The Rich Roll Podcast - John McAvoy: From Life Sentence to Life of Purpose

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

If you’re someone who actually believes that people don’t change, prepare for a major mindset shift.Meet John McAvoy. Returning for his 2nd appearance on the podcast, John is positive transformation rendered in human form—and his story is one of the most compelling, improbable, inspirational, and cinematic tales you will ever be privileged to hear. The McAvoy name might ring a bell for longtime listeners. He first appeared on the show a little over four years ago on episode #379—a conversation that ranks among the most memorable and impactful in the ten-year history of the show. For those unfamiliar, John is a former high-profile armed robber, one of Britain’s most successful career criminals and most wanted men. His reckoning was delivered in the form of a double life sentence (the 2nd of 2 prison stints) on the notorious Belmarsh high-security wing—a space he shared with extremist cleric Abu Hamza and the 7/7 bombers. To the rational outsider, John’s future was bleak. But a chance encounter with prison gym indoor rowing machine would ultimately change his life forever. In short shrift, John ended up breaking a cluster of British and World indoor rowing records while incarcerated, and upon parole, began forging a new life as a professional endurance athlete. Today, John is a Nike-sponsored Ironman athlete living in the Alps, a vegan (not my doing—I promise), and a stalwart mouthpiece for prison reform who has testified at 10 Downing Street. But above all, he’s a staunch advocate for the inherent power we all possess to course correct the trajectory of our lives, no matter how dire the circumstances. I was in London recently and couldn’t resist the opportunity to reconvene with this legend. This episode is old school—no video, just two guys vibing across a kitchen table. We pick right up where we last left off four years prior and dive even deeper into John’s remarkable story to further mine the extraordinary, latent potential we all hold to better ourselves. Watch: YouTube. Read: Show notes. As you’ll soon discover, John’s greatest heist isn’t a bank—it’s his life. Peace + Plants, Rich

Legacy to me is about helping people realise their own potential and when I'm dead, because that person's had an interaction with me or something I've been part of that's positive, their life is better. Like you can achieve things with your life, you can turn your life around, you can be positive and a beacon of hope and it isn't the end. Just because you make one bad decision in your life, you can always come back from it and achieve something with your life. You've got to look at other people's lives and look at them and go if they've been able to do that I'm able to also do it it's not jealousy it's not looking at other people and thinking oh why have they got that there's people that

achieve things and things that I don't really find interesting but it motivates me because I think they're living what they want to do they've achieved what they want to achieve and it makes me realize that I'm also able to do what I want to do. They've achieved what they want to achieve. And it makes me realise that I'm also able to do what I want to do with my life. But just being open to experiences and opportunities and knowing that you're not going to be here forever and just make the most of the short time that you've got and act on stuff.

Don't put stuff off to tomorrow, to next week, to the week after that, because those weeks might not ever come. And don't be that person at the end where the doctor might say, you've only got a couple of months left to live and you think I've not done anything in my life. The Rich Roll Podcast. People don't change. Look, if you're somebody who actually believes that nonsense, I think you need to prepare for a little bit of a major mindset shift because today's guest, returning for his second appearance on the podcast, is just positive transformation rendered in human form. His name is John McAvoy,

and his story of total metamorphosis is one of the most compelling, improbable, inspirational, and cinematic tales that you will ever be privileged to hear. The McAvoy name might ring a bell for long-time listeners. He first appeared on the show a little over four years ago. That was RRP 379. That episode ranks among the most memorable and impactful in the 10-year history of this show.

So if you missed it, correct that immediately, please. But for those unfamiliar, John is a former high-profile armed robber, one of Britain's most successful career criminals and most wanted men. And his reckoning was delivered in the form of a double life sentence, the second of two prison stints

on the Belmarsh High Security Wing, which is a space that he shared with extremist cleric Abu Hamza and the 7-7 bombers. But it was a chance encounter with the indoor rowing machine in that prison gym that would ultimately change his life forever. In short shrift, John ends up breaking a cluster of British and world indoor rowing records while in prison. And upon parole, he begins forging this new life as a professional endurance athlete. Today, John is a Nike-sponsored Ironman athlete

living in the Alps. He's a vegan, not my doing, I promise. That's new since the first time we sat down together. He's a stalwart mouthpiece for prison reform who has testified at many places, including 10 Downing Street, as well as a staunch advocate for the inherent power that I think we all possess to course correct the trajectory of our lives,

no matter how dire the circumstances. I was in London recently. I just couldn't resist the opportunity to reconvene with John. And so this one, which is an old school, no video, just two guys sitting at a kitchen table vibe podcast, basically picks up where we last left off. We go deeper into John's remarkable story. It's about mindset. It's about advocacy. It's about service, giving back. And again, the extraordinary latent potential we all hold to better ourselves. As you'll soon discover, John's greatest heist isn't a bank, it's his life. So let's take care of a little business and thereafter, enjoy me in conversation with the great John McAvoy. We're brought to you today by recovery.com.

I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions,

and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey.

When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how

challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it.

Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself. I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery to find the best treatment option for you or a loved one again go to recovery.com okay let's do the show

so mate it's been i looked exactly four years since we first met, which is crazy. A lot has happened in your life since the first podcast that we did. And I just kinda wanna open this by saying that, first of all, I'm continued to be inspired by the example that you set. I think it's really an extraordinary thing. And it's been cool to see you take the responsibility that you shoulder seriously in the way that you give back.

And as you might suspect, people often ask me, like, what's your favorite podcast episode? Like, who's the coolest person that you ever interviewed? And that puts me in a weird position. Like, I don't want to choose from my babies. I've been doing this for 10 years. There's like 700 of these things. And I often say, well, it depends on what you're interested in, but I do find myself referring new people to your episode or referencing you in the discussion

of some of the most powerful and impactful shows that I've done. And so that's just one of many reasons why I'm excited to pick things up where we first left off four years ago. Yeah, it's been a journey since we last met each other all those years ago back in London. And even the reaction that I've always received from people that have listened to a lot of podcasts, because I've done a lot of podcasts since your podcast, but a lot of people always reference yours in particular as one that's impacted their lives the most.

It's cool, man. In the discussion around kind of what you've been doing since we last met, I mean, you don't, we're right now, we're in an apartment that's like right in the middle of Portobello Road. So if you hear background noise, that's because like there's a lot of life happening outside of here. But in any event, you don't live here anymore. You uprooted yourself. Yeah, I did uproot myself. And if you remember last time when we did the podcast and I was meant

to do the Ironman race that I had to pull out of because my probation officer messed up all the paperwork and I wasn't allowed to leave the United Kingdom unless it out of because my probation officer messed up all the paperwork and I wasn't allowed to leave the United Kingdom unless it was approved by my probation officer. And they made a mistake with the dates and I didn't end up racing that Ironman that was meant to do in Hamburg. But since then, the Secretary of State for Justice in the United Kingdom, he removed all of my life sentence conditions. And one of those conditions was I wasn't allowed to leave the United Kingdom unless it was approved by my probation officer, which if I'm honest, I never really thought would happen, but it was such, it's such a rarity in the UK that that ever

happens to someone serving a life sentence. So when I got out of prison, I'm unlicensed for the rest of my life. And when my probation officer phoned me up, she said, I've got some good news. And at the beginning, when I saw her number on my phone, normally it's bad news. Right. And I was dreading answering the call. And she said, look, I've got something to tell you. This is really going to impact your life positively.

And I asked her, okay, what is it? And she said, what I'm about to tell you, I don't even know what it really means because we've never done this before. And she said that we've been contacted by the Ministry of Justice and they're gonna take away all your life sentence conditions. Which means you can travel freely wherever.

Yes, and I could live wherever I wanted without prior approval. Because before, even when I lived in the UK, I had to live within a 10 mile radius of my probation office. So all of that went and then I was allowed to travel so I was like a kid in a sweet shop the first thing I did was literally go abroad because I didn't have to ask anymore um and it was yeah it was such an amazing feeling

I didn't realize subconsciously the effect it had over me because I kind of always accepted I couldn't travel so when people that I knew my friends used to go abroad and they used to invite me I just used to just say no. It was just an instant reaction. It wasn't even something I could contemplate doing because it wasn't sort of an option to me. But yeah, they removed all the conditions and I went abroad properly for the first time in 2019. So just another example on a long string of miraculous, we've never done this before kind of incidents, right? Like, what do you make of that?

Like so much of how you've been able to do what you do is the result of, you know, the sort of universe conspiring to support you in ways that you didn't suspect. Like it's just, you're putting out a certain energy and at some point you are rewarded for that, I think, right? Like obviously a decision was made that had never been made before and your behavior and your actions behind the scenes

informed that decision. Yeah, all the work that I was doing, I never did it for that reason. And I do think it is energy. And I think when you put good energy out into the world and you apply yourself to positive things, I think these things reflect and they come back to you. That energy comes back to you.

And with all the work that I was doing, when I used to have my quarterly probation meeting, there was a point where I was having meetings at 10 Downing Street with, at the time, she was Prime Minister, Theresa May's policy advising team, about opening up school facilities during the holiday periods for disadvantaged kids. So kids could go to these school sites and then local community groups could run like sports initiatives and give kids healthy food.

