The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1265: Joe Loya | Confessions of a Bank Robber Part Two

Episode Date: January 1, 2026

Former bank robber Joe Loya reveals how childhood trauma transformed him into a prolific criminal — and how he found his way back. [Part 2 of 2 — catch up with Part 1 here!]Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1265What We Discuss with Joe Loya:Trauma fragments your sense of the future. When Joe kept robbing banks while out on bail, it wasn't recklessness — it was survival mode. Unprocessed trauma keeps you focused only on getting through today, unable to imagine or protect a future that feels impossible anyway.Compassion beats forgiveness as a healing strategy. Instead of bestowing forgiveness from a position of moral superiority, Joe learned to accept his abusive father by understanding his formation — a beaten child who grew into a broken adult. It wasn't personal; any son would have been beaten.Self-examination is scarier than any external threat. A man who fearlessly robbed 30 banks and survived federal prison found confronting his own grief and dismantling his rage infinitely more terrifying than anything the outside world could throw at him.Your survival armor can become your prison. Joe needed his rage and menacing persona to stay safe in prison, yet that same emotional armor prevented him from healing — forcing him to project violence while secretly working on becoming a more sensitive, self-aware person.Transformation begins with telling your story honestly. Writing became Joe's tool for self-investigation — processing grief, rebuilding conscience, and eventually sharing his journey with his daughter and the world. Start documenting your own growth; the act of articulating your past can illuminate your path forward.And much more... [Part 2 of 2 — catch up with Part 1 here!]And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: Huel: Get free shipping, a shaker, and a t-shirt with your first order at huel.com/jordanShopify: 3 months @ $1/month (select plans): shopify.com/jordanCookUnity: 50% off first week: cookunity.com/jordan or code JORDANHomes.com: Find your home: homes.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Have you ever had a moment where you think, man, someone should really do something about this? Then you realize, maybe that someone is you. Well, with the help of GoFundMe, you can change someone's life. You could start a GoFund me to help a friend pay for school, fund that new community space, or help a local kid finally get to that national competition. I've seen this myself. Last year, a friend of mine launched a GoFund me to help with medical bills after an unexpected surgery. It was incredible how fast the support rolled in.

People want to help. They just need a way to do it. And GoFundMe makes it easy. So do you have a dream, a person, or a cause in your life that could use some support? Don't wait for someone else to bring change. You can be the one who makes a difference. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com. That's gofundme.com. Gofundme.com. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a

better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional drug trafficker, investigative journalist, astronaut, or real-life pirate. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about it. I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, social engineering, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash starts. Or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Now this is part two with Joe Loia. If you haven't heard part one,

of course, go back and listen to that. We're going to continue his amazing story right now. Where we left off last time is that you were out on bail. Your aunt had put up her house to get you on bail, and you are just in such a place in life that you really kind of, in your words, you just didn't care about anything. It wasn't, I'm out on bail, I better go get a job at Target. It was Robin Banks again. And I was just, I think most of the audience, myself included, is just like, why?

Damn it. We started that entire story. I've never started a story with the question you asked me. How does somebody do this? Like, how do you get to do 30 banks? I try to track the movements that erode my sense of posterity. I don't believe I have a future. So there's nothing inside of me like, oh, I got to protect my future.

I better get a job. I better start saving money for the future. I better get a profession so that I can rise in the ranks in the future. None of that. Because of trauma is so intense, you're only looking at surviving the next day in front of you. You know, in fact, the best of the way I've come to understand people who mess up, mess up, mess up, mess up, mess up, mess up, mess up, mess up, mess up, mess up, is that they're only trying to survive that day to get to the next day in hopes that maybe one day they can make the jump to goodness. So they're just surviving every day and they're making mistakes because all they need to do is get to the end of the day.

And then they wake up the next day and it's just day and day. And then you see people change like me and you realize, oh, every day was impulsive, just trying to survive. The things we're facing our challenges outside of us. Like the challenges came to me. I could stab them, beat them. It wasn't the external challenges. It was all the challenges inside of us that a lot of us don't have language to process. I told you when I had grief as a child, what did they tell me? Don't cry. Don't cry. Because your mom's in heaven, which compounded my pain because now I'm feeling guilty. All that's internal. I told you one of the worst things that happened to my child had nothing to do with physical beatings. It was what I was. What I was.

I heard and how my body metabolized that thing my dad said to my brother. What is that? It's all internal. Our internal compass is so messed up. It's like looking at a compass that's just spinning. There's no true north. There's no nothing. It's just spinning out of control. And nobody can help us figure out how to grab a hole of this trauma, place it down, ground it, and start working on it. What's given to us instead is language of you're a sinner, you're a bad person, you're a super predator, you know, all that stuff, right, sacopad, narcissists. Like, but we're just trying to get by. We're trying to do it.

Now, over time, we can become habituated to the underworld, to the other side of taboo, to the grand transgressive life. And it's hard to get out of it once you've allowed your trauma to get you in there and swim in it. It was challenging for me to get out of it. And then, you know, then you're a mess. Right. You can't play well with others.

If you let me out, I'm going to hurt more people and go back in kind of thing. And that's where I kind of was at that time. I was at the place where no sense of future, no job. I don't want to job. You had an interesting idea as well, which was teach another guy to rob banks. So what was the plan here? Like teach him to rob banks and you take a cut and there's less risk for you? Obviously, it was like, I still want to make bank robbery money.

But the FBI have my photo and they know my ammo. Like if I go rob a bank, they're going to look at a photo and go, wait, we just locked this guy up a month ago. Yeah, and he's out. Beirut Bandit, right? And I wasn't a disguised kind of guy. I was just in there, let's get it, let's get the hell out kind of thing. So what I thought was I knew this person and this person was a little older than me. When I was younger, I thought they were kind of a tough person. And I thought, let me recruit this tough person. But by all measures, I now measure toughness. This person had no toughness. When I was younger, I looked up to them, but they didn't have what I had. They didn't have gravel on their cross. as they said. Okay. They didn't have the minerals for us. So I take them out and I say, okay, here's what I do.

You got to go in there. You got to say these words. And they're basically, it was my MO. The person resembled me a little bit as well. But the person was four inches shorter than me. What's happening is I go to this guy and I say, hey, you're going to run in there and you're going to say these words and they're going to give you the money. And, you know, look menacing when you say them.

And he does. He goes in the first time. He comes right. out and I'm parked far away, but I can see him. So I pull in on an alley, so no one can see him jump into my car. And he jumps into my car. He ran to my car. And now I'm like, I'm pumped up. Like, oh, shit, they're coming after us. Let's go. And I take off. And I'm excited. Just like, I'm a constraining on. I'm a getaway driver at that point. Like, who's coming, what's going on? And then finally when it settles down, I realized we got away. I turned to him and say, hey, man,

so how much did you get? And he said, I didn't get anything that told me no. I was like, what? So he's also an idiot, aside from being not tough. He's a moron. Like I said, he had no body. He wasn't frightening. He didn't scare anybody. He had no menace.

He didn't have the rage, which is what always got. When I went in there, I was raging. I was prepared to, like, to injure myself and injure others, that kind of thing. So I get so upset. It was a waste of time. We put ourselves at risk. So I pull over and I scold him, and I say, here's what you need. here's how you need to think about it.

