The Joe Rogan Experience - #2475 - Andrew Jarecki

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

Andrew Jarecki is a filmmaker, musician, entrepreneur, and documentarian. His latest documentary, “The Alabama Solution,” co-directed with Charlotte Kaufman, is available to stream on HBO Max and other digital platforms.www.thealabamasolution.com Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Go to https://surfshark.com/rogan or use code ROGAN at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! Get a free welcome kit with your first subscription of AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/joerogan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joe Rogan podcast, checking out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. What's happening, man? I'm good. How are you? I'm great. I watched your documentary, the Alabama solution last night, and it was wild.

It's very, very disturbing. I'm kind of shocked I hadn't heard more about it. You know, because it's such a terrible, terrible story. It's such an unbelievably awful city. situation. And I think you covered it really well. It's very, very heartbreaking. Yeah, thanks for watching it. Yeah, it's sort of a question of, sort of a question of why people don't know about things that are happening with our tax dollars in our backyards. You know, are there things that we don't want to know? There's a reason why people sort of drive by prisons

on the highway and they see the little metal sign and it says, you know, XYZ correctional. And they I probably think, as I did for many years, well, I'm sure it's not great back there, but it doesn't need to be great. And if anything terrible was happening back there, somebody probably tell me about it. But because of the secrecy that surrounds prisons, you know, we treat them sort of like black sites. There's no way for us to really look inside. So the press doesn't get lit in and the public doesn't understand what's happening. And we know that, you know, when you give people total control over other people, bad things happen. Bad things happen every single time.

And this is one of the worst things. What's really terrifying is the sheer numbers of people that died there with no investigation. That's what's really terrifying. Yeah. Because, you know, you even detailed at the end, like, since then, how many people have died. And it's just like, good Lord. You're thousands. Yeah.

Well, there's an attorney general in Alabama named Steve Marshall, who's always run on like tough on crime strategies and saying, you know, we got to lock more people up and people who are in prison for violent crime should potentially never get out of prison, ever. And he says in the film, as you remember, that they're, I ask him about the nature of crime. And he says, well, I think there are evil people in this world, people who have absolutely no regard for human life. And this is a guy who's presided over a system that's killed that's led to the deaths of 1,500 people just since we started making the film. Right.

So this question of like who are the good guys and who are the bad guys and, you know, what's the nature of cruelty? What's the nature of punishment? Are we putting people there to try to make them better, rehabilitate them? Or are we putting them there because they're drug addicts and we're trying to get rid of them as opposed to rehabilitate them or as opposed to try to get them off of drugs? So obviously prisons have become pretty much a catch-all for the ills of society. So if you have mental illness, much more likely to go to prison.

Once you're in prison, if you're mentally ill or you have bad social skills, you're much more likely to get into a scrape with a guard who probably isn't trained to deal with somebody who's mentally ill. And you're much more likely to get murdered, which is what we saw happening in Alabama. Well, you even, it's the old expression, who's going to watch the watchers, right? Because one of the things that you detail is very obviously nonviolent people who spend all their time writing and reading and they're getting retribution because they're calling attention to the terrible conditions at the prison. So the one guy with glasses who was beaten blindly, what was his name? Robert Old Counsel. I mean, there's so many stories that you show. in this documentary from smuggled cameras.

So these guys all get contraband cameras from the guards. From the guards. Yeah, the guards sell the cameras, sell the phones to the men inside. Which is also crazy. Yeah. I mean, there's so many drugs in the Alabama state prison system. And I spoke to one of the people who was incarcerated there early on on a contraband cell phone. And I said, you know, where all the drugs coming from?

The amount of drugs here. This is incredible, you know, humans. In wasteland, you're seeing just high, high percentage, maybe 80% of the people are addicted to drugs, many of whom were not addicted to drugs before they came in. And how are you getting all the cell phones? And the guy looked at me like I was, you know, stupid. And he said, you know, we don't leave, right? And I thought, oh, I get it.

The people that come and go are the guards. Those are the ones that go out. They get the packages. They bring them in. And I've spoken to guards who said, you know, we make. $36,000 a year without the drugs, without the cell phones. So, of course, we got to sell the cell phones and the drugs because that takes us up to $70,000 or $75,000. Oh, God.

Yeah. So what are the main drugs these guys are addicted to? What are they getting them? Well, there's originally, right, it was sort of more traditional drugs and people were using heroin and using whatever they could get a hold of. but as the drugs have gotten more complicated and easier to bring in. Now they can actually put, there's a drug called flaco, which is a very significant problem there, fentanyl, obviously also. But these drugs can be brought in on a piece of paper. So somebody could send you a letter and it could be in the letter.

They can actually put the drug into the paper. Oh, sort of like acid when they put acid on paper. Yeah. And so, you know, there's this effort to kind of start. stop that, but then does it lead to people being unable to communicate with their loved ones? Ultimately, the easiest way to get the drugs is for the officers to sell the drugs. And so, you know, we say, and I think it's sadly true, that the Alabama Department of Corrections, and it's not just in Alabama, but obviously we use that as the lens through which we saw

incarceration more generally. But the Alabama Department of Corrections is the largest law enforcement agency in the state of Alabama, and it's also the biggest drug dealing operation. You know, you're much more likely to die of an overdose inside the prison than you are out on the street and out. Really? Statistically? Yeah.

Oh, my God. Oh, boy. You know, one of the things that is, what was very heart-wrenching is this callous approach, you showed at the one time where all these prisons went on strike. So they all communicated with each other through these contraband cell phones. They all got from the guard. So I guess it's ubiquitous throughout the state. It's not just this one.

Correct. And these people on the radio were like, well, it's prison. It's supposed to suck. You know, maybe if they had saw your film, they wouldn't have such a cavalier attitude about it. Yeah. It's that attitude. It's like these are human beings and some of them barely did anything. Like one guy that wound up dying from.

you think they did something to, or they think they did something to a cigarette that they gave this guy. All he did was break into an abandoned building. Yeah. He didn't steal anything? Entering an unoccupied building. Yeah. His name is James. I mean, I don't even know if he broke in, right?

It was unoccupied. It might have even been open. Yeah, it said entering. So he entered a building that he wasn't supposed to enter, and he got 15 years in a cage. And then on his way out, the, at least they're inferring that they killed him because he had too much information about what was going on inside and he was going to get out.

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promotions are available both in store and online, though some may vary. When West Jet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Yeah, this goes back to the story of a woman who we had met and her son when we were first communicating with the men using these contraband cell phones. And they were telling us what was going on inside the prison, inside the various prisons.

We sort of, in the early days, we couldn't believe it. Because the way we got into the prisons to begin with is I had gone down to Alabama because I was always interested in incarceration. the problems of that system and the justice system. I made other films about the justice system. And I was always curious about Alabama because it's sort of famously maybe the worst prison system in the country, but it mirrors a lot of others. And my daughter was 14 at the time, Jeremy, and she said, you know, I'm reading this book by a guy named Anthony Ray Hinton, and it's a book about his wrongful imprisonment in Alabama.

And maybe you should read this with me. So we end up reading the book together. And then we both sort of just spontaneously decided to take a road trip to Montgomery because we just didn't know anything about it had never been there. She was growing up in New York and it was just not in her frame of reference. So we went down there and we met a man who was the first black prison chaplain in the state of Alabama, Chaplain Browder. And I said, well, I'm really curious about what's going on in the prisons.

And he said, well, you should just come in with me. And I said, well, I'm a filmmaker. They're not going to let me just walk into the prison in Alabama. And he said, well, just don't come in as a filmmaker. You just don't have to bring a camera. Just come in and talk to some of the guys. So I went into film. Ultimately, we were allowed to film ultimately in one of the prisons.

And when we were in there to film this revival meeting, just because we were lucky enough to find a warden who felt like, you know, he wanted to show an example of how Christianity was, active and important in the prison system, which I agreed with. But then while we're in there filming with like five cameras, which was just unheard of, the men inside couldn't believe that there were any cameras in there. And they started taking us aside and saying, listen, what they're showing you here is a very curated version of what's going on in this prison. You have to get into these other buildings. You've got to see what's going on in that dorm over

there called the behavior modification dorm where guys have been killed by guards. And you've got to look in that dorm where people have been in solitary confinement for five years at a time. You know, don't let them show you just what they want to show you. And I felt much safer, you know, even though the warden had said to us when you go in there, you know, don't talk to any of the men. They're all very dangerous. I immediately felt safer talking to the inmates than I did talk to any of the guards. And when we left, it was really because we got kicked. out, right? We start, you saw in the beginning of the film, we sort of start getting nosy, and we start trying to look in some of these other areas, and then they shut down the

filming, they throw us out. And then we thought, well, you know, maybe we're stuck now. How are we going to make a film about this? We feel we have to because we're the only people that know what's going on in here, but they're not going to let us back. So it was then that we found out that there was this network of men inside who had access to these contraband cell phones who were documenting what was going on. So that was. was our way of getting into those buildings that we couldn't see inside. And one of the first things we learned was one of one of the guys inside Melvin Ray texted us to say, hey, you know, this, this, this guard, it was a guard that we had been tracking already who was a particularly violent guard.

He just beat somebody very badly and he's now that person, the victim is at UAB Hospital. So we jumped in a car and we went to UAB Hospital. I just walked up. I just put my iPhone in my pocket, and we just walked up to the intensive care unit. And when we got there, we found that this young man, Stephen Davis, had died from his injuries. And as we started to get deeper into it, we went and visited his mother, because we didn't even know if she knew that she had lost her son. But in fact, she had been with him when he passed away. She had sort of turned off the life support.

And we said, we wanted to do. to make a film about this. We're trying to tell the story. And she immediately said, I'm in. I want to help you. I don't want this to happen to any other mothers. You know, and this is a very nice white lady from Uniontown, Alabama with an oxygen tank. I mean, she's she's not somebody that you would see ordinarily as kind of a heroic person. But when she loses her son, she really becomes so activated and she ends up telling us the story. And then she says, look, you know, they're lying to me already. You know, my son just died last night and they're already calling me and telling me things about how he was the one that attacked guards. And none of this is true. This all seems like

it's fake. So teach me how to record my phone calls, you know. So this older woman suddenly became a really important partner in making the film. And this gets back to your question about Stephen Davis. So her son, who was a drug addict, right, didn't kill anybody, but was in a car when a drug deal went bad. He went to try to buy drugs and his friend went in the house and they had a fight and somebody got shot. And then he got arrested and was charged with murder because that's how the felony murder statute works. And so here you have a drug addict who goes to prison in Alabama and is in the highest security prison there and is targeted by a particular. guard who is especially violent and it's just beaten to death in front of 70 witnesses. And then, of course, as we go through the film, we start tracking that in our investigation and

we start looking into the cover up and why they lied about how he had died and how they scrambled the witnesses and how the Department of Corrections is organized so that they prevent people from finding out what really happened to their kids or their loved ones and they avoid liability and so on. And there was one person that we ended up hearing from, this guy, James Sales, who originally tells just the police side of the story, just says, well, you know, yeah, it's exactly the way that the guard said. But then he kind of hints on the phone, listen, when I get out of here, I'll tell the real story. Now, do they have access to these communications? Is there a way they could be hacking into it and known that Sales had said that to you?

Well, the person that he said it to was the lawyer for Sandy Ray. So he was supposed to be on a private attorney call. But we do think that the Department of Corrections doesn't abide by that. I think they do listen to attorney calls. Sales didn't say exactly on the phone what he was going to say. But I think they knew that he was a problem because he was a good person. I mean, sales, the one who entered an unoccupied building. and was locked up for 15 years for that, was obviously a decent person. That's why he says, you know, when I get out, I'll speak to that. I'm not going to lie to that man's mother. But right now, this is their world, bro. I'm not going to say more. I'm not going to put myself on the house right. But just by saying that might have been his death sentence.

He also, as he started to get closer to getting out, you know, because he was killed a month before he was going to get. out. And so as he started getting closer to release, he just started to get more frustrated and more angry and started to say things to guards about, like, you know, you know what I've seen in here. And then, lo and behold, he gets found in his cell dead. And, you know, he's bleeding from orifice is in his body. And it was pretty clear that he was given what they call a hot shot, which is they give you a cigarette that's got something bad. on it and it can kill you. Boy.

So when you first started, when you first showed up with cameras, did you know basically what was going on? Do you have an understanding of what was going on? Like, what were you attempting to do when you got there? Were you just going to try to investigate and figure it out? Or did you already have reports? We already, we knew a bunch of stuff. You know, we knew because we had this, this, we had visited some prisons.

as volunteers. And I had gone on the death row with my filmmaking partner, Charlotte Kaufman. We had gone into Easterling. We had gone originally into Holman prison where they have the death row. And we went in there with the chaplain. And the lieutenant came down and said, you know, unfortunately, we're so understaffed right now, which is an understatement, that, you know, we don't have anybody to take you around. But, you know, Chaplain, I know you want to show your friends around the death row, so, you know, just go for it. So we ended up walking around the death row for like two or three hours just talking to men. And those men were very helpful. They weren't, you know, we weren't talking to irrational people. We weren't

talking to, you know, there are people who were trying to get the story out. And so we knew going in that there were a lot of bad things happening. We didn't know exactly what. And then when we went into Easterling and the men started calling us aside and saying, you know, they beat me so bad I defecated on myself or, you know, I just saw there were five stabbings this week and none have been reported. We started to realize that it was really a huge crisis, but it was just being kept secret. This episode is brought to you by Surf Shark. With the help of AI, scammers are getting smarter every day. Sending emails that look legit but are designed to steal your data, passwords, and money. If you want to stay protected, you got to check out Surfshark.

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So it's crazy that you're relying on these guards to get in the phones that they're using to expose the crimes of the guards. So and it's like the guards are aware of the phones because they provided them to the inmates and they're contrabanded. They're not supposed to have them, but yet they all do. And so they have to ignore it if they want to keep selling them phones? Well, another way of looking at it is that there's so little accountability that they don't actually think they're going to get in trouble for anything. And they're kind of right. Right. And if you remember that that guard who kills Stephen Davis, Rod Gadsden, who's, you know, this guy might be the most violent prison guard in America.