So then when I'm having my quarterly meeting with my probation officer and I'm telling her about this stuff, she even said, this is ridiculous. Like, yeah. Yeah, you know, typically she's probably used to people coming in and telling them about their bricklayer job or something like that.

Like, are you showing up on time? That kind of thing. Yeah, and I was doing what I was doing and I was doing it for the right reasons. I wasn't trying to manipulate people. I just wanted to contribute and give back. And I said this to you in the last podcast, but sport profoundly changed the trajectory of my life.

Like without it, I'd have ended up spending my whole adult life in prison or I would have died by default. So I believe in myself, I have a duty and a moral obligation to reach back and help other people. And by that, the by-product of it was that people in positions of authority and power saw this

and they gave me another chance. Right. And they removed all those conditions, which obviously changed, again, the course of my life and where I've ended up going to live. Right, so now you live, I'm not sure exactly where you live, but it's somewhere in the Alps.

Yes, yeah. And why did you make that choice and talk a little bit about the lifestyle there? So I was allowed to start traveling and I entered the race in a place called abdues which is very very famous in cycling and they have a triathlon there and i entered this race and i went out there and i had i had an injury i had a foot injury and i couldn't end up taking part in it and it would it had been the first time i'd ever been to the high mountains so i'd

never experienced what the high mountains was like before um because when i was traveling i was going to cities I was going to like lower parts of France and when I was going out on the training camp and I have never in my life been anywhere where I felt at home like I've been obviously for obvious reasons I spent 10 years locked in a prison cell so I didn't have control of my environment where I was getting moved. And then when I got out of prison, I was living in London. I was quite nomadic. I've never felt settled. And then I went to this place and then I just fell in love with it.

And I say this quite often, the only thing I've ever loved more than those mountains is my mum, by a country mile. Like I've never felt attached to things like that before in my life. Like, my stepdad, when I was growing up as a kid, he always used to say to me, don't have anything in your life you cannot walk away from at the drop of a hat.

And I kind of have always been like that. I've never been attached to material products or things, people, like that I couldn't just go. And then I went to this place and I genuinely fell in love. And I've never felt that emotional connection. I honestly Rich it profoundly changed me so either because I'd never experienced that emotion before to something or a place and and I'll come back because I didn't live there and then when I was back in London I was constantly thinking how can I go back what can I go back for and then I was going back to where I lived in inter-season so it's when everything shut and I got a little apartment it was cheaper because there was no tourists there and and then

I'll come back and I was going back and I was coming back and I was doing it as much as I could in a calendar year and then in 2020 COVID hit and I was in London and June of 2020 I was again going to go out to race this triathlon. It got cancelled because of COVID, but I had my apartment booked for a month. And I was in this apartment on my own for a month. And I was going out hiking in the mountains. There was no racing. And I just started looking at my life and I've become quite reflective. And I thought like, I have to practice what I preach. I think we get one life. I feel the way I perceive perceive life some people say it's quite morbid but I think I probably at best got 40 summers left in me and I want to be in an environment that I love being in and wake up every morning and feel a passion for the environment and place

I am in and I thought I'm gonna I'm gonna practice what I preach and I literally gave everything up that I had in London I gave my I contacted landlord, handed him my notice on the lease. And I thought, I'll make this work. I will make this work. And I'll take advantage of the fact that everything shifted online. So I could work remotely. I didn't have to attend meetings. And then I thought, and because people then

that I do work with will get so used to that, that even when things open back up, everyone would just go, well, John doesn't live here anymore. He lives in the Alps. So then I could kind of just carry on doing what I wanted to do. So now I can kind of just carry on doing what I wanted to do. So you're somewhere in some village,

riding all these epic climbs that you see in the Tour de France and living kind of a really grounded existence that allows you to get out and do the things you love every single day. Simplicity. Simplicity, like even financially, financially like living there I probably earned half what I did when I lived in London but I value the way I want to feel every day and I want to be

feel content it's not happiness it's being content it's waking up in the morning and looking out at the mountains and feeling content in myself that I'm at peace. And my life's been quite sort of turbulent. There's been a lot of noise in my life throughout it. And again, where I am now, it's the peace. That's an understatement. Yeah. It's been very, very turbulent. It's been very turbulent,

but it's where I am now, I feel at peace. And even to the degree where my whole diet, everything changed. I've become a vegan living there. Yeah, we're gonna get into that. Yeah, I bet we are. We're gonna get into that. Yeah, I bet we are. That's a big shift from the last time that we spoke. But obviously we're here in London right now.

There's a reason why you're here in London. You were sharing before we started the podcast, like it's strange for you to come back and process all the overstimulation. But the reason I imagine has to do with all the advocacy that you do and the outreach and the prison reform activities and working with kids and stuff like that. And I saw just on Instagram that you were doing that while you've been here.

So, yeah, talk a little bit about those organizations and your involvement. about opening up school facilities, school sites in inner cities to allow children within those communities to access those schools during the school holidays in Britain, which is a six-week holiday over the summer period. So to give you some background, children from a lower social economic environment lose their cardiovascular system, sorry, regress 80% during the six-weeks holiday because they're sedentary, they're not doing any physical activity, they're sitting in front of screens than their middle

class peers. Their educational learning regresses by three full calendar months. So when they go back to school after six weeks holiday, they're 80% less fitter and they're three months behind. So I knew these stats because of conferences and stuff I've been to. And to me, it was a non-brainer that you've got these massive facilities in the UK, school sites that the taxpayers paying for. And 70% of all leisure space in the UK, like football fields, are locked behind school gates. So to me, it was a non-brainer to open up the schools because most children live within a two mile perimeter of the school.

So you don't need to get buses. They can walk to school like they would in a in a normal school year and we would allow local community groups to access those schools and deliver programming to children so I went to Nike and I pitched the idea to them it was just before Covid and I remember it was semi-green lighted and enough away it's just just gonna die and they completely backed it when covid started to shift the needle a little bit and we started to unlock they pledged um a three-year investment into opening up these school sites across the uk and um and and we are where we are now with open doors and it's my greatest achievement my greatest student by by none like

anything i've ever done in sport or life nothing even comes close to yesterday and the day before going to schools across the country and seeing kids that if if they wasn't in that school and I asked the teacher I said what would they be doing and he said they'd be sitting in blocks of flats all day doing absolutely nothing and they're running around with their friends they're cycling for the first time they're running they were playing blind football they're just being children and they're having a childhood and it's making them feel happy and content and they're being active and they're with their friends and it's giving them a safe space

with positive role modeling. And I've got no doubt, again, if I was one of them little kids and those teachers around me, maybe my life might've gone down a different road. If one of those coaches or mentors would have seen me and said, you've got a lot of talent and then they sort of,

they could have channeled me into something positive and I wouldn't have spent 10 years in prison. Yeah, sure. I mean, there's so many sliding door sort of scenarios in which your life could have been very different. I mean, you're so smart and intelligent and articulate. You have a facility for communicating your story and what's important to you in a really compelling way. And I think that is, you know, on a talent level, like equal to whatever your, you know, athletic achievements are and, you know, setting aside mindset and all of that, which we're going to talk about. So that's really cool, man. Like it's super inspiring. What is the name of the organization?

It's called Open Doors. So we basically open up school sites, open doors. Yeah. Cool. But you you're back you're getting out you're going back to the elves tonight right tomorrow morning yeah um because the show is it has been four years since you've been on and the show's a lot larger and i'm sure there's a lot of people listening to this who have not had the chance to listen to that first episode or taking the opportunity to go back i think it would be worthwhile to recap some of your backstory for context. I don't know how to begin that conversation because once I tee you up, it just goes forever.

So we don't wanna monopolize the whole thing, but I think, yeah, like what is the thumbnail version of how you ended up where you ended up and how you clawed out? So we have to go all the way back to before I was even born. We have to, because it's- It's already started.

It's the context. I got time, bro, it's cool. All right, go for it. You said six hours, right? Yeah, right. But I have to go back before I was born because my biological father, he passed away when my mom was eight months pregnant with me.

They've only been married 12 months. He's 38 years old, went to bed one night, never woke up, had a massive heart attack. So I was born into the world, didn't have a dad, really loved as a child. Like my mum's got six sisters, I had an uncle, my sister, like I had all these women doting on me as a little boy. I couldn't have had a better childhood. I was so loved and looked after. I can remember like Christmases and birthdays. My mum used to do, she was a florist, but she used to do everything to make sure me and my sister had everything we needed. And then we had a happy childhood. And when I started going to primary school, children used to tease me because I didn't have a dad. No, my dad never picked me up, but I didn't realise it wasn't normal not to have a dad because I just was brought up by all these women. And I sort of go home. I asked my mum where my dad is.

I'm a young kid still. I'm five, six years old. My mum simplifies it, says your dad died before he's born. He's gone to heaven. But this profoundly did something to me as a child because I had this relationship with death from being very young, and I knew I wasn't going to live forever. Now, that woke something up inside me where I didn't want to be normal, and I didn't want to be average. And it made me incredibly ambitious as a young man, as a young child. And then as you're growing up, you're learning. I loved learning at school. I was very inquisitive.