I said, those people went up to your house last night where you were asleep. They went upstairs. They grabbed your pants. While you were sleeping, they took them out, they grabbed your wallet. They took all your money. Your money's in that bank. All moral authority accrues to you now. Yeah.

You are in a position to go get your money. They took your money. That's how you have to go in there to think about it. So I sent him in the next time thinking that I gave him the hype, right? I gave him the game. So now there's one of these malls where, like, there's a big parking lot. And then there's a other parking lot beyond it. There's a big place in Orange County.

And as soon as I see him coming out, I'm going to go across this big boulevard and I'm going to wait for him out of the street for him to get in my car because I can drive there fast and he can run there. I see him step out of the bank. And as soon as he steps, there's one of those doors that when you open one, the other one kind of moves two, you know, because the wind or the air. I see. So he opens the air.

he opens one door and the other goes and there's this eddy of air and he's holding the money like this and it just it just goes all up in the air oh my gosh and then everyone inside can see oh this is a knucklehead man yeah we're not supposed to be afraid of this guy he's grabbing as he gets as much as he can and it's like the bennie hill skit where's one guy the rat da da da da da da da da da and the crowd falling in it right is so like comical and i'm over there now parked and waiting for him and he comes running across that boulevard, almost getting hit by cars. And I'm looking at my mirror and I'm like, oh, shit. And the other people, they don't want to cross the boulevard.

They stay there. They start pointing at him. He robbed the bank and all this traffic. Oh, no. That's finally stopping out of light. A truck turns left onto the street where I am. They see him, I see the car take off. And they only see one person in the car, the back of my head. Because he's so short, he's in the front seat.

They can't see him. So they think the guy who's driving this car is, a guy who just robbed it. They chased me, but I'm at an old RX7. I take off. And they can't read my license plate. They don't do anything.

But I'm going so fast. I'm like 100 in a residential. Oh, man. And I come up to a dip, and I cannot slow down in time. I hit that dip, and I go flying. And when I land,

I know I've just broken my oil pan. I limp about a block and a half away. The lights are going on, flashing. I drop him off, and I say, get home. And he goes in a house. on Auto Zone and he hangs out there talking to a guy, just, you know, bullshitting guy to guy, man and man for like two and a half hours.

And now there's a drag knit out looking for him. But he's just in there chilling. And I go and parked a car and I run away. And eventually I get away just by running through the neighborhood and getting to, you know, have my brother come and get me in Orange County. But the point is when we finally get home, I saw, how much did you get? And he said, $900. And I was like, you are worthless, man.

Yeah. That was my experience of trying to get somebody. And so on bail, I robbed the next three. I was just like, I don't need the hassle. Do you want something done right? Got to do it yourself. That's what they said, right? Did you have any close calls with getting caught?

There was a time where your car overheated. This is kind of a funny story, and I thought you were done for it at this point. There was a couple times. I mean, one time the money exploded. Like a die pack or whatever? And the bag exploded. The die pack exploded in my bag in the middle of the street. And when I went to pick it up, there was a big hole in it had a big red plume of smoke

coming out of it. And when I go to pick it up, there's also tear gas in it. Oh. And I lean in a boat and I got cat like reflexes, right? So I pull back, but not before. It's in my eyes. Right. And now I'm like blinking, blinking, blinking, blinking, blinking, being trying to grab it. Go into my car. I'm running through a park, holding a bag with a big old red plume of smoke coming out of it. My car is parked away. I think I'd mention. I always parked far away. Bankers walked out. They could look sideways. I think there was a getaway car, but I was far away. They probably saw me. because it's just follow the smoke trail. I get to my car, open my trunk.

I throw it in a sports bag and I zip it up. And so no more smoke. But I drive away and I got away. I barely got away because my eyes were like a little bit more of tear gas than I would have been done. So there's that time. Another time was I robbed four banks in San Diego. In one day. It sounds like a lot.

But it was actually almost like three because I robbed one bank and I was so angry with the amount of money I got, which ended up being like a thousand. And it was like pulling teeth to get that thousand. So I walked in the next bank right next door and robbed it, even though the police were coming. I didn't care. I was like so angry. I robbed it and I was able to get away.

And that was the first two knocked them out, 10 minutes. I was done and was able to bank two banks first thing in the morning. That's why it was easy to rob four. On the way out of San Diego, have you driven up from San Diego on the five? Sure. Yeah.

Okay. So on the way up, there's another border where they stop you. And there's also a big, a big stretch of land where on the right-hand side coming north of Camp Pendleton, the Marine Base. I'm there driving up out of San Diego and all of a sudden I hit, like, the freeway stopped.

We're stopped. We're parking lot. We're not moving slowly. We're stopped. And I'm in my uncle's car as a BMW. My car starts overheat. I didn't realize at the time, but the fan in that car, if you're not driving it, The fan just stops.

It was overheating. So I pull over the side of the road. I'm able to get over to the side of the road off. And I can see in my rearview mirror that a cop is coming. Highway Patrol way back there, also on that side lane, right? And so I try to move ahead so I can get out of, you know, I'm like this. I try to move ahead so I can give him room to go by. And when he pulls up, he scolds me.

I'd take you in right now. If there wasn't a cop injured up front, you're not supposed to drive. And I said, I'm not driving. Man, my car's overheated. I don't give a fuck, and he just takes off. And I was like, I got over $50,000 in my trunk and a bunch of chains of clothes. And maybe a die pack in there that you don't know about. I might, maybe.

But no, this is another time. I wasn't that. So, but the fact is that I have a lot of money. I'm getting away. Now, I'm there, and I'm thinking these people may have stopped for me. This might be for me. So remember, I got arrested the border going to Mexico because they were looking for stolen cars. So I'm thinking this might be that kind of thing again, right?

I get out of the car and I start walking backwards because I want to see if I can get to find one of those call boxes. So I could see if I can get a truck to come out and help me. But you know what? All the call boxes have a big iron mesh over them and a big X. And I'm like, oh, these guys are shrewd. They don't want me to get out of my car and go and try and get somebody else to drive me away. That would have been a good plan.

Yeah. So I'm thinking, yeah, I'm thinking they're very clever. So I have to walk forward. And when I walk forward, all the callbox is even moving forward another mile to an off ramp. They're all blocked too. So I start walking down on the off ramp thinking I'm going to go underneath the off ramp and go back, walk back or hit your ride going back. I go to the bottom of the off ramp. And there's a cop there directing everybody into Camp Pendleton.

And apparently what happened, they had closed the freeway. And now five lanes of traffic were having to move out of one off ramp. So that that's why the traffic was so intense there. a mile at least of this parking lot traffic. So I go down the bottom, it's the cop who would stop me. And I said, I told you my car was a wreck, man. I need to, is there a gas station in there? He says, no, you got to get on the freeway and go back the other way. I said, thanks. So I go under the freeway. I start going up the off ramp and I hear boop. And I turned and there's a highway patrol with two guys and they pull up next to you. Where are you going? I said, your partner back there,

my car overheating, your partner told me I have to walk back this way. And they're like, get in. I'm like, okay, I'll get in, and I get in the back seat, and I'm bouncing in there, like, oh, I've never been in the back of a cop car before, and I'm playing it off. I'm 26 or 27, I think. I'm wearing, like, khaki shorts, top siders. I'm wearing a UCLA tank top, baseball cap. I don't look like a bank robber. I look like I just got out of college.