He's still working in the Alabama state prison system. After he's a starring role against his will. sure, but after he has a starring role in our documentary, which has been seen by millions of people, they still have him employed there. They still have him interacting with people. And he got hired to a higher position. Yeah, yeah. He's been promoted twice and now he's up for another promotion. So I think to some extent the guards just say, well, you know, I can do whatever I want. I can sell the cell phones. And by the way, not all the guards are bad, right? There are guards that we met there who were pretty heartbroken because they went into the system, hoping,

to make change or trying to, maybe they wanted to work in the police department and there weren't any jobs. But in their town, they had the ability to work in a prison. So they kind of went in there and described to us that they wanted to help people with addiction. They wanted to see if they could help rehabilitate people. But when they got in there, they realized very quickly that was not what was in the offing. That wasn't an opportunity for them. So the guy, this Roger guy that beat Stephen to death, the story was that Stephen had some

sort of an implemented weapon, correct? Yeah, that he had a plastic knife. Right. Was there any evidence of that? He had some kind of like a, some kind of plastic thing that he had made. It did not appear to be anything very serious because the reason he had made it is because somebody had called him gay and you have to fight your way out of that, right? He wasn't gay, as it turns out. You have to fight your way out of that?

So if somebody called you gay, you have to fight them? Yeah. In other words, you can't put up with that because otherwise they're going to turn you into what they call a sissy. They're going to turn you into somebody that gets raped. And there's so much rape in the prison that the DOJ report that came out said that there's rape occurring at all hours of the day and night in all areas of the prison. So rape is such a significant problem. And when Stephen Davis was in there and was accused of being gay, he had to make a show of fighting the person that. was calling him gay. He never went after the guards or anything like that. And everybody that

the lawyer spoke to, a dozen witnesses who had seen what happened, all of them said he, as soon as the guards came in, he immediately lay down on the floor and put his weapon about 15 feet away from him, put this plastic knife 15 feet away. And then the guards came in and just started beating him, even though there was no threat. And the guards would say, Gadsen was saying to Stephen Davis, you know, quit resisting, quit resisting. And he wasn't resisting at all. And that's what all the witnesses said. So they just have to say that. So they yell it out. Yeah, it's almost, I think it was almost like, it was almost just a warning to everybody else. Like, look, I can do anything that I want. I can say that he's resisting. Isn't it funny? You know, and, uh, and the way, you know,

the way he kills him, he stomps on his head with his size 15 boot. This is a guy who's almost 300 pounds. I think he's about six foot five. And he's been implicated in 24 other excessive force cases. And the Attorney General in Alabama, every single time, is defending the guard. How many other people have died in those cases? There have been a lot of other injuries. The only – I think that there have been two people who've died out of the 24, 25 cases that we know about. But there are a lot of just maimings.

There are a lot of situations where people are just damaged often permanently. you saw what happened in kinetic justice when he, you know, Robert Earl Counsel, when he leads a nonviolent work strike that guards come and attack him and, and he loses sight in one of his eyes. He's, you know, dragged out of the cell. There's a huge amount of blood. So, you know, especially these guys who are leading a nonviolent effort to try to improve conditions, they're always met with violence. Right. He was the guy that was at the head of this strike. Yeah. And then the strike really highlights something that I think a lot of people are unaware of is how many industries actually use the prison system essentially for slave labor.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, that was a shock to me, I think, is that, you know, I guess we all sort of assume, well, if you're in prison and they ask you to mop the floor, you need to help serve the meals or something. You know, that's a reasonable thing to do. I think what we don't realize is that those people are leased out to the governor, to the mansion where the governor lives.

Crazy. You know, that was crazy. Yeah, yeah. People that were denied parole were allowed to be on the grounds of the governor's mansion doing like groundwork, landscaping and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And beyond that, they're used for labor in industry, right? So those guys are sent out in the mornings and vans.

They go work at McDonald's. They work at Burger King. They work at Kentucky Fried Chicken. They work at the Hyundai plant. They work at the Budweiser distributorship. And it's all sort of under the heading of, well, this is good for the guys. They get to get out into the community. But it's a forced labor situation because if they don't, if they don't accept those assignments, then they're going to be punished.

And they're going to be punished with long stays in solitary confinement. They're going to be given disciplinaries so that their sentences can be extended. They are often just beaten for that. So it's really an extension. you on your show talk about, you know, talk about the Jim Crow laws, which led to convict leasing. And what we're seeing in Alabama now, it's not like convict leasing. It is exactly convict leasing. They are just selling the labor of incarcerated people to industries. For pennies on the dollar of what you would get if you had to pay people. Yeah. And they, I mean, they get paid well. They get paid. They get paid well. Yeah. But not the, you're saying they meaning the prisons get paid well. But not the prisoners. Correct. The prisoners get any money?

They get a little money. For example, the guy you see who's driving a sanitation truck, Danny Dandridge, describes how he's getting paid $2 a day. And now is that standard across the board for all those other jobs? A hundred plant, everything? I think for that, for that job, they get paid a little bit of money and then on top of that, they're charged for the cost of the van that takes them to the, workplace. They're charged for the uniform that they have to wear. So it's sort of like

their kind of fees and fines that knock everything down to almost nothing. And in a lot of cases, the $2 a day is a lot. They're required to do lots of work unpaid in the prisons. They do all the construction. You could see that even the drug dorm where the counselor decided to leave his job. There was a professional drug counselor in one of the prisons. And nobody replaces him. And so Raul Poole, one of the guys in our film, just starts running the drug dorm. And that's a drug dorm that's getting money from the federal government to pay for drug treatment program in prison. And that money's just not going anywhere or money is just going into the coffers of whoever's running the prison system. God. And is there any accountability for all the money? Does there any, do they do

an audit of the money? Is there, is it just? There really is not any meaningful accountability. You know, there's like the state auditor who we actually interviewed and spent a lot of time with, just sort of threw up his hands. You know, he said there's just no way for me to keep track of this money. And, you know, for example, they got this incredibly horrible set of findings from the Justice Department, right? The DOJ went in to the Alabama state prison system and did an investigation because for reasons I can explain, they're kind of incredible. But anyway, they went in there and they investigated the whole prison system, which I think they'd never done before.

You know, usually they investigate an individual prison or something like that. And they went in and issued a report that said, this is a, you know, beyond the pale. There's horrific things that are happening in your prisons, people being murdered, and there's the highest rate of drug overdose and highest rate of rape. and Alabama's response was to say, well, you know, we think that's just anecdotal and you don't know what you're talking about. And then they decided that their solution, the Alabama solution that we sort of ironically talk about in the title of the film, the one the governor talks about, is just to build new prisons. And meantime, the DOJ did not say to build any new prisons. The DOJ said, your problem is with corruption and brutality.

and you're operating really a criminal enterprise, and therefore you need to address the underlying problems. And Alabama's response was, well, the DOJ says the prisons are no good, so we've got to build new ones. Well, that, you know, so they get a massive contract. Yeah, exactly. So we, you know, we always call it the Alabama Department of Construction because they don't really change anything unless they have the opportunity to build something. And that's really good for all the governor's supporters and all the other people who are, you know, in the construction industry. And, you know, they've now started construction on these massive new prisons. You know, Alabama's a tiny state.

It's like, you know, smaller population, I think, than Norway. And they've got a tiny budget. And yet they figure out how to put together a multi-billion dollar prison construction plan. They can't fund it at first. The governor announces she's going to build these new prisons, which the DOJ did not ask for and are not going to solve the problem. And they admit, by the way, that they're not going to affect overcrowding, which is a huge problem. The prisons are operating at like 200 percent capacity.

And, you know, when they're asked about it, the head of the Department of Corrections, they ask him, you know, is this going to affect the overcrowding? Or is it just the same number of beds? And he goes, no, it's the same number of beds. It's not going to affect overcrowding. So they're building these massive new facilities. The governor can't get them paid for. She can't raise the money in a bond offering.

So they go after the COVID money that they got from the government, which is not designed to build prisons, right? It's very hard to argue that building prisons is something that's going to relieve some other kind of health problem or whatever. And then I think they get fined for that or you have to pay a fine if you use government money for a thing that's not supposed to be for. And then when they start construction, they still can't raise the money, but they start building the new prisons, even before they were authorized by the legislature. That's how clearly it was communicated that these

prisons were going to happen. In other words, we had a crew in Alabama that was watching this site of this one massive prison that they were planning on building, and there were just bean fields. And it's quite beautiful, actually. And one day I get a call from somebody and they say, we got to start filming because there are 25 earth movers here. And I said, well, that's impossible because the legislature hasn't even approved the new prison construction. And they said, well, the prison construction companies know it's happening and they're already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars just to clear the site. So the fix was in on this new prison construction. and the governor announced that it was going to cost $900 million to build three new prisons.

So far, they've broken ground and are far along on the first prison, and it's up to $1.3 billion. So when you open that door, a whole lot of commerce comes in, a whole lot of companies come in, you know, and they ask them why it went so, why was it so expensive? How did it go from $300 million for one prison to $1.3 billion? dollars for one prison and counting. And they said, well, you know, it's inflation. And, you know, meanwhile, like, I'm pretty sure that the government's not going to say that we got 400% inflation at the moment. So it's, you know, it's kind of institutionalized thievery. Yeah, it's organized crime. Yeah. It mean when you are in charge of deciding what's crime. Yeah. And you're running a state like Alabama. Yeah. Yeah. And I think.

Like, you know, money in the justice system is a very perverting factor. You know, I made this film, this series called The Jinks. And Robert. Great fucking series, by the way. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Crazy. Yeah.

Like, you watch this going, what? Yeah. Is this real? Yeah, me too. I mean, you know, he's an incredible, he's an incredible person to watch. But one thing about him is, you know, that family's worth nine. billion dollars. This is not like a regular rich person in America. This is an extra super duper rich person in America. And he's killed three people over 30 years and just walking around,

gotten away with it. Meantime, you have, you know, young women moms in Brousas County Jail in Texas. You know, our mutual friend Jeff Ross did a documentary there. And he interviews the girls that are in there. And he says, what are you in here for? And two of them say, I'm in here because I stole baby formula. So, you know, that's a money, money means a lot in this equation. Yeah. Yeah. The money stuff is, is all over the place. You know, it's the perverting of the system with money. You see because, you know, for example, these big prison companies like Geo Group and Core Civic make money by having full prisons, you know, their private prison company. But there are lots of prison.

There are a lot of companies that provide services to public prisons to state prisons, like, you know, Cisco and all these companies that sell food there. But everybody makes more money if the prisons are full. And so you have that the head of Core Civic just did a shareholder call not too long ago. And he's a hinder, I think his name is. And they said, you know, what do you think? What's the outlook? And he said, oh, with all the new immigration prisons and all the prisons and all the increased emphasis on law enforcement and on incarceration, you know, this is the most exciting time in my career. So, you know, you're really building this prison industrial complex every day, especially right now, I think.

And all these people are doing, they're all doing bad stuff. You know, there's a company called Securus, which is run by Tom Gore's, who is a big team owner, owns the Pistons, Detroit Pistons and some other teams, and is a private equity guy worth about $10 billion. And his company, Securist, does communications for the prison systems. And they made deals that have now been sort of exposed, but they made deals. with sheriff's departments where they had jails, and they said, instead of letting kids visit their parents in jail and actually get to see them and hug them and maybe have some kind of normalcy, let's install video visit terminals. So the cover story was that video visits are going to be great because you don't have to

drive across the state to see your loved one. But the contract specifically said that they had to replace in-person visits. So when a kid went to go visit his dad, even if he was 20 yards away from him in the prison waiting room, he had to use a video terminal, which costs $12.99 for 20 minutes. And he was not allowed to see his dad in person. So that's an example of, you know, and that's in the contract that's in the securist contract that said that they have to eliminate the in-person visits. So when you allow that for-profit motive to be driving things in these like state institutions where theoretically we should, you know, have some kind of like moral approach that makes sense for society or, you know, can help community or build our relationships or help people

stay in touch with their loved ones when they're incarcerated, when you add that for-profit motive there, the system is just designed to exploit. It just is natural that all those people have to get, you know, they all have, there's a kind of a value to every visit. Every time a visit, you know, every time a kid comes and visits a parent, it's worth $12.99. Well, why do it for free if you can get $12.99 for it? Is it one of the darker aspects of human nature in regards to our relationship with money that so many people, if unchecked, if you give them,

the opportunity to make more money at the expense of other people, they do it. They just do it. Yep. They do, especially under the framework of a corporation. The framework of a corporation allows you to have a diffusion of responsibility because you don't think that you're the one doing this horrible thing. It's this thing that you work for and I'm just doing my job. Yeah.

And also, if you're involved in a corrupt system and this is your job and you think of these people as all good people that are part of the career, system, it sort of minimizes the horrible feelings that you have about that corruption. You just dismiss it. I really believe, I've heard you talk about the fusion of responsibility before. I think it's such a huge part of what drives all this is that you have people who don't really have to ask themselves the hard question. Am I the person that's exploiting somebody?

Am I the person that's overcharging a mom? Am I the person that's charging somebody a crazy amount of money for their medication or allowing somebody to die from medical neglect? Because once you have a corporation and you look at that org chart, you know, you can see the org chart. It's like, oh, that's a nice orderly way of getting commerce to move forward. But it's also a thousand points of responsibility. Every one of those persons just take. makes a tiny measure of responsibility.

Well, I'm just in the accounting department. I mean, I don't make the rules. I don't make the laws, you know, and you see that, you know, in the healthcare industry, people recording their calls with their health care providers or their insurance companies saying, oh, I'm sorry, I really can't answer. That's not my job. Somebody else makes that decision. And so when you have these massive organizations, there's a way for very bad things to happen.

And it's like the death of a thousand cuts. And it's also everybody's trying to maximize profit. And when you're trying to maximize profit, you just find some ways to justify things. Like your main job is not to help people. These prisons aren't rehabilitation centers. You're trying to make, like, you actually profit off people becoming, like, functional members of society once they get released. That would be amazing. Then you'd have an incentive to make people better people in prison.

Like, imagine if their profit was based on. on people being rehabilitated, reentering society, and becoming, you know, functional, proper members of society where they contribute. Sure. Yeah. They're so... They're twisted. Yeah, they're so twisted.

It's like that saying money's the root of all evil. It's not the root of all evil. It's a root of most of it though. It's like a giant percentage of it. Yeah. Maybe it's 75% of evil. The rest of it's like, what, lust? Yeah.

I mean, my... Anger, jealousy. Yeah. That's the root of a lot of evil, you know, whatever, whatever the other percentages, but money, 60% maybe, let's be charitable. It's the root of a lot of fucking evil, man. And when you can do it inside of this framework of a corporation, it's so twisted because it's ubiquitous.