History was my subject when I was at school. And my mum used to take me to museums, and there was the London Dungeons and HMS Belfast and I used to watch documentaries on World War II I was fascinated with all these things and every month my mum used to get me magazines at the news agents they were called discovery booklets and used to put puzzles together different parts of history and I remember putting these together as a little kid every month and then one day it just hit me that like Anne Boleyn Henry VIII these people lived thousands of years hundreds of years before I was even born but I was reading about them in our flat in Crystal Palace in South London and they had achieved something like they they were remembered after they were dead and again I was so young I

didn't understand what that was but that's what what I wanted. And it was a legacy. It was accomplishing something. My life had meaning. And that sort of carried on sort of festering inside me. And then I was looking around. It was like, what do I want to do? And then I become intoxicated with British Telecom, which they were like the monopoly in the UK of telephone communications.

Everyone in the 1980s in the UK had a BT landline in their house. Every street corner had a BT phone box. And I can remember being in my mum's car, seeing these BT phone boxes when we were driving to my auntie's. And one day I asked my uncle and I said, how much money does British Telecom make? And I grew up in the area of like Margaret Thatcher. So it was all about greed is good, go after it. And he said said they make billions and then that seed was planted and when any adult said to me what are you going to do when you get older it was to own British Telecom and then what I'd done in my mind I equated then legacy success to the acquisition of wealth and then the perfect storm was then created that when I turned eight my mum's ex-husband that she

married when she was 16 years old, come out of prison after serving 16 years for armed robbery. He was like one of the most prolific armed robbers in the UK. He had five acquittals at the Old Bailey. He was a multimillionaire when he was 21 years old. And he come to our home and I didn't realise he just got out of prison. It was the first time a male had come in that wasn't related to me, like an uncle. got out of prison it was the first time like a male had come in that wasn't related to me like an uncle and I remember he'd come in and I was just I was mesmerized by him like he was very charismatic I remember I said it in the last podcast black hair really white teeth big gold watch and really shiny leather shoes and he went into the living room and he asked me to make him

a hot drink a cup of tea and I went and made it and then when he was leaving our flat he gave me a 20 pound note it was the first time an adult ever give me paper money so I had coins before like pocket money and and I was just intoxicated with him and he patted me on the head and said you're a good boy and he left and then when he left obviously the questions started coming out said to my mum who is he my mum tried to again simplify it and said before I was with your dad when I was really young I was married to that man and your sister that's his daughter and then when I was I couldn, I was married to that man. And your sister, that's his daughter. And then I couldn't understand because my sister's my sister. She's not my half sister.

And then that was it. And then what he started doing, he wasn't in a relationship with my mum, but he'd come round on the weekends and pick my sister up and take my sister out. And my mum didn't want me to miss out on opportunities because my sister was going to restaurants with him and stuff. And he said, can Jonathan come? And mum said, yeah. My mum let me me go and as the weeks and months progressed he started taking my sister out less me out more and I developed this incredible bond with him like a father-son relationship like he didn't have a son I didn't have a dad and we were just magnetized

each other and it was only when I got to about 10 11 my, my granddad passed away. Now I knew he was incredibly wealthy and I used to sort of pick up on the conversations he was having with people around him. And I knew when we went out to restaurants and stuff, people treat them a lot differently to everyone else. Like if there was a packed restaurant, they would always find a table for him. He was in clothes shops spending thousands and I could see this. So again, you get magnetized by the money. But when my granddad died, we went to clear my granddad's flat out, my mum and my aunties. And my granddad, in a drawer, had an envelope. And I opened up the envelope. My granddad kept all these newspaper clippings. And it was from all the national newspapers when Billy got arrested.

So then suddenly I'm reading all these headlines about Gottschalk and one of the most prolific armed robbers in the United Kingdom. And then I'm sort of then connecting up all the dots. And then I realize this is what he's about like this. And then 12 years- Prior to that though, you had no sense that he was procuring this lifestyle illegally.

No, all he used to say to me when I was growing up, so he'd never overtly told me he was involved in criminal activity but i could tell by the way my mum was and the way my mum used to talk about life and the way he spoke about life and the way people that he sort of took me to and i interacted with like older men like friends of his they didn't see life through the same prism as what everyone else that i was exposed to did. Like my mum and my mum's aunties, like sisters, like my aunties and my sister, they would see life through a different lens. And there was a very anti-establishment, very like the system's corrupt. And I'd pick up on these things as a kid, the way when they'd see police drive past, calling them pieces of shit.

But I didn't twig what they were doing I knew they was all incredibly wealthy but I didn't know what they were doing and being involved in and sort of in that sort of circle of people it had an impact it wasn't the pivotal moment it did have an impact it was only when I was 12 and I saw a film made about my dad's brother, Michael, who committed the biggest armed robbery in the world. That was the trigger. Because I watched this Hollywood film as a 12-year-old in our flat in Crystal Palace.

And I wasn't really aware of my uncle. My mum shielded me from this as much as she could. But obviously you're indoors, you're watching the TV and this film comes on Channel 3. And then suddenly your surname is being spoken about in this film. And then all of these characters that are in this film, my stepdad, Billy, is taking me out.

So like their names are the people that I could relate to. And it obviously a very surreal experience. And my uncle stole 26 million pounds worth of gold bullion. So that was in 1983. So probably it'd be worth a hundred million now. But I didn't see that my uncle was in prison for 25 years for that offense. I saw Sean Bean, a Hollywood actor, sitting on 26 million pounds worth of gold bars in Heathrow Airport. And that was the real trigger. And at that moment, and I feel it does make me feel embarrassed now to say it, but that at that moment inspired me to become an arm rubber

because it was obtainable. Right, and that inspiration grows out of this like background hum of the system is corrupt, following rules is for suckers or for losers. You got to take what you can take. And then you have this very charismatic mentor, father figure who's showing you how to do it. And slowly these puzzle pieces are getting assembled to create this psyche where when you reach a certain age of maturity,

you're all in, like you're bought in. Do you feel like he was purposefully doing that? Like, I'm going to mold this kid into a successor. I'm going to teach him everything that I know, into a successor. I'm gonna teach him everything that I know, but I have to mold his mind first so that he can kind of be receptive to this type of lifestyle. Do you know what? I actually don't think he did.

I don't think he deliberately didn't. He just felt like this kid doesn't have a dad. I can fill that role, but I am just who I am. Yeah, that's who he was. So you have to understand, Rich, the way that they live their lives everyone else is abnormal they're normal so to them it's a way of life it's an existence like how many times you've ever watched a film and like you see someone that's

made millions of pounds out of crime and you think why don't you just give up why don't you just stop why is there always that one last thing right because it becomes it's their ego so identity it's who they are so So everyone else is abnormal. They can't understand how people function in society the way that they do. They go to work. They pay 40% in tax to a system that's corrupt. So that is the normal for them. Now, obviously, no, he never wanted me to go to prison.

So as I get older, when I got to 14, started truanting heavily from school because he didn't realize the impact of me being with him. And I was with him more and more and more as I get older when I got to 14 started truanting heavily from school because he didn't realize the impact of me being with him and I was with him more and more and more as I got older and I was around all these organized criminals more and more and more so the more I'm with them and the more I'm hearing and you're hearing about people corrupting the system corrupting juries like you're hearing about corrupt counselors that hand out planning permission and and my stepdad you say to me everyone's got a price you can buy anyone when anything goes wrong. So then you start looking at the system. You hear about corrupt police officers, and this is all planned in my psyche.

I go to school and my English or maths teacher standing up in front of me, and they're saying, well, if you don't get a B in English, John, you're never going to get a job. And I'm looking at this group of people over here that are multimillionaires out of crime and none of them are academically clever, but they're all very streetwise. So I started just completely, I just completely disregarded my education. It didn't mean anything. So 14 years old, I was truant in, I did everything I could not to go to school. My mum even got fined because I didn't go to school and she used to get really upset. But at this point, she just basically had no influence over me whatsoever because I would in my mind made that decision and then when I got to 16 my mum got

really upset and she sat me down and she said you need to leave school with some qualifications you cannot leave with nothing so she got me upset I remember she was really emotional and I thought you know what I'm just gonna go I'll sit the exams I didn't do any coursework leading into them and I turned up in the like when you're in the assembly of all the other pupils and you got your pencil and you're sitting on your table away from everyone so you can't cheat and I did it and then left and then a couple weeks later you get you you get your grades and I was the last student to turn up to pick my grades up and my head of year was a man called Mr Vickers and I really hope he's listening to this and he did everything he could at that school not to one exclude me because I was truanting so much and two he really wanted the

best for me this is something now I can I can process and I understand at the time I just thought he was a busy body that used to try to keep getting me in trouble sometimes he used to write letters to my mum informing her that I'd sort of been truant in 40% of the year and I hadn't come to school, I was late, I was disrespectful. And I remember I was the last people to turn up and they had like this box with all the envelopes of all the students and he pulled out my envelope and said, do you want to look at your grades? And I was completely disinterested.