I look like I could be a college, you know, like a grad student. They're like, oh, what are you doing? Where are you? What are you doing down there? Or where you going? I said, oh, you know, my car broke down. I got to come on. I could come and get me.

I said, but I was down here. I said, what were you doing down here? I said, I met this woman at USC and we hit it off. I came down here. I spent a couple days in her, but, you know, she just got crazy, man. You know how it is. And so now I'm using this as I'm appealing to the misogynist. And I'm like, let's be buddies now.

I'm not a guy to be worried about. We're all the same kind of male bullshit. We're all jackasses. They're like, yeah, yeah, of course. And all of a sudden, there's camaraderie there. Yeah, geez. I'm just a guy who's down here and don't we know how women are, like that kind of asshole, right? Yeah.

And so they go along with it. And then I say, hey, so why is it all locked down? They said, well, there was a shootout and one of our guys got crashed and a bad guy, he got shot and he's dead. And I said, oh, man, that's terrible. How's your guy doing? How's your boy doing? And they're like, well, he's going to make it. He's in the hospital.

And I said, does he have a family? And I showed great compassion. And I just like, I'm caring about the cops. You know, like, I'm a guy who appreciate the cops doing the work for us. And I want to let them know I'm appreciative. And they're buying it, man. They're just totally buying it. Now, remember, I got a fanny pack around my waist that has about $40,000.

It was all I could fit in there. Wow. And I just robbed four banks in the city. So I see a rest stop coming. I say, you know what, guys? Just drop me off here. And sure we could take you to gas? No, no, no.

I'm going to go in here. There's a taco truck there. I'm going to give me some to eat. I'll call my uncle. I'll have him to pick me up. I sound almost a little spoiled. Like, I'm going to make my uncle do all the work. I'm not getting, you know, like, I'm letting them feel like I'm just a guy.

There's nothing dangerous about me. There's none of that. Well, they dropped me off and I try to get, hey, there's no way to get out back. You know, back back. I pretend like, I've never been in a police car before. A car car that doesn't have any, like handles, right? They're like, oh, yeah, we got a bunch of bad guy. We don't want to get now.

Let me get you out. That's fine. And so let me out. And I come to the front window. I'm like, hey, man, thanks guys. I really appreciate it. And they're like, we could drive you. You sure?

I'm like, no, man, I got this. Thanks. And I was just as super friendly as you can get. And they loved me. And they hid it up. And they go, I call my uncle. I said, what the hell is going on, man? He's like, oh, yeah, the fan, whatever.

He doesn't want to talk about the fan. I wait to all the traffic dies down. I get over there eventually. And I just drive away. But when it was interesting to me about this story, the next day, that night, I get a call from a friend that I've been in San Diego, county jail with when I got arrested the first time at the Mexican border, right? He called you over, hey, Joe, you know what it says?

I said, yeah, and he says, were you doing any work down here? I said, yeah, why? And he says, you're on crime stoppers. And they said that, I said you're out four banks. And they said that they think you're Indian or Pakistani and they think you live in Tijuana. I said, oh, okay, thanks for the heads up. Now, I know I was in crime stoppers, which means in the morning when these guys showed up to work together and there's pictures of me, like, have you

guys see this guy, look out for it. And I wonder if they looked at each other and like, yeah, we're not going to say nothing. Yeah, we're not saying. Exactly. Or did they say, oh, yeah, we had him in the back of our car. We know he's going to L.A. or like, whatever, right? What do you think happened? We took about the crime scene and drove him to a rest stop and then let him go after having him in the What do you think they did? Did they speak up? No way. No way. No way. They looked at each other and they were like, wasn't him, right? No, no, no, no. He was too nice. Anyway, yeah, they just with like, nah, no chance that they brought that up to anybody, possibly not even each other. Where do you hide the cash after you rob a bank? Because you can't just put it into another bank,

but you have a lot of money. I mean, are you doing that breaking bad thing where you put a big pile of money and you lay on it? I mean, money's pretty gross, actually. I did. I did one time. So, yeah, I did actually. And that's where, that was a fascinating time because I just laid the money on the bed. You know, it wasn't a lot. It was maybe at the time of $70,000 or something cash. But I laid it on the bed. And when I lay on it, all of a sudden, man, I smell like there is shit on the bottom of my shoes. I get up and I'm like, where is that smell? And I look at my shoes. There's nothing there. And then I look at all the money and I lean forward. And I'm like, oh, man, this money stinks. And you don't think of money stinky, but everyone's greasy pausing on.

And that, that money stunk when I was on it. I realized, oh, money stinks. Especially, you know, you have that much money out. That was an interesting observation. to make about money really stink when you have a lot of it. Yeah, it's kind of gross. Eventually you get caught for real. Late us through how you get caught, but then since you had the double, they got confused and they couldn't pin it on you. Okay, so when that guy robs that bank.

The guy you train, the dummy? That guy tutored, right? Right. When he robbed, he used my ammo. We have a bomb. I have a gun. Give me the bunny now, you know? So when he robbed those two banks, the FBI gets notified.

There's a guy out there who robbed. Here's his MO. It goes over the thing, whatever. They're like, oh, that sounds like Joe lawyer. So those two guys who are investigating FBI, they go to the bank. And they have a six-pack of photos, one of them's me. And they show it to two women. And two women point at me and say, this is the guy who robbed us.

Right. Now, I wasn't in the bank, obviously. So they go and they rescind my bail. And the FBI agent, Special Agent Keith Cordes, who we befriended each other much later. But Keith Cordes, he calls my dad and said, hey, man, you're sorry to say, but your son started robbing again. And my dad's on. And he says, he's considered armed and dangerous. So if you want to help him, tell him to turn himself in because I probably won't be the one to arrest him.

And they'll think he's armed dangerous. He could die. He can get killed. So my dad gets a hold of me where I call my day. Hey, what's up, dad? And he says, turn yourself in. They know you rob that bank. So I wasn't any bank today.

And he says, they know you robbed it. they have it positively identified. I said, dad, I swore on mom's grave. I was not there. Now, mom's grave is sacred to me. And so when I said that, he was like, oh, okay, I'll tell him. So he calls the FBI back and he says, listen, my son swore on his mother's grave, which is, you know, I believe him. He wasn't in that bank. So he said, have Joe call me. So I call special agent Cordes. I said, dude, it wasn't in that bank. You can't rescind my bail. It wasn't me. He said, all right, I'm going to go the next day. I'll go tomorrow and I'll check. And the way a check is he gets the tape and the person who is standing at the counter, the counter will come

to a certain place on me and it'll be four inches taller on him. So he goes the next day, sure enough. I have a double because those two women were just robbed and they both identified me, which means fresh identification, positive identification was totally wrong, which means all the identifications, when I got arrested, they went back to people who had been arrested, 18 months before, you know, been robbed 18 months before. Yeah. 10 months before,

eight months. All of those are suspect now because I have a double. So when I call him, he says, Joe, listen very carefully. Go to your attorney and tell them that you have a double. You have an official double. Right. And so I do.