It exists in almost all industries. There's always, whether it's the, like, this is the reason why people celebrated when that healthcare executive was shot, right? They were like, hey man, fuck you guys. Like, yeah, finally one of you guys got it. I lost my dad. I lost my mom. I lost my sister.

You know, that kind of shit is in every fucking industry. Yeah. Whether it's military industrial complex, whether it's the health insurance complex, whereas it's pharmaceutical drug industry. When you look at the Sackler family and what they did with opioids, I'm sure you've seen the Netflix, the Peterberg, Netflix, Painkiller series. Yeah. Fucking incredible.

It's just incredible that that guy's just walking around. You're irresponsible for the death of who knows how many people. Because who knows how many people that had relationships with the people that got addicted also lost their lives, also lost everything. Because you're dealing with a brother or a mom that's completely lost and addicted. Your life is hijacked now by this situation. You've lost your dad. You've lost your mom. You lost a spouse.

Fuck. Yeah. I mean, you know, I've heard you talk a lot about mental health. And obviously, there are a lot of causes of mental health problems. And, you know, that includes social media, it includes sort of alienation and includes a lot of things that are, you know, present in society. But the prison industrial complex and the experience of having somebody incarcerated has a huge impact on. mental health. They, you know, I think people don't realize when you have two million people locked up in these facilities and many of them are just being traumatized every day, whether

they're seeing somebody get killed or they're constantly in fear for their life. The idea that those people are going to somehow be okay when you want to let them out 10 years later and they're going to rejoin society, you give them $50 in a bus ticket and you say, hey, I hope you can become a taxpayer. Meantime, they don't have enough money to pay for one red roof in for one night. They can't do anything when they get out of prison. And then we say, well, why is there such high recidivism? I guess that means they're bad people. So let's put them back in. Right. So the mental health implications for the people that are incarcerated are huge and the people who are in their families, as you say, you know. Imagine the anxiety. You don't have any family

members and they're going to give you $50. And now you're out. And you have to figure out how to eat, how to get a roof over your head, and try to figure out a way to earn money. Yeah. The $50. Yeah. And there are ways to do it. You know, there are, there, if you go into the, I mean, all this sounds very dark and horrible.

Uh, and it is. But there are a lot of, there are a lot of, um, uh, of positive developments that you can see when you give them a chance to, to grow in society, you know. Um, so, so, for example, um, like, I love what you say about, um, I love what you say about, about community, you know, about the importance of building community and seeing the country as our community. And, you know, if we're torturing people that are in our community, if we're being cruel to people that are in our community, what does it say about us? Right.

You know, what does it say about Christianity? What does it say about, you know, about about God? What does it say about forgiveness? And clearly, we see. that there are so many instances where people are trying, you know, trying to do something better. There's a woman named Erica in Alabama who was a mental health professional. And she described to me what it was like to try to give mental health services to people who are incarcerated. And I was trying to figure out, you know, looking at these images of the places that they keep people and these cells, these solitary cells with just a little trace lot.

And, you know, they're in there in a five by eight room with no windows, and they could be in there literally for years. And I said to her, well, can you tell me, like, when you do an obsession with somebody and you're trying to, you know, talk to them about their suicidal ideation or their various problems, you know, what does that look like? How does that work? And she goes, well, you know, it's a little uncomfortable because, you know, I got to be on my knees. And I said, wait, why are you on your knees? She said, oh, well, I have to be able to talk through the tray slot. And I said, so when you're giving a mental health counseling session to somebody who's incarcerated, you're not allowed to open the door. You're not allowed to see, assuming that person's not like having a violent fit or something like that.

You're not allowed to sit down across from them and have that conversation. She said, no, no, no, but it's okay. I just put my mouth up to the tray slot. And I just thought, you know, when you think about the idea that that's going to be somehow something that will give relief to somebody who's really struggling with a mental health crisis in prison, you know, we're doing the absolute minimum. You know, we're checking the box that says, yeah, once a month, this guy has a psychiatric evaluation. But nobody's taking a picture of that and showing what it really looks like to have this nice, you know, young lady, this idealistic young mental health person. kneeling outside of a metal cell with, you know, blood stains on it, talking to somebody inside. Through a food slot.

Through a food slot. And that's probably the only interaction this person has with human beings other than the guards. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You are very cruel. Yeah. And you're alone in that cell, which is also terrible for mental health.

Like, there's nothing worse for mental health than complete total isolation with no access to anything. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Have you ever had experiences with people, friends or family who've been incarcerated? Oh, yeah. Yeah. What have you? What's that been like? Well, I had this one friend that I used to do martial arts with when I was a kid. And when I was probably around 16, 16 or 17, he wound up going to jail. I didn't know him that well, but I knew him as this guy.

who competed in tournaments and, you know, he would show up and train with us, and he's just a pretty tough guy. He went into jail and he came out, first of all, much bigger. He was just, like, stacked with muscle. All of his tattoos, he burned off. So he had scars, like these big keloid scars over all of his tattoos now. And he was a completely different person, like a violent animal, like a terrifying guy to spark. If you spar with him, you were in a, it wasn't, there was nothing, no holding back.

Sparring for the most part, when you like people, you're hitting them only a certain percentage of your strength. This guy was not doing any of that. He was full blast with everything. It was like a caged animal. And as I got to be closer to him, I actually became closer to him after he got out of prison than he was before, you know, because I just spent more time sparring him and hanging out and training with him and being in these group classes with him,

he started telling me stories about what it was like in jail and just fighting for his life. He had to take on three guys, and he picked up a broomstick, and he was beating these guys. He was just telling me these crazy stories of guys trying to kill him in jail, you know, and he was in there for three years for drug selling. And then he went right back to selling drugs.

And he eventually got arrested, and I've told the story before, It's kind of crazy. They found a guy that had every bone in his body broken with hammers. And they kept him awake by injecting him with cocaine. They kept injecting him with cocaine. And then they cut his arms off. They cut his hands off.

And then they cut his head off. And they found his body. But it's like all of his bones had been shattered. And this guy that I knew as a kid got arrested for that. They never wound up trying him for that. They brought him in for questioning. He definitely knew something about it. He knew either the people that did it or knew something about it.

It was all drug-related, and he was selling cocaine. And then I lost touch with them after that. That's a crazy story. Oh, yeah. I knew quite a few guys like that. Because the world of fighting, like people that are interested in entering in competitions with people, you get a lot of troubled people, a lot of very angry people. You know, a lot of them that come from violent households,

they were beaten as children, or they were bullied as kids, depending on where. I came from the most mild of those environments. I didn't have anybody abusing me. I lived in the suburbs of Boston. I lived in Newton, which was a really nice neighborhood. I just was interested in martial arts. And then I was fascinated by this idea

of bettering myself through competition, because it was so scary. And then all of a sudden, I'm around, like, hit men. I knew one guy who was a hit man for Whitey Bulger and he I would train him. I would teach this guy how to do martial arts and he was an assassin. That's amazing. It was very strange. I knew a bunch of organized crime figures for mostly with the Irish mob. A lot of those guys came and trained and especially because they they knew some other guys that we knew that were a couple of one of my friends who was a box, he was a professional boxer and And he lived in South Boston. He was very tight with a lot of these guys. So some of these guys came to train with us.

And it was very weird exposure for me. I've never been around any of that. I never had anyone in my family that went to jail. No one was a, you know, no one was a criminal. No one was a drug addict. No, there's nothing really crazy. Yeah. And then all of a sudden I was around a lot of these people that either went to jail eventually or had been in jail.

Yeah. Because I think there's that question of. you know, people say, well, if you don't like the prison system the way it is or if you don't think people should get locked up forever, then, you know, you're just soft on crime and, you know, obviously, you know, you're some kind of snowflake. But clearly there's a role for prison. There's a role for jail. The question is whether we should be putting people into institutions that just further damage them, further re-traumatized them. Right.

Just making them hardened. They're going to be worse criminals if they get out, if and when they get out. Yeah. And there's no emphasis on rehabilitation. So that's the thing. It's like if you're releasing them back into the street, like, what are you doing to the rest of the society? If you're taking a person who's committed a violent crime, making them way worse in jail and then releasing them. This is like a slow bomb, you know?

It's slow release bomb. And then also they have no options because no one wants to hire an ex-convict. especially someone who went to jail for aggravated assault or something like that. So it's very, very difficult for these people and very, very difficult for society to make a decision. You know, you want to make a quick fix of something. You want to protect people. Just keep them in jail. Keep everybody in jail.

But there's zero emphasis on how to take a person from a completely broken childhood, broken home, violence, drug addiction in the home, all the chaos, complete. accustomed, completely being accustomed to violent crime because it's all around you. It's in your neighborhood. You imitate your atmosphere. And then what do we do with these people? You know, there's no emphasis whatsoever on it. It's just using them as human batteries to generate money. And that's evil.

That's what's really crazy. And this is where people have subverted this idea of incarceration being some sort of a rehabilitation or correction, right? They call them correctional facilities. You're not correcting anything. You're just making money. You're just making money off of people and you're taking advantage of the fact that no one wants to pay attention to it because society generally looks at people that are criminals and have committed violent crimes as like, oh, well, fuck them. Push them aside.

And look, there's some people that I agree. Yeah, fuck them. If there's people that have, you know, killed a bunch of people and raped a bunch of people and they're constantly robbing people and breaking out houses or violent. Yeah, fuck those people. Fuck those people. But that's a small percentage of what's in jail. A large percentage is nonviolent drug offenders. And that's where it gets really weird.

It's like so a person is deciding, you can have the drugs that we sanction. You can have the drugs that we tax. You can have these drugs. You can have these prescription drugs. You could have this drug that you buy in the liquor store that we call alcohol, which is clearly a drug. You could buy your cigarettes. You could buy your coffee. You could get all these drugs that we like.

Adderall? You need Adderall. Andrew, I think you know it a little ADHD. Maybe you seem to use some fucking speed. and we'll sell you that speed and we'll tax that speed. Anything else, we'll put you in a cage because you're not following our rules. And it's like a grown adult telling another grown adult what they can or can't do with their life is responsible for what, 50% of the people that are in cages?

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And for a limited time, get a bottle of omega-3 vitamin D3K2 and an AG1 flavor sampler for free in your welcome kit with your first subscription. That's an $111 value at Drink, AG1. dot com slash Joe Rogan. Yeah. And I'm really crazy. Yeah. I mean, there's this kind of illusion that everybody that is in prison for something that we don't think, the average person doesn't think they should be in prison for for many,

many, many years, like a drug crime or being an addict, basically, that those people, that all those people have been let out already. You know, that somehow like prison activists people have said, well, you know, all the people that are in there for drug crimes should be released. But it's not really true. You have an enormous criminalization of drug addiction. So you're already making people sort of feel hopeless. Then they're turning to drugs and then you're putting them into cages.

So like Steve Marshall, for example, the AG in Alabama says, well, we've already released all of the nonviolent criminals, right? So the only people that are locked in there are the worst of the worst. But, you know, that's clearly not true just because of sales from your documentary. Yeah, of course. So you have, you know, and he was put into a maximum security facility for entering an unoccupied building. That's because there's sort of an inflation of this concept of violence. So they will, in Alabama, I think there are 44 different crimes that are considered violent crimes. And they include crimes that you and I would not consider violent. So if somebody threatens somebody verbally, like most people do in arguments with, you know, people that they're mad at or whatever,

but doesn't assault somebody, that could be considered a violent crime. If somebody enters a building, whether they steal something or not, that could be considered a violent crime. And so it makes it easier just to, as you say, like, I like that image of the battery. I think about it as like sometimes like the matrix, that, you know, for Alabama to do what it's doing, it's got to have 20,000 people in suspended animation because that's how you can use them for labor. That's how you can use them to sell them stuff. That's how you can charge them for fees and fines, you know, that you need that many people. I think they did a terrible thing when they allowed private prisons. I think it's a terrible thing. I think, like if you think about the people that

founded this country and the people that wrote the Constitution, they had a great understanding of where, how tyranny can emerge. And so they tried to create a system, again, 1776, crazy to think that we're still following those same rules today, you know, but they had a great understanding. Don't worry, we're not following those. But the checks and balances and make sure that one person couldn't accumulate all of the power. Whoever first initiated the policy of allowing and paying for private prisons to exist in this country did not think it through like that at all. Did not think of incentives, did not think of how people always, when given the chance to make more money, figure out a way to justify making that more money and come up with rules or regulations or carve-outs, caveats, some reason why they can continue to accelerate.

Right. And then you don't think about the fact that prison guard unions and these private prisons, these people that own them, actively work to keep some laws on the books that maybe the general public would not want to be illegal anymore, certain things. And they do that just so they can keep their prisons full so they can keep making more money. Sure. So then they take the money that they get from these private prisons where they're using people as human batteries to make sure there's still laws in place. that are ridiculous so that they can keep arresting people so they can keep filling up their buildings and making more. And the fact that nobody saw that coming. Nobody saw that coming. They saw it coming.

I don't even know if they did. I think they probably short term, we're just saying, oh, this is a good business. We'll get into it. Then the business is like, we've got to grow this business, just like everything else. Like if you're selling tires, you know, you got to make better tires, sell more tires. We're trying to sit, we want to be number one in the tire business. Well, they're trying to be number one in the human battery. business.

Yeah. And that's what's fucking insane about allowing that in this country. And how do you put that genie back in the bottle? I don't know. But I think it's very sick. Well, the genie's figured out a way to get into a whole new bottle because a lot of people say to us, well, this film that you made, the Alabama solution is obviously about Alabama state prisons.

Are those private prisons? And we always say, no. Those are state-run institutions, but they kind of function like private prisons in a way because they're able to make deals with securists about their prison phone system. And that makes millions and millions and millions of dollars that's extracted from the poorest people in the country, right, who are being charged like high, you know, daily and even per minute fees for being able to communicate with their families. then you have companies who are selling the food to the prisons. You have companies that are doing health care contracts with the prisons. And so there's so much money in that that they sort of, even though the state owns that piece of land, it still kind of functions the way that private prisons function.

Right. So we've sort of just given over the care of two million Americans to companies that are accountable to their shareholders maybe, but the shareholders don't know. Well, they're certainly not accountable to humane living conditions. That one scene where kinetic justice, that gentleman, what's his real name? Robert Earl Counsel. When Robert Earl Counsel was in solitary and you see the rats swimming in his toilet, rats are swimming in his toilet and he has rats in a water jar and what do you say? Like, catches... 11 caught in one night. Yeah. And why are they there? Because, you know, he tries to put this food in a bag that hangs on the door of the cell, but then they write him a disciplinary

for doing that. But if he takes his food out of the bag and he puts it on the counter, then the rats are going to get it during the night. They're just everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. So there are rats all, they're rats throughout the prison. And so it's asleep in this room where these rats are crawling all over him at night.