And he said, well, I'll tell you. And he opened up the envelope and I remember he pulled a piece of paper out and he looked at me and he said, if only you would have applied yourself what you could have done. And I still managed to get relatively decent grades considering I didn't turn up to do any of the coursework or like none of the lessons. And he said, what are you going to do now? And I lied. And I said, I'm going to go to college but the backdrop to this and again it's only something I've been able to sort of understand later on because of my uncle got released from prison at this point so my surnames in the national red top tabloid newspapers all the time my teachers quite clearly knew my what my life was like and they could see the journey that I was probably going to travel down and he said to me what are

you definitely going to college I said yes and yes. And he was deeply concerned. I remember even when I left, like, that's it, I'm done with school. I'm out. I'm finished. I've done it. 16 years old. They can't do anything to me anymore. He was still phoning up my mum to check that I was okay. And he was an amazing man. He really, really was a great teacher. He just couldn't save me at that point. And he gave me these pieces of paper with all my qualifications and I walked down my school drive in Beckenham near Kelsey Park it's in South London and I remember ripping them up and chucking them in the dustbin because they meant nothing to me whatsoever and I went and bought a gun like literally went and bought a gun

so that was it I was in I thought I'm going to be an iron robber. And my stepdad found out. And this is now the part where I do think he did think that he was going to sculpt me because he found out I did this. So I went and bought this gun of this 40 year old man in South London. It was a shotgun, sawn off. And he found out I did this. And he was then so worried that I was going gonna be running around with firearms. He felt that then he would protect me by bringing me in more to basically be with him and all the people he did stuff. Cause he knew I was-

If he's gonna do this, I better guide him. Otherwise he's gonna get killed. Yes, but he didn't realize the impact that he had before this by being around him. But now at this point, now he knows I'm in and he knows how I am and what i want he thinks now i'll be protected so this is sort of where the next part of the journey ends up beginning where i started they used to send me out on tasks so i used to go to security depots out in the suburbs

where like the lorries used to fill the depots up in the early hours of the morning and they would like literally and again it sounds like something out of a film but we had to go to like army surplus shops and i'd get like netting khaki netting there was woods at the back with a camcorder and i'd film the lorries coming in and early hours in the morning at four in the morning and film it and give these video cassette tapes to all the criminals and and i had a really good memory like security vans used to make deliveries to banks so i used to follow the van at the depot follow it to to all these banks. And then you could calculate how much money the van had on and I'd relay all this information across. And in my stepdad gets arrested when I was 18 years old. So again, the arrogance, he gets arrested. I should have known what was probably going to happen to me, but I didn't. And I basically

thought like, fuck you, I'm still going to keep doing it. Right, and this is my opportunity to now step up, right? Does that mean like suddenly with him out of the picture, now you have kind of a green light to hit the gas pedal on this? It was already sort of in my mind because I realized quite quick by doing what I was doing, like I was never gonna become a multimillionaire like by helping other people get rich. So he used to say to me, and I said it a moment ago, I referenced it. He was a

multimillionaire when he was 21 years old, committing organized crime. He used to say that to me all the time. He had a Rolls Royce when he was 21, multimillionaire, everyone, he was renowned within the criminal underworld in the UK as that man that was a multimillionaire at a young kid. And he always used to bait me with it. So when I was 18, he'd say, do you think you're going to have more money than what I had when I was your age? And he used to bait me and bait me and bait me. And then he gets arrested. And then like you've said, it was like, well, I'm just going to keep going. Like, even though all the alarm bells should have rung at this point, and I should have said, he's just been caught. The highly probability is the police now watching me.

I didn't, I just carried on. And the inevitable ended up happening. And two months later, I ended up getting arrested for conspiracy to commit armed robbery. So that's your first incarceration. And what was the sentence with that one? So I got five years. I was looking at 16 years. They made me a security prisoner so I was I was not 18 years old when I got arrested and in the UK if you're under the age of 21 you cannot be kept with adults over 21 but because the metropolitan police believed that I was a high escape risk because at this point my stepdad's a double category a prisoner armed police because my uncle tried to break out a prison in a helicopter they thought I had the means and capability to be able to escape from

custody so they basically did something called starred me up which then put me in a maximum security prison prison yeah prison as a as a category a prisoner and there was only like five young offenders in the country that were at that level of security that made me worse I've ended up going onto this wing with all these organized criminals like men in their 30s 40s 50s 60s they're all putting this admiration onto me they're lavishing me and obviously you're a young kid like the ego i wasn't scared of the prison officers because like my stepdad drilled it into me about showing weakness like don't let ever ever get broken by the system so you i'll go into this environment suddenly all these older criminals and even the prison officers used to lavish respect

on you which is crazy now when I look back. They say it was like Butch Cassidy in the Sundance kid. I remember like being in the segregation unit and I was looking at 16 years and I got offered a plea bargain two days before my trial started at the Old Bailey and they gave me five years in prison.

And that was the experience where you were in solitary, right? And I don't know what you did, but you ended up in solitary and you did your time in there and they were gonna let you out and you decided to stay. Yeah. Right, which is a really interesting inflection point that I think reveals the mindset aspect of this

and also the more subtle idea of how important it is to feel like you have some agency in your life. Like that act of defiance was a way of you holding on to some level of control in a scenario in which you had very little control. Yeah. So when I got moved to another prison, they wanted to strip me naked and take all my clothes off me and put me in a special suit, a yellow and blue suit. So they thought I was an escape risk because I come from an adult prison as a maximum security prison um as a prisoner when i got downgraded and they took me off that because the sentence didn't justify it because they can't justify it with five years because it costs so much money to keep you at that level security

when they then transferred me to another prison the governor of that prison thought well if you've just come from there as a category prisoner you were probably an escape risk of this prison but he couldn't make me category so what he did he put me on something called the escape list so they want all my clothes i refused to give him my clothes said you're not having them obviously you're in their world they do take your clothes but they put me in a segregation cell for seven days for refusing a lawful order so they got their own rules and regulations in prison and after the seven days was up they come to me and they was going to let me go on the wing and they said you're going to be a wing cleaner.

And it's hard for me sometimes to really express this to people because I realize how poisonous and toxic this behavior is. I absolutely hated these people with every ounce of my soul. I hated them so profoundly. And when they asked me, ordering me to do something, I just did the complete opposite. And I said, there's no way I'm cleaning up your shit every day on that wing. And they said, are you refusing to have a lawful order? And I said, yes, I am. And then they put me back in front of the governor again that gave me the first seven days. And then when I went in there, he said to me, you must remember one thing, McAvoy. He went, you're in my world, I'm not in

yours. I tell you what to do. And he smiled at at me and he said I'm going to give you another seven days confined to settle and then when I went back to that segregation cell and it was like a Victorian prison I was in so it was really old-fashioned one thing they can't stop you from doing when you're in there is reading so a librarian used to come around with a little trolley and you'd be able to take books off and there was a book I don't know why I picked it off the trolley with Nelson Mandela and I started reading it and when he was in prison in Robben Island he used to come around with a little trolley and you'd be able to take books off. And there was a book, I don't know why I picked it off the trolley, with Nelson Mandela. And I started reading it. And when he was in prison in Robben Island, he used to smoke cigarettes. And he realised one day that the prison officers was using the tobacco as a punishment to take away from him. So my brain as a 19 year old in this situation, I thought, well, actually,

if you think by putting me in this room as a punishment, I'll take that away from you. And when they come and they said, you're going on the wing said no I'm not and I sat in that room for 365 days and when I didn't intentionally realize when I made that decision to do that I didn't realize it was going to be for as long as it was but it become like a bit more of a Mexican standoff like I didn't want to submit to them and look like they had broken me but i needed to feel alive rich like i needed to feel alive like i was a human and you get put in that situation and this is where my journey of exercise become like i was i was i wasn't good as at sport as a kid i had no interest in fitness whatsoever like i had no role models as a kid whatsoever that was athletic um in in the UK we

have a big sort of football culture like soccer you have a football team but I would watch it maybe going goal but that was it I wasn't interested in sport whatsoever but when I was in that cell something one day just made me start doing press-ups and burpees and and I didn't even know the names of the exercises when I was doing them at the beginning but as i went through this journey every day i got a routine i used to get up in the morning and i'll start exercising and when they used to come around do the checks looking for your cell window i'd never want it to be laying in bed because there's prisoners that would like sleep their prison sentence away they would just lay in bed all day and sleep and i used i didn't want them to see me doing that so i'd be out of bed at morning at six o'clock i'd be exercising i'd

finish exercising and then i'd start reading and as the weeks months progressed i end up building up and i'll do a thousand of each exercise burpees press up step ups and i used to get a notepad and pen and i'll do it in reps of a hundred so i'll do a hundred squats hundred press ups hundred and just go through it and then start again, 100, 100, 100. Right. And my whole body just completely morphed. I ended up being sort of a chubby, overweight young man to suddenly rip, shreddy. I didn't have any body fat to the degree that when I got released, my mum looked at me and she said, she just looked really sick. She said, look what I've done to you. And I had like a gaunt face. I probably lost about three stone, I would say.

I probably lost about three stone, I would say. Okay, back to the show. Well, this is typically the point in the story where the epiphany of self-betterment, you know, kind of comes in. You're struck with the inspiration to, you know, form a new life for yourself. The pushups, the press-ups, all of these sort of things are changing your body.