And my attorney goes to the DA and I get arrested in the meantime. They go to the, I get arrested soon after three days later or something. And my attorney goes to the DA and says he has a double. all those ones are suspect. And not only that, I had time cards at my job saying I was working that day. Positive ID trumps time cards. But when all those positive IDs just collapsed, my time cards become boss. And so I have an alibi now, where I was, but except for three banks. I didn't have an alibi for them. So they said, well, have him plea guilty of three banks. We'll give him eight years or something like that, and he'll do seven. And I was looking at 36 or something like that, 36 years.

So I was like, where do I sign? You know, like I got love. And that helped me, that guy who resembled me, it actually helped me so that that's why I robbed 30 banks. And, you know, the FBI has been on TV on the show. I almost got away with him. They said they actually suspect me of 30 or 40. That's their count. I know from my own count, it was 30.

So that guy not only, so he only stole 900 bucks, but he saved you like 29 years on your sentence. So he actually had the biggest take of all, that idiot. He ended up doing me good. But, you know, I ended up doing good by choosing him and getting him in that spot. You can rationalize almost anything if you need it badly enough. Speaking of which, time for some ads. We'll be right back. Don't forget about our six-minute networking course.

It is free. It is non-cringe. It is down to earth. It'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer. It's all about relationship building. And six minutes a day is really all it takes. Many of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us.

You'll be in smart company where you belong. The course is free. There's no shenanigans at six-minute networking.com. Now, back to Joe Loyah. Prison sounded like chaos. I mean, what you wrote about or what you talked about in the podcast, you think like, oh, prison is boring or prison isn't like TV. It sure seemed like it was almost like TV.

Some of the stuff you described, the chaos that was going on. You mentioned that I think you either saw or at least heard a guy getting lit on fire in his cell. I mean, what the hell is that? What's that all about? Yeah. That's a crazy place. I'm watching a show right now called The Night of. It's on HBO.

It's about a guy who's innocent, but he gets pulled up into the system for a murder that he didn't come at. And he starts going through being a fish in prison. He gets confronted with all these things that he's totally unaware of, all the intrigues. What's a fish? First term, like first time in. He's just a little guy, and there's sharks, and there's fish. I see. He's just, he might as I call him a guppy, right?

He just knew, like I was when I went in, I didn't know what was the what. Fortunately, I had some experience of doing time before. A couple of guys there knew who I was. They knew I had a little reputation at the person I was before because of violence I had committed and earned respect for that. So I can show up with little something. Not only that, I happen to be fortunate because one of the most renowned neighborhoods in California prison system is the neighborhood where I was born in, in Maravia, in East L.A. that's just my chance I was born in like a legendary place in the lore of prison gangs and prison violence.

I see it. So I'm able to say I'm from Mada Vian and goes, oh, who do you know? And I just tell them whatever. But I had some access to some resources that when I first went to Lawn Park that other guys didn't have who just going for the first time. But this show what I'm talking about was I'm with my girlfriend. I'm realizing there's a lot of things that are going on that actually happened. They've accelerated it for the purpose of the show. But there's a lot of things you have to confront that are scary, that are dangerous.

And if you're not savvy, they can come at you. And it was very wild. The fire one was, I worked in the sign factory. And in the sign factory, there's a place where all the flammable stuff is. And they would open this big door and me and another guy from the order. We'd go inside and they'd close it and lock it up. And the only person allowed to come in was a guard and another inmate. They'd come with a cart and they would give us a list of the paints and the acetone or whatever they needed.

And we would give it to them. And we were locked in there. They'd lock us in again. And we just had to keep inventory of the stuff. And then when they came in, we would give them the stuff. But we always smuggles stuff out. We were smugglers. We would take it out and we would sell it.

He would smuggle out acetone. And acetone is what you could use. Put a spray bottle. You could set someone on fire with it, right? What happened one night, it was late at night, a guy was in the TV room. He gets out of the TV room and the guards said, okay, stand in front of your cell and he has a spray bottle of acetone in it. He goes on the first floor. The guard goes through the third floor to start letting guys in their cells for the TV room.

And most of the guys are in their cells going to sleep. This is 11 o'clock at night, at 12 o'clock in night, whatever. And these guys, you're allowed to stay in the TV room on the weekend for two hours. And every hour, guard comes there and says, hey, who wants to get out now? And then the next hour, okay, everyone get up. And it was one of those moves. It was late at night. And there's Native American sleeping in a cell.

This guy who has the water bottle, there's a white guy. And he goes to the cell and he starts squirting in the room on the floor, on the guy's blanket. Just he starts squirting inside. And then he lights it on fire. He goes to the next cell and he's doing the same thing. Lighting on fire was this guy's friend. Lighting it, lighting on fire. But at this point, that guy is starting to hear this guy scream on fire in the first side.

So he gets up and he's able to kind of like put a pillow in it. So that guy doesn't have a chance to get him on fire. The only guy on fire is in the first cell and he's on fire. He has long hair and everything. Now I'm hearing screaming. I go to my window and I could see the unit right across a little patch of grass. And one cell is lit up on fire. And that's the guy who's screaming trying to put it out.

It was terrible. And that wasn't the worst part. When the guards come, they all rush to that unit because the guard hits his panic button, all the guards come. They grab the guy who had lit it on fire. They don't know who he is. He's just standing out there because the guard had to come down to put him in a salary. They put him against a wall and they say, here, they come with fire extinguishers,

and they pull the guy out. He's just sitting there kind of, they put him out of fire, and he's laying there and they're waiting for the nurses to come. And the guy who lit him on fire, who's sitting across the tier, just waiting in all the hubbub. He walks over there. He grabs a fire extinguisher shirt right there. and he started beating the guy he just set on fire.

Wow. He started beating him, the guards tackling him. So the final indignity wasn't just the fire. It was that, you know, he got beat down with a fire extinguisher. He lived, but man. It's just these people are like animals in there, some of these people. Yeah. That's really like the brutality is just.

We're animals out here too. But we're just, we have logic and we try to like hide all our animal instincts. But like polite society. Like for me, I'm just like, wow, that level of brutality is actually insane. Yeah. You get in your own fight, you have almost like a spiritual experience in solitary confinement. Tell me about that. Yeah, so, you know, I was, for the first half of it, I was a criminal, I was committing crimes. I was doing everything I could to, you know, to make money in there and doing all the hustles that are against the law. But I get pulled up. I get swept up in a homicide investigation on six other Mexican guys, five other Mexican guys. And they keep us there for two years before they say we didn't have anything to do with it.

Because you're in prison for seven years at this point, yeah? Yeah. So this is the middle of my term. Yeah, right in the middle of my term. And while I'm in there for sure, I'm doing everything I can to stay sane. I'm doing exercises. I'm doing concentration games. I'm trying to, like, because you're locked in a cell the size of a parking stall for, you know, 24 hours a day, 23 hours some days. Oh, my God.

You know, they let you out to go to walk in a bigger cell for a wreck five times a week and then three showers a week. So, you know, you're locked in there for a long time. I do a lot of reading. I do this stuff. But my mind slowly started a fragment. And I started hearing my voices. I had an hallucination that there's a little bald boy in myself. I cracked.

I see this bald boy in my cell and I'm like, oh no, I've seen guys crack in solitary confinement. And they do crazy things. And I was like, oh, no, I can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy now. So I'm in that realm. There was a guy once he came out and he went in Bobby and when he came out, he put red pencil on his cheeks. He tucked his t-shirt in to make it look like a halter top. He rolled his boxes up to make him look like panties.