Yeah. You know, and people, just to get into him for a second, I mean, he is, he is, frankly, one of the most, one of the bravest people I've ever met in my life. You know, this is a guy who's incarcerated when he was 19 and he was selling drugs in his neighborhood. Somebody is trying to chase him down with a car and almost runs him over and he shoots the person through the window and the guy dies. So this is now 30 years ago. In any other condition, you would have thought that's a self-defense case, right? That's, that's, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, non-violant non-violent, non-violent labor strikes. And yet, here he is 30 years later with a life without parole sentence in a Alabama prison. And he's

every method that he can use to call attention to the problem that 20,000 other people have. And he's using a contraband cell phone to talk to us, knowing that he's probably going to get retaliated against by the authorities once the film comes out or once they know that he's organizing a labor strike. He would be an unbelievable asset to society if he were out in the world, right? He's advocating for nonviolence. He's obviously smart as a whip, and he's incredibly motivating to other people. You know, he's got that entire prison system listening to him when they want to be violent because they're so angry at the treatment. And the prison system starts bird feeding them, starts to cut off their food rations to force

them back to work. And kinetic, Robert Earl, is the person who says, you know, that's not going to solve anything. We don't want to do that. So, you know, you see this huge level of humanity, talent, thoughtfulness in people that are locked away. And we just assume, well, if they're in prison, that means that they're bad people. And meantime, there's so many other people on the outside who don't get locked up for doing things that are much worse. You know, so it's a very confusing message to be sending. Well, especially for someone like you who did the jinx and then you do this.

Yeah, I mean, it's a really good point. You know, I worked for a long time on the story of Robert Durst. And when we discovered evidence that showed that he had killed his wife and his best friend and his neighbor in Galveston dismembered him, we found the only evidence that proved that he did those things. And suddenly, I was in a dialogue with the L.A. district attorney, the L.A. PD, talking about how to get him arrested. And even if I don't believe in the way that we incarcerate people, it's clear that there's a role for prison. And there's clearly a guy like Bob Durst who keeps killing people needs to be taken out of society. What kind of prison is he in? Well, he died now.

And he was locked up in a facility in Northern California. It was sort of a facility for senior citizens who had medical problems. So, you know, a lot of really rich people, as you could tell from, you know, There have been a bunch of cases on this. Really rich people hire consultants to help them navigate what prison they're going to end up going to. They can negotiate for better conditions. And so you end up, you know, with that sort of situation where a guy who maybe has stolen $100 million and not paid his taxes or taken money from his workers or committed some horrible act of fraud ends up in a prison farm, ends up in a pretty nice facility where, you know, he has access to lots of things.

And then you have poor people that are locked up in places that have rats in their cells and vermin. But, yeah, it was, I was always sort of amazed that Robert Durst was able to get away with what he got away with for so long. Why do you think that is? Well, you know, did you, how much did you know about it before you started the documentary series? Well, I knew a lot because I had made a film, a narrative film called All Good Things, about sort of Robert Durst's origin story. His relationship with his beautiful wife, when they were both young, before all the bad stuff started happening, and he became the guy that he became. There was this kind of strange love story between this kind of difficult man and this very lovely girl, Kathleen McCormick. and I made this film.

Ryan Gosling played the Bob Durst character and Kierston Dunn's played his wife and really investigated that story so that we could tell the tale of what had happened to them in an accurate way. And while I was doing that, we reached out to Robert Durst to the real Robert Durst and I said,

you know, we're making this film about, I guess we spoke to his lawyer, so we're making this film about you, about your client. and we'd like to talk to him to get his input, make sure that we're trying to tell the story accurate. What was the premise of the film? It was basically the story about him and his wife when they first met this rich guy and this girl from sort of the other side of the tracks. And then how eventually that relationship got toxic, eventually he kills her.

And then later his best friend, Susan Berman, who knows about what happened to his wife, starts to become problematic. Then he kills her. And then later, he moves to Galveston, Texas and disguises himself as a deaf-mute woman, if you remember this. And he ends up becoming friends with his elderly neighbor. And this guy named Morris Black, and they go out shooting on Pelican Island and so on. And eventually they have a little altercation because he figured out who Bob Durst was and that he was sort of on the run. and he dismembers that man. He kills him and dismembers him.

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the Performance Auto Group way. 39 stores, 23 brands, one upgrade event. 26 to 28, visit performance.ca.ca.com upgrade sale for details. This movie with Kristen Dunst, when was that released? I guess we started working on that in around 2005, and it came out in 2010. So in 2010, it's about to come out in theaters, this film. And there was a big article in New York Times about how accurate it was and how much we had done to, you know, make sure that the details were right and so on. And the real Robert Durst reads the article and calls me out of the blue. And, you know, I had tried to get in touch with them before without any success.

And he actually calls the distributor of the film first, Magnolia Pictures, and he asked for the president, Eamon Bowles. And Amon's – Amon and I would use Bob's voice, like when we would talk to each other because Bob had a very – recognizable voice. So when I would call him, we would hang up and I would say, bye, bye. And that was always sort of Bob's tone. And then one day somebody calls Amon's office and says, this is Robert Durst. And so his secretary walks in the office and says, like, you know, in air quotes, like, it's Robert Durst on the phone thinking that it's me. And he picks up the phone. He's like, hey, Bob, I, you know, I'm not surprised you're calling. I think we did a hell of a job on the film. And there's long pause. and he says, the guy says, who am I talking to?

And Amon says, oh, who's this? And he says, this is Robert Durst. And so he reaches out to me. I knew that he was trying to reach me so I could record my very first phone call with him. And I call him and I say, listen, I'm keen to talk to you. I've been making this film about you for the last five years. And he said, well, I would like to see the film. So I arranged for him to see the film.

and he calls me immediately after he sees the film and he says, I want you to know I like the movie very much. The movie kind of shows him killing great people, right? And I said, well, why did you like it? And he said, well, you know, you did a beautiful job explaining what I was going through as a child and the difficulty I had and losing my mother and Kirsten Dunst was just like my wife Kathy. and I cried three times. And I would like to do something with you.

You know, I would like there to be something out there from me, my ability to sort of tell my story. And I said, all right, well, why don't we sit down? I'll ask you a bunch of questions. And he said, that's fine. Okay, let's do that. So I end up sitting with him for three days. I've just finished a movie about him, a dramatic film,

which is now in theaters. And I sit down with him and interview him for 21 hours. And you think you do long interviews. He's 21 hours with this one person. And he is fascinating. I mean, absolutely extraordinary. He's he is incredibly honest about things that most people would never be honest about. Like, you know, he talks about how, you know, he had violent arguments with his wife or he says, you know, that he, he says crazy stuff.

I mean, he explained to me that I said, you know, I think you were kind of offensive when you went to viz. visit her mother. You know, she had this mother who was in her 80s, and you went to visit her mother, and, you know, I think you did some odd things. He goes, well, yeah, you know, I visited those people, and they were, you know, that woman, she reads Yankee magazine, and, you know, and she asked me how I liked her daughter, and I told her that Kathy had come out of the shower, and my penis was hard. Like you said that to her aging mother? Yeah, yeah, I'm me. What am I going to?

Sure, that's what I thought, you know. You know, or you say to him, well, what did you say, you know, why did you tell the police that after your wife, after you put your wife on the train, you went to the neighbors to have a drink when that clearly wasn't true. Oh, yes, I lied about that. I said, well, why did you lie to the police? Well, you know, I needed to be somewhere and I wanted them. them to stop asking me questions. So, you know, I told him that I went to the neighbors. I said, well, that was so easy to disprove.

They just talked to the neighbor. Well, yeah, but, you know, I don't, people don't usually do that. So he's very candid. He speaks very, very openly, almost like having a level of sort of Asperger's. Did you believe him at any moment while he's telling you this? Because obviously he's proclaiming his innocence, right? Yeah. I mean, he is so good.

at telling the story his way, and he tells you so many facts that are true that when he occasionally lies about really critical things, I think a lot of people just didn't pay attention to that. I did because I had already researched the story. So I knew when he was trying to tell me something that was bullshit, that it was bullshit. But, you know, I did have to put myself in a position of giving him the benefit of the doubt. whenever I could, partly because that was the only, you know, you got to just get into that mode where you're trying to hear his version without debating it the whole time. Right.

Because otherwise he's not going to tell you his version. And, you know, you want to hear his theory about all this stuff. And in the course of that, he really indicts himself. I mean, you know, he sort of came into it with the attitude that he wanted to tell his version of the story so people would stop thinking he was a murderer. But during the course of it, he admits to so many bad things that, you know, you just pretty quickly assume that he is guilty. How old is he when you first started filming him? I guess he was in his early 70s. So he's probably already experiencing some kind of cognitive decline.

And then you have the years and years of hiding all this which wears on you. Yeah. Yeah. And I do think there was a, I think he had a compulsion to confess. Yeah. I think most people that aren't complete sociopaths when they get to a certain point in time where it's almost too much and they want to tell people. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that ultimately what happened with him, as you may remember, is he, we find this evidence. The evidence I thought was determinative. I thought it was going to be something that police would ultimately. used to convict him for murder. But we... What was that evidence again?

So there was a famous note that the killer of Susan Berman, this friend of Bob Durst in California, had left behind when he shot Susan Berman. And the note said 1527 Benedict Canyon cadaver. And it was sent to the Beverly Hills Police Department. And that very seldom happens. But people speculated a lot. Well, why would somebody who killed somebody have sent a note to the police? Well, maybe if he liked the person, if it was his best friend, this woman, Susan Berman, and it was Bob Durst that did it, then maybe he wouldn't want her body to lie there.

And, you know, she has dogs. They didn't want the dogs to mess with the body. So he may have just killed her and then left this note. But then later, when he was asked about it, he said, I have no knowledge about that note. So when we're doing our investigation, we discover a letter that he had written to Susan Berman that has almost the exact same words on it because it's addressed to her at 1527 Benedict Canyon. So we can see the handwriting on that, not just a handwriting sample, but a handwriting sample that's saying exactly what it said on the letter that... Right, with the same misspelled words, right?

Exactly. And he writes 1527 Benedict Canyon, Beverly Hills, California, misspestine. the word Beverly puts in an extra E at the end. And of course, this letter that we find, he also misspells the word Beverly. So nobody had ever seen or the police hadn't known about this letter. So we find it. And then I immediately start planning a way for me to show it to him in a second interview. And he had always said to me like, oh, if you ever need me to sit down again, I'm happy to come back and I'll ask it.

You know, I'll answer any question you want. But I start to call him about doing the second interview and he gets very skittish. And then this goes on for two years. And so we have this evidence, but we need to show it to him. And I had done a bunch of research. I talked to Marsha Clark, for example, who was smart about how the L.A. District Attorney's Office works. And she said, if you had the opportunity to sit down with him and show him the evidence,

do that before you go to the police because it's going to. be very, the police are not going to be able to do something like that and he's going to lawyer up. But you guys, before you're even in contact with law enforcement, you could show him the evidence and he's going to have to react to it. And I bet it's going to be interesting. So we finally get him to sit for the second interview. And I show him the evidence in the interview. And he has this incredible meltdown. You know, I don't know if you remember this, but he starts burping uncontrollably and he starts rubbing his face and breathing. And he's obviously very, very surprised to see that there's this, that there's this letter that matches the cadaver note

that he admitted could only have been written by the killer. So he's sort of in a, he's trapped. And I finished the interview with him and he gets up and goes to the bathroom. And he leaves his microphone attached. And while he's in the bathroom, he confesses to the murder. He's, He's a guy who talks to himself a lot. And he always said that to me. He said, oh, sometimes I talk to myself for long periods of time. And I get in fights with people because they think that I'm hassling them, but it's just me. I just talk to myself.

So when he goes in the bathroom, the first thing he says when he goes in is, there it is. You're caught. He says that to himself. And it's, it's, it's, it's, and then he goes on to say, killed them all. I killed them all, of course. And it's such an extraordinary thing to have bubble out. Did you have your headphones on while he was doing that? No.

And that's kind of fascinating. So I didn't know that he said anything when he went to the bathroom. And so we're working with the LAPD. We're giving them the printed evidence, the letter that matches a cadaver note. And it's a pretty strong case already. And we don't know that he's said a word in the bathroom. And it's not until 26 months later that we have an editor, Shelby Siegel, who is just going through audio and kind of cleaning up old tracks because we're getting ready to deliver the film to HBO. And she sees on the editing system that there's a little waveform, there's a little squiggle that shows that there's some audio when he's in the bathroom.

So the problem was that I had a microphone. There was a microphone in the room and he had a microphone on. So there's a lot of noise. We're finishing. I just finished the interview. I'm incredibly excited that I got him to give this crazy reaction. And it's pretty obvious that that's going to be part of proving that he's guilty. And so I'm out there kind of whispering to the crew.

There's noise in the room and there's noise in the bathroom. And so she mutes the other microphones. and she hears him say, there it is, you're caught. And she screams. And she runs in the next room to where my other, our main editor was, Zach. And she says, you have to hear this. And he listens to it. And he says, wait a minute.

I was there that day. And we have audio that's a continuation of that. That audio stops at, at, there it is, you're caught. But he was in the bathroom for seven minutes. So they go and get the drive that has the other seven minutes of audio on it. And it's this long, rambling confession. And I come over and I listen to it and I can't believe what we're hearing. I mean, it was extraordinary.

And I had to call the LAPD and the L.A. district attorney and say, hey, I know literally two days ago, we gave you the documents. We gave you the letter so that you could start this prosecution. We found something else. And so they come to New York and they listen to this confession. And it's just, you know, absolutely mind-blowing that that happened. And then when the film comes, when the series comes out, you know, we've been working with the police then for a couple of years while they were building the prosecution. And when the film finally comes out, when the series comes out on HBO, he is arrested

the day before the final episode. So it's in the final episode that he makes that confession. and they arrest him right before because they knew that he was going to go on the run. Was he aware that you had the audio of the confession? I don't think he remembered saying anything. You know, I don't think he's even all that aware that he sometimes just burbles out with these.