And you have this realization that you could actually change your life, but that is not what happened. This was really still a rudimentary kind of act of rebellion that derives from this anti-authoritarian kind of streak that was instilled in you in a very young age. It was really a fuck you to everybody else and a way of feeling human through exercising that small amount of control that you had in that confined space. Yeah, it was defiance. It was a a fuck you like when i used to look through that flap it was like i was uh i felt like i was a machine like you you you will not break me and i and i

used to process it and then the hate in me that was the fuel that was what fueled me to do it it's like i look back now and i think sometimes even now like if i didn't do that back then i wouldn't have the life i've got today. And I never intentionally did that then to be where I am today. So I was driven by something so different to what's in me now. But if that defiance and that hatred didn't fuel me back then,

I wouldn't have the life I've got today. And when they opened up that door and they let me walk out into the street, genuinely, like I was a hundred times worse than the man they locked up. Right. So I've got out of prison now, I'm early twenties When you weren't doing pushups, you were plotting your return to become a better bank robber. I had a mantra when I was in prison, I would never be conditioned by

them. So, and every day I used to repeat, this is not my life. I've been kidnapped. And what fueled me was I used to think every single year you've taken of my life, I want a million pounds when I get out. That was the fuel that fueled me during that whole process. And it was, it didn't even enter my mind to change. Like to me, in the world that I grew up in when I was a younger man, like late teenagers years, was anyone that changed, this is what I was brought up to believe, was weak and they'd been broken. They changed, they'd broken, the system had broken them. So when I was in that situation, I wasn't going to be cleaning up their crap.

Like they was not going to break me. No matter what they tried to do to me, they could take everything away from me and I'd let them have it. Take it, it doesn't bother me. So to me, in my mind, as a young man, rehabilitation, being rehabilitated, was meant that the system had broken you down. And I can remember clearly being in situations where I'd be with older people, like men, and they would be talking about someone else that did change. And they would all call them weak.

Right. The system had broken them. And I thought, I'm never going to be like that. And my stepdad always used to say to me, the only thing you've got in this world is your name and if someone thinks you're a piece of shit and you're weak that's it and that stuck with me during that process and it really really profoundly stuck with me and then when I got released as I said I was so much worse than the person that originally been locked up and I remember going through

reception when they would let me out so I had had no visits. I had nothing. So I literally got released in the suit I wore at court. Right. And it was all massive because I lost so much weight. And when I was in the reception area, they give you a discharge grant and you have to sign the paper. And I had some money in my account where like family had sent me your money. And I remember he said, you need to sign this for your discharge grant. And I was like, fuck your discharge grant. I don't want anything off you people. And I'll never forget it. As I was walking out, he said, McAvoy, because they will not call you John. He said, you'll be back. I said, no, I won't. And they literally walked me to the gate and they let me out into the street. Well, a couple of things. First of all,

on top of all of this, getting pinched is a rite of passage, right? So that's the kind of context in which you're processing what had happened to you. Like, this is just part of the deal. Like this kind of happens and you know, your community of people, they're not gonna break ranks with you because this happened, like this happens a lot, right? So there's no reason to change course or change.

This is just part of the life of being a bank robber. And now I just have to learn how to be better so it doesn't happen again. Yeah. It does the complete opposite. Right. Because you've been tested. Yeah. And the testing part, which is where the mental rigor comes in, what's interesting about the way that you communicate around that or process it is that it's all about non-attachment. Like even earlier on, you were talking about being a nomad. Like I wanted to have this life where I could just, you know, have my go bag in any moment and split.

Like these things don't mean anything to me. Like whether I'm confined to this room or whether or not I get my, you know, roll of bills back when I leave the prison, like that's all stuff that I don't, that doesn't define me and is not going to drive how I make decisions. Yeah, most definitely. And like I said, like when I got released, I was worse. But within that world, you've been tested. Like you've physically, you've been tested by people. People now know you go in there. I didn't inform on anyone.

People outside in that world knew how I did my prison sentence, that I was defiant, that I fought back. So you basically, your stock goes up in that world. Right, your name is even better. You get more respect and more, and people then, people know you can be trusted because you've been tested.

It's all well and good, people say, well, you can trust me. But when you are actually in that situation and people see actually when he was in there as a young kid and that and he and he and he acted the way he acted that they can they can entrust you with their own freedom so when I got released that was another thing it was like you prison becomes like a bit of a university of crime and you it's it's an amazing place to connect up with people like I I used to say, sometimes it was absurd. Like when I went back to prison the second time when I was older, but you would get like a Colombian drug trafficker

and you'd put him in prison, the cell next door with someone that was in prison for transporting drugs. Right. So you put these two people together, they've all got their networks outside. They're just gonna end up doing business together. But this is exactly what ends up happening.

And sometimes we used to sit there laughing about it because that's what it's like when you are in those environments. It's the London rowing club for organized crime. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So how long after you get out before you commit your next crime? So I was released and then I would say within four days,

I found tracking devices on my car. So I was like, when I got got released I knew they were very unhappy with the length of sentence I got and I was I was paranoid and I was paranoid for the right reasons because they were genuinely following me around I found these tracking devices on my car they had a GPS and a radio transmitter I used to have my car put on a ramp like in a mechanics workshop and my friend took my car for the morning, phoned me up, said, can you come down? We need some work doing to your car.

Didn't really twig, turned up at the garage. And he took me to the car under the bay, lifted it up, went up to the back bumper, pulled off this block, pulled off this other block. And I'm like, wow, like, they are on me. So then, obviously, then I'm processing everything. Who have I seen? What have I been doing?

Because they think when you get out of prison you're desperate you need money you're going to be networking you'll make a mistake and I played a game with him for a month or so I used to drive around I um I had like a pretend job my friend owned the company and what hit me to the degree how much they were on me I used to have obviously when they're following me around you have a routine go gym stuff like that and then one morning I used to have, obviously when they're following me around, you have a routine, go gym, stuff like that. And then one morning I go to his house really early because he says, come to mine, jump in the work van. So my routine has been changed. So even though they're following me around, obviously I've still got a semi routine. I'm just not mixing with lots of criminals and put myself in situations where they could arrest me because I was, I was on license when I first

got out. And I went to his house in the early morning, winter, dark, down country roads, parked my car up outside his, get into his car to drive to his office. And then suddenly as we're driving, the way I've just come, all these unmarked police cars with little blue lights, no sirens flying down the road. And I thought, wow, like they are on me.

Like they're literally 24 hours a day. They must have thought, because I'd like gone out too early in the winter i was up to saying i was probably going to commit a robbery and then i the alarm bell was really rung i thought right there they really want to put me back in there and i took the tracking devices off my car and i had a back i had a solicitor at this point and i went up in hatton garden and i remember i took them off the car i went in and he was like good god man what are you doing he went they're probably listening to us right now so he got his secretary to take these things outside and he said what do you want me to do

and i said write a letter to the metropolitan police and say they're harassing me and he said john i'm telling you now if we do it they're just going to come back and say we neither confirm nor deny that we've put them there he went so it's pointless and he went but i'm going to give you one piece of advice he went whatever you're doing it. He went, because they will put you back in prison. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I thought, they don't know. And anyway, I then made the decision, Rich. My uncle's family lived in Spain.

I'd met people that were in the Netherlands. The minute my license had ended, I literally left the UK straight away. And I remember this sense, this relief when I was on the ferry. And I felt, that's it, I've won. They're never going to be able to put me back in prison again. Because in my head now, I'm thinking I'm going to live in Europe.

I'm just faceless. No one knows who I am. The police don't know who I am. And I can just carry on committing crime in Europe. And I'm just going to blend in. I'll just vanish off the face of the earth in regards to the UK. And I did for like 18 months. I was doing all sorts of stuff.

I was selling drugs. I was down in spain and then you get caught into this whole like young man fast living high octane being around people with lots of money living in the south of spain that typical lifestyle you'd imagine a young man in that world would live like living in the fast lane don't give a shit about anything but you'll you feel like you're on, you're meeting all these people that are all very, very rich. And I felt like with my mate, I remember we believe we were on the precipice

that we were just on the edge now of like making it and like moving up that next level. And then obviously I come back to the UK and yeah, that was where the next chapter of the story would go and me going back to prison. Right, so walk us through how you got pinched that second time. And, cause this is really where the story regarding me going back to prison right so so walk us through how you got pinched that second time and because this is really where the story truly begins so i was

living in spain i was living in between spain and you're like doing the abitha nightclubs fast boats and big watches kind of thing it was very similar to that yeah it just wasn't ibiza it was another very bad place called marbella and all right so it's that that that lifestyle notion yeah and my friend at the time was having a birthday party in the uk and he asked me to come and i felt this loyalty to him right i liked him a lot he'd done a lot for me in my life and i thought you know what i'm gonna make the effort and when i was coming back a girl dropped me off at the airport and she said, why are you going back? And I was like, I'm only going to go back for a few days, six days, and I'll be gone, in and out.

That was it. Dropped off at the airport, made the decision. I wasn't doing anything illegal here. So when I come back, I hadn't done anything where they could arrest me. So I'm good. I'm all good. I'm living here. No one knows who I am.

