overcome this.

And I think why people are attracted to these stories of the wrongfully incarcerated, I had to search myself. It's because I like being around this kind of strength. I don't know how, you know, people like him summon the strength to get through it. And, you know, in talking to Bruce the last couple of weeks, what he endured in prison is something we haven't really talked about on the show too much, like in granularity about what it's like in these institutions.

And I was hoping we could talk about, among other things, some of that today because he was in some of the worst penitentiaries in New York, from Attica to… first penitentiaries in New York, from Attica to? I was in Clinton, Great Meadows, Sing Sing, all maximum securities, all maximum security prisons way upstate in some towns that are essentially, you know, a lot of racism is pervasive in those towns. And the prison is the only economic development in that town. So you've got brother, cousins, aunts and uncles working in the same prison. So you get into an incident with one officer, you've got a problem with the entire system.

And that's just how it is when you go deeper upstate. I mean, borderline Canada, you know, Clinton, Dannemora, Great Meadows, and different prisons like that. And the economy of the area depends upon the prison. Depends upon the prison because there's really nothing there but snow during the wintertime and farming. So there's nothing else there. So the prison is the driving force behind the economy.

So everyone's there, right? Siblings. So nepotism is prevalent in these prisons. And one of the things that you encounter is that it's not just cold in those areas. A prison is a cold environment, and it's up to you to create your own heat. It's a dark environment and uh somehow you gotta find that light you know that light within yourself in order to um in order to travel in order to you know to do something with your life more meaningful you know what i mean um and it's

difficult it's not easy uh you watch guys uh you know guys you talk to today and you know tomorrow they're swinging from the light they're dead right yesterday they were fine you know, guys you talk to today and, you know, tomorrow they're swinging from the light. They're dead, right? Yesterday they were fine. You know, the next morning you wake up, they've hung themselves. You know, and these are the things that you encounter day in and day out. And you still have to maintain a sense of humanity, right? You've got to become, you can either do two things.

You can become bitter or you can become better. I chose the latter because one of the things I did early in my incarceration was make a conscious decision to not serve time, but to have time serve me. I made up my mind that if you were going to have me incarcerated for a crime I did not commit, then I was going to take this time and use that cell as if it was an office. I was going to use that school building as if it was a university. And every chance I had to just self-reflect and engage in introspection and do the things that I needed to do to protect my soul, I was going to do it. You know, and I made it my business to do so. And I started

delving into material that I probably would never have read, you know, being a free man. I started reading, you know, everything from, you know, philosophy books to very few novels, but I tend to learn from the experiences of others. So autobiographies became my thing, from Quincy Jones to Miles Davis, and just continuously studying, and then studying the system and what drives the system and why it has become what it is, you know, from education to, you know, to the whole system of why educational system looks at a guy in the third grade and determines whether or not he's going to be caught up in the criminal justice system as early as the

third grade, right? Based on your reading level, they can determine how many prison beds that they're going to develop. These are things that most people don't know, right? Like 50% of the incarcerated people in New York State or probably in the country are living with dyslexia. So then so they're unable to learn, you know, the basics of education like reading and these guys go home and they commit crimes over and over again because they were never corrected. And these same systems that were built on the premise of rehabilitation are draconian in that they do nothing but, you know, steal a person's humanity and allow them to become or looked at as nothing more than a number.

You've got to wake up 6 o'clock in the morning. Sometimes when they're coming around, they're asking you your name. They're not asking your name. They're asking you your numbers, what cell location you're in. They're not calling you Mr. Brian. They're calling you 60 cell. And a lot of people begin to internalize that and lose their sense of self. And so I remained guarded and tried to maintain a sense of humanity through my meditation, right, through fasting every now and then,

and just through deep introspection and reflection. For me, that was the hard part. The easy part was education and learning. The hard part was intros learning. The hard part was introspection and fighting a system, right? Not just a prosecutor or a court, but fighting a system that was premised on, you know, oppression, right? That was premised on, it's a business, a prison industrial complex. You got cheap labor. You know, the 13th Amendment says you're allowed to be enslaved if you're convicted of a crime. You see? And so, you know, in a system like that,

you have to find a way. You got to find it within yourself to rise above the fray. Did you meet anyone else inside that showed you this path? side that showed you this path? Yes. Early on in my incarceration, there was a group of guys called the Resurrection Study Group. And it was founded by a guy named Eddie Ellis, who has since passed on. And what the Resurrection Study Group did was they developed this program called the Non-Traditional Approach to Social and Criminal Justice. And it helped them understand why the vast majority of incarcerated people in New York State came from, at that time, they came from seven basic neighborhoods, right? And these were neighborhoods that were all impoverished,

that were all plagued with what we call crime genitive factors from, you know, substance abuse to dilapidated housing to, you know, just poverty. Right. And so you see you see violence. And what I've come to realize is that poverty is violence. So wherever there's poverty, you're going to see violence because poverty itself is violence. And so these neighborhoods, you begin to learn and study, and you begin to see that this is not by accident. These prisons were built for a purpose. There's a saying, they say, you build it, they're going to come. That's the same thing with prisons.

You build them, they're going to come. Similar to the 1994 crime bill that was signed by Bill Clinton and co-authored by our now President Joe Biden. It incarcerated more people across the country than any other time. It perpetuated the three strikes you're out. You had guys who stole a slice of pizza, third strike, he gets 25 to life. We're looking at cases now where guys took $200, he's been in jail for 20 years. Some guys sentenced 70 years for armed robbery. All of these things come under the 1994 crime bill. So when you begin to see it as a system that was designed to do certain things.

It's a wake up call for you and you begin to say, hold on, man, I fell for the trap. It's time for me to begin taking a different route and begin to educate myself more. And so the Resurrection Study Group, these guys steered me in that direction. They steered me in that direction. And I began to learn from another gentleman that was a part of it by the name of Dr. Gary Mendez, who also died. And he had a program called the National Trust for the Development of African American Men. And what it did was it helped us restore those values that we strayed away from. So this is what got me on the right path early in my incarceration. How difficult was that to stay on that path?

Because it seems like, obviously, you did find a way to be very disciplined and stick to it. And you give off this energy of a person who's been on a long voyage in that regard. But how difficult was it as a young man? Extremely difficult because the norm is, you know, a microcosm of what takes place in society. Drugs, violence, the hustling, everything that goes on uh in society it happens in prison right you know relationships with staff um all of that takes place right and so it's extremely difficult it's it's almost like a battle because the guys in my age group they were not doing what I was doing. They were in the yard either gangbanging, selling drugs, getting high.

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

like affirmations or quotes that I would develop, not that I would take from anyone, but ones that I would develop myself, right? After reading and studying, and then you have these epiphanies. I used to sleep with a pen and a paper. That's what the guys from Resurrection Study Group taught me. I would sleep with a pen and a pad because they say some

of your most pure thoughts come in the midnight hour, in the midst of your sleep. And certain things, principles that I began to live by would come to me in those late hours. And I would write them down. And the next day I would wake up and I would stick them on the wall and I would begin to internalize these principles and these morals that I began to develop that reconnected me to my own humanity because prison strips you of so much of that man

what was it like on day one of your release what was that is it even possible to describe that feeling it was the best feeling that a human being can feel to see my mother to see my loved ones, my siblings, still breathing, still alive, because I lost my father in 2017. So to see love is what I saw.

It's indescribable. It was beyond being elated, you know, joy. It was just a deep, deep sense of bliss. It was almost like heaven, man. If there was such a thing as heaven on earth, there was heaven the day that I walked out of prison. It's like I walked out of hell and straight into heaven. There was no purgatory, right? There was no purgatory.

So I went straight from hell straight to heaven. This one, I got to tell you, for me, you know, I've had the fortunate experience of walking, you know, my fair share of people out. This one was like, this one was what they based the movies on. This was so stunning in the way it happened. The super, the warden of Sing Sing is actually a great man. His name is Mike Capra.

He's too bad he's retiring soon. And he really believed in Bruce. And, you know, he was responsible for making sure that there are a lot of programs in Sing Sing for the people that want them. And they typically release people out of Sing Sing, which is in Ossining, New York. It's about an hour and a half north of the city on the Hudson. And they usually just take them from a prison van to a bus stop and just drop them off. I was outside the prison gate. And so was Bruce's family and friends and other loved ones that had come from around the country.

from around the country and I called the super about half hour before he was released because we had got word from another guard that was standing outside oh they're not gonna release him here they're gonna drop him off at a train station and I called him I said please you know let him have this moment and he said we're gonna we're gonna do that and if you picture this 30 foot wall steel green wall that all of a sudden just parts and you see this figure um emerge with a net with his worldly possessions. And, you know, it was and his he was walking his sister, Justina, who is, oddly enough, a court officer in the very courthouse where he was convicted. They were walking to each other, and the walk started to turn into a fast walk.

And then they both, at the same time, just ran to each other and embraced. You know, I'm a crier. I just, like, I just stood back and watched. And everyone was just weeping, you know I'm a crier I just like I just stood back and watched and everyone was just weeping you know and and his mother had just pulled up she got you know sort of like lost on the way to the prison it's not easy to find and um that one for me this one he Bruce and I have a deep, special relationship. He had spoken to my children on the phone before he got out. They call him Uncle Bruce.