Do you think he started, I mean, this is pure speculation, but do you think he started going crazy after he started killing people? Just like the ability to shut that part of your brain off and put that aside and lie up. about it, just the struggle of having that information in your head? I think the way that he would have thought about it, you know, from inside the killer, right? He doesn't think of himself as a murderer, right?

Steve Marshall and Alabama doesn't think of himself as, you know, this incredibly amoral person. He thinks of himself as law enforcement, right? Bob Durst thinks of himself as just a guy trying to get along. you know, like we all are. So I think what happened was in 1982, he and his wife who were having problems, in part, in large part, because he had big personality problems. I mean, he was a, he was not a, he was not an easy person to deal with at all and was also very spoiled and was also, you know, had all these resources. Grew up healthy. Yeah. And had a lot of power over her. And so I think

something happened between the two of them where they were at their lake house and, uh, there was an altercation. He admitted to me that they had had a pushing and shoving argument that night. The night she died. Yeah. And then he, and then, you know, he says he took her to the train and sent her into the city, but none of that makes any sense. So I think what happened was he either accidentally or semi-accidentally killed her. I think they had a fight.

They ended up getting into some altercation and she landed on the, you know, maybe on the stone of the, of the fireplace or something like that, and she was dead. And then he thought, well, it doesn't make any sense for two people to go down. I mean, unfortunate that this had to happen, but I got to get rid of the body. And so he found a way to make her disappear. We don't know exactly what happened to her, but we know that, you know, he alleged that he had put her on the train to go in the city, and they never found the body. So after that, he's sort of widely believed to be. be a likely person to have killed his wife. There's no other explanation for it.

And how long did it take before they realized the wife was missing and when did they determine that she was dead? It was a few days later because he kept sort of, he held off on telling anyone. And then later he said, oh, Kathy, you know, I put her on the train to go in the city and then I haven't heard from her, what's going on. So he had a bunch of explanations about why, you know, somehow she had. run off with a drug dealer or she had run off with some boyfriend or something like that. But none of those really held water.

But it took him a while to report her missing. He waits five days to report her missing and does a brilliant thing, which is he reports her missing in New York City, even though the last time she's ever seen is in Westchester. So they were at their house, their lake house in Westchester. She disappears. And he goes into the city five days later. and he says, oh, my wife was at our apartment. So he complete, that's why I'm saying he's very smart.

He completely redirects the police so that they make, because, you know, the police aren't organized for a guy to come in and give a phony story about what happened to his wife. Most of the time, somebody comes in and says, my wife is missing. And they say, oh, where did you last see her? Let's help you try to find her. So I think he was smart enough to flip that on his head. And he says that my wife was in the city. And so they do their whole investigation in the city.

They don't look at the lake house. They don't figure out where she really, truly might have been. Did they ever do an examination of a forensic on the lake house? Yeah, they did. And they, it was sort of because it was so late in the game, because it had taken so long for him to report or missing, they didn't find anything that showed that she had been killed in the house. And she may very well have been killed somewhere else. but they never find the body ever. And so her family is bereft and they don't know what to do.

Did he ever confess to that? He didn't. But during the course of his interview with me, I mean, he never did it publicly. But in the bathroom, he says, killed them all, of course. So he's being accused of three murders, his wife, his best friend and his neighbor and Galveston, who he then cuts up. and his confession in the bathroom has killed them all, of course. So I think we, you know, I think we know what happened. We don't know how it happened.

Did they find his neighbor's body or his best friend brother, his friend's friend? Yeah, his best friend's body was in her house where somebody shot her and that's where they left that cadaver note, the note saying 1527 Bennett Canyon. And then in Galveston, when his elderly neighbor disappears, the reason they find this out is because a, a bunch of black trash bags wash up in Galveston Bay. And a little kid is fishing with his dad, and they see something bobbing around in the water, and they see these bags. And the police come and they look in the bags,

and there were all these body parts. So he had actually taken off the legs and the arms and all that. So, I mean, I think, you know, I think it's fair to say that there are people like Bob Durst who need to be out of society, you know, and are repeatedly causing problems. for others. But that's, as you say, you know, that's the extraordinarily rare case, you know.

And I think a lot of the sort of tough on crime politicians will say, so you guys just want to let Jeffrey Dahmer out on the street. Like, nobody thinks that. Nobody really believes that. People are saying, well, no, what we're saying is that people who are in prison for having entered an unoccupied building probably never should have been in prison at all. and the people who are in prison with good reason because they robbed somebody or something, we don't necessarily have to believe that those people can never, ever have a chance to come out

of prison and be productive citizens. You know, there's a, there's a, you just have to take a nuance for you. You know, you can't just say, well, they're bad people and they're good people, especially because they've got so many bad people walking around and so many good people locked up and vice versa. Yeah, the nuance part is so important because the real question is like what causes so many people to become bad people, and how come no one's examining the root of this? How come no one's looking at these deeply impoverished crime-ridden communities that have remained that way for decades and decades and decades and offered up some sort of a solution?

You know, it's almost like you have to financially incentivize a company to radically improve the economic and the justice situation in any random community that's, experiencing a lot of crime. Like, it's almost like you have to figure out a way to privatize peace and safety. You know, it's almost like the one way. I mean, it's really what I was saying before. Like, imagine if these prison companies got paid based on the amount of productive citizens emerge from their prisons and then wind up doing really well. Like, you get incentivized.

Like, this is, he's never committed another crime. Now he started his own business. He's doing this and that. He's got a family. His kids all get straight A's. Everybody's happy. This is a success. And we got a bonus because of that success.

Yeah. I mean, you're right in a way that it's the root of some way we are. We sort of are privatizing it because like in my neighborhood in New York, there's a group called the Doe Fund, which has been around for a couple decades, I think. and they take guys who have had severe drug addiction, have ended up in prison, and are released and have no starting place, as you were describing. And they give them a bed, they give them a bank account where they give them a certain amount of money each week for working. And it's not a huge amount of money, but it sort of is the first step toward even being

able to sort of have a checkbook and be able to say, oh, okay, so I've got $100 and I've spent 50 and this is what I have left. And they give them a job, which is they make deals with neighborhoods around New York for them to come and do like street cleaning and clean up the neighborhood. And they give them a uniform, which is clean, and they put them out on the street with a big blue trash bucket and some, you know, functional broom and things like that. And sometimes they'll put them out in pairs so that they have, you know, they can, they can work in tandem. And these neighborhoods become incredibly clean. The guys stay in this facility for as long as they need to until they sort of get back on their feet. They can't do drugs when they're in the facility. So there's a little bit of tough love going on there, too.

But they end up bringing people back. They end up bringing people back who were otherwise abandoned and who otherwise would have been. additional homeless people lying on the street in San Francisco or additional people who are, you know, bothering people outside an ATM or whatever because there's a level of desperation that you, you know, you have. We all know, like if we absolutely had absolutely nothing and we thought that our kids were going to starve, we would do a bunch of things that, you know, would probably get us in trouble. One hundred percent. And taking care of people that are in that situation and providing them some sort of a vehicle for improving their life is going to be a good thing and it's going to have some impact. But the real impact is going to be when you address

the environment in which they came from. Sure. Like if, again, if we're our community, if we're this entire country as a community, why do we have these places that have been fucked for 50, 60, 70 years? Like, why haven't we put resources into communities? You know, centers and education and providing some method for these people to get peace and safety. Why aren't we doing something about that if we really care? Well, there is a lot that can be done. One of the places, for example, this can be done inside and outside of prison, obviously. And I think you're pointing out a really important thing, which is the earlier, the better.

So when you look at, you know, Head Start programs, which are one of the first things that people go to cut because you can't put your finger on exactly what they do. But if you track people that got early education, you see that it dramatically reduces the likelihood that those people are going to go to prison later in life. And if you look at people who are even in prison, like in the main state prison system, which is a very humane prison system, I have pictures on my phone of guys who are sitting at a bench. working on models of tall ships, these beautiful, stunning pieces of art that they've been trained by other prisoners to build, and they give them a proper workbench, and they give them some

time to do this work, and they give them training. And then they sell that stuff in the prison store, and they make a couple million dollars a year that goes back into rehabilitation programs. Oh, wow. So where people... Is Maine one of the best places for that? I think Maine is the best prisons I've seen in the U.S. And partly it's because it's run by this very brilliant guy.

Randy Liberty is his name. That's crazy. And he first visited the Maine State Prison when he was 14 because his dad was locked up there. And later in life, you know, he became a sheriff. And I think his dad was in his jail at some point. And it was like, Randy, get me a coffee. Oh, sorry, dad. That's crazy.

And but over time, he just said, well, why are we throwing people away? when we put them into prison for having made a mistake of some kind or even a series of mistakes. Yeah. You know, what can we do to bring these people out? Because 95% of the people are coming out and, you know, are these people that we want to be our neighbors, you know. Yeah. And that's that, this issue of community is so important because, you know, how are we going to get back to some kind of brotherhood in this country? You know, it's so important.

And if we can demonize people so quickly and just say, well, look, my neighbor. you know, he put his tractor on my lawn and therefore he's a horrible person and I'm going to go over and smash his tractor. And, you know, as opposed to the guy saying, oh, I couldn't put my tractor in my garage because it had a flood. Oh, you had a flood. Let me help you. You know, that it's, it's that there's a level of, you know, rage right now that we're tapping into. It seems like a higher percentage of the people are like the martial arts people that are going into it because of damage that they suffered. It's like more Americans are becoming like that. You know, more Americans are sort of...

Well, we're getting radicalized by the Internet, for sure. Yeah. 100% on both sides of the aisle. People are being radicalized by hate and anger and frustration online. And a lot of it isn't even real people that are writing these things, or it's state actors and organizations that push certain narratives. And you're being fed a lot of hate porn. And people are sucking it up, and it's highly addictive.

So it's consuming an enormous percentage of your available resources in terms of your attention span. The people that I know that are addicted to Twitter X, whatever, are like genuinely mentally ill. Like whether they realize it or not, because they're still functional, they still do their jobs, but they are fully addicted to a thing that is just people bitching back and forth with each other. And they check responses all the time. They can't wait to type in another response and they're sitting there looking at someone else's response and getting angry.

It's illness. It's an illness. It's like, this is not in your life. Like if you put that down and look around, what do you see? You see the people that you know. You see the neighborhood that you live in. The stores that you visit.

And none of that exists. It exists in this weird fucking cloud world that you choose to enter to get upset for no fucking reason. And if you put it down, you will feel better, but yet you think you're missing out on something. So you have to go check it. When you're on the toilet, well, I'm on the toilet. What am I going to do?

Let me check to see what people are pissed off at. And I don't fucking agree with that at all. Well, this guy's an idiot. And then you're mentally ill. And then it becomes because we have this bizarre political system in our country where we have two sides, only two. We only have two perspectives, you know, and then you have a conglomeration of ideas that are attached to each perspective that you might not agree with at all, but you have to because you're a right-wing this

or a left-wing that. So you have to say whatever the fucking party wants you to say. And if you don't, you're a Nazi or if you don't, you're whatever you are, a communist, whatever it is. And I loved your when in your comedy special, which was so fucking funny. And, you know, I'm like a big fan of comedy. But in your last special, you sort of talk about

how people like sign up for, oh, yeah, well, you know, I agree with that. That makes perfect sense. Oh, yeah, I agree with that. Oh, and by the way, if you're going to agree with that, you know, you're also going to have to agree that, you know, that. Men can get pregnant. Yeah, the men can get pregnant. You're like, what?

Wait, so that those are my choices. I have to go along with like, you know, trans people should be allowed to be in every sport and it doesn't matter. Like, I have to go along with that one, too, if I want to be part of my tribe. Oh, yeah, that's part of the tribal initiation ritual. You're going to have to sign up for that. I think it's a really great way of delivering it all. Because it makes people laugh at themselves. Yeah, and everybody wants to be on a team.

Yeah. And you're like, you know, oh, we believe that everybody should, you know, be free to do whatever you want. And as long as you're not hurting anybody, I agree, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Going along with it. This sounds great. Yeah. Hey, I'm with you guys.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're like, oh, fuck. That's right. Is this a package deal? I have to. Yeah, and that's what people are agreeing to. And then you get groupthink. And then you get also ostracation.

You get ostracized from the community. if you don't do it. So you, you know, you get kicked out of the kingdom. And you don't want that. Yeah. Because being excommunicated

from whatever group that you identify with is terrifying. Because then what are you going to do? You're going to join the fucking Nazis? I'm going to join those people on the right because the left kicked me out because I don't think that men can get pregnant. Maybe I should just apologize.

Maybe. And then you just wind up apologizing for something you don't even believe in. You're like, God, I can't believe I have to say this. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's a bad way of communicating.

It's online communication is a terrible way of communicating. And it's the primary source that young people experience. You know, young people like, my kids, they don't even fucking text each other. They Snapchat. You know, they're all Snapchatting with pictures and shit. I'm like, this is like the minimal amount of communication you can do. And when they have to talk to people, just put their phone down and talk to people, they're lost. They're always like reaching for their phone.

Oh, yeah. They always want to grab their phone. The middle of you talk. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They have to check. Like, it's like you're perpetually distracted. Yeah, yeah. It's going to get worse, I think, when you have glasses and you could be walking down the street

or you can meet somebody and be like, hi, Joe. So when you went to college at and then you learned, you know, it's like they're, this idea that the information is more available and therefore it's better. My kids are like constantly deleting Instagram. or deleting TikTok. Yeah, a lot of kids are doing that now. Yeah. But, you know, and then it comes back for some reason

or they'll say, well, I felt like I needed to do this or whatever. But it's very encouraging to see them recognize that, like, you have to go cold turkey on social media. Well, that narrative's out there. Fortunately, for a lot of kids, Twitter, which I think is maybe the most toxic in terms of what it can do, most beneficial in terms of, like, whistleblowers, getting news. Like if anything is happening in the world, I almost immediately go to Twitter. It used to be a little better for that because now part of the problem is with AI generated content.

There's a lot of weird stuff when it comes to, like, especially war stuff. There's a lot of videos that are just completely fake and it's hard to tell. Or they take a video that is real and highly exaggerated and they add AI to it. It's very strange. And you've got to wonder like who's doing that. Why are they doing this? Is this our government doing it? Is it the Iranian government?

Who's, who's releasing these fake videos? And are we doing it to ourselves, by the way? 100%. A lot of people are doing that just for clicks because there is an actual economy based on engagement. So you can make money. If you're putting up these posts, these posts are getting millions and millions of interactions, you're going to get more money. And so there's a lot of people doing that.