And he came out, Sally. Oh, my gosh. There was another guy just rubbed feces all over himself when he went crazy. And they had to try and get them out. And nobody wanted to go in there to drag him out. People go crazy. They do crazy things in there. And I was thinking, oh, no, I'm on that spectrum.

Yeah. Like, I know that this isn't cool. I just saw somebody that feels as real as anything I've, as if I, you know, in the visiting room, you know. And as I'm lying there thinking I'm a wreck, within the day, I realized, oh, you know, when I was a kid, a seven-year-old bald kid, I knew when I was seven, and he was, he drove his, wrote his bike in the neighborhood, and he had leukemia. And when he's riding, we become friends, and he said, hey, can you come to my house? I got a little club in my garage, and I asked my mom, she calls his mom, and we go over there.

We're best friends now. It's just two blocks away. I ride my bike over there and his garage. The parents had set up a little clubhouse in the back, so we go in there, and he grabbed, his hair and he takes it off and he puts it on the on the thing it's got all these loops of tape in there i'm like what's going on he goes oh i'm sick that's nothing because when he would ride his bike coming in a neighborhood he had his hand on his head and he was riding his bike and the little hair was flapping up you know so i knew there's something weird with his hair you know he had leukemia

and three or four months later he died on the way to church my dad told me my friend died he's in heaven now riding his bike and so i'm thinking oh i knew a ball kid and my psyche pulled up this kid out of nowhere, I'm visited there, and it's so humbling this experience of going mad of having this hallucination. I know how to perform prison maleness. I know how to perform. Don't mess with me. Like I've done violence already. And now I have this homicide investigation that I survive. And when I come out, there's something that happens to you when you're investigated for a homicide and you don't get the case, right? What men in prison think is, oh, my God, you beat a homicide. Right. You're a killer. Yeah. It's easier for them to think that because it's safer. You don't know

if I killed someone I may have, though, and so you don't want to bother me. And what that did is allowed me distance from people because now I've been writing the last year in prison trying to save myself. I'm writing. I'm thinking of stuff. I'm writing stories. The first one story I wrote that ended up in the memoir was about this bald kid, right? Yeah. And so I'm writing all these stories from my past, and I need time in my cell to keep writing and investigating who I am. The great irony of my second half of doing time was I had to periodically really pretend like I was ready to stab someone or whatever and commit violence on people so that I had to project. So that you can get some peace and quiet.

I will hurt you so that I could be in myself becoming a more sensitive man right into investigating myself. You know, that's, that's, I'm having a spiritual awakening. Get away from me or I'll stab you in the face with a pen. I'm having a compassionate awakening. And if you disturb me, I will give you with a sharp toothbrush. Yeah, this is crazy. So what was scarier than going to prison or having to take a cold, honest look at yourself?

Cold honest look. Because all the crimes I did and all the violence I did. And starting with my dad, 16, it was like, I'm wired for that. I'm made for that. I've already committed so much violence that I know I'm fearless. I've robbed 30, but I walked in there, you know, ready to die. I'm a fearless man. but there's a reason why I was doing this external stuff

because I didn't want to go inside and deal with the internal stuff. I was afraid of going in there. So what I realized when I started investigating myself was, man, this is hard. This is scary. I was going to have to change. I was going to have to confront all these griefs that are actually, those are the animating force to do what I'm doing, to live the way I'm living.

I need this rage to survive here, to survive in the underworld. I need the rage. So all of a sudden I'm thinking about dismantling my rage and confronting my grief to take away the power of the rage. And I'm like, I'm going to be naked. I might as well be like melting my armor because that's what I need. And the armor is what I need to survive in here.

So it was scary. Like it was super scary. And then of course, you know, there's all the grief that comes up that I'd shut down and the conscience. I had a conscience now that was a baby conscience. And I was so distraught to think about all the harm that I had caused, I opened up a little bit of my conscience and everything was waiting and just all the bad that I'd kind of pushed away. And there was a lot of bad and a lot of regret.

It was a lot of shame. So it was heavy on me. It was super heavy. I wasn't sure how I was going to cope with it. So the writing was super helpful that way. Did you start to understand your father a little bit more being in that position in solitary and started having that, I guess, awakening from the sound of it? Yeah, you know, it was this interesting thing where I was raised Protestant Christian evangelical. You know, they always always. tell you you got to forgive people. I also got this little Buddhist tract in solitary. And I started doing this correspondence course with, you know, sort of Eastern ways of looking at the world. And what was interesting about that was that I had been forgiving my dad for years. And it never took.

In fact, when I came out of prison, there's a lot of people who've been forgiving their dads. And they never, it doesn't stay that's hard to do that. And I figured out, the reason it was hard for me was I was always thinking, I'm going to forgive my dad. Yeah. And at the beginning of that is ego. It's me. And what it started sounding like in my ear was, I'm so magnanimous, which is already ego. I'm so magnanimous that I'm going to bestow something on this lower person so that I can elevate them so that we're now fine. We're good now. But in order to make that happen, I have to bestow forgiveness on him. And to me, that power dynamic does not show, that didn't feel cool. I was like, no wonder it doesn't work. It's always starts with I.

And so I read about compassion in a way that blew my mind. Because what compassionate told me to do was, you don't forgive them. You accept them for who they are. And the reason they are who they are is because look at their childhood, right? If you look at my dad's childhood, his father brutalized him. He was so bad that sometimes he would make my dad sleep in the chicken coop outside. I know this because his brothers and sisters told me. He was raised in such a violent home that he watched his mother get breakfast.

brutalized all the time. And he had to process that and the grief of that, right? So I looked at my dad and I started seeing that the guy who's in our home doing what he did, he wasn't a monster. Was he behaving monstrously? Yes, but he wasn't a monster. He was a little boy who had been beaten and beaten and he was like a tree that you keep beating and grows crooked. More importantly, it was like a little unlicked cub grown to grizzly size. He didn't get love. He got violence. What's he going to do? He's going to grow up and be this. angry bear. And when I started looking at my dad's formation, I said, I don't need to forgive him. I just accept that he is who he is because this is what happened to him. And the biggest thing

in me was, I realized that we shared a grief that animated our violence as well. He was totally in pain by the death of my mother. It fractured him. And it destroyed me, too. And so when I was able to look like, oh, our violence is underwritten in many ways. by the death of my mother, the absence of my mother. And then that made solidarity between us. It's like, I found the hidden likeness. Before it was just, oh, you're a monster. And I was brutalized by you.

Now it's like, no, we share the same grief. And more importantly, our anger is trying to disguise that wound. So my dad has the wound. I have the wound. We have all these wounds from our childhood. We're the same. And when I had compassion for him, there was no need to forgive them at all. I see.

And so when I tell people that they say, have you forgiven it at them? No, never. I have compassion for him. And another way to have compassion, a compassionate way to look at it was, he may have socked me, he may have choked me,

he may have done all those things, be me with a bat, but I don't take it personal. And people are like, how can you not take a personal? It literally happened on your person. And I get it because I didn't understand it before either. When people would say that,

I was like, it happened to your person. How do you not take a person? And the way you don't take a person and the way that helped me move away from, oh my God, he did all this thing to me, was that if you had lined up a hundred sons, they were all going to get beat. Because it wasn't about the sons. It was about what was in him.