And, you know, I'm sitting back. I feel like a proud brother listening to him speak. to him speak, you know, what an impressive human being just to hear him articulate in his command of the, of not only, you know, his knowledge base, but his understanding of the world around him. It just, it always hits me like what, what a weird irony that this man in the face of his innocence still recognized, I got to change my life. I didn't commit this crime, but I don't like the way I'm living. And, you know, I mean, we say the words 29 years and you hear of what he overcame, but, you know, it wasn't without incident. You see the scar on his face there were

stretches and solitary confinement that I'd rather him describe because I didn't live it and you know dealing with the violence of prison and you know he's explaining to you like waking up in the night with a thought and writing it down on a pad and it's like it conjures up an image at least for me of someone blissfully sleeping i mean this is against the backdrop of him living on a on a tier that is full of people many of them suffering extraordinary mental illness screaming yelling having rap competitions until 2, 3 in the morning. I mean, deafening noise on a cell block for those that have never been there.

Yeah, 88 men, 88 cells on a gallery in Sing Sing. And you have four galleries right on top of each other. The longest tiers. So you can see a guy getting stabbed in 88 cells. And you may be in 10 and the guy is way down there getting stabbed. The guard is by the staircase and this guy is screaming for dear life. No one hears him but you know he's getting hit and you know the prison culture. You got to fend for yourself. You know what happens in an environment like that.

Guys keep quiet. Sometimes a guy gets shoved back in his cell. Either he's left to die or he prays that an officer comes and finds him in there, laying in his blood, and he survives. I've watched guys that I was close to. You talk to them today. You have coffee with him today, and tonight when they call on the child,

he doesn't move out of his cell. You find out what's going on with him. You find out he OD'd off a fentanyl 15 minutes earlier. There's no Narcan in the cell blocks to hit this guy to wake him up. They know drugs are ubiquitous in prison. They're everywhere. Yet, you know, the procedures that are in place are not there. The safeguards are not there to protect lives because they don't see your life.

It doesn't matter, right? There's a huge sense of being devalued. Human life is completely devalued in these institutions. Your numbers. And once you leave, someone else will take your place. And that's the attitude of the prison industrial complex as a whole. You know?

What's terrifying is there's been no talk to mitigate all the problems that lead to the prison industrial complex. No one's talking about getting rid of it. No one's talking about getting rid of private prisons. No one's talking about trying to figure out a way to, other than just policing, to do something about these communities

that keep, decade after decade, being a place where no one has hope. And every politician says, let's get, it's either get tough on crime or light on crime. Yes, right. Right. So, but no one says, instead of getting tough on crime, why don't we get tough on the social conditions that produce crime? Yes. Because no one is born a criminal. These are conditions that people come out of that drive them.

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

Both of these communities, both of these places are, you know, crime is high, violence is high, right? Drug use is high because the social conditions are that bad, right? And the cycle continues. You know, it's a cycle because people are living in not just poverty, they're living in concentrated poverty, generational poverty. So my family grew up, one family grew up in the projects, their children wind up growing up in the projects, right? Unless someone comes and breaks that cycle,

unless there's serious intervention to break the cycle of incarceration or intergenerational incarceration, it continues to be perpetuated. And the problem seems to be that every politician is just concerned with getting elected. So they want to say whatever the people want to hear. And if the people want to hear, get tough on crime, it's that. But you don't hear, we need to eliminate all the areas of our country that are creating these issues.

We have to fix that. It has to be a concentrated effort. I've always said, you want to make America. They have to fix it. It has to be a concentrated effort. It has to be. I've always said you want to make America great. Have less losers. How do you have less losers? You have more people with opportunity. You figure out where people don't have opportunity.

You provide opportunity. And you pour all the money into that. We obviously have billions of dollars to provide to Ukraine. There's always something. There's always something that they come up with where they need trillions of dollars for this and billions of dollars to provide to Ukraine. There's always something. There's always something that they come up with where they need trillions of dollars for this and billions of dollars for that and green energy and this and that. There's no better use of resources than making better human beings, giving human beings opportunity. And maybe it's time to stop relying on the government for it because politicians it's almost like when I

think of a politician now and in in the context of helping solve these problems it's almost like you know wouldn't it be nice for me to be able to fly yeah that'd be nice but it's not gonna happen right you know so what we're trying to do with the Perlmutter Center for legal Justice is to get the word out to even the private sector. If we can create self-driving cars and artificial intelligence and send people into space, this is a solvable problem. the things that has been I mean I don't know why I needed this as like some epiphany because I've been doing this work for close to 20 years but lately I have been struck by the cases that we're working on in a way that I haven't before and if you ever want to see like the the true it's the best way to articulate this how how fucked up this country is in terms

of racial disparity and the mistreatment of minorities in this country, go visit a prison. Sing Sing has a program where we'll talk about it, where they take people from the community in and say, here's what is going on here. I have routinely sat across a table like this in a small room in the legal visiting room at Sing Sing. Let's just take Sing Sing for example. We recently, one of our new clients was sentenced to 70 years.

70 years for a first offense in which the extent of the victim's injuries were four stitches. This man, Sheldon Johnson, served 26 years. And I took a look at this case and I said, how is this possible? A few weeks later, I'm visiting with a man who's serving 25 to life for the alleged robbery of $200 in which the alleged victim has a condition where one eye is shut and the other eye had multiple surgeries that were never disclosed to the defense. That is an eyewitness account? Yes. There's no evidence. And he's the only eyewitness. And he's the only one.

He only has one eye. No pun intended. I just didn't have a good one. And he could not identify the person. And that wasn't disclosed. And then not the extent of his eye issues. You couldn't hide the fact that one eye was closed. But the point I'm trying to make is that it is extraordinarily rare for me to be hearing these stories and the person sitting across the table from me is a white person.

It's always a black man or a Latin man. or a Latin man and it begs the question well you know what do we think African Americans are more have a higher propensity to commit crime that's not it it's exactly what Bruce is talking about and what what I hope to do is to continue to get the word out because we so often have people writing us, calling us, sending us emails, DMs on Instagram. How can I help? Right. And one of the ways that you can help is getting involved in communities that are poor, whether it's volunteering at a community center in areas like Brownsville, whether it's donating funds to community based organizations, whether it's corresponding with someone, and it's just getting the word out in a way. And if you're going to be a politician for the young generation, you know, you have to actually not look at what the public wants to hear or what you think the public wants to hear.

It's okay to run and lose as long have these ulterior ideas that they don't divulge run and then try to implement them this is the idealistic utopian view of a president here's the problem with that i think when you get into office they sit you the fuck down and they explain how everything really works and i think it's very terrifying and i think we're probably a brink of conflict all over the world. And there's all sorts of problems they're constantly dealing with. And they don't want to hear jack shit about what you want to do for communities. They want to know how much money can we get for these military industrial complex

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

We know they're involved in doing these things. We know they're involved in putting agent provocateurs into all these organizations, like that Governor Whitmer lady who got a kidnapping plot to get her 14 people, 12 of them, were FBI informants. I mean, that's just fucking insane. So all this stuff exists. This is not conspiracy theory anymore. I think that's the problem, what happens when you get into office. You are dealing with a fucking tsunami of bullshit, and it's just deeply ingrained.

It's just like the system of these impoverished communities is deeply ingrained and generational. I think the culture of the deep state is also deeply ingrained and generational. The culture of the relationship that they have to money, to whether it's money from the bankers, money from the pharmaceutical drug companies, military industrial complex, there's sensational amounts of money that can be had. And we're seeing it in motion right now

in what many people are framing as a just conflict in Ukraine. But there's also an insane amount of money involved in this. And you have to be very careful of whatever the fuck the narrative is that's being discussed when there's an insane amount of money involved. And that's what's going on right now. And I think that if we as people, I like what you're saying, is if the United States, and if you can get businesses involved, and businesses can actually generate revenue from rehabilitating communities. If they could figure out, if Halliburton can figure out how to rebuild Iraq after they

blew it up, which is one of the craziest things of all time. You got a guy who's the CEO of Halliburton and just happened to be the vice president of the United States and then they get no bid contracts to rebuild shit. He decides to blow up. I mean, it's wild, right? But if they can do that, if there's profit in that, how is there not profit in rehabilitating neighborhoods? It seems like profit for everyone.

But that's why we're continuing to do this show. I cannot tell you. I say it every time I'm on here. You'll get tired of it maybe, and maybe it sounds like ass kissing, and I will kiss whatever ass there is to kiss. This show has become such an important platform for us. Because watch this ready. I spoke about this before. There's a case in California right now. The case of this guy, Pierre rushing, right? The attorney that's

handling it from a big law firm named Greenberg Trarag. His name is Jordan Gratzinger. He is – this kid really was accused of murder in 2011. He's sentenced 50 years to life. There's one witness. This guy's name is Robert Green. He's a serial felon, a seven-time felon. He doesn't identify Pierre Rushing until three weeks after the crime. He is a crack addict who admitted that he was high at the time the crime was committed. No physical evidence implicating Pierre Rushing. Two other witnesses at the scene when this shooting took place say it was not Pierre Rushing. So Jordan Grotzinger sends me a direct message on Instagram because he heard this podcast. Now, here is a global law firm

that has vast resources. And he said, I just want to do something. How do I get involved? And, you know, he learns about this case and gets the pro bono department at his law firm to take it up. He now has declarations from the only witness, this guy, Robert Greene, who has totally recanted and said he made it all up. He has another declaration from, you know, another witness saying that Pierre Rushing, actually the other guy that was convicted of this crime, said Pierre Rushing had nothing to do with it. So the question becomes now, what can you, so look, it's a testament to the power of this show and this platform that this guy is hopefully on the precipice of getting out or saving a life. But the question becomes, well, what can you do

as a listener? Grab your pens, all right? You can write to the Alameda District Attorney Pamela Price at 1225 Fallon Street in Oakland, California, 94612. And I know you can just rewind it if you miss the address. Write DA Pamela Smart and ask her to please release Pierre Rushing. There's a petition called a petition of habeas corpus, which I think translates in Latin to the holding of the body. Can I stop you for real quick? Spell Fallon. F-A-L-L-O-N?