I'm sort of mellowing or mixing with people. And I was committing crime, but I was just not sort of overtly doing it to the degree where I was in the UK. And I come back, my friend picked me up at the airport and I went into a phone shop and I bought a Pazugo mobile phone. I did not even take the phone out of the box. The phone number was on the side of the box. My friend that picked me up, I gave him that number because I didn't want anyone to know I was back in the UK. I didn't want to give anyone my Spanish phone number because I used to change my phones all the time.

Just so people couldn't listen to me or they couldn't track me and stuff like that. So I used to get paid as it goes. But because I was in the UK, I thought I'll have an English phone for the six days and I'll just throw it away afterwards. And he said, where do you want to go? And I said, can you drop me to my mum's? he dropped me to my mum's because I hadn't seen her

for a little bit and I was so tired because I've been out partying and stuff went around my mum's he goes off didn't want to go out that night put the phone on charge next one the phone's ringing so I'm assuming it's my friend that picked me up because he's the only person in the world and it wasn't it was mine and my stepdad's friends associates was on the other end of the phone I'm like have you got this number and he said oh last night your friend picked me up he went to the pub he was in there said oh I just picked John up oh have you got a number for him he's gave him the number so he's phoned me up he said what you up to today and I said well not really much I'm going to a party and he was like oh do you want to have breakfast

so yeah of course like when I was growing up as a kid I idolized this man I did like I remember he got released from prison serving 16 or 18 years he got released but by this point I was in it like I was 14 15 years old I knew what he was doing within that world he's very well respected tried to break out of prison two times um he hijacked a jcb prison um in in wandsworth prison tried to run the war and get out he like he he was renowned within the criminal underworld right no respect for law and order whatsoever like he was even more extreme than my stepdad and he asked me to go meet him and never forget the cafe i met him was called the chestnut we were sitting by the window

and I walked in I didn't see him I embraced him I felt I just had this connection to him I liked him so much as a kid I admired him so much and we sat down and we were just chatting about stuff and he said to me do you want to go work meaning do you want to commit a robbery I was like nah I'm all right thanks and he was like no like I said look mate I'm out like I'm good I'm going back there I don't I'm not interested then he told me the sum of money and he said it's easy and then obviously you're processing it and I'm thinking do you know what like I could just do it and then go back there no one's even gonna know and then I agreed to doing it and and it's just like every movie. Well, it is.

It is. It's just sad. I say it's sad. I say it's sad. It was the best decision I ever made in my life because I just agreed to committing this robbery with him. What I didn't know at that point was outside of that window

was a hundred man surveillance operation watching him. And they'd been watching him for months waiting for him to commit this robbery or commit a robbery. And I just walk into it. Were they listening in on your meal, you think? No, they wasn't listening in because obviously when we got arrested,

you see all the surveillance logs. So what they did do, when me and him meet, I agreed to doing it. And I said, when is it? He said, the day after tomorrow. I leave, he leaves. By this point, obviously he's got my number.

I go back to my mom's, but I was walking through the park after tomorrow. I leave, he leaves. By this point, obviously he's got my number. I go back to my mum's, but I was walking through the park and stuff. And I was thinking, well, they're not going to be like, I didn't even think I was going to be followed, but like I would still go through the park. I wouldn't drive directly to my mum's or anything like that. They obviously followed me on foot. So I went back to my mum's address

and they did like a check on my mum's address. So then obviously my name's come up. The operation just literally blew up. Like we saw this in the surveillance logs, literally blew up. Cause now they know you've got two convicted robbers together, both high profile. They know he's been looking at things.

So it's on, right? And you've been underground. I've been underground. So I just popped up. You just resurfaced. So that's like a gift. So you've just walked straight into this thing. And then the next day we went to do it and then nothing happened.

We didn't do it. We decided not to, but I'm in now. I'm in, like I've made in my mind, I've already made the choice to go now and start doing this. So the one we spoke about didn't happen, but I'm in. So I'm thinking, well, what's the next one? So he goes, well, there's another one tomorrow. So now I should have just said I'm out, but I didn't happen but I'm in so I'm thinking well what's the next one so he goes well there's another one tomorrow so now I should have just said I'm out but I didn't and the next morning

we go we had walkie-talkies so we didn't have mobile phones so they couldn't sell site us apart us anywhere and he's in one car I'm in another car waiting for this van to turn up to make a delivery I'm on the other side of the road. The van comes in. I'm on a walkie-talkie. Nothing comes back. And I looked in the rear view mirror and I was parked down like a cul-de-sac a couple of minutes before that. So it was a dead end road. And I looked and I saw these three cars shoot down this cul-de-sac and my heart sunk. I knew it was the police. Instantly, I knew it was the police. The way that the cars, like the suspensions dropped and it was so aggressive.

And I thought, oh, wow. Like I'm radioing him. Nothing's coming back. I drive off from where I'm parked. Now, I had a friend at this point that did not live too far from where we were. And I remember thinking, I'm just going to get out of this car

and run and jump over garden fences. They're not even going to know I've seen them. And I want to get to my mates and just get out of this country as quick as I can. And Rich, I had this overwhelming sense of guilt. I remember it so clearly. I pulled in on the side of the road and I was radioing, nothing was coming back. I kept saying, they're on us, they're on us, they're on us, the police are here. Nothing come back. And this overwhelming sense of guilt. I kept saying, they're on us, they're on us, they're on us, the police are here. Nothing come back, and this overwhelming sense of guilt, and I thought, I can't leave him. And I did a U-turn in the road,

but I didn't see the police had moved now. They were unmarked police from where that cold is at, where they drove down. And then suddenly, I'm driving towards them, and I saw them coming, and obviously, they now know I'm going to see them. They had the caps on, bulletproof vest. And then one of them just tore in front of me and smashed the front of the car. One's come from behind.

One's come to the side. And it's kind of stopped me. They've jumped out. And I've just seen this firearm. And I just thought, fuck this. And I threw the car into first gear, drove up on the pavement. And I kind of got down a little bit because I thought they were going to shoot in the car. And I ended up getting away, like got on the pavement, got around them and drove off. And honestly, mate, like as I'm talking

to you now, I had this voice in my head and I kept saying, I'm not going back to prison. I'm not going back to prison. I'm not going back to prison. And I remember, and in that brief moment, I was fully prepared to die to try to get away from them. Honestly, like, because I knew what was coming. The first time I went there, I didn't know what prison was like. And I knew that segregation unit, I knew the isolation. And I thought, I'm not going back to that place. But it was this voice in my head going, I'm not going back. I'm not going back. I'm not going back. And I was driving along and I was trying to get rid of them because they were chasing me, and I went down this back street, drove into this, like, it was like an old person's home, and as I've gone to get out of the car, they've ran me from behind, the car's gone up onto three

wheels, I've smashed my arm in the window, got out and run, and then I've run around, like, it's like, it was like a rabbit's warren, it's the only way you can explain it, and then I run into this garage area, and it had all this trellis fencing and i ran in there was nowhere to go and then suddenly i looked around and you could see this tsunami of officers running towards me and it kind of startled them it startled them because they didn't expect they didn't expect it suddenly they've just run around the corner and i'm there and and there was an asian police officer all like honestly my peripheral vision i could see them all running towards me there was one asian police officer and I was looking at him like in his eyes and he was screaming for me to get down. And I froze. Like, I remember thinking they're going to shoot me.

And I, and it was like, I tensed up even though I can't deflect a bullet, but you, you, you tense up. And I was like, my brain's processing what's happening. And I thought he's going to shoot me. And he's going, he's screaming, get down, get down. And I wouldn't get down. And then they just like bundled me to the floor. And then they've all just like, basically they were doing what they're doing. Like they were kicking me and punching me and stuff. And then they put me in handcuffs.

And I remember one of them said, stop doing it. There's a window cleaner. So thank you to that window cleaner, whoever it was at the time. And then they lifted me off the ground. And then they put me in the car. And straight away on my feet i'm thinking how am i going to get out of this and i thought i'm gonna pretend i've got concussion because they like sort of manhandled me so i'm in the car and i'm shut my eyes and the cop policeman's gone you're right and i went i don't know i don't know where i am and and i remember someone got in to the passenger

sorry the driver's side of the car. And he kept calling my name. He said, John, John, John. And I looked up in the corner of my eye and I recognized him. And it was the police officer, DCI Curry, that arrested me when I was a kid. And he looked at me and he went, you haven't learned your lesson of the art. And he's smiling. And he went, you're going to go back for a long time.

And then they was all outside, all the police officers. And they didn't arrest the guy i got arrested with at that point and i could i was listening and i was thinking please say you saw them please say you've not got guns on you because i thought if there's no guns they can't prove we've done anything and there and i could hear the police officers talking amongst themselves and they gone have you arrested him yet and then whoever's on his surveillance team said we've not arrested him he's in a high street. And then the call went in to arrest him wherever he was. And I was thinking, please say you've seen them. Please say you've seen them.

And the copper said to the other police officers, he's screaming fit up and we found two firearms. And I just thought, oh no. So how come he didn't respond on the walkie talkie? I was assuming he already got pinched. Yeah, they were blocked. They weren't, they were blocked. It was just a bad area.