And he didn't know how to deal with stress. And he was always going to beat somebody. And then that way, I was like, it's not about me. And so I don't look at it like, you did this to me. I look at it as you did this to yourself. Your conscience now has to deal with what you did to your boys. Your wife told you take care of my boys before she died. And the courts took us away because you failed.

that taking care of your kids, you have to live with that shame. You have to live with that grand. I let it go. I have compassion for you. It didn't happen to me. I said this at a conference once, Sun Valley Writers' Conference. And there's a famous writer there named Frank McCourt who wrote a book called Angela's Ashes. I don't know if you've ever heard of it or read it.

One of the greatest bestselling memoirs of all time. And Frank McCourt came up to me afterwards and he said, you know, I've never been able to verbalize that. Because the book, Angela's Ashes, was how his dad was such a drunk and spending all the money and beating the kids and being his wife was that some of the kids died because they didn't have food. And his dad was terrible in that regard. But Frank said, I've been trying to articulate this, but you articulated so well because I don't feel like I need to forgive my dad. And nobody understands that. He says, I really appreciate that. Behind him was a guy named Brayton Brayton Buck, who was this great poet from South Africa.

He came from a big family, Brayton Box were prime ministers and generals and that kind of thing. But in the 60s, he became a radical. He ran with Mandela's crew, the African National Congress, and he had to leave the country because there was death threats. He snuck back a few years later to see his mother. He was snitched on, and they arrested him, and he did time with Nelson Mandela. Now he was free. He's a great poet, sensitive, sweet man. He comes up to me after I talk about how I didn't forgive him.

my dad and he was like, man, that's exactly how I feel about my guards. I don't need to forgive them. I have compassion for them. So I feel like this idea, if you've gone through really terrible abuse by people and one of the ways you can let go of this trauma of having been brutalized by authority is to realize it wasn't about you and find a way to move away for it, not with forgiveness, but with compassion for them. Like, that's the way they were raised to see the world and that's what was that was the system they were raised in you know and so were you able to apply that same realization to yourself that compassion for yourself it was easy to give it to my dad it was really hard to give it myself that's a good question jordan that's a great question

it was so much harder for me and you know what sometimes i struggle with things and i realize even at my age 64 i've been out 29 years now sometimes it's still hard because of the the regret and the shame that i've been wrestling with all these years sometimes in a moment of like real spiritual, emotional fatigue, it's hard for me to give myself compassion. But that's always going to be my work, right? It was always going to be my work, and it's what I strive for. When you got out of prison, were you ready to be around normal, good people? Was that something that you fit back into easily? I'm a preacher's son. Right. So I have social skills because of that. And then I was that very smart. And so also I learned, I had a lot of savvy having been in prison and being able to look at people and stuff.

I came out with confidence that I would be able to like graph myself under the body politic, the host body of, you know, of citizenry. Yeah. I was scared that I might fail, but I wasn't afraid that I could connect with people again. I had had a correspondence with this writer named Richard Rodriguez for a couple of years. He's a great essayist. And he was like, I'll get you work as a journalist. You're already a writer.

You're better writer than some people I know. And he gave him all this confidence. So when he came out, I had a pretty soft landing because I got gigs writing pretty quickly. And I'm also a fortunate writer in that when I started writing, people would come to me and say, can you write on this topic? Can you write on that topic? And so I wanted the rare writers who I didn't have to pitch a lot. I didn't have to go and say, can I write for you? Can I write for you? It's just people would come, hey, Joe, this happened. Can you write this? Joe, this happened. So I was fortunate when I came out to have that validation. Like I published within three months in the examiner,

six months I was in the LA Weekly and then the LA Times op-ed page. So I was getting a lot of attention. And that LA op-aid piece got me on 48 hours. Oh, cool. Dan, rather, on bank robbery and stuff. Yeah, yeah, so that's how it happened for me. This is how people become the thing they hate, one rational choice at a time. I shall now shill mattresses and or vitamins. We'll be right back.

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Now, for the rest of my conversation with Joe Loya. You have a daughter, correct? Yeah. How did you tell her about your past? And I wonder how you tell other people. How do they normally react? For some reason, we got the impression, you know, kids hear things they know things. She'd already been in school.

a lot of the parents in school knew that I was, you know, had been in prison or whatever. So I suspect that she was hearing things from other kids or something, but she got the impression that I knew something about banks because we started, we hung out all the time, you know, we were very close. And I was picking her up from taking her school, picking her up. And one day she was like, do you know anyone who's robbed on her cars? What's a bank robbery? And so I realized, okay, she's asking questions around the edge of what happened with me.

and I didn't know when I was going to tell her, but I felt like I needed to introduce her the concept of what happened. Now, I was prepared for this because ever since she was little, when there was a cartoon where some kid offended the group of people and he was shunned and then they had to figure out how to get back to him and absorb them back into the group, I would always highlight those. You see, sometimes people do bad things,

but we have to be willing to let them come back in their little society. I was constantly hitting more of those themes. And they're in every show. There's episodes in every show, you know, little kid show. And so I was preparing her for this for years before she got to seven. So she was two, right? I told her mom that I was going to tell her. I think it's time to tell her because she's asked three times this week about bank robberies. So we decided that one Saturday, we were going to spend the day with her. Because once you spend a long time with the kid,

you're doing things, they just feel safe. Their nervous system is so calm. And then we're like, hey, let's go get some fro yo, you know, we go get some frozen yogurt. And we bring it home. And We're having a great time. We've been together for six hours, seven hours or something, and said, hey, I got somebody to tell you. I just goes, what? And I said, I bring my book. And on the cover of my book, you know, the title of my memoirs,

the man who I grew up who is prison cell. Joe lawyer.lt. You can get it and I'll sign a coffee for you. But, yeah, it's the man who I grew his prison cell. And I pull it out. And on the cover is this really, the iconic photo of me walking out of a bank, the FBI surveillance photo with a trench coat and a suit and a tie and all that stuff. And, you know, with my Ray Band sunglasses, it looks pretty badass. Anyway, I've come to a

shore, I said, listen, a long time ago, your dad, when I was a young man, you know, I was very angry. I made a lot of mistakes. One of the mistakes I did is I robbed a lot of banks. And when I did, I went to prison. I changed my life. And I came on. I'm a writer now. You know, you see me always writing. And the society is taking me back in because they saw that I changed my life. And that's why we and you and I get along. I'm a good father now. I'm a good person. And so I changed my life and I showed the book. You see, I wrote this book and this about how I changed my life. And her first question was, oh, did you have to pee in a bucket? And it turned out. I was like, and I told her, I was like, no, I wasn't in the Bastille. It wasn't an 18th century French prison.

That's how he said. Because I had seen the image she was talking about. There'd been this cartoon in Phineas and Ferb where some guy goes to prison and when he gets locked in a cell, they give him a bucket that he has to do his business in, right? And to her, That's what she imagined prison was. And she asked one or two questions. And then she was like, can we go play? Yeah. And that was it.

Like, I just needed to introduce a concept. And knowing that we've now begun a conversation about it. And over the years, she would ask, did you have a best friend? What a prison smell like? She would ask me questions that are really interesting to have that conversation. But that's why I told her. I'm afraid to ask, but I will anyway. What does prison smell like?