F-A-L-L. F-A-1. So it's Alameda District Attorney Pamela Price, 1225 Fallon Street, Oakland, California. Two L's. Yes. So Fallon with two L's. And, you know, I know that the case is on her radar.

I think that she is, and read about the case, Pierre Rushing, just how it sounds. it sounds. And the more we let district attorneys, politicians know that the public is paying attention, I can tell you from my experience of being on this show that the DAs listen. I've had them reference appearances on this show acting like, how could you say that about Douglas County, Kansas? But then they get a thousand letters and they realize that politically it's not going to look very good to keep an innocent. What is the holdup? These wheels of justice grind slowly. And for a man like Bruce, who is sitting in there and having to, you know, witness violence on a day-to-day basis, unthinkable conditions where he sleeps in a room when he's put in what they call the box or the hole and has rodents

crawling across his chest as he sleeps. I'm not making this shit up. This was his day-to-day existence. Pierre Rushing is in similar circumstances. You can make a difference to write a letter, read about the case. The habeas petitions are out there to read them. And I think that we just need all I can do, all I can think of, we could have grandiose ideas. It would be amazing if a big corporation didn't decide to donate a lot of money because they felt guilty about what happened to George Floyd. And then all of a sudden, it became the summer of like, corporate guilt. And everyone starts donating. You don't donate because it's in vogue.

You donate because you actually wanna make a difference and take it from little old me. I know that I'm one grain of sand on a massive beach, but what Bruce said, and I've said it before, I'll say it again. I've done my fair share of drugs and mind alteraltering substances. There is no feeling like helping restore somebody's life and freedom. Nothing. Nothing comes close to it.

So if you want to be another grain of sand on that beach, hopefully the grain of sand will form a sandcastle. And then there'll be more sandcastles and people will start paying more attention that's all i can think of as just an individual and an organization to keep on doing is to keep banging the drum and the more we bang it and the louder we bang it so again i i thank you for the for the platform and i want people to be able to see and witness these marvelous human beings as such a waste to have them locked away behind prison walls when you know you hear him speak bruce just accepted a position with the perlmutter center for legal justice he's going to be a criminal justice reform advocate and a student mentor not because i feel bad for him

not because i think you know oh he's because he's earned it. Listen to him speak and listen to his command of the issues. You know, so I sometimes find myself like I feel like I'm trying to climb. I feel like Sisyphus sometimes. Right. And the boulder keeps rolling back on me. Back on you. Yeah.

And then I get a, you know, you get a little taste of what that's like to like to help you know stand next to him last night and watch him watch a comedy show and then we were walking down the street and just hear like hear him inhale a breath of fresh air or this morning before we came here he saw the pool at the hotel and teared up. And he said, I'm going in. And I heard this like with like childlike wonder, the splash. And like, you know, I went over and he had both arms in the air. He said, take a picture of me. I still got it.

And I fucking blanked. And I thought to myself, this must be the first time he swam in over 30 years and you know it was just to be able to watch that and to be even a small part of it um it's just like makes you feel like getting up the next day and with a smile on your face with the will to want to do it again and help someone else? I want to touch on something that Joe said. I think investing, what people don't realize is the huge talent pool that exists behind prison walls. These guys can, they can help drive the economy outside of just being incarcerated. You spend $80 billion a year on incarceration across the country.

These guys, you got artists, you got guys that, guys that make anything in here, man, out of just anything. I've seen guys make statues like this from paper towels and soap. You say, what the hell? So the talent pool is broad if we're willing to invest in people, right? If we invest in the social infrastructure and tap into that cultural capital that exists behind prison walls and just start beginning to invest in people instead of things and prisons, right? You know, we got to learn to just really say,

well, is prison the right answer? Who's corrected from prison? Prison corrections has never corrected anyone. It's the person that engages in introspection and says, I want to make a change. But even when you look at the investments that they make in law enforcement, if law enforcement were the answer to crime, we'd be the safest place on planet Earth. America would be the safest place on planet Earth because we've got more cops than anywhere else.

Right? So we give so much over time and we give our money to the police officers and they grant it. You know, they're important, right? But they don't solve crime. They don't prevent crime. It's just that simple. They just don't, right? When you invest in people and you provide them with opportunities

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

This is where it gets dangerous because the prison industrial complex is a business and the business protects itself. There's been prison guard unions that have lobbied to keep marijuana illegal in states because they want work, which is one of the most evil things you could ever consider, that you're using human beings as batteries so you can generate money, keeping them in a cement box, essentially using them

as batteries to generate money. The whole thing, it's fascinating that you brought that up. The whole thing, it's fascinating that you brought that up. I read about that recently. Yeah. And I thought that I misread it. That a, I did not understand the connection at first. It kind of went over my head. That a union would fight to keep marijuana illegal until I started to, like, say, well, wait a second.

You're just missing the obvious conclusion here. One of the obvious conclusions is, you know, the leading, the leading cause of contraband in prisons aren't like family members stuffing things down their pants and coming through. It's guards. It's prison guards. Of course. And, you know, I just think that I guess where i get frustrated when you said this is where it gets tricky what gets tricky for me and where i get frustrated and um feel like overwhelmed i'm listening to the two of you speak and thinking to myself, you both get it, right? The question becomes to me, well, how do we make it happen? So how do you rebuild a community like Brownsville, Brooklyn, right?

Everybody knows Brownsville because Mike Tyson comes from there. Zab Judah comes from there. Some pretty famous fighters come from there. Biggie Smalls comes from there. Riddick Bowe. Riddick Bowe. And, you know, they're not come from there. Biggie Smalls comes from there. Riddick Bowe. Riddick Bowe. And, you know, they're not going back there. Shannon Briggs.

Shannon Briggs. Yeah, Shannon Briggs. Let's go champ. Shannon the cannon. Shout out to Shannon. Yeah, that's my guy. So I don't – they go back and try to do what they can. But, you know, it's like start with Brownsville.

How do we solve the problem? Is it us trying to convince the owner of a sports team, a billionaire, a philanthropist, someone to go like, here's a plan. Let's go to the mayor, Eric Adams, and propose this community center. I mean, I just don't know what, and this is like not, this might be out of ignorance for me because I can only take on what I can take on. I'm sure there's some people out there trying to get this done. But I think the more influential voices we can get behind an idea, let's try this experiment in one community. I just, I'm at a loss for, I know what I know how to do. I know how to see a case and know that someone's innocent and fight for it.

I feel like I know the right levers to pull to get that done. It gets way more difficult and intimidating to me trying to figure out, well, how do we solve this bigger social problem? But I think it starts with shows like this. Just the conversation now. social problem. But I think it starts with shows like this. From different walks of life coming together and really talking about real issues. It's really an honor to be here with you, Joe. It's an honor to be in your comedy club last

night and it's definitely an honor to be here. It's an honor to be here with you, too. And I really, really appreciate it, man. And this gets the conversation out there, right? And hopefully people will hear the conversation and people will begin to galvanize and say, well, what can we do? At least the thought is out there. The thought is out there. And we've put it out there many times now.

And I feel very blessed to be your friend and to feel very fortunate that you have you've come on here and trusted this platform with all these stories, because it changed the way I thought of our system, our legal justice system. I have a completely different opinion after having conversations with you. And it's not just me. It's everybody who listened to these conversations. So you're talking about millions and millions and millions of people have heard these conversations now. It's a crazy number. And we've done a lot of them now. We keep doing them. And as we keep doing them, it gets out more and more and more.

And slowly but surely, something's going to happen. It's going to have to. If we value humanity, if we really value our community, which is what our country is supposed to be. It's supposed to be a united group of human beings That's right. It's supposed to be a big community and we can isolate it into neighborhoods We can isolate it in the cities But reality we're supposed to be on the same team if we're on the same team if you care about these people How how is it possible that you can continue to ignore it?

Decade after decade and it's going to take a lot of work This is not going to be a thing that you're going to fix because you have grown people that have been indoctrinated in these horrific ways. And these people have to somehow or another have hope to change, which is a big thing for people. It's hard for people to lose weight. You know, it really is. Just stop eating food is hard to do. That's all you have to do is not do something that you know You shouldn't be doing and it's hard to change your whole life Have you been involved in gang banging and drug dealing because you had no other options and you had no other role models and you?

Had no other examples anywhere around you of people that had hope and you felt like well The rest of the world is different and what we got here sucks and that's just the way it is and i'm just gonna be a part of it and that's how human beings do we imitate our atmosphere whether it's positive or negative we're a part of a tribe and this tribe should be expended it should be expanded to the whole fucking world but at the very least we have to be an example here in America. We have a possibility because of these kinds of conversations, because of this narrative, we have a possibility to change, particularly the way young people look at it. This idea that people that live four blocks away are different than people who live right next door is nuts. We're all just humans. And if there is a community that's fucked, it's better for everyone if we chip in and do whatever the fuck it takes to re-engineer that.

And it's going to take a long time. There's an old saying from gambling in pool. They would say you got to get better the same way you got sick. Meaning if you're gambling, say if I got you stuck like $10,000, you're like, okay, all or nothing. Like, fuck you. Fuck you, double or nothing. Fuck you. We played for $1,000.