So it used to be better because it used to be just pure information. and if it was a video, it was just a video that someone took with their cell phone generally. Now it's like a lot of weirdo stuff, a lot of weird fake stuff. So it's hard. Also, there was a piece in the paper today that talked about how, like, Trump gets a, like, a few-minute video every day. That's a compilation of all the attacks and all the explosions that have happened in Iran, you know, but it's not getting a more nuanced picture of it. So to some extent is kind of, you know, drinking his own. Kool-Aid. How do they know? What he gets? I think that there was enough of a leak to say that

he was given a, that each day he's given a chunk of video to watch. And that I think historically has been something that happens with him is he'd rather watch it than read it, right? And that by putting together just, it's not even that they're saying they're fake videos. I mean, obviously there are a lot of fake videos. But he's only getting the positive videos. He's just getting explosions. Right. He's just getting a lot of pictures of explosions. So he's saying, you know, we're destroying their Right. There you go. Here it is. Inside Trump's daily video montage briefing on the Iran war.

This is NBC News. The montage typically runs for about two minutes. That's enough time. Let's give you a nuanced perspective on a fucking international war. Has raised concerns amongst those of the president's allies that he may not be receiving the complete picture of the war. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And of course, the people that tricked him into doing this in the first place don't want him to get a full. nuanced perspective of the war. I mean, nobody thinks it's a good idea. Yeah. And the people do. The series of clips of stuff blowing up. Hilarious. That's the world we're living in.

It's a TikTok president. I mean, or a TikTok briefing for the president. You know, but video, I mean, what we saw in Alabama, and I know you have some clips of this, and I think if you feel like running one, there's the level of depravity that's going on in our prison system is so much higher than the average person thinks it is. And one of the reasons why we've seen so much outrage from people, finally millions of people have seen the Alabama solution because people have HBO or they have watched it in theater. And it's the first time they've been able to see inside. It's the first time they've been

able to really see it as opposed to reading a statistic and a lot of people die in prison or whatever. And I think it does tap into our sense of humanity and it taps into our sense of community and the feeling that, like, I don't want to be a part of that. I don't want to be part of doing that to other people. You know, I could be tough on crime. You know, we've shown the film to a lot of conservative viewers, including one of the founders of CPAC and various people who are, you know, pretty right-wing people and have said, look, I might be tough on crime. That's not what I'm talking about. Right. That's a human rights crisis. And where's the DOJ and where's the government doing anything to protect.

Where are the inspectors? Yeah. How are they allowing any of that? Yeah. You know. Well, that's the one of the great things about your documentary is it's clear. I mean, there's no ambiguity at all. It's like laid out there, full color.

You could see the blood on the ground. You could see, I mean, it's horrific. When kinetic justice, when that guy's beaten in his cell and you see how they dragged him out, face. He's faced down, bleeding all. They thought he was dead, and he managed to live. And he's being dragged out, and you're following the blood trail from his cell with the contraband cameras from the cell phones. And had those cell phone cameras not existed, you'd have zero idea.

Like, if those guards only decided to sell money bringing drugs in and not phones with cameras, who knows what you would know. know. You would know very little. Yeah. Yeah. And it does. I mean, you know, I would like to believe that the average American does not want to harm the average other American, you know, and even if you get hyped up on Twitter or you get to see, you know, too many videos of people blowing up stuff or whatever, that ultimately people have that experience of saying, you know, I went to that like coffee at the church and I sat there with that guy who I really can't stand. And, you know, we ended up having a conversation. You know, people are, they're kind of amazed at how much commonality they can feel with people

where if they just see the person, I mean, we all know, like, if you text somebody, your kids or your wife or whatever, there's just some places where texts are not good. It's not enough. It's not enough. It's going to make somebody's feelings hurt, you know. But when you get to sit down across from somebody, you realize that. it's another person you can kind of relate to. So it's really disturbing that, whether it's social media or just the demonization of people,

the way that we just turn people into these one-dimensional figures, and then we could just rage at them and just hate them. And distract yourself from your own problems. That's a big part of it. People love something that takes the focus away from whatever shortcomings they have or whatever things in their life they don't like. They'll focus on external things. some people whose lives are completely fucked up in so many ways their health is

fucked up the relationships are fucked up their job is fucked up and all they want to talk about is politics like hey man clean up your backyard like clean up your life like why are you spending so much time paying attention to what's going on with USAID like how much does that affect you does it does it really affect you that much all this fucking fraud right but what about your life man your life is a fucking disaster And all you care about is the government, you know, and what they're doing to fuck the people over. Like, I don't think that's really the problem. I think you're getting in your own way, son, you know, and that's a lot of people out there in this world.

And anything that you do distract yourself, whether it's start drinking, gamble, get on pills, whatever it is. People find ways to distract themselves from whatever is wrong with their life. And that's part of what social media is providing you. It's providing this alternative avenue for your attention to divert you from all the things that really are making your life a fucking disaster. Yeah. There's also that. I think sort of nuance falls into that also because people are made calm by the idea that they can just identify problems and that they're simple, right? So if you say to somebody, hey, like locking people up for 75 years probably doesn't make a lot of sense, that's complicated.

Wait, now I got to make a determination of what's the right thing to do with another person. And so you end up with a lot of politicians who say, well, I know. This is these are the bad people. These are the good people. We've got to promote the good people and get rid of the bad people. Not recognizing that like everybody's a little of both and that some people certainly do a lot more bad stuff in the world than good stuff and vice versa. But you have to see yourself, you know, as you're describing, like you have to recognize what's

happening in your backyard in order for the community to work. You can't say, well, look, I'm always right. My neighbor's always wrong. And therefore, I'm just going to keep raging over this. You have to say, like, you know, I could see myself doing something. I could see myself. Boy, if I really got out of hand, I could see myself having a, you know, taking a swing at somebody. And it's probably not a good thing. But I don't want to say that somebody else that did it is automatically just a horrible person. And that's why, you know, if you see this, this attorney general in Alabama, you know, this idea that, you know, he says there are these horrible people in the world, people who have no respect for human life. And yet he's presiding over 1,500 of them dying. But he hasn't imagined that he's part of the problem, you know.

Respect for human life while human life is dying in these places where people are taken if they show no respect for human life. And they're being killed by the people who are watching over them. Yeah. So it's a very topsy-turvy. Like, what? And also, cruelty plays a part in it. We know, you know, we know that if you, sometimes we say about this film that, you know, it's about what we do to each other when no one's watching.

Like, you know, all human beings have a little bit of a propensity to want to put a firecracker in a frog's mouth and just see what happens. You know, there's a level of cruelty that I think we have intrinsically, you know. Certainly wants you other a person, right? Absolutely. And that's to some extent why when it's exposed, right, when there's transparency, when the press is allowed to report on what's happening inside prisons, people kind of get a conscience because they start realizing, yeah, I wouldn't want to do that in front of my kid or I wouldn't want to do that if it ends up in the paper. I wouldn't want, you know. And I think that is kind of a balancing effect, which is one of the reasons why this like war on, you know, on transparency is a, it's a huge problem. Right. We're not allowed to see what's happening in prisons, even though we're paying for them.

Right. You know, and the Supreme Court had this ruling that said that wardens could deny access to journalists simply by citing safety and security. But meantime, in the last 20 years, no journalists has been harmed inside a prison. So who's all the secrecy keeping safe? Right. Right. It's we're sort of perpetuating a system. Our job going into the Alabama State Prison System was to shine a light on that.

It shouldn't be that these guys who are incarcerated have to take life and death risks using contraband cell phones to show what's happening in institutions that I'm paying for and you're paying for. Right. You know, we're spending, you know, $116 billion a year in the United States on prisons, jails, parole. That is an insane number. And if we're spending that much money, we should sort of know what every one of those

dollars is going to. and we should have watchdogs who will say, hey, guess what? In Alabama, they're supposed to be paying for a drug treatment program. We don't know where the money's going. Right. You know. Yeah. Transparency is always good, especially in something like that. I mean, to me, the idea of preventing journalists from it almost as akin to these ag-gag laws

that they've slapped in states that have factory farming to prevent people from filming the horrific treatment of some of these animals because they would be bad for business. You know, it's just fucking crazy. Like, it should be bad for business and people shouldn't tolerate it. They should take their business elsewhere, which is what transparency is all about. You don't want to buy chickens from a place that brutally beats their chickens or pigs or whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, and a lot of people say, oh, well, you know, it's going to upset.

We don't need to upset the public. Well, what are you doing something for inside a slaughterhouse that would upset the public? Like, there are ways to, if you want to euthanize an animal. or something like there. There are ways to do it where you're not using like a bolt and smashing their skull with it. Well, the bolt is actually the most humane way. It kind of instantaneously kills them.

All right. The other way is when they hang them by their ankles and slip their neck. That's a little rougher, but that's if you want kosher. There's a lot of weird ways that they kill animals, but it's really the beating and it's the horrific torture that the cruel people that work there sometimes do. Because there's been some videos that have been released

of people like beating animals, with crow bars and stuff for no fucking reason. Just sadistic, sick people that just happen to work in these places. They become very accustomed to treating these animals badly, just like security guards, become very accustomed to treating prisoners badly. It's kind of one and same lines. I totally agree. And just imagine what would happen if, you know, what if Tyson foods or any of these companies

just the policy was just if the press wants to come in and photograph and the person, Press wants to come in and write about it. They're allowed to come in once a week or whatever and just do whatever they want. Well, it should be non-negotiable. It should be a part of the ability to run a facility like that because of the consequences. Because if you don't do that, there is the potential for you being a horrific abuser of animals. Of course. And nobody wants to buy your chicken or your pork or whatever it is if you're doing that.

And we should know. But like criminalizing taking video. Crazy. Of animals being abused. Crazy. Like, how could you justify that, you know? You would only do it if you value profit over ethics, over morals. It's the only thing.

If profit is more important than educating people on the horrific nature of how these animals are treated. Yeah. It's more important. It's really important. It's we have cheap bacon. Okay. Yeah. But it is a big, it's like a big tapestry because the diffusion of responsibility figures into it.

Right. And, you know, the perverting effect of money. figures into it, but it's a very, I mean, I think there's, just being accustomed to horrors, you know, I knew a guy worked at a slaughterhouse and he told me like, you never get the smell of blood off of you. And he goes, and you never get just like the image of animals dying. He goes, you got to understand, like, if you're working at a slaughterhouse, you're seeing, who knows any, thousands of cows die a week. Just thousands. Just thousands of deaths. You're just thousands of death, constant death.

Most farmers never saw that. Like the way people used to raise animals for food, you know, you would kill a cow and you would eat it for six months. You know what I mean? Like you would, you could kill the occasional chicken. You, you weren't seeing thousands of dead animals a week. You weren't like seeing thousands of them get disemboweled a week. It's like after a while.

And you're in a factory. They're going by on hooks on a conveyor belt. Like, what are we doing? This is crazy. I went to visit a prison. I went sort of on a series of prison visits in Berlin and Norway and a few other places. And I was there with this sort of elderly woman that was like a deputy commissioner, I think, in North Carolina and the prison system, Virginia. Ginny.

And I loved her. She was so smart. And the first thing they do is they bring you. to concentration camp. So they bring you to Soxenhausen before they take you to the prisons to see how the prisons are run. And we're standing there in this concentration camp with the guide. And the woman says, well, this is where they would bring in the people on the trains. And then they would take them out. And then this is where they would, you know, shave their heads. And then they would strip them down and they would spray them with fire hoses and water. And then they would put

powder, disinfectant powder on them. They would take away all of their, you know, any kind of distinguishing marks that put them all in the same outfit. And they would give them a number instead of their name. They would be, you know, and everybody sort of looking at it, like very disturbed. And Ginny leans over to me and she says, you know, Andrew, we do every one of those things in our prisons today. And you realize that this dehumanization, this homogenization, this like making

everybody look the same is part of just desensitizing us to what we're going to do to those people because they just look like they look like bad people because you know that's what happens when you shave your head and you're pale and you have the same outfit and you look like a convict you've turned them into another yeah you've turned them into another and because of the tribal nature of ancient human civilization we have almost like a deep-seated DNA that allows us to other people because those people were coming and they were going to kill your tribal members and steal your resources and do whatever they could to the survivors and it was all horrific. And so we have this thing that we're able to do that allows us to attack or to go after people and just to not think of them as your brothers

and sisters and neighbors and fellow human beings sharing this wonderful spinning ball. No, these are evil people. These are others. You kill them. These are fill in the blank. These are the Japanese. These are the Germans. These are the this, these are the that. Whatever it is that we're at war with, those are the people that are not us and we kill them. Yeah. Yeah. And that's how you feel about prisoners. And then there's the other side where you go too far the other way and you have these crazy no cash bail policies where you've got violent offenders in and out of jail constantly. You've got people that have been arrested 40 times pushing old people in front of the train. And, you've got people. And, you've got people. And, you've got people. And, you've got people. And, you've got people. And, you've got people. And in New York City. You've got people that are just like mentally ill, violent criminals, punching women on the street in Seattle. And they just keep getting out of jail. And you go, how is this possible? How is this okay too?

Yeah. Because that's not good either. Yeah, you can't. But I think to the extent to the extent to the extent to which we could get everybody, which only is going to happen in little bits and little areas where we can make an impact, but we're trying to say, well, look, it shouldn't be, you know, it's, it shouldn't be that everybody who says that we shouldn't be running our prison industrial complex the way we are is soft on crime. It's okay to be tough on crime. It's okay to recognize that some people need to be separated out from society. But if you, if it becomes so polarized, then you get the progressive DA who, you know,

there are some very smart ones. And then you get some who are just saying, well, you know, we just should abolish prisons and therefore, you know, we don't need any of this. And that scares everybody. And probably doesn't lead to any level because we all want public safety. Like everybody wants to be serious about public safety. That's different than being tough on crime. Yes.

Well, it's also like if you're not addressing the root of crime, if you're not addressing the, again, the same neighborhoods where it happens over and over and over, you know, this is You don't have like this rampant crime that's developing in Beverly Hills, right? It's all happening in these impoverished gang infested neighborhoods. Like, why has there been no resources put into that? Imagine the amount of return that you would get. Like, I always say if you want to make America great again, here's the best way. Have less losers.

How do you have less losers? Give more people an opportunity to succeed. Well, it's not like we're all at the same starting block. We all know that. No one will say that. No one will say everybody is at the same line. And how you get by in this life is depending upon how much work you put in once are at the line.