That's not a bad question. Kids always have really good questions, actually. Often, I should say. Yeah, the answer is it smells myriad in any given day. You walk by one guy's cell. It smells like tuna. They just opened a can of tuna. You walk in another guy's cell.

It smells like cigarettes. Another guy, the devil's lettuce. Like, you walk through it and you're just, every cell has a different stench coming out of it, right? Or also, one guy, he was this Cuban guy. He loved the smell of Ben Gay. And he thought, oh, it's really a strong scent. So he would get this boiling water from the where you get your boiling water for your coffee.

He would put it in a mop bucket. And then he would put Ben Gay in there. And so he would mop. floor with Ben Gay. And so that scent came out of the cell really strong. Yeah, eucalyptus. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, something, whatever. So I told her it's just any given time, it's just different smells. There's not like one smell. Yeah. Okay. You were going to tell me how other people react when you explain what you used to do. I mean, on a podcast, we, we ooh and on get the whole story, but what about the average person? You know, it depends when it comes up differently. People find out

about it too, you know, through other people. The biggest response I get is like, you don't look like a violent person. You don't. Because I come out here and I don't let anyone read violence off me. I'm not trying to intimidate anyone. I don't perform that hyper-male thing out here at all. You know, I still have aggression for me that I dialed from a 10

down to about a two or three. That's as low as I can go. And it's still sometimes a little intense for people. But mostly there's no real, and that's the response I get. People are like, wow, it's hard to see you. Like, my girlfriend told me that just last night. We were talking about prison and stuff. It's hard to imagine you being that guy.

Because now I'm kind of a big old sweet bear. So, I mean, I'm a big guy and everything, but I'm kind of a nice guy. So most of the responses are like that. You ever watch heist movies or anything and think like now? I love heist movies. In fact, I'm trying to put a podcast together and where every week I talk about a different heist movie. There's hundreds of them.

They come out all the time. Yeah. And I have opinions about them. So I want to do a podcast in which I break down a heist movie. I think that's a really fun idea. You know, you could take a scene and go, this would not work or here's why, or this would, this is a bad idea. There's a better way to do it, but it wouldn't look as good. So Hollywood chose this one.

Let me hit a note on that real quick. In the podcast where I would do is I would have guests who were in a heist movie, wrote a highce movie, directed a hoist movie, you know, acted in a hoist movie, like somebody, because I was a baby driver, so I could have anyone there. That's right. I could have Jamie Fox on. I can have John Hamm on, you know, I could have people who I know who are in the business, who directed, written, whatever. So I feel like I'm in a unique place for that because I'm, you know, I've consulted in Hollywood for like a consultant in Hollywood for like a consultant and was in baby driver. So anyway, go on. Yeah, I think that would be fun. Let me know if I can help with anything like that. That sounds like a fun side gig, a little project. Yeah, right? The banks you rob, they were all in L.A., right? And I assume you keep your money in a bank now and not in a dirt pile in the back of your garage.

Did you ever rob a branch of the bank that you now use as a customer? I didn't rob only in L.A. I robbed as high as Ventura and all the. way in San Diego. Okay, but like your area. Yeah. Southern California, yes, yes. You know, because if you rob a Bank of America, are you a Bank of America customer now? That's exactly right.

I gave Bank of America the Blues and I'm a great customer for Bank of America. And I like Bank of America. They've done me nothing but good. And so it's weird. I pulled this move once. I talked to this guard at my Bank of America when I was living in another city and I went up to him and I started talking. Man, you know, I see you here all the time.

How do you like your job? Is it dangerous, whatever? We got kind of like friendly. I said like, how do you make sure that you're protecting everyone? He says, and he gives up the gang to me after a year or two, right? I told him I was from East LA and he says, yeah, my mom moved me from East LA because she didn't want me getting into gang, so I came up here. So we had the solidarity thing.

He told me a lot of things about bank robbers and stuff. And one day I say, I know, man, I was once in a vault when it got robbed. Technically true. Yeah. And he was like, really? I was like, yeah, man, it was scary. And that line is, George Clooney says that line in the movie he did with Jennifer Lopez out of sight.

He leans into a banker and he says, hey, man, I was once in a vault when I was robbed. And we already seen a rob a bank and he was in the vault, right? So I use that line with this guy and I wonder if he ever figured it out. But yeah, my bank is cool. This is like when you told your dad, I swear on mom's grave, I was not in that bank. It's like, okay, well, he said he didn't rob the bank.

That's not what I said. What I said was I was not in the bank. Again, technically true. That's all I was admitting to. And what's interesting about that story that I didn't get to, Cordes liked me. Special Agent Cordes liked me. He never met a bank robber like me.

He told me so. We were driving to the court. And he was in the back. He said, I never met anyone like, Joe, your friends are so nice. If I understand what your dad did you, but I've never, I usually gangbangers are here, tattoos, drug addicts. And he says, you're really smart. You can be whatever you want.

And then his partner said, I've never seen him. weirded out about a case like with you. And I told him, hey, Curtis, too much analysis causes paralysis. So let it go. And he was like, that's exactly what I'm talking about. He says, I could use that with my boss, man. That was the kind of relationship we had. So when he called me on the phone, he says, you have a double, tell your lawyer about the double. But I'm not going to talk to you about how your car was found a mile away. Right. Overheeded. We're not going to talk about that. Right. So even he knew that I was very particular and specific about what I was admitting to, which is I wasn't technically, my feet never hit the tile of that bank, right? I was ever on the other side of that door, but I'm not saying that it wasn't the getaway driver. Fortunately for me, the weird thing was that the truck that was following me, like I said, there was only one driver because they only saw my head. So there was a way in which my car may have been involved, but he couldn't prove, anyway, bottom line is that he let that go. Do you think you'd be able to rob a bank in 2025 from a technology standpoint?

Because now there's so many cameras and there's so much better. Like they're 4K. Before, when you were doing it as like, grainy shot, can't read the brand on your shirt, one angle, you know, the tape's all messed up because it's 20 years old. Now it's like 4K view, parking lot, every corner of the place. That's not the worst of it. No? That's actually the easiest thing to overcome.

The worst of it is everybody has cameras now. So I can be walking out of bank And it's like, hey, look at that old man walking. I could have a disguise. They're like, look at that old man walking away. That is actually one of the most dangerous things is that you don't know who's taking photos of you or just video of you. It's out there everywhere, right?

And also, cameras are way more ubiquitous than they've ever been. They're everywhere outdoors. So you can get picked up a bunch of different ways. And they could track you like, okay, he passed this camera going that way. And let's go this way. And we find another camera over here showing them going this way. You know, you can be tracked. So that's a challenging one.

But also the biggest challenge is that I don't have the requisite rage anymore to go in there and rob. I was capable of doing a lot of things because I was driven by rage and the I don't care attitude, right? And I don't care about my life if I put it on the line. I care about my life now. And I have a sense of posterity. I'm an older man. I don't have the young rage that I had. So when I think about it, I don't think worry about cameras.

I don't think about it. I really think about, do I even have what it takes? to muster up to do a 30 bank robbery? No. If I was desperate, I think I obviously have muscle memory and I could do something, but I don't feel like I'd get away with it. And also, something would have to be dire. They're holding my family hostage, whatever, whatever, something like that. But I could do it, but I'm not sure that I would get away with that because, like I said, that's when the cameras and everything come into play. Sure. Even if I went back to crying for whatever reason, I would never think that bank robberies the hustle. You ever walk or drive past a bank and go like,

Oh, yeah, I robbed that place before. Oh, all the time. When I was in LA, there's a lot of ghosts. In fact, I'm going to go visit a friend next week driving down. And she says, I live in Ventura. I've known her since high school. I robbed her. And she was like, man, I could have been to the bank when you were robbed that.