So then I win $11,000 and then another $1,000. Now I win $12,000. You can't just win one and get it all back. You got to get better the same way you got sick. It's a long road. It's a process. Hey, listen, you made me feel better, both of you. So, you know, look, there's no so you know look there's no um i've you know there's no magic bullet yeah there's no magic bullet and and nor is there

any one size fits all no and look i i told absolutely i told bruce last night um you know it's an odd thing to get recognized for um but, you know, a bartender said to me, hey, aren't you that guy that helps get people out of jail? And I was like, man, that felt so good, right? I don't know if he saw me on 2020. Most definitely it was probably on this podcast. Or, you know, like I was pulling into the Aria in Vegas. You know, like I was pulling into the Aria in Vegas. And, you know, the valet guy goes, hey, aren't you, I've seen you before.

You help innocent people get out of jail. I saw you on Rogan. I get that a lot. And I always take a minute to stop and say, you know, do you want me to help, you know, point you in the right direction of how you can help? I've had so many people take me up on it. So you guys made me feel better. I mean, look, I just, there are moments where I feel like, is the problem ever going to get, you know, solved? It is frustrating to me. So frustrating. And that's why I'm so in your debt because we, Joe and I had this idea, Bruce, you don't know this, a couple of years ago where he committed to doing this once a quarter.

And, of course, I thought, really? Is he really going to do it? And not only has he done it but allowed me to bring an exoneree on every time. And first we had Robert Jones and then Derek Hamilton and now Bruce. know first we had Robert Jones then Derek Hamilton and now Bruce and and I hope that people not only see the humanity in these men but see the talent and see the I mean think about these three men right Robert Jones said I'm gonna one day get out of here and put on a suit and come back in and help the people that need help and he did did it. Derek Hamilton, known the country over as probably the

brightest legal mind in the prison system, said, one day I'm going to get out of here and I'm going to help the people inside. And not only has he done it, he's like a meteor. He's like a streaking comet of a human being. I've never seen anything like it. District attorneys, conviction integrity units, when he calls, they pick up the phone and they have meetings. A district attorney in Manhattan, you know, Alvin Bragg, say what you want about him. My opinion is he picked up the phone when Derek called about Sheldon Johnson. And, you know, there was this great group of lawyers called the CAL, the Center for Appellate

Litigation. And they had brought the case, you know, right to the goal line. And they said, you know, we need the DA's ear. You know, can you just sort of get this? And there's some great people in that office, Brian Crow, that really want to make a difference and You know, we met with the DA in Manhattan and he spoke to Derek and then you know Sheldon gets released So yeah, it does make a difference and I think that for Bruce, you know when I heard about Some of the programs that he created from on the inside, can you tell Joe about and the listeners about the Gun Buyback Program and Voices From Within?

Yeah, Voices From Within, I'll start there. There's a group of men that founded it prior to me coming into Sing Sing. Lawrence Bartley, John Adrian Velasquez, they started this program. Lawrence Bartley, John Adrian Velasquez, they started this program. And it was a progressive program that was designed to, they wanted to redefine what it means to pay a debt to society. And they've been doing just that. So they began doing this progressive work inside and created this event called Choices, which is choosing healthy options and confronting every situation.

And what they do with these choices events is they bring in children whose parents are incarcerated and then begin, you know, having what they call playback theater, which is they'll have a young person talk about a dilemma in their life. And then they'll have two of the guys incarcerated actually play it out. and then they'll have two of the guys incarcerated actually play it out. So the person can actually visualize what it is that they went through and see the opportunities to make better choices. So that's one of them. But also the civic duty initiative we founded in Sullivan, myself and a guy named Joseph Robinson and Stanley Bellamy,

who was also just granted clemency. He had 62 years, he did 37. What we did, we begin you know finding these poor impoverished communities and whether they've been upstate or in the inner cities and decided that what we're going to do is we're going to do a book drives, we're going to raise money in prison through these are prison organizations to buy backpacks and school supplies for children of incarcerated parents.

And we did just that. We gave thousands of books away. We raised tons of money to contribute to a gun buyback, hopefully through a church in Albany with a reverend by the name of Charles Muller who had a program. Albany was being ravished by violence, and his program had run out of money. And so I reached out to him, and we collaborated

in Sullivan Correctional Facility and decided that we're going to pull out resources and see how we can come together. We also had him bring in some young guys so that we can talk to about youth violence. And this continues to go on, right?

The Youth Assistance Program, YAP, that they have both in Sing Sing and in a few other prisons in New York State. I was on the YAP team in Sing Sing where they bring in 30 at-risk youth. In my group, I had some young kids that were from El Salvador who were dealing with MS-13s. And I had one young guy and one young girl tell me that they had to leave El Salvador because where they lived, their friends were all in gangs. And what they did was they would play soccer with the heads of the rival gangs.

And that had made me cringe. I had never heard anything like that. And these kids were like 18, 19. I literally leave the country because their family was like, if they stay there, they have to be in a gang. I mean, these kids said that their friends would literally play soccer with the heads, the decapitated heads of rival gangs. So these are some of the kids that we've been able to reach and talk to through the Yacht Program. It's never enough because sometimes they bring in kids that will never be at risk.

Sometimes they bring in kids from high-end society that have no business coming in. They're going to be successful, right? So, you know, sometimes we have a little issue with that, but the other program is Children of Promise NYCU. I've been working with them for the past decade. Can I stop you there?

Yes. Why are they bringing children from privileged society into that program? It makes absolutely no sense. I think that for me, if you want my personal opinion, I think that they bring them in to show them what they can do and what they can control, right? You can possibly one day be in control of a prison or a corporation because you're bringing these kids from high society that they're literally never going to come. They're never going to see the inside of a jail cell. So they're bringing them in so they get the inner workings of prison so they can enter into the prison industrial complex? On some level.

On some level. But not become. We know they're never going to be incarcerated. Because it's a viable business. It's not going away. It's never going away. And you have, if you decide to go down that road, you have a guaranteed source of income. I mean, the product that we made in New York State Prison is called CoreCraft.

This is on the stock market, CoreCraft. You know, CoreCraft is making upholstery in one prison. In Greenhaven, they make couches, tables like this. How much do guys get paid? Well, they might make $0.16 an hour, $0.10 an hour, literally. this. How much do guys get paid? Well, they might make 16 cents an hour, 10 cents an hour, literally. And they have to do it. Oh, yeah, you don't go to program, you go into the box. In 2000, guys refused to go to the core craft

because they didn't want to build cells. They had a group of guys that found out that there was steel coming off of the van. They unloaded a truck. A group of prisoners were forced to unload a truck, and they realized what they were unloading were bars, bars and doors. And they said, hold on, man, they're opening up a shop where we have to build cells. So a few days later, these guys said, we're not doing that.

We're not building cells for our kids. All these guys went to the box and they shipped them from a prison that's close to their family, Greenhaven. They shipped them to Clinton. And the box for the listeners? The box is solitary confinement. So if you don't do labor for 16 cents an hour, you get confined to solitary confinement. Yeah, you get a misbehavior report. Nine times out of 10, when you go for that misbehavior report, you're found guilty

and you're penalized for not engaging in slave wages, slave labor. That is a fact. This has gone. Every prison, when COVID started, a lot of people don't know where the hand sanitizer was coming from. It was coming from Great Meadows, right? It was coming from Great Meadows. And at one point, you know, Governor Cuomo, he had it on the news. We got a hand sanitizer the guys are making.

And this was for sale at one point. And so that's another form of extraordinary profit. Oh, of course. Even more profitable than making iPhones in China. Which is wild, because it's already evil. Yeah. From everything. You go from,

okay, New York made 11 million bottles of hand sanitizer, now it has 700,000 gallons it can't get rid of. Wow. They said, a spokesperson said he makes no apologies for single-handedly solving a hand sanitizer shortage. Oh, really, spokesperson?

Hey, how'd you do that? Maybe you should make an apology for how the fuck you did that. I absolutely love this show that you can pull this stuff up in real time. Yeah. In real time, you can see guys like former Queens prosecutor John Scarpa. Yeah. In real time.

In real time. In real time, you can Google former prosecutor... Yeah, let's Google him right now. Former Queens prosecutor John Scarpa. Yeah. And you can see what his conviction was. And this is a guy that has a history of doing this.

Just the fact that... This core craft, that's what it's called? Yeah. The fact um this is a guy that has a history of doing this for just the fact that this core craft that's what it's called yeah the fact that this is a profitable entity that you could trade on the stock market and the the very people that are working there are essentially slaves when when not even essentially when steven king when steven king wrote rita hayworth and the shawshank redemption which which became the movie Shawshank Redemption. And there was a, you know, the part of the movie where they talked about the work program and how some genius figured out that there was cheap labor to be had in prisons. He didn't base that off of some fictional whim, you know, when he was up at night, chop, chopping away on that typewriter. That was based in, this has been going on for decades and decades. And, and, you know, I think

that it's, it should shock people and it should, it should be a rallying cry. You know, if you've never been in a prison before and, you know, it's just sort of occupies a space in your mind as it's just a bad place that I don't want to be in ever. And I wouldn't want my family member to be in. That's OK. You could live your life that way. But you can also take notice of the fact that, you know, somewhere between four and seven percent, some estimates of the people in there are innocent. And some of the other people that are in there just made a mistake. And you don't throw away a life because they made a mistake.

And to see some of these sentences, you know, 50 years, 70 years. And it's not just in California where there was a three strikes rule. To see sentences getting doled out that are de facto life sentences to children. To children. Michael Dawson, Sheldon Johnson was, I think, 17 or had just turned 18. And the guy gets sentenced to 70 years on a first offense. Look, this is a beautiful moment. I don't know if Jamie has a picture. I sent it to him. Like two weeks after Bruce got out, we got word that Sheldon was going to get out and get resentenced. So Bruce said, I want to be there when he walks out.