Well, that's not true. So how do we figure out these people that are at the farthest end of the starting line, the most fucked? Put some money into that. Fix that. Put some engineering into that. Put some actual thought in trying to devise some sort of a method. to increase the odds of having more productive people come out of these places and give them help.

And you would have better neighbors. You'd have more people that are thriving in whatever business, more people that are artists, more people in the economy. The world would be a better place. Like, why wouldn't you invest in that? Well, because there's no money in it. You have to spend money on it. Yeah, I mean, there's – Or there's money in it, but nobody really wants to do the work to figure out.

There's money in it, but you can't make that money. They're going to make that money, right? You're going to help people make money. And it'll contribute to the GDP. It'll contribute to the tax base to the overall economy. But it's not a business where you can, like, say, oh, if I get into that business of helping people, I can get rich. And that's the problem. Yeah.

I mean, if you try to make the, if every, if the, if the, you know, the ultimate adjudicator of everything is whether it is turning a profit, it, you know, you sort of race to the bottom, right? Everybody's sort of, nobody really wants to do anything smart. They just want to do things that enable them to get the most money the quickest. But ultimately, right now, spending $116 billion a year on our prison system, you know, we've got 5% of the world's population, we've got 20, 25% of the world's prisoners. Crazy. Like this whole thing. Fucking wild. What a wild statement.

Yeah. It's incredible. That's a broken society. Like, if that's not evidence of a broken society, look, not like it's better in some of these other places that don't have a high percentage of people because they just kill them. Like, there's a lot of places where you do something bad, they just kill you. There's no thinking about, you know, rehabilitation at all. But, I mean, in terms of like modern civilized society, you know, we don't do this well. No, we don't rehabilitate well. That's for damn sure.

Yeah, we don't, as you're saying, we don't invest in kids. We don't, you know, like, how are we in a situation where we are paying teachers so little money that they have to use their own money to buy books and school supplies? Right. We're beating the shit out of our teachers who are the people that are going to turn our kids into part of our community. How could we be surprised we don't have a community? Yeah, it's almost like it's a conspiracy. I mean, you realize why people slap that tinfoil hat on and tighten it down to the chin. Because, like, at a certain point on, like, why wouldn't we put more money into schools? It seems kind of crazy.

When you got, like, in California, they've got programs that, like, spend hundreds of billions of dollars and go nowhere. Like, where, where's the railroad? You spend so much money. Where's all the tiny houses? Didn't you guys get hundreds of millions of dollars for tiny? Where the fuckers the tiny houses? No tiny houses? It's like not a one tiny house has been built, but there's a lot of that stuff, the 24 billion to the homeless.

The homeless people increase. Like, imagine if they put $24 billion into the education system. Guess what? You would probably ultimately wind up with less homeless. If you put $24 billion into education community centers, God, imagine the work that you could do in California with $24 billion just in education. California would have the greatest education system in the country. If you just paid teachers an exorbitant amount a month, an amount of year, had fantastic

oversight, these incredibly well-structured education systems, great counseling, social workers that can help work with kids, people that could give them productive ways to expel some of this excess energy that they have, figure out how to focus, figure out what kind of jobs they may be excel at based on their personality type, educate them towards that. You could get a lot done. You could get so much done with $24 billion. Instead, it just... It just disappears like Kaiser Sose. There's fucking no one knows where it went. There's no accountability.

They veto. Everybody tries to put an audit on it. Yeah. Right. How did Alabama's prisons go from $300 million for $1.3 billion? And they described it as inflation. And no one's like, no one's investigated. No one's going to jail.

No one, like, fuck you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's, and there, I think that when you say it's a conspiracy. I really believe that, you know, conspiracies do not have to include people in dark back rooms, right? It's very often just everybody's sitting around the table.

Everybody knows what the motivation is. And they just go, okay, I'll do the thing. You do the thing. There's not, nobody has to be rubbing their hands together and having secret meetings. They all know what's in their financial interest. Well, clearly, if you beat prisoners to death and then lie about it and you all agree that you're going to lie about, you're conspired. right yeah I mean that's that happens obviously all the time clearly meetings like that all the time clearly but I think there's an insidious element to the fact that um you know that people are agreeing that

$24 billion should be spent on X Y or Z nobody really needs to get like a secret memo saying how they're going to steal that money like they just go oh okay in Alabama what now we're allowed to spend $1.3 billion on one prison great okay well I'm not personally taking the one 1.3, you know, I'm not personally taking a billion dollar overage myself, but you know, it's going into the system the way that, you know, that was an overage. Well, your first red flag is they start construction before the deal is even signed. They already start. So the fix is in.

They know what's going on. Look, I grew up in Boston and Boston was a part of the most corrupt construction site in the history of the country, the big dig. Big dig, right. That fucking thing was supposed to take like, I don't know how long it was supposed to take, but went on long after I moved out and then came back to Boston like 10 years later. It was still going on. I'm like, this is crazy. And by the time it did it, the population in Boston increased, so it didn't even really alleviate traffic. Yeah. But there's always going to be stuff like that. If you have no oversight or if you have people that can figure out a way to inflate this and add on to that and da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Next thing you know it.

Well, the press is extremely important, which is why government, this government or prior government, they don't like the press, right? Nobody likes getting in trouble because the press does when it operates at its best and when you have the people that are able to make a living being journalists and you're not firing everybody who's a good investigative reporter, then that should be. It's one of the reasons why the country was founded in that way, why Friedian in the press is so important, is because it's the only disinfectant. It's the only way. And it doesn't mean people don't use the press in malevolent ways or people don't bullshit in the press. People bullshit everything. Yeah. But like the public kind of has a sense, or at least used to have a sense and hopefully will again, that when somebody does an investigative story and they are able to produce the facts and figure out who's really responsible for.

a certain kind of corruption, that it reduces the corruption, just is the case, you know. And it's like you can't really regulate it or you can regulate it, but if you regulate it, nobody's paying attention to it, then the press has to identify that people are breaking the rules. You know, the DOJ right now is supposed to be the monitor of making sure that government institutions and others don't defy the Constitution, right? So in Alabama, clearly, every time you see one of these events that happens in our film, those are all crimes. Those are being committed by a state actor, by a prison guard, right? Those are crimes being committed against our fellow citizens.

The fact that some of these people are incarcerated doesn't mean they're also supposed to be killed or named, right? And so who really monitors that is the U.S. Department of Justice? Because at the end of the day, their job is to maintain a constitutional level of. care and and it's not, by the way, that's not that great, right? It's like you have to make sure that there's no cruel and unusual punishment. Well, clearly in Alabama, there is. Well, they started starving them, which is really crazy. During the strike, they were giving them like a tiny ration. Yeah, yeah. They kept shrinking there. No food for days. Yeah. And so the DOJ's job is to do that. What was the DOJ doing, you know, a few years back is they were doing a kind of a sort of an okay

job pursuing just the worst actors, the worst of the worst. So they would find a police station that was just regularly harming people in its jails, arresting people for no reason. You know, they were finding prison systems where people were getting murdered, like in Alabama, and that was going okay. Well, that whole civil rights division of the DOJ is now basically gone, right? It's been totally repurposed. So now it's dealing with, you know, reverse racism and various things like that. But they're not doing those other cases anymore. They don't care about what's happening in a police department or what's happening in a, so you don't even have that level of scrutiny. So when did all this change? I mean, I think most recently you've seen the DOJ

just dismantle the civil rights division. So that's been in the current administration. And the civil rights Division was in charge of looking at the prisons? Yeah. So what had they done during the last four years before that? They also didn't do a great job, but they did bring actions that had impact in a bunch of different states. So, for example, they sued the state of Alabama, which happened under the first Trump administration, actually. The case against Alabama started under Obama, then under Trump, Jeff Sessions. had to approve the issuance of these letters, these findings letters. And then they had when

Alabama said, you know, take a hike, you're wrong, we don't agree, we're not going to make a consent decree, we're not going to settle. Then they had to sue them. So that happened under that happened under Jeff Sessions. And that was now, you know, two administrations ago. The Trump administration brought this action. But it's just being dragged. dragged on and dragged on. And now the DOJ doesn't really care about this kind of litigation. So the people that were running it are gone, all those people. Well, I have to also imagine that you're, there are so many cases.

And if the press was allowed to weekly, if there was weekly access the press had to these correction facilities all over the country, the amount of cases would be fucking extraordinary. But because they've been allowed to hide, because they've been allowed to do this stuff in complete secrecy with total control over. whether or not things get released or don't get released. Like, it's, it's just become just a part of the system. It's like standard operational procedure. Yeah. And it's, I mean, but the cases would go down, right?

Oh, yeah. They would have to. They would have to. Right. If you're beating people in your care, if you're a prison guard like Roderick Gadsden, and you've had 24 cases of excessive force. Yeah. It's sport for them.

You know, you would say at one point, well, this is. not working so great for me, so I want to at least behave somewhat better. Of course. Well, I think your film was probably the first time most people ever got a chance to see. And I would hope that your film and then also this conversation and the other ones that you've been having will move this conversation in a different direction where people start talking about it openly where they're forced to do something. Because it seems like you have to force them to act. And they're probably dealing with so many other cases as well. This is just another burden to them.

And if it's the prisoners, oh, well, that's the least priority situation we have to deal with. These people are bad people that are in jail. Like those, the radio people that you used, their voices. Like, it's, God, it's like, shut the fuck up. Like, you're listening to them. As a person who's had multiple podcasts with people that were wrongfully convicted, I've done a ton of them with my friend Josh Dubin, who was originally with the Innocence project and he's now with the Ike Pearl Mutter Center for legal justice.

It's like his passion project is, besides being a successful attorney outside of that, his passion project is finding these very obvious cases of people that were wrongfully convicted that have spent a giant chunk of their life in jail. And through these podcasts, we've gotten a bunch of these people out. And you've got a chance to have conversations with them. I've had a few on here. And you have these conversations with these people. you realize like, well, these are brilliant people who lost a giant chunk of their potential

to nonsense. Yeah. And I think if it's, if it's, first of all, I think Josh's really smart and I know I've, you've done a lot with him. And I think that's so important. There's, you know, there's always a tendency to sort of think of only wrongful convictions because, you know, everybody can agree that we shouldn't be. locked up for something that we didn't do.

We've had people on that weren't wrongfully convicted that did an extraordinary amount of time for a minor crime. Right. But unfortunately, one of them wind up getting out and then killing a guy, cutting off his head and wearing a wig. He didn't, I guess he didn't know what norm, the new cameras could do, which is funny but also not funny. You're saying it's a technology problem.

He didn't understand the technology he was dealing with because he put on a wig and he thought, oh, I'm going to look like a woman. Like, bro, it was like HD. He was trying to... He was learning from Bob Durst. Yeah. He was... Well, I think he, you know, he probably acted out of passion and then was trying to figure out

to rectify this problem that he created. Yeah. But one thing I want to talk... I haven't met Josh, but I want to talk to him. And one thing I want to talk to him about is the fact that there's like a level of conviction on the part of a lot of prosecutors that they're on the... As you're saying, they're like, they're on that team. And therefore, they have to subscribe to everybody's guilty.

Everybody should be locked up for as long as possible because there are all these other people. There are defense lawyers and people like that who are on the other team. Right. But then you end up with people like Steve Marshall, who, by the way, is running for Senate right now. And we're pushing to get him to step down from his Senate run because, you know, he's sort of been exposed for what he's. And by the way, he said that he had never been in the film. He never met me. He just came out with a whole public statement saying, I had nothing to do with.

those people I never met them. I got like 50 pictures in my phone of him walking me around the state house in Alabama. There's a missing piece there. But that's being very charitable. But why is it that, I'm a charitable person, but why is it that, you know, in Alabama, for example, there's a guy named Tafaris Johnson who was arrested for a murder a million years ago. He's been on death row the entire time. And, the evidence against him totally fell apart. There are dozen people that gave him an alibi that said we were with him at this club that was across town. He had nothing to do with this crime. And yet, and by the way, the DA, who that office is the office that should prosecute that crime,

they've asked for a new trial. They've said that they're not confident that he's guilty. And yet the Attorney General's office is continuing to try to execute him. They're trying to kill him for something which he clearly did not do. There's another case, a guy named Chris Barber, where there's DNA evidence that showed somebody else committed the crime and the DA is trying to execute Christopher Barber. And so, you know, there's this teeming, you know, where you become a part of law enforcement and then somehow you lose your sense of judgment or nuance or your ability to decide who's guilty and who's not guilty.

And that's a really dangerous thing. Yeah, because your career depends on you getting a win. Your career advances if you get a win. The way you get a win is convict people and not getting convictions overturned. That's a loss that fucks up your career. So better to kill them. Yeah. Which is just really crazy.

Yeah. Which is very, I mean, it's disturbing that we have and come up with ways to identify fairness. right? That fairness should be the method by which you judge how a district attorney performs. It's like, well, we decided to prosecute a certain number of cases. Some of those cases weren't worth prosecuting. Some of those cases were going to turn into wrongful convictions. We're not just going to prosecute everything, which is why this whole thing about like Brady material, where you're supposed to give the other side, anything that comes out in the investigation that might be used to prove their innocence. You know, if there's something that goes against the criminal case, you have to provide it to the lawyer on the other side.

But regularly, prosecutors just bury this information. You know, you have some witnesses said, I was with that person at the time, and that witness's testimony disappears. Or you have something that shows that the gun that they thought was used to commit the crime wasn't the one that was used to commit the crime. So there's just a, that's the thing, the teeming the decision that you have to be part of one side or another. You know, I really think that that part of your special where you're sort of like putting me in the position of somebody who's having to make a decision about what team I'm on and where I lose the thread, you know, that's like, that's a very significant thing that you did there, you know, because it was like a way of bringing to the average citizen that feeling that they're all having right now. Yeah, you all get lumped into it. everybody gets lumped into it because there's only two choices

in this country and that's stupid or you could be one of those wacky libertarians you know and then you're like oh Bob's a libertarian he's out of the fucking that shit's never going to work you know what else you get I mean I'm always I'm always curious about I'm always asking myself

what I should be you know what I should be spending my time on and I get involved in a film and it kind of grabs you and it could How do you decide? How do you decide? I feel like it decides. I feel like I'm just sort of walking around thinking,

maybe I don't need to make another one of these things. They're very exhausting, and then something happens, or, you know, my shrink says to me, yeah, I know, you always say you're not going to make another movie, but I think you're better when you're making a movie. I think you're better when you're engaged in something like this. And I'm curious for, you know, you've built this incredible platform,

and you have access to just to, just a remarkable number of people in the universe. And what do you feel like your mission is? What do you feel like is the, you know, when you get to the end of a week and you look back and you think like, I did what I was, I did what I set out to do this week. All I ever do is try to talk to people I'm interested in talking to.