They just didn't work. Wow. So there was no communication. There would never have been communication. So then when he got- I thought, yeah, I thought they had already picked him up. No, no, no. And what's interesting is that

you weren't really caught in the act. Like you were still in the kind of lead up to the act. So was the charge conspiracy? Like what were you actually- Yeah, the charge was conspiracy, but the charge is worse as conspiracy because like the barrister, because again, this was all new to me at the time. I didn't really understand it, but a conspiracy, so the conspiracy goes for as long as someone engages in a criminal act. So say for instance, someone engaged in a criminal act in 2000 and you joined the criminal act in 2021. Yeah, you've got nothing to do with the 21 years

before that, it doesn't matter. You're part of the broader conspiracy. You get arrested, the whole thing. So that when the police were watching him, I kind of got sucked into this whole conspiracy that I wasn't even part of. Like I didn't even know what they were doing before. Because you were running your own conspiracy in Marbella. So I was committing crime. And I always say this about reception

responsibility for your actions and stuff. No one ever made me do any of this stuff. It was all through poor life choices. And when I got sucked into it at the beginning, obviously you do get quite resentful because I was looking at all the evidence and there wasn't really much evidence on me to a degree. And obviously you're figuring out how can I get around this how can you beat the system and stuff and obviously the more and more evidence that comes you get the charge sheets going up and up and up and more and more inflated so when we got arrested or when I got arrested in the car when they transported me to the police station DCI Curry that arrested me the first time i remember him telling me look out the window johnny went because you won't be seeing this for a long time and i remember it was it was

a september morning and there were people like coming walking around in high street with suits like shopping bags and i thought wow i do anything to swap places with them now because i knew what was coming and they took me to the police station and i and I was in something called incommunicado. I wasn't allowed to talk to my lawyer, because they were raiding people's houses, trying to find out where I was living. They dug up my mum's garden. They destroyed her garden.

They went around and ripped her house to pieces. And then after that period of incommunicado, I was allowed to talk to my solicitor, and he'd come up. And I said, like, how bad do you think this is? Before I had the first police interview. And he said, it's bad. He meant it it's bad considering you've been to prison already and you're kind of I'm still on um like a license even I was allowed to travel at this point I was still I'd still do some of that prison sentence from the time before and then I didn't realize to the degree now what was about to happen but after I got interviewed I was there for three

days before we went to the magistrate's court, I knew I was going to get remanded. But when we was getting ready to go, I thought it was unusual that the police that arrested me were taking me to court. And then I remember listening to this big fan. It was like a big air conditioning unit. There's only way I can explain it.

And all the radios were cracking. And then they took me out into the yard of the back of the police station. And there was this massive bomb-proof prison police van. There was a helicopter flying over the police station. There was armed police, dogs, police officers with Alsatian dogs, all in bulletproof vests. And I said, this is a little bit overkill. And he said, we're not taking any chances of any of your little mates trying to get you out.

And then, do you know what's quite interesting as well? I know I'm sort of going off on here to a tangent last year i put a post up on instagram and i remember i remember when i walked out to the police like a compound car park part of the police station there was a window and i remember looking up there was loads of police officers all staring out like normal police officers a woman that was one of those police officers commented on one of my pictures and said she she she praised me for turning my life around and she said i remember you years ago she said like like when that circus come to that police station with you there and how young you looked and she said how arrogant you was because again it was that defiance like I showed

no fear whatsoever during it and it was the defiance of being strong so when they took me out and they put me in that van and I said what I said and he was like we're not we're not taking any chance of any of your little mates breaking you out obviously I realized how much trouble I was in and I thought wow I'm going to be in this for the long run. But when she said it to me, it really took me back to how I was and how other people perceived me back then. Right. Like you still feel like you're the same person,

but that ability of her to reflect back the difference. Yeah. And as she perceived me at that moment, like this young kid, because I did look a lot younger. I was like 21 years old. But like, you've got this whole circus around you like all of this resource put on you to stop you from breaking out of prison

and you're defiant with them like even then you don't show any fear it was arrogance complete disrespect like even when they was put processing me for the police station i wouldn't tell them my name my address my date of birth i would just i wouldn't comply with them right and when it's in the interview like wasn't it wasn't even like no comment it was literally just staring off into space and just sitting there and being completely defiant with them and then kind of got took out got in that like that van went to um the magistrate's court first time i saw the guy i got arrested with straight away we're sort of talking he thinks it's me he thinks the police have been following me but we didn't know the evidence at that point.

And then we had this like circus going from the magistrate's court to the prison. And then I went to Belmarsh. And then when I was there again, go get in process for a reception, name, address, nothing. Just be as difficult as possible. And they put me in a holding cell.

And because I pretended I had a concussion, even when I was at the police station, the doctor, they had to send the doctor to see me. And I was thinking, oh, if I pretend I've still got got it they're going to take me to hospital and I'm just going to try to get out somehow so when I went to the prison and they put

they processed me for reception they put me in this holding cell they then come to me and said you're going on HSU and I thought it was like a hospital unit or something they were going to take me to because I pretend I had a concussion

and I was like yeah and then they really didn't explain to me what the HSU was which is a security unit what is it yeah in Belmarsh which is a prison within a prison um and they basically the police made an application to the ministry of justice and they believed that my escape risk was so high that escape must be made impossible so they put me in this unit that was built in like the late 1990s to house the IRA um and it was basically we used to call it the bat cave it was like a it was like you was underground you wasn't but like there was no natural light it was like those banks of like lights you get in hospitals that fluorescent light stuff always humming always remember the little hums they made and they um they put me in a little van they drove me through the prison

handcuffed up and then they took me on this unit and like none of the doors have got keys. It's all intercom, so you can't take hostages. And then they, yeah, they put me on that, this tiny little unit. And I thought, I'm in a lot of trouble here. Like I really- And this was even before sentencing? This was before sentencing. Like on remand, right?

This was on remand. And the prison officer said to me, like, you've got, you basically had a choice. When I got on the unit, it was so small. It's very hard to explain unless you've seen it with your own eyes. It's like a little submarine. Is there any way you can explain it? And the prison officer said to me, look, John, like, they call you first name on there. There's a lot more respect on there.

It's more adult, I found, in regards of how they treat you. And he said, look, you've been in the police station three days. He went, your, your like spur is on exercise as far as you are take your exercise you won't get it until tomorrow so i said all right and then he said look put the little kit i did have into my cell you get a bar of soap and stuff and then they they walked me downstairs through prison officers and all these intercom doors airlocks one shuts one opens and then they walk you outside but you get this feeling that you're still inside but you're outside like there's so much anti-helicopter wire.

It's like a hamster cage. Right. So we were walking through this little tunnel and I looked up and like you can see the sky, but it's so meshed up that you feel like you're still inside, but you're not. And then we got to this like quite a big exercise yard because you know how small the environment was, like the unit. And then they press a button and there's a prison officer in a little cage box thing because he can't go in the exercise yard of anyone so no one can take him hostage and he lets you on the yard and then i walked into this quite big yard considering there was only like six or seven other prisoners walking around in a circle and then really the reality of

the situation really dawned on me when i went out there and shagabu hamza was fighting extradition to america for terrorism and then you had the 21-7 suicide bombers that were on trial trying dawned on me when I went out there and Shagabul Hamza was fighting extradition to America for terrorism. And then you had the 21-7 suicide bombers that were on trial trying to blow up the tube network in London. And I thought, I am fucked. Yeah. I mean, you know, people on the world's most wanted list, basically. Yeah. But again, it was a very surreal experience because before I, bear in mind, I was outside. So even when I was in Spain, like it was everywhere, like the news, you would see these attempted suicide attacks. Global, global news.

So then suddenly you're then in a situation where two weeks before you're reading these stories or watching Sky News or something, and you're seeing these people and then suddenly you're there with them. And it was, it obviously at one point, it's very surreal. Um, and even that rich, like when, when I went there, like hamza he uh come up to me he said like brother do you need anything do you want some wheat a bit do you need food milk and all that stuff and i was like no i'm absolutely fine and and the guys that were in there trying to block the tube i remember i wouldn't speak to them i i never spoke to them for three months when i was in there you can imagine how awkward it is like i mean how many

people total are in this unit so there was was me, there was one guy in there, he was a contract killer. He'd just been convicted and got life for a minimum of 35 years. There was Sheikh Abdul Hamza and the four guys who tried to blow up the tube network in London. And I used to speak to the guy that was in there

for the contract and he'd just been convicted. I mean, he was waiting to get moved. They called it being shipped out to another prison. But we're all maximum security, high risk prisoners. I was level two. So that meant when I got moved out of prison, I'd have to be given an armed escort and a helicopter. So I wasn't a threat to national security.

The guys in there for terrorism, they were a threat to national security. So their level of security was mine, but we were on it for different reasons. So with me, it was because they believed I had the money, means and capability to be able to escape from lawful custody. With them, because they were a threat to national security, it was like,

if they do escape, they're going to kill people. Right. And it'll be an international scandal as well. Even though they might not have the capability to do it, it's even the remote risk that they could do it. So we were all in there together, but we were in there for different kind of reasons. And I just remember one day being on this because when we had association for the hour a day we had to come out of ourselves we weren't allowed to sit in ourselves so the cameras could see us and i remember um ramzi muhammad was talking to omar and they were talking about arsenal football and i remember listening like you think they're talking about things that you're familiar with and then something i don't know in my head i thought i'm never going to be in a situation like this ever again in my life where i'm going to be exposed to these sorts of people and again being a kid i was very inquisitive and then i

thought i'm going to start talking to them and i did and i started speaking to them and i wanted to understand the psychology behind what they did and why they did it and we would have conversations about politics and about life and i found I found the process very sort of fascinating. Right, what did you learn? That they weren't too dissimilar for me as a kid, hated the system, chose to attack it in a different way to what I did. I went down the road of organized crime and money.