And, you know, he got all so that is them facetiming me as Sheldon walked out of the gate and J.J. Velasquez is is the other gentleman on the other side of Sheldon J.J. Velas, you know, it took one guy who believed in J.J., this investigative reporter named Dan Slepian, who believed in J.J. amongst many other people that believed in J.J. J.J. now goes into Sing Sing regularly and runs a program there called the Frederick Douglass Project. And he does it with the professor from Georgetown, Mark Howard. And he goes in there and he brings people in from the community to try to show them the humanity that is behind prison walls. There was over 100 years of over-incarceration and wrongful incarceration in that, a century in that picture.

It'd be nice to invite Joe to go in one day. Go in with JJ. We tell JJ, man, we extended the offer to Joe Rogan and his team to come into Sing Sing one day with the Frederick Douglass Project. Come in and meet some guys and see what it's like. We should do that. You know what else we got to do?

I got to take a leak. So let's pause right here. Anybody needs a leak, we'll be right back. All right. Sorry. What's up? So did you find that dude? This corrupt?

Let's pull this guy up. Look at that fuckhead. Queens lawyer convicted of bribing witnesses get 30-month sentence. That's it? That's it. That's it? So that guy put you away for 29 years, and he gets 30 days for being a piece of shit. 30 months, excuse me.

Whatever. And he's done this to countless people. It's incredible. People versus Nathan May, people versus Gary Steadman. He was a prosecutor in all those cases. They all got out, right? They all got out, and all those cases were subsequently overturned. How many cases do you think this guy was involved with that were dirty?

To be honest with you, countless. Because as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney, he has countless lawsuits against him, several allegations against him. How crazy is it they only gave that guy less than three years? Well, look, it's crazy. It's crazy no matter any way you look at it. You know, the thing that gives me some hope in situations like this is the current district attorney in Queens is a woman by the name of Melinda Katz. And she did something pretty extraordinary in this case, which, you know, you have to recognize it when it happens. When the governor is considering someone for clemency, they check with the district

attorney's office where they were convicted. And the Queens County district attorney's office where they were convicted and the Queens County district attorney's office, who is also reinvestigating Bruce's case, its conviction integrity unit is, you know, I mentioned earlier is reinvestigating his case, did not oppose Bruce's grant of clemency. extremely rare in a murder case where an 11-year-old boy was murdered for them to not oppose. So that's, you know, I think that she deserves recognition for that. Her office deserves recognition for that. And what we can hope is that we keep on making believers out of them by presenting cases like Bruce's. You know, people like to make broad generalizations, whether it's police officers, prosecutors. I hate it when people do that about anything. There's good and bad in all professions. And I just think that, you know, when you see people trying to make change happen, even if it doesn't go sometimes at the pace you want it to happen at, as long as it's moving in the right direction, it deserves to be recognized and applauded. So I just wanted to make sure because it's easy to like

see this guy who was a former Queens prosecutor and then, you know, make a dangerous leap that therefore all prosecutors in Queens are bad, which is not the case. Exactly. He just said he just happened to be a bad one that finally got caught. And it was interesting. He didn't get caught until he was a defense lawyer. He became a criminal defense attorney and he got caught bribing witnesses in connection with a defense case. It's kind of ironic, right? Because the other cases that were he was a prosecutor and it got overturned, he was doing the same shit. He didn't just come down with a like a like you come down with a cold like a case of the bribes one day. You know, he wasn't like, oh, this sounds like a good fucking idea.

This is learned behavior. This is the way he learned to work the system, in my humble opinion. And you think there's others like that? I mean, this goes back to the 80s. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's others like that. I mean, it happened in New York with the so-called mob cops, right?

Scarcella. Or how about that guy in Pennsylvania that was sending foster kids to jail? Oh, you're talking about the kids for cash with the private prisons? Yes. Until the young kid killed himself. He was a young up-and-coming wrestler. And he was sent to jail for, I think, pushing his stepfather and cutting school. So they sent him to juvenile.

But what happened was in the private prisons you had to maintain a certain capacity it had to be filled to like 80 capacity and what happened was these judges if they were they were charged with keeping these jails filled right so as long as they kept them filled they got a kickback it's called kids for cash there's a documentary on it. Yeah, I know about it. You know, it just, when Joe asked me, and this happens and there's others like it, I think it goes down, it comes down to this ugly part of human nature

where, you know, I love the quote, absolute power corrupts absolutely. But I also think even a little bit of power can be super dangerous. And, you know, you see it in, you know, all facets of life. People get a little bit of fame, they get a little bit of notoriety, or they get the ability to have influence over someone else. I'll give you an example as it relates to Bruce for people that don't think that this doesn't happen. As soon as Bruce was granted clemency, all over the papers, you know, when a governor grants clemency, it's news. There's people that oppose it because they get, you know, the 60,000000 foot news headline view of it and don't know shit about the facts of the case how could she have done that you know letting a killer out they have no idea about this guy Scarpa about any of the

facts of his case and the people that read those papers are often corrections officers too and just to show you like the final stretch of discipline, I think, for Bruce is, you know, there's good corrections officers that I'd go in and visit Bruce and knew what we were doing and knew what the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice is about and knew that Derek Hamilton used to be in prison and turned his life into basically a mission to help others that have been wrongfully incarcerated or just that need a second chance. And there are others like the CEOs that find out he got granted clemency and don't want to see him go home. That's right. And all of a sudden, he starts getting fucked with by one corrections officer that is baiting him on a constant basis, calling him the worst names you could possibly think of, trying to get Bruce to do something so that it would somehow keep him in jail. And it was happening so often that one time, you know, there was a lot of people involved in the effort to get Bruce out on clemency and legal aid and students. We get 10 a semester. They have a seminar where they come in for two hours a week that we teach in the law school.

disciplines of forensic science, how it goes wrong, what to do if you spot it, whether you're a prosecutor or a defense attorney, how to, if you're a prosecutor, rely on it in a way that does it justice in the name of science, right? There are certain conclusions you can draw about blood spatter. You just can't make ridiculous conclusions like saying what instrument and from what angle and the manner in which it was swung, right? So you get my point. But then they also have 10 hours a week of field work where they come to my office and do work on actual cases. So they worked on Bruce's case, as did, you know, I have a partnership with Jay-Z and his mother. They have the Sean Carter Foundation and we have the Josh Dubin Fellows at the Sean Carter Foundation. They worked on Bruce's case and they wanted to meet Bruce. So they came in and met Bruce, some of them, and some of my students came in.

I hadn't really ever seen Bruce mad, exacerbated. I'd seen him emotional, but never losing his cool. And I came in one day. And when you go to visit someone in a maximum security prison, it's a real ordeal getting in. maximum security prison, it's a real ordeal getting in. And it's really sad. You see families coming in and it's very emotional. Sometimes there's kids with them. And you would think as an attorney or as law students, you might get treated a little different. But you come across the wrong CEO, the wrong corrections officer, yeah, I don't like the way your shirt saying to a female student is a little bit too low or you're not wearing a bra. I mean, it's kind of like, really? That's what you're saying? And take your pockets, pull them out. I want to see the bottom of your feet. In any event, we're waiting to get into the visiting room and all of a sudden there's this loud crash against the door.

It's behind bars. And, you know, all of a sudden there's a lockdown because an inmate punched a female visitor in the face. And, you know, and it was the person that was visiting him. And they were rewinding it on the surveillance as we were waiting so the students were already like wow this is this is some crazy shit and then we get go in the visiting room after they sort of cleared that situation out after 40 minutes or so and bruce came down and you know he's he's as cordial as he is intelligent, which is to say he's always just super, you know, warm and comforting. And two of the students that have worked on his case for quite a while were in the visiting room with me. And he sort of like blew past them and said, I can't take it anymore.

Everywhere I go, every time I see this corrections officer, he is trying to goad me. He is trying to get me to do something. And it was the closest I had seen him to tears because of the prison experience. This guy still works there? Absolutely. And it was during a major lockdown where over 200 incarcerated people at Sing Sing were brutalized. It was so bad that day they locked the prison down for about a week to bring in a special search team. So when we were called for visits, what they would do was they would have an officer come to your cell, get you, handcuff you, and bring you to the visiting room. I get called for a legal visit. Who decides that they want to

be the officer to come and escort me? This officer, John, right, that's had a hard-on for me. For some reason, he comes. So I'm like, oh man, I to visit. Now, this guy is going to handcuff me and take me. So I can't even defend myself because the prison was locked down. In fact, that was a major New York Times article as well. The abuse that took place at Sing Sing in November of last year when they locked the whole prison down. That's the case that Bruce Barquette and Epstein and Marty Tancliff took on. Big article. They came into the prison, shut it down, and began picking certain guys out, cracking ribs, cracking heads open, just abusing guys. So here this guy comes to get me.