I said, yes, she could have. So she told me she moved to Ventura. And she said, I'm sure you didn't rob a bank of Ventura. And I said, oh, you're wrong. I didn't rob a bank. I robbed the bank not far from you. So, yeah, I mean, I have in Orange County where my brother lives. I've passed banks that I robbed and I've been able to tell them, well, here's how I got away and whatever.

But yeah, I have. What's your relationship like with your father now? It's really close. You know, when I got out of prison, when I got our prison, I went up to him and said, check this out, Dad. I've done a lot of bad. You've done a lot of bad. Why don't you let my bag cancel out yours and you let your bad cancel out mine? Let's just start fresh.

I have all this compassion towards you. I want to be a new man. Let's start over. my brother and him were having problems and I wanted to model for my brother how I got over a lot of things to get to my dad in a really healthy way. And so my brother got on board and we've been working with my dad since, you know, 1996. And he was not doing well. And our love helped him get back on his feet and help him out. And all these years, we've been pretty tight.

There was a couple years after my book came out where he was kind of upset the way he was portrayed. But, you know, we worked through that. I knew we were going to have a very long relationship. He's now 80. My brother and I love him. Every time I'm in LA, I see him. I'm in the Bay Area now. But my brother hangs out with him every Tuesday.

He takes her for running around, a bunch of errands and stuff. You know, we call him a couple times a week. I talk to my brother almost every day. So we're a tight family now. You know, we don't have my mom, but we have each other. One of the ways in which we get along really well is my brother and I feel like my mother loved this man. My mother loved him.

No getting around it. All my aunts on her son. everyone knows my mother loved him. And so to honor my mother, we carry on that love for my dad, hold the love she had for him and respect that love. And it makes it easier to approach him and deal with him with love. And so we just throw a lot of love at the relationship. And, you know, my dad's pretty articulate. And at this age, he, you know, we can have a conversation on him. He's having memory loss now. And things are starting to happen with him in that regard. But he still has his faculties enough. So he can remember things from the past and we talk about a lot of things in the past.

But about 15 years ago, I stopped talking about our past. I said, I don't want to talk about what happened anymore. You're my dad. And moving forward, because you would always talk about like, oh, I was a terrible dad. I was a terrible dad. He's beating himself up. So stop talking like that. I said, you're still my dad.

You think you were terrible dad because you stopped daddying at the minute I stabbed you. But you're still my dad. You can model an end game for me. Show me how I'm supposed to leave this world. I need you. You're still my dad, man. Be good. Show me.

He took to that. He was like, all right. I'm still your dad. And so what I would do is when I was with my daughter when she was born, she would do something that was something, she would copy me. We had little things I played with stuff. And I was copying my dad, what he did to me when I was a kid. And so she would do something.

I would call my dad, hey, man, look at that thing you did for us. It's now third generation. So I would constantly say lovely things about how, he did a bunch of good things. I want to always highlight the good things and how they rippled through me and were rippling under my daughter. And that was helping him heal too

because he only had a sense of himself as being a terrible father from zero to 16. And I'm trying to let him know those spikes of bad behavior were small compared to all the good that you did for me and my brother. I'm an artist because of my dad. I have a good facility with language.

There's a lot of things that I appreciate in the world because of my ideas. And so I try to always remind him, dad, you did good, man. And my brother's super talented and super smart and super, you know, educated and an artist as well. So we feel like we got that from my dad and we always let him know. You did us good, dad. You did, you know, there were some moments in which it was traumatic. But overall, you did things that hurt us, but you gave us so many tools and resources so that we could work through it.

So it's just complicated. It's a paradox of life, you know. Joe Loyah, thank you very much. It's a fascinating story. Really? It's wonderful to be here, Jordan. I appreciate you. You asked a bunch of good questions, so kudos to you, man.

Thank you. Think you need top secret clearance to catch war criminals? In this preview, Elliot Higgins shows how everyday citizens with nothing but Wi-Fi and curiosity are uncovering global crimes that governments tried to bury. Bellingat does something called open source investigations. Thanks to smartphone technology, social media, and the wealth of information we have online, stuff like Google Maps, giving you satellite imagery. ship tracking websites, plane tracking websites, all kinds of information that's accessible to you now.

I started doing this in 2012 as a hobby. I just tried to figure out how can you prove if a video is filmed somewhere. And I realised that you could compare landmarks visible in the video with satellite imagery and do a kind of spot the difference for it. Now that's a technique known as geolocation, but back then it was just me playing adults spot the difference on social media platform. I think when we live in an era where the truth is constantly contested, especially on the internet, it's good to have something where you can not only point to the evidence, but the actual process you used to come to your conclusions, and open it up for debate, because there is a tendency for people just to read stuff that reinforces what they already believe,

and that causes a lot of problems. If we're going to have a debate about something, it should be on actual facts, not just the opinions of a new perspective of a colonist you've just read. What we do is important. It's not just about allowing people to see our working, but giving them the ways to actually do it themselves. And if we let the world just be run by people who want you to shut up, then it's going to be a vague, dark place indeed. For me, it's really about taking open source investigation

and guessing as many people as possible to use it. Yeah, I'll just say, give it a go if you're interested, because that's what I did, and it turned out quite well. To hear how Bellingcat is using open source sleuthing to expose war crimes and rewrite the rules of intelligence, check out episode 1192 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. When you hear stories like this, it's tempting to file them away as extremes, that guy, that life, that kind of person.

But what stuck with me here is not the fedora or the money or even the bank robberies. It's how ordinary all the steps really were. One decision, then another. Fear the first time and less and less fear every time after that until the thing that once felt impossible starts to feel routine. This isn't a story about how to rob a bank. It's a story about how people normalize the unthinkable and how trauma. when it goes unexamined, doesn't disappear, it just finds new outlets.

What happens after that is really what matters, the reckoning, the cost, and whether you're willing to take a cold, honest look at yourself when there's no adrenaline left to hide behind. Thank you all for listening. All things Joe Loyah will be on the website in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'd love to see y'all sign up for the newsletter as well.

I write this thing every week. It comes out on Wednesday. a two-minute read. This is not a bunch of stuff that's going on with me. It's a gem from the show, and that makes it a great companion to the show. Jordan Harbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six-minute networking as well over at six-minute networking. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. In this show, it's created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadasidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you should. share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment

you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in a good redemption tale, a crime tale, a bank robbery tale specifically, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. Sounds weird to say that during a bank robbery episode, doesn't it? I'm in the redemption stuff, so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by What Was That Like Podcast? If you're looking for a new show to add to your rotation, and something that'll make you stop mid-dishwashing and go, wait, what that actually happened?

You got to subscribe to, what was that like? It's real people telling the most surreal moments of their lives, and they're not just giving you the highlights. They're walking you through it from the inside as a person who actually lived it, which means you're basically getting a front-row seat to the chaos. One episode is about Scott getting locked up in a foreign jail for a crime he didn't commit.

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Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical. useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not. The through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star

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