And that's it. And I feel like that's what I started with. And that's what I stuck with. and if I deviate from that path, if I say, oh, I'll get this guy on because he's famous and then I'll get more views. Or I'll get her on because she's controversial and I'll get more views. I don't think like that at all. I don't allow it into my head. I get a list of people on my phone that are interested in coming on the show and I spend a couple hours a few times a week.

Just going over this list and then I'll go, hmm, that's interesting. Let me look into this. And so then I'll do a search on this person and what they're interested in. And then maybe I'll watch a documentary or I'll get an audio book and I'll start listening to it on the way to work. And then I'll decide. And I'll go, yeah, okay, I like this. This is cool. I'm into this.

This will be a conversation that I'll be genuinely curious about. And so that's the only way I do it. And I've done it that way from the very beginning. I either talk to my friends or I talk to people who I've seen a documentary that they did or I read one of their books or I've watched a YouTube video with them in and I thought they were fascinating. And then I reach out to my guy and I say, hey, can you see if this guy's interested in being on? And that's the only way I do it. So I feel like as long as I do that, I will continue to give people this same service. and this service is this is an extension of my curiosity, my honest curiosity to the world.

So whoever I'm honestly curious about, sit them down, talk to them, do my best, that's it. And if I try to make anything more than that, if I try to change it or distort it or move it in a general direction or make it have a message or make it make more money or whatever it is, I'll fuck it up. That's what I think. I think that's really smart. And I think, you know, this is what's lacking is sort of authenticity. And everybody's like, oh, authenticity is so important. How can I manufacture that? Right.

And I think your approach is really smart. I also think, you know, I think you talked about that you really like playing pool and that if you weren't doing this, you might just play pool all the time. Yeah, that's what I would do. I like playing pool. But I'm wondering, like, you know, something's keeping you from playing pool. right now. Well, I still enjoy this. If I didn't enjoy this, I would stop. Like, I don't need any more money. I could just stop if I didn't enjoy it. But I do enjoy it. I am a very curious

person. I'm fascinated by different people's perspectives, how they view the world, how they got to where they are, what was their first step? Like, why do they make these choices? Like, what is it about the way they think that makes them unique? And I don't think I'm ever going to lose that. I think that's a very important part of my understanding of, um, what I'm us as a species, us as a civilization. And I'm very fascinated with the history of the human race and how we got to this point and where we are and how we define what is normal and what is not normal

and what our standards are and how they get manipulated. I don't think I'm ever going to stop being curious about those things. I may stop doing this publicly. I will never stop being curious. I'll never stop watching all these documentaries or reading books or I don't think it'll ever stop. stop trying to have conversations with people, even if I don't do it publicly. Because it's, I mean, it's, this is totally accidental.

I don't know if you know the history of this podcast. It started out with me and my friends just bullshitting in front of a laptop. And there was no expectations. It made no money for years. And then it just kind of grew. And I never promoted it. I never went on anywhere and said, please watch my show. I never took an ad out anywhere.

I just kept doing it. And it just snowballed to the point where I'm like, all right. And now I just feel like I have this responsibility. And I get up and I go, all right, I got to do this thing today for, let me clear my mind first. So I go to the gym and I work out and I get in the cold plunge and I get in the sauna and I clear my mind out. And then I'm like, make sure I'm prepared and just show up at work. Yeah. I notice that you're not like you don't look at shit.

You don't look at your phone. No, you can't do that. That distracts people. I totally agree. It's very gross. Especially if you're talking to someone that has something really important to say. I mean, if I'm looking at my phone for a brief second is because it's something relevant to what we are talking about.

I want to send it to Jamie so he could pull it up on the screen. But I think it's one of the great benefits of having these long conversations with people on a podcast is that that's time where you're not staring at a fucking device. And most people lack that. So I've gotten this completely unexpected education in life, in human beings, and how they think, and what drives them, and just what makes them interesting. And, you know, how does it, how does it impact like your, you have girl, you have two girls, right? Three. You have three girls.

How does it impact sort of how you interact with them? You feel like you, you learn something and then you, yeah, I'm a way more educated person than I ever was when I was younger. I'm just, I just know more about humans. I know more about myself. I've just, you know, you're thinking and you're constantly thinking. So it's just adding to this database of understanding that you have about human beings and about just life in general and just education. You know, unfortunately, my kids are really smart.

And so I have this cool conversations with them about stuff. And, you know, one of my kids has this crazy recall that my wife insists. comes from me she's it's nuts like she can recall things about the Titanic and specifics about like the the voyages because she's got down this Titanic kick for a while you know and lately we've been talking about the Mongols because they're there's she's studying Jenghis Khan in school and so we had these long conversations about Mongols and what they did and what was and you know I'm telling her some stuff that she has known that she tells me some stuff that I didn't know I'm like whoa how old is she this one's 15 um but

So it impacts my, not just my relationship with them, but really my relationship with everybody in my life. And what's really hard is talking to people that aren't interested in anything and don't engage with all these different things. And then when you talk to them, it's like they're operating on this frequency that's like time and work and life is sort of ground down all their sensitivity and callous. all of their senses to the world or their thoughts of the world, their perspectives of the world, and they've developed

these sort of placeholder opinions for things. And it's so awkward. And over time, like, you know, Tony Robbins talked about this once, that if you make small changes in your life, like if you're both going in parallel lines,

right, and then you make a small deviation, a few degrees to the right, over time, you'll be way over here. where they're kind of on the same path. And that's what I find in life that's weird. And then I think about how many people don't have the opportunity to do that

because they have a job that's like mundane and it's consuming and they're involved in it all day long. When they get done, they're exhausted and they never really satisfy their curiosity or encourage and engage with their curiosity, foster it, you know. and it's what to me makes people fascinating. When I talk to someone who's curious about things and it's really like, and it went down a while, I was curious, so then I started researching.

And this is what I found out. I'm like, that's the kind of person I want to talk to, you know? Yeah, it's real. I mean, I think it's also, you know, you're probably, because it got big without a plan to get big and because I think you're, the essence of it is wanting to, express curiosity wanting to take in information. How do you deal with the people who say like, oh, you know, you had so and so on, you should have asked them this or you should have done this.

I don't know that they're saying that. Because you don't hear it. I don't pay attention. I gave up on that years ago. Like, fuck off. Because you used to follow. Yeah. Then you realize, like, oh, I'm at the will of other people's opinions constantly.

And some of them aren't logical. And some of them are petty. And some of them are shitty. They're just shitty people. They're mean. Like, why are you being mean for no reason? Like, you know, why are you being insulting for no reason? And a lot of it is jealousy.

They're not getting enough attention. They think you're an idiot. Why are you getting so much attention? I'm brilliant. I should be getting more attention. There's a lot of that. There's a lot of ego involved. But there's a lot of, like, very, to be nice.

Like, just people with shitty perspectives. And you don't want to engage with that. You don't want that in your head. Because I think that's contagious. And that's why people that are constantly surrounded by negative shitty people, they develop negative shitty tendencies. It's just we imitate our atmosphere, which is why like this idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is so fucking crazy. When you're asking some kid whose dad's been in jail since he was three and lives in a crime infested neighborhood and has 11 kids living in a one bedroom apartment and you're saying, well, how come you went to jail? Shut the fuck up, bitch.

You would have went to jail too if you lived there. You don't know what you're like, what we need to do is figure out why are these kids in this situation? Why are so many of our citizens, people of our community stuck in these situations with no attention paid to our whatsoever? And then you're wondering why so many people commit crimes. You're wondering why your prisons are so full. Like that when you engage with people that constantly have shitty perspectives and shitty, a little about that. A little when you're young is good. But once you're by the time you're like 19, 20, you know what an asshole is.

You know, you don't want assholes in your life. You like avoid at all costs. And online, if you're engaging with people online, you're getting at least 10% assholes. It's like there's no way of avoiding it. So I don't pay attention. And it gets in your head. Yeah, it gets in your head. I am probably as critical, like logically critical as anybody is ever going to be about me.

Like, and what I do and the way I do it. and like interviews that went well or didn't go well, I examine them, you know, and I think about it. Like when they're done, like, oh, that one's like, I should have stopped them from talking about that because I should have said, like, wait, that doesn't make sense. Like, you let people ramble a little bit too much, and then they change subjects.

You want to go back to it. And then something else comes up and you lose, like, ah, I should have really challenged that a little bit more. Or I should have done this or should have done that. But, you know, you're free-balling. You don't know what, I don't have any, like questions I know I'm going to ask. I just have an understanding of the subject and I let it play out.

And I think that's why it's good. I just think when you listen to people when I know, you grew up in, blah, blah, you did this, you did that. It's like the same tone. There's just questions and the person answers the question

and then another question comes. Like, you're not having a conversation. And I don't think of them as interviews. I think of them as conversations. And I think that's what I want to hear. So that's what I do. And if people like, well, you should have done this and ask them this like, no, you should go get a fucking podcast, bitch.

Make your own podcast and then get popular enough where you can get that person on. Then you ask them that. I'm going to ask them what I ask them. And when I'm done, I'm done. That's it. Yeah. I mean, you know, I do interviews for when I'm doing documentaries. I'll do interview for seven, eight, nine hours at a time.

Not that I suggest you do it. But it's the reason I do it is because I want to, I want to like convert. I want to really understand the other person. I want to give myself time to really hear them out. And also, you know, to some extent, the most interesting stuff comes out when everybody just feels comfortable in their defenses go down. Yeah. Yeah, Elon was talking about that.

He's like, that's that last hour. The last hour, you can really get them. Because it's hard for, especially if someone has an agenda. You know, you could, after a while, you're talking to them, the tendencies, the way they view the world comes out. If I really want to know how someone feels about love or life, I want to ask them, you know, how they got to where they are in life, how they became who they are. Like, give them a chance to brag. Give them a chance to inflate their accomplishments or give them a chance to pat themselves on the back.

Give them a chance to dismiss other people's accomplishments. Give them a chance. You'll find out who people are without even pressing them on certain things. Yeah. No, they want to tell you who they are. They really do. Yeah. And they also, like a lot of people, they have an agenda.

You know, they really want to project something to the world. And then there's people that don't. Those people are amazing. There's some people that come in, they're just open books. They're just like just a mind, a curious person, just a person who followed a path, an artist, a singer, a comedian, a this or that, an athlete. Like, whatever it is. Like, what made you you?

How did you get there? That's why I love comedy so much because, you know, just let's see. There's a joke in pumping mics, this little series that we did with Jeff, you know, Jeff Ross and David Tell. And I got to watch, you know, six versions of Dave. It's just incredible telling, they're both great, but Dave telling the same joke like six different times. Right. Because we filmed it over like a long weekend and we did two shows a night at the cellar. And so he's got this line when he says,

They're talking about, like in memoriam, you know, people we lost. And they talk about Stephen Hawking. And Dave says, yeah, Steve Hawking, the great astrophysicist. You know, we lost him. And as Jeff says that. And Dave says, yeah, I knew something happened because my printer stopped working. And for some reason, like, this joke makes people, so many people laughed at this joke because it's so insanely like impulsive, right?

I knew that Stephen Hawkingdick's God because my printer stopped working. And the next night, he did a different version of it where he said, oh, because my computer stopped working and it got no laughs at all. And just being able to see the spontaneity and like the unlocked quality of Dave's mind. The tweaking of the joke.

Yeah. But also just like the freedom, right, which maybe some of that for some people come being stoned. Some people, but I see like the feeling, like even your comedy special, the feeling that it's coming in the moment, even though I know a lot of those things are things that you've been thinking about talking about and honing over a lot of years. It's the moment when it feels like it's coming naturally. That's where like the biggest laughs are. It's also like where the biggest connection, the biggest human connection.

Yeah, so the dance is. The dance is like staying in the moment no matter how many times you've talked. about a subject. Don't think about that. Think about the actual subject. You're basically doing like a form of hypnosis. You're leading people to think the way your mind is working. And the only way you could do that is your mind is actually thinking that way.

If you're thinking about some other stuff, for some reason, even if you're saying the words the exact same way, they can smell it on you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They can tell. Yeah. Yeah. Well, hey, man. Thank you for everything you've done. Thank you for the jinx.

and thank you for the Alabama solution because it's really awesome. And I really hope that through that film, a lot of people get outraged and the right people. And enough attention gets put on it where you force people to do something about it. And I don't think people have any idea how bad these fucking prisons are until they see that.

And I think those contraband phones and what those inmates have done and the inmates themselves through the way they conduct themselves, and when you can see how intelligent these people are and that you realize like this is not right. None of this is right. Yes.

I mean, on the positive side, I would say, just so we don't end on a really negative note, the film has had an impact in Alabama. It's having an impact in Alabama already. And there are incredible demonstrations that have been happening. There's actually, I don't know if you have it, There's a still of this if you want to look at it. But there's hundreds of people showed up on the steps of the Capitol, people really showing up with the intention of showing their loved ones being there and saying, this is really happening and giving the rest of the public permission to understand that this is, you know, 45% of Americans have had an incarcerated relative or been incarcerated.

This is an infection. This is happening in many, many, many places. So for us, the film has been unlocking that, giving people a feeling that they're not alone, that they don't have to be ashamed of having somebody. So, you know, these are people who've seen the film who've decided that they want to express themselves. And this is happening more and more. And we just saw there was a bipartisan bill that was just introduced by Senator Larry Stutz, who's a Republican senator who said he saw the film. he couldn't unsee it and he said this is not

he wrote an op-ed about it not being an example of Christian values and he introduced this bipartisan bill for prison oversight which is a real bill it's not a bullshit bill

it's a real bill about how you take the investigations because you saw in the film the investigations are run by the same department that commits the crimes so I think we're seeing a lot of positive

action as a result of the film and I think that's what transparency is all about is if the public can see it, and I appreciate your talking about this and having this be in the public conversation because it's really important. If people see it, they're not happy about it. They understand that something more humane needs to be done. Yeah, I think universally. I don't think anybody could watch that and not think something should be done. So thank you. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for being here. I enjoy it. Bye, everybody.

Thank you.