I had no idea it was you that was on the visit. But in my mind, I'm saying, I swear I hope it's my lawyer coming to visit me, man, because this guy is taking me. So he's antagonizing me. Hurry up or you won't go on your visit. And just juggling at me, juggling at me. So I'm handcuffed and I'm maintaining my composure. I see a sergeant there. I tell him, listen, man, get your dog off me, man. So the sergeant knew me and he tried to say something to the guy. But the guy, he listened right then and there. En route to the visiting room, he's steady trying to go with me,

trying to pull me out of my character, you know. So it just became so stressful, man. That's why I came that day. I was like, man, I was so glad that it was you that came that day. But I was just glad that he didn't actually put his, because he was on the verge of putting his hands on me. If it was in a, because I was handcuffed. If it was an isolated

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

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

and a lot of them are abusive because you can do that with them and like you talked about power when when you can do things knowing that there'll be no repercussions. Are you aware of the Stanford Prison Experiment? Very much so. Yeah. Where they took the students and they divided them into correction officers and incarcerated people. And what they did was the officers took on, this group of students took on the role of correction officers and these group of students took on the role of prisoners. And it became so intense. I don't know if you're familiar with this it became so intense very much

so the the group of students who were acting as uh playing the role of correction officers became so abusive based on the false sense of power that they literally had to end the study they had to end this they had to stop to stop it. So what is that? This is the part where I start. It goes back to power. Well, yeah, I know. This is the part where it gets me feeling real shitty about humanity. Because you see it even in TSA agents.

You see it in, you know, last night we were going into a place to eat. And I had the audacity to ask again, where do you order from? And the guy was working security at the door. And what a shitty attitude he gave me about it, right? Like, because he's the bouncer and i was like you know five or six years ago i learned i learned the strength in silence and i learned the strength in restraint um because i was you're not gonna fix that guy you don't have to respond right right yeah i mean and i learned to be who he is and i've learned from being around people, you know, like you and you've taught me a lot about, you know, what it means to really listen.

And, you know, sort of impressing upon me how important martial arts is. Right. And just watching you move. You don't feel like you have to peacock your accomplishments in front of it because you have a sense of um your yeah security yeah um knowing who he is watching guys like like james prince um who is so comfortable with the silence um because he doesn't need to show off and i learned that it's the it's the insecure among us. It's the weaker among us that will either abuse the power or pop off. And the more I exercise that restraint and, you know, resist the urge to say something back, the more gratified I feel afterwards. But what bothers me about this power thing, that's fine. I could exercise restraint. It's taken me many years and a lot of therapy to get there,

a lot of introspection. But what does that say about humanity when you have a bunch of kids that are at an Ivy League school, Stanford or an Ivy League school, I think it is, that are at an Ivy League school, Stanford or an Ivy League school, I think it is. And they know they're in an experiment and they're given that taste and then they abuse it. And I see it at the airport with TSA agents. I see it, you know, if you make a kid a safety patrol in an elementary school, it just seems to be something that has to be guarded and approached a lot more a lot more a lot more carefully intentionally and carefully yeah i worked as a security guard when i was 19 at this place called great woods great woods is in mansfield massachusetts like concert place and uh almost immediately everyone on the security team developed this attitude of us versus them

the audience the people that were coming to the show they were all fuckheads they were all they all didn't listen you had to yell at them you had to tell them what to do and there was a culture of doing that and these people behaved almost exactly the way you describe in the stanford prison experiment or you describe with cops in some occasions, these people, they were terrible to these people and it was normal. And I found myself doing it, like yelling at people and stuff. And you realize like, what, what is like, I realized at 19, I was like, what is this weird inclination to like make it us versus them? Like I go to concerts, like I could be them. Like I'm the same, it's the same person. I'm only 19. None of this makes any sense to me. But there was a clear natural pattern of behavior that emerged that emerges in war.

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

So if you're given these jobs, you have this extraordinary responsibility to people that have never developed character. They've never really developed compassion and true empathy for other people and a true understanding of their strength. And they're always trying to puff their chest out. They're always trying to peacock. That's the worst person to ever have that position because now they have this unqualified position of power. They didn't do anything to earn it, but they have it. And they want people to listen. If you don't fucking listen, no, you have to listen.

You have to listen. That's what it is. want people to listen if you don't fucking listen no you have to listen you have to listen that's what it is you have to listen i mean is it is it natural or are they socialized into thinking this is how a correction officer is supposed to act because we've been taught that this is how he acts right we've been taught that a bouncer has to be this way and it's tough and he has to have this attitude of us versus them so i'm not sure if it's tough. And he has to have this attitude of us versus them. So I'm not sure if it's a natural inclination as much as I think we're socializing to believing that. There's that, but then there's also another element. The other element is the person that's in that position of power, particularly police officers, you're dealing with an input of negativity and people lying to you and people committing crimes that's never ending. You want to talk about PTSD. I mean, guys go in combat and they come back with PTSD and we recognized it.

We recognize it. We understand it. We don't think of cops that way. How many cops have PTSD? How many cops are terrified every day, every time they pull someone over? How many cops are deeply ingrained in this blue gang, this us versus them mentality? And you've ever seen the 7-5, that documentary on Michael Dowd?

Yes. Great documentary. You recommended it to me. Holy shit. It's about a super corrupt precinct in New York. Brooklyn. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

It's amazing. It's an amazing documentary. But this guy, first day on the job, witnesses someone get murdered. Witnesses, and they shut the fuck up. They threw a guy out a window. Like, you know, like, you shut the fuck up. And he's like, I guess I shut the fuck up. And, like, this is what we do.

Stealing money from drug dealers. Like, setting up hits. I mean, it was all inside the business. Maybe we have to rethink the way we teach people because I think that, I think it's a combination of what both of you, I think it's innate, unfortunately, in human beings because we're not- But not with everybody. It's innate with people that get unqualified power. That's right. Well, look, maybe there needs to be, Look, maybe there needs to be, there needs to be, not maybe, there needs to be better training of law enforcement. For sure.

Because they need to be, you know, desensitized or sensitized, you know, whatever their background is needs to be taken into consideration. But I couldn't agree with you more. You know, I can't stand when people that are so far left start talking categorically about police officers. What a fucking hard job. And of course, there's great cops out. I mean, you know, so I look, I went through it myself recently teaching. I had done one offs before, but I'd never taught consistently. And I'm looking at these young future lawyers, and they look up to you just because you're the professor. And I had this moment, and it took a lot of work for me, and a lot of therapy, and deep introspection, and a particularly humbling experience for me to really take a long, hard look and say,

who are you, Josh? And who do you want to be? I had always equated vulnerability with weakness, probably my whole life. And I, you know, there's issues tied up with my father and all kinds of shit that sort of led me that way, to thinking that way. And I don't know if I told you this, Bruce, but I had a moment with you actually in public where I had to fight the urge. My instinct told me, don't do this. And then my sort of my new project project of sort of reinventing myself and how I think and sort of having this as close to an awakening as I could have sort of won the day for me and said it's okay you, I had Bruce come to my class at Cardozo Law School and teach four days after he got out. I wanted him to, the students to see the fruits of their labor

because some of them hadn't met him yet. And he came to my class and, you know, like the faculty was cheering when he came in, it was a really a beautiful moment. And he came and sat in front of a group of lawyers. Jamie, I think I sent you a picture of this also. This is an extraordinary moment for me. I, I sat next to him. And I was so overcome with emotion. And I was like, I bit a hole in my bottom lip because I was trying to fight this feeling of guilt that I had for letting this man sit there for four years and I didn't write him back. And I had never addressed it with him. And I apologized to him in front of the class and I just started weeping. Um, and I felt so good that I allowed myself to be vulnerable in front of these students.

And I gotta tell you, I felt a shift in the way they looked at me from that moment. I wanted them to know that it was okay to be vulnerable and that just because I have a quote unquote position of power that they need not look at me as being on some sort of pedestal. I started sitting sometimes in class so I could be at eye level with them because I read a lot about being a young father, how sometimes just getting on a knee and being at eye level with an adolescent changes the dynamic when you are trying to teach them or discipline them.

And it was like a great moment moment i felt more like a man in that moment more like a man a strong man in that moment than i have you know and many other times in my life when i thought i was being cool or really filling some insecure void in me yeah you know and and that's something that i've learned Dealing with guys like Derek Bruce a lot of other exonerees. This is a big strong man, right? and He's one of the more vulnerable people I've met Authentic allows himself to cry when the feelings come over him allows himself to cry when the feelings come over him. I've seen you do it. You know,

it's the strong and secure among us that I think you're, there's a long way of saying I agree with you. That I think if we teach our kids more, that just because someone is in a position of power doesn't make them better or more commanding. And if you are ever put in that position of power You remember what it's like to be on the other side of it I really go to great lengths to try to do that with my children with my students. Am I perfect at it? No way I'm trying though and maybe you know the more we we do that with How great is it when a police officer helps you? You know, it feels great. I had some help with the ATM car, remember?

On my first day coming and taking the train. Right. The cop came over and said, you need some help with that, buddy? I said, yeah. And you had every reason not to want to trust him. Of course. It wasn't, it was your MTA card to get on the subway. Yeah.

Because when he was before he was in there was no mta cars or tokens yeah it's it's hard it's it's hard to get your shit together and there's no guidebook it's why it's why one of the things before i came home one of the things that josh said to me he says what's the one thing that I can do for you that I can help you with? And I thought about it, and I said, the most important thing is therapy. I need a therapist because, like you said, PTSD, right?

The trauma that we experience from being kidnapped for 20-something years. The trauma that you experience from being kidnapped for 20 something years, the trauma that you experience from being behind prison walls and being dehumanized and and being labeled the number for decades as opposed to being a human. Right. See, it's easy to dehumanize. First, they dehumanize you. Right. And they take that from you and then you begin to internalize that and feel this way about yourself feel like you're less than so i asked josh i said therapy and um and i think that kind of surprised you when i said that it did um it surprised me in that um it knew it surprised me and it didn't um i think Bruce is a highly evolved person, especially considering the circumstances. But your emotional intelligence is such that it shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did.

But it's very rare for me, just in my own experience, for people to get exonerated or serve long prison sentences to recognize that they need that. I mean, for me, it's had such a profound impact on my life to have a person to speak to that understands how the human mind works and what human psychology is. Some people don't believe in therapy. I'm a strong believer, and if you get the right therapist and you're willing to take that journey, you know, it can be – I feel like it's like going to the gym for your mind, like the feeling that you get after you go to the gym and you feel like that release of endorphins and whatever else gets released,

which I'm sure Joe knows way better than I do. But, you know, I just feel that way from my mind. And being able to trace back sort of like where my trauma comes from. And, you know, we all have trauma as human beings. It's been, you know, it surprised me, but it didn't. I'm grateful that you, you know, entrusted me to help you with it. grateful that you, you know, entrusted me to help you with it. And I think that, you know, more people that, you know, we read these stories about the wrongfully incarcerated. And they seem like feel good stories, right? But the sad truth is that the vast majority of my clients that get out struggle terribly. When they get out. There's just no way

to undo the psychological and psychiatric damage. You could hope to keep it in check, but, you know, the vast majority of them struggle really terribly with PTSD, social anxiety, social anxiety general anxiety difficulty sleeping difficulty trusting and a whole litany of issues that was why it was so great to see you just out

last night smiling and you know you had a couple of top of the line comedian them guys deserve to be on have their own show them guys are funny man you know

that was good, man. At least I didn't ask you what the guy says. Oh, you got to take him to a strip club. At least the average guy that comes out, he normally says, what's the first thing they ask for? Man, you got to take me to a strip joint, man. Yeah, it was like the person will remain nameless, but I was like, nah. I was like, actually.

That sounds like Tony Hinchcliffe. Nah, I couldn't say who it was. But I was like, actually, nah. Not only do I not want to go there because I find them to be sad places with, you know, girls that probably have a lot of trauma. But more importantly, he doesn't want to go there. You know, and he was explaining to me it was interesting he had dinner with someone that had gotten out recently and he said this guy reeked of the penitentiary and I don't want to

give off that vibe I have a chance second chance to reinvent myself and I just think it just speaks volumes about him not that he should be like applauded for not wanting to go to a strip club right when he gets out some people want to do that and that's cool I don't begrudge them sisters gotta make their dollars too sisters gotta make their dollars too

also you're still on this path of improvement you're out but now you're on a more free path of improvement. Yes. You're out, but now you're on a more free path of improvement. And why divert that? That's right. And like I said, you know, I made a decision that prison wasn't going to define who I was, nor what I can become.

So, you know, once you begin that process and you say, I want to take this particular path, you got to go all the way with it. And I'm one of them guys, once I'm in, I path. You got to go all the way with it. And I'm one of them guys, once I'm in, I'm in. I'm going all the way with it. Because once you begin to really reflect and you become aware of how you've been duped by the system and how the system was designed to continue to do that and to create this permanent underclass, because that's what it does, right? It creates a permanent underclass, because that's what it does, right? It creates a permanent underclass.

So you've got a group of formerly incarcerated guys who, many of them still dealing with dyslexia. They can't read, can't get educated. Many of them are still dealing with barriers towards getting a decent job. A lot of them can't go back to the housing projects because, you know, if you're convicted from projects, oftentimes they won't even allow you back there to live, to reside there. Really? Yeah.

So now you have to find housing somewhere, and you're limited to a menial job with a lack of education. Do you know Jelly Roll? You know the musician Jelly Roll? No. Fantastic guy. Got arrested for armed robbery when he was 15.

Wound up doing time, gets out, turns his life around, becomes this mega huge artist. I mean, he just won. He does, like, some of his music is country, some of his music is hip-hop. It's like country hip-hop. I'm familiar. It's all kinds.

His voice is sensational. And he's such a good dude. Such a good dude. Just a salt of the earth person. He couldn't buy this house that he wanted. I mean, this is a guy who won three country music awards just this year. He came. It was in Austin.

He came to the mothership that night on cloud nine because he wins these awards, comes to see Ron White, and then finds out that this house that he thought he was buying, he can't buy now because he's a felon. Are you serious, man? They won't let him in the community. It's a gated community on a golf course, his beautiful house, his dream house.

This guy's been out for a long time. He's been a productive member of society. Not just productive, but he's a massive celebrity and a great guy. Like, you would want him as your neighbor. Yeah, it breaks my heart to hear stuff like that. He was convicted at 15, huh? At 15. He's a grown-ass man.

And it wasn't him carrying the gun with somebody else he was there the whole thing was a disaster hanging out with the wrong kids young and dumb not raised well you know this is like he tells a story about his childhood it's it's horrific he's just he's a guy who pulled himself out and then there's people who still don't want to believe just meet the guy just meet. He's got tattoos all over his face. You know, people get weirded out by him. Yeah. Just go listen to this motherfucker's voice.

Is he singing in this? This is the Ryman, right? He's playing in Nashville at the fucking Grand Ole Opry. The man is amazing. Get it, Jelly Roll. I love it. But a great guy. Unbelievable.

Like, you would want him in your community. So this is underscoring the point that we made earlier, right? It should not take being wrongfully incarcerated for Bruce Bryan to realize his potential. It shouldn't take wrongful incarceration for Derek Hamilton and the scores of other people that realize their potential. There should be opportunities as their children. Right. If you give people a path and they learn during that path that it feels good to improve and grow, that is like the most important thing you can teach a child. That you want to be lost, don't do anything.

If you want to be depressed, don't do anything. That's right. But if you find something that you really love and you do it and you pursue it and you get better at things, you get better at being a person, you get better at all things. And there's a great value in that and it's difficult and it's it has to be difficult because if you don't struggle you don't grow and no one teaches people that no one teaches kids that no one teaches that there's a there there's a beneficial kind of struggle and you have to like become disciplined and you have to become you have to have a mindset of improvement and you have to understand that you are very blessed to be a human being that's existing in this incredible time, 2023, and you live in America.

Go get it. And somebody needs to guide people. They need to be there. You need real mentorship. You need hope. You need a place where someone can go when shit's fucked. You need real guidance. It can go when shit's fucked. You need, like, real guidance. It can be done.

It can be done. Look, I have, it's like, my mom was my hero in ways in which mothers can be heroes to kids. But for me, it was something additional. We go into the community. She was a fourth grade teacher and she taught kids that had you know education or special needs um you know learning disabilities and she we would run into to her former students and they'd come up to her with a tear in their eye um or give her a hug and a kiss and say they called her doobie all her kids called you know my last name can be doobage doobie doobs people used to play with it a lot

with my mama was you know all her students called Dubie. You saved my, you know, you changed my life. So I always have had deep reverence for teachers. And I had this experience with my son where he, I think he was in kindergarten or pre, he might have been in like pre-K. And here I am a civil rights attorney and i remember him coming home in pre-k you're like four and he's telling me about martin luther king getting killed um and i remember thinking to myself that's god that's so so young for him to be learning about death. And isn't this too young?

And I had a great rapport with his teacher. This really awesome guy named Olu Bala. It's still at the elementary school where my son went. And I went and spoke to him about it. And he pulled me down the hall. And he said, Listen, I've been watching the way African-American men have been treated my whole life. You know, he's an African-American man, and he said,

my whole life. You know, he's an African-American man. And he said, and the only way I know how to try to write this is to help create different human beings. You know, a different kind of human beings that understands empathy young.

And then I read the book that they were reading and it was so fucking appropriate. And I felt really idiotic in that moment, because everything, the way that he articulated it to me was, you know, I want them to understand now that difference is beautiful and to be celebrated, just as I know you teach them at home. And that stuck with me. I mean, my son's 11 now. This is, you know, seven years ago.

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

Right. So, yeah, there's something that we can all do. Having children and bringing a human being into the world, that should be such a sacred thing. So I feel like I get my advice that I get on parenting is from people that are sometimes younger than me but had kids earlier. You know, like some of the best parenting advice I got was from Andre Ward. He's 10 years younger than me, but he had teenage kids when my kids were babies.

And I just loved to watch him as a father. But it's another great example. That's a guy who's gone through the fire, right? This is a guy who's developed character through struggle and through accomplishment. Right. And that's why he's that guy. And sports is one of the great ways to do that, especially combat sports. The problem is, there's also the downsides of it, the people that don't make it, the people that get brain damaged, the people that get fucked up. There's that too.

That's real. You know, it's not a fucking 100% path if you choose combat sports. But if you do choose combat sports and you become an Andre Ward, that's an exceptional human being. That's a guy who won world titles with one arm. Yeah. Not only that, but, you know, was from the worst possible situation in the worst circumstances with you know parents that had real struggles a Biracial kid that you know was like

sometimes very confused about you know his where he fit in and You know, that's why I like to surround myself with people like him because he's just you know he's a beautiful parent he's a beautiful husband you know and he does so many great things even his response when Canelo knocked out Kovalev and they offer him a big-money fight with Canelo while he's still in his athletic prime this is like I think I serve boxing better as a commentator this is a guy you, you know, they'll probably throw millions of dollars at him. Millions and millions of dollars. Many, many, many, many, many millions.

Probably the biggest payday of his career. And he's like, you know what? I think I did it. I'm done. I won gold medal in the Olympics. I won two division world champion. That's it. Undefeated. That's it. Takes a lot of... That's an incredible character. It's a guy that's grounded, man.

Yeah. But, you know, there's no growth without pain. Right. Growth comes with pain. Yeah. Comes with struggle. And that's with anything. They tell you that in physical condition, right?

No pain, no gain. Right. You got to rip that muscle when you're living that steel. You can't think you're going to live an easy life and that life's going to be exemplary. It's not going to be. that's the deal you can't think you're gonna live an easy life and that life's gonna be exemplary it's not going to be that's right see my my question for you bruce is you know having been out three and a half weeks four weeks um are you um are you feeling overwhelmed not at all i'm feeling good i'm feeling great i'm here with you and and Joe Hogan. We just spent a comedy night last night.

I got a good laugh. Last night, if anybody met you, they would have never guessed in a million years. You just look like a dude who's seen his friend, haven't seen your friend in a while, out having a good time, big smiles all around. Nobody would have guessed. Three and a half weeks ago, you were incarcerated. No one. The way you handle yourself is incredible. I appreciate that, man.

It's incredible. The way you handle yourself is incredible. I appreciate that, man. It's incredible. The lack of bitterness, just the sheer joy that you have just interacting with people, you know, it's amazing. Life is about relationships, man. If I can sum it up in one word, it would be quality relationships. And that's what life is about.

And you can't build those relationships being bitter. Bitterness only consumes you yeah right you know there's that there's a study that came out recently i won't i'll get it wrong if i try to attribute a source but there was a study that came out recently about longevity and happiness who lives the longest and who lives the happiest lives. And it's the people that have close personal relationships. Right. Have you read about this? And yeah, that's hit home for me, you know, lately more than anything is that having a few good quality people around you, it just makes you, it propels you forward. People that are happy for your success, that propels you forward, not looking to, you know, tear you down. Which brings us back to

these communities that have been just immersed in violence and crime forever. You know, there was a guy we had on way back in the day who was a cop in Baltimore. And one of the things they found while he was on the job was a docket. It was a list of crimes that were committed in 1976. It was all the same crimes in all the same areas. And this just feeling of futility, just this feeling of wash. What are we doing? What is this? This is insane.

This is not fixing anything. This is not, you're not making it better. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about that in one of his books. I don't know if it was Outliers or one of his books about that. It might have been David and Goliath. Yeah, maybe it was that. And he talked about Baltimore specifically, about how it's the same point you made earlier,

that the vast majority of the prison population in New York comes from the same seven neighborhoods. So we know what the problem is. Look, maybe the best thing to come out of today for me personally is the fact that in times where I feel like, is it enough? It is enough. This show is enough. I mean, doing this work brings you into a community of people. And I would encourage folks listening to this that get sort of intimidated or like, I don't know anything about that. You'll find a community of just great people. That's right. That want to help. That's right. somehow, you know, was referred to him to take headshots of Derek and I for the opening of our center. And his style is that he gets to know you and talk to you as he's photographing you.

And he was so moved by the work and just meeting, I think it was really meeting Derek, right? That, you know, he kept in touch with me and said, I have this great idea for a project that I want to do. As you get people out, when you find out you're going to get them out, I'd like to go interview them in prison, and then capture sort of the contrast between them being inside and then them getting out. So it seemed pretty ambitious to me because most prisons aren't letting some photographer in with a film crew to film people. And he was super persistent and, um, you could see how inspired he was to do it. And his agent told me, you know, I've never seen him this dedicated to something. And you speak to the guy, and he's sort of infectious in his humility.

You know, there's something special about him. So I floated the idea to Bruce, and was like yeah I mean you know let me meet him mm-hmm so he's now embarked on creating a documentary about Bruce and our first three releases so he sent me a trailer to this documentary that he's working on with Bruce and I think it's a good sort of summary of what we've been talking about. Would you mind if I show it to you? I don't know if you're familiar with the parable, the dandelion and the wild orchard.

Well, the wild orchard, it only thrives and grows in a particular environment, right? A dandelion can thrive in just about any environment. So sometimes there's snow outside, and the snow will melt, and you see a dandelion just coming through the grass or the crack in the concrete. So I decided that I had to be that dandelion. I was going to thrive despite where I was at. When they took him, they took me. So, I get them back.

Whether you're guilty or not, you still want to honor the potential of that life that was lost. Despite being not guilty, incarceration was always in some way trying to honor the potential of Travis Levy. You gotta be there to support him no matter what. He deserves everything that's gonna be coming to him. You think I'm walking? I'm waiting for you to walk with me. I want you to walk with me. I want you to love me. I want you to love me. Hugging my sisters and brothers, hugging my mother and seeing my mother is going to be the joy of my life.

And seeing them is going to be the joy of my life, right? Mommy! Mommy! He said anytime he was called, he'd say, Mommy! Hi, baby. Hey! Man, I can't even describe it. I'm so happy.

I'm so happy. I'm so happy. I'm so happy. I'm so happy. I'm so happy. I'm so happy. I'm so happy. I'm so happy.

I'm so happy. I'm so happy. I'm so happy. I'm so happy. I'm so happy. Man, I can't even describe it. I'm excited. I feel the love and the support and I'm just free. No cuffs on, I feel free. I feel like a load was lifted off of my shoulder. Like, I can relax now. I realize that a lot of times I've been tense, my shoulders are up, but they just were able to just drop down.

Without me even acknowledging it or realizing it, it just dropped down and I was just so happy to see her and my mother. So yes, I have tremendous regrets. I also have to see her and my mother. So yes, I have tremendous regrets. The course of my life, I've learned that I can have those regrets and still love what I see when I look in the mirror because I've done the work to become better than I was yesterday. I'm still able to live and do and be better and more than I was before so I

accept my regrets and I still love what I see when I look in the mirror and I try to just live these day better and do better right because if you want more you got to be more just those quotes right there so powerful whoo that's a tearjerker it's amazing yeah this is the trailer and when will this whole thing come out it's a it's a work in progress you know for those of you that want to help look there's a GoFundMe for Bruce Bryan it's interesting. You saw the T disappear at the end.

I always knew him as Bruce Bryant with a T at the end. That's not his name. That was the name the prison gave him. They added a T. That was why it disappears at the end. So there is no more Bruce Bryant. That was the prison version of him. He has an Instagram.

It's at bruce.bryan24. On his Instagram, we will have a link to his GoFundMe. He has any little bit helps. Bruce is trying to get back on his feet. There's his gofundme um so you know and for those of you that want to get involved in any way i try to answer as many of your messages as i can i have a lot more help now because we have the center um but you know whether it's writing to the district attorney of Alameda County, Pamela Price, reaching out to Bruce and making a donation on his GoFundMe page, even just dropping him a nice line. So many of the people that were there the day he got released, you know, it's almost like hanging around with you where you never know if there's going to be someone interesting hanging around.

We were talking to one of the comedians last night. He's like, I'll be hanging out with someone and not know that they mapped the human genome. That was Brian. I'm bringing some weird people to that green room. It was the same thing like on the day of Bruce's release. I would see these people and say, how do you know Bruce? Oh, he reached out to me because he saw he read an article about the work I do or I reached out to him because I read an article about him. is that he is somebody that holds on to relationships and good people, and those good people will continue to get him through.

I just can't thank you enough for giving us, again, this platform, and I vowed that every time I come on, I'm going to have a new person to hopefully inspire people and keep telling these stories until the grains of sand on the beach start to keep on build. And maybe we'll be on here talking about a new community center in Brownsville

or a program that we start to help teach kids a different way. Well, we're not going to stop. Well, I can't tell you how every time I come on here, I try not to tell myself that's the last time I'm crying. But thank you so much for having us. It's my pleasure. Allowing us to tell these stories, it's just really important.

Yeah, listen, I never anticipated in a million years that this podcast would be anything remotely close to what it is and if i can take what that is that platform and use it to highlight things like what you're doing and what you've done i mean there's nothing nothing nothing more important. Thank you so much, Joe, man. Thank you. Nothing more important than what you're doing, getting this voice out, you know, giving us a voice to share with the people, inspiring and encouraging people to get involved, man.

Contributing to humanity, man, because it's going to take all hands on deck. Yeah, I think you're right. You know, the best of us got to help inspire the rest yeah i think you're right you know the best of us got to help inspire the rest of us and you're one of the best of us man just like josh's man you guys are some of the best of us and it's going to take y'all to inspire the rest of us and you know you got a team player here man i think what we're talking about when we talk about community we're talking about having people in your life that inspire you and having people in your life that you admire.

This is also a part of that community, this podcast, all these podcasts. They're a part of people's lives. Even if they don't know anybody like that, where they are, they're filled with despair. They're in a place of no hope. You still know now that it's out there. That's right. It's out there. And the reality is we need each other.

We need each other. What are we if not but for the collective? We're nothing. We're nothing. I mean, no one knows more than you when you get put in a hole. Yeah. It's the worst thing they could do to you. No one knows more than you when you get put in a hole.

It's the worst thing they could do to you. I mean, you're locked up with murderers and convicts, and the worst punishment they could give you is leave you alone. You're a beautiful man, Joe, really. So are you. So are you. Both you guys. I just want to extend my gratitude, man, and just, you know, my oceans of gratitude to you, man, the deepest appreciation for.

I have the deepest appreciation for you, too. It's my pleasure. Hopefully this is just the beginning and we can continue to do. A hundred percent. More work. And Josh and I will be back at the comedy club again. We need some laughs. All this crying, we need to get some more laughs.

We got to get Domeni to do a set. Yeah, do some magic up there. I think also it's like, you know, these conversations are infectious. They're contagious. And they spread. And people understand things now that they didn't understand before. Trust me, these conversations that we had. Some people have very callous views of things that don't affect them personally.

And this gives them an opportunity to see things in a very different way. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Let's wrap this up before we cry. Again.

More. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Thank you.