Most of them didn't have dads as kids. They become radicalized when they got a little bit older, went to like a mosque or where they were where it was like a radical preacher like abu hamza and that indoctrination of them i could never understand why they denied what they did that was that was a thing we used to speak about quite a lot like i've been in prison with people that were in there for other forms of terrorism the ira and the way they perceived what they did it was a war and then when they got caught they wouldn't and the way they perceived what they did, it was a war. And then when they got caught, they wouldn't admit, they wouldn't deny what they did. They would just waste millions of pounds of taxpayers' money to go on trial. They would deny what they did. Well,

not all of them, not all of them, but that group did. So I found interesting that we used to have a conversation about, they said they were innocent. That was their argument. They said, we haven't done it. And I said, right, if you haven't done it, you haven't done it. It's not for me to judge you. I'm not your juror or judge. If you say you haven't done it. And I said, right, if you haven't done it, you haven't done it. It's not for me to judge you. I'm not your juror or judge. If you say you haven't done it, it's your trial. And then they went on trial and they all got found guilty. And they got, I think they got life.

Some of them got whole life tariffs. Right. But the common theme being a broken system that let them down, people who fell through the cracks and in kind of a point in time in their lives where they're very impressionable, found themselves, you know, under the influence of a very charismatic person

who could mold and radicalize them. Yeah. Which, you know, yeah, there's a lot of similarities between your story. And that was something I identified when I used to talk to them. Like I strongly disagree with what they've done and what they went on to do.

But talking to them on a human level, again, they never admitted their guilt. But when you listen to their stories and you listen to how they've got to the position or point of thinking, how they've reached that point. You understand how those decisions got made in the way that they did. Probably if they would have had my stepdad

as a role model as a kid, they would have probably end up going down the road that I end up going down. Do you feel like they seized an opportunity to try to radicalize you? I mean, didn't Sheikh Abu Hamza give you a Quran? Yeah, he did, he did, he did. It was the biggest book I've ever seen in my life.

Did you read it? I went and had a shower. No, I didn't. Well, I did. So when I come back in off exercise, I went and had a shower because we had like a tiny little moment of association. And obviously I've been in the police station for all those days., I went and had a shower because we had like a tiny little moment of association. And obviously I've been in the police station for those days.

And I went and had a shower. And when I come out of the shower and I went to my cell, there was a Quran on the bed. The biggest book I've ever seen. Like genuine, it was massive. And he put some wheat, a bit of milk. And I took the book and I went back to him. I said, I'm fine, thank you. And he was fine.

He said, yeah, okay. I thought it might be something nice for you to read. I said, no, absolutely fine. Don't believe in God. So he took it back. And he didn't vibe you? No, no, no, no. Do you know what?

It was very interesting, like, being with him in regards of, like, obviously the way the media portrayed him. That was what I was seeing on the outside. But then when I was with him, he was probably one of the quietest people I've ever met. Well, obviously everything I ever saw on the media was outside doing sermons and he was very aggressive. But when I was with him, he was very placid, very quiet. Yeah. It was just interesting seeing the two characters of him. Yeah. He ended up getting extradited to the US. I don't know

what's going on with him now. He's in a super max unit in Colorado. Is he? Yeah. And what, again- Didn't he get gravely ill or there was some kind of medical thing? He had, again, this is again being inquisitive, like obviously it's glaring, obviously he's got no arms and he's got one eye. Right. So you would assume, and I did,

I said, did you blow your hands off building a bomb? And he said he was sort of getting rid of landmines in Afghanistan, I think it was. And that's where he said that he basically he lost his arms and eyesight but we was having this conversation about heaven and hell I don't believe in God I used to as a kid I grew up in a Catholic family but I don't believe in God at all I think once we die we die that's the end of it I wasn't alive in World War II. I know it happened because I know people that were alive when it happened. So I know it was a thing, but where was I? I didn't exist. So I think the same thing happens when I die. It'd be like going into a long sleep and never wake up from it.

And this is how you believe now? Yes. Yeah. Even upon reflecting upon your insane arc and everything that's occurred, like you can't find some strain of spirituality in that. This notion that like you endured all of these things that you endured to be able to do what you do today. And in that, like I'm able to see some kind of non-denominational divinity. Like there seems to be a greater purpose beyond our perceptive abilities to calculate

that is operating here. Like, otherwise it's too insane. But where do you think all the animals go that die? I don't know. I don't purport to have an answer to that, only to say that I do believe that there's more going on than maybe our small minds are able to truly comprehend. And maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe at the end, I might have to have that conversation with someone at the end of my life. But the way I see life is that, like, at the moment, I'm in a very content, happy place. And I've got to see how beautiful the world is. I don't really want for anything to a degree. Like I live a nice, simple life and I'm happy like that, but I think everyone has the right to live how I live. So I think that whilst I am a breathing and I am alive and I am on this earth, I should help other people have the

same standard of existence as me. and they shouldn't have to go through shit and and not be able to live their fullest life whilst they've got it but I do think when the lights go out the lights go out and I think that's the end of that and Christmas my mum's partner that she'd been with for like 30 years he was dying of cancer and it spread all around his body and he was in palliative care and he was at my mum's and he was years he was dying of cancer and it spread all around his body and he was in palliative care and he was at my mum's and he was in he was in the living room and the and the like they bought the nhs bought a bed round because to stop him from getting sores and stuff and he deteriorated massively like he was on a concoction of drugs and he didn't know he was dying which

again it was crazy like my mum knew it spread from his lungs to his brain and he was dying. And I remember my mum promised him, she said like, I will always be here or Jonathan will always be here. And my mum would not leave his side unless I went around every morning and stayed next to him whilst my mum would go to the park or the shops.

And honestly, Rich, I did think at one point, I wonder when we're sitting there, like me and him sharing experience, because sometimes it was just me and him and I was watching him struggling to breathe. Like maybe I might think there has to be something else. And I didn't. But what it did when he died, it really sharpened up to me how short and fragile and precious life is. And for me to live the life that I feel is the right life for me to lead. Because we're all on a timer.

And that's going to happen to me one day. If I even get to 72 or 73 years old. People's lives are so fragile and so short. And I took the positives out of seeing what I saw. Obviously, I didn't want him to die. But when I watched him die, it was like it really heightened in me how fragile my life is and what what a precious gift life is and being able to physically able to use my body to sort of experience the world experience the mountains because one day I won't be able to do it so whilst

I am able to do it I want to really maximize that time and have as many life experiences I possibly can whilst I'm still alive. I feel like my sense is that that experience affirmed the sense that you had when your father passed away, like this notion of finality. Like when your dad died, is that when the idea of legacy becomes super important? Like it falls on the heels of that, right? Like, and legacy is related to the finality of death, right? So in your subconscious mind, when you're dead, that's it. There's nothing more. I need to do everything I can while I'm here

in this finite period of time to ensure that, you know, my name lives on or that I'm here in this finite period of time to ensure that my name lives on or that I'm doing the works to make the world a better place. Like that seems to rent a lot of space in your head. Yeah, massive. Death has profoundly shaped my existence. Like going back to being in prison,

like when the catalyst for me changing was the death of my friend. Without my friend Aaron dying, there's no change. Right, we're only halfway through the story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I told you to give me the thumbnail, but like. Yeah, we've jumped. We haven't even gotten to that part, but yeah, no, go ahead. Yeah, but when I found out my friend died,

like I'm not an emotional person. I never have been. Like I could probably count on one hand the amount of times I've cried since I was 20 years old like when I was a kid maybe a lot but when I'm an adult a handful of times and the night when I found out my friend died was the most emotional I've ever been as an adult like genuinely I couldn't stop crying because the the relationship I had with him in this bond I had with him and then I realized I'm never going to see him again

and that profoundly changed my existence because I was then reflective on where I was, what I was doing. I'm in prison, like I thought I was at war, this imaginary war against his system. The things I placed importance on, money, wealth, wasn't important. The people I idolised as a kid were all old men rotting in prison or they were dead. But him dying awoken me to the nonsense of the stuff that I thought was important in life and it wasn't. But obviously I was trapped in an environment where I couldn't just get up and walk away and go, I want to turn my life around and

change. I want to stop taking drugs. I want to stop drinking. I'm just going to go and do something else. I was physically trapped in this environment, which is a very negative environment to be trapped in. And I've said this countless times, but it is like being a drug addict, trying to get off drugs, but being locked in a crack den, trying to get off drugs. So I'm in prison, trying or wanting not to be around these sort of negative toxic people but I'm trapped with them I can't just get up and walk away and I and I what really hit me was the following morning after my friend died we was in a communal eating area and there was prisoners next to me and no one obviously knew what what had happened that night and the fact that I'd been

told that my best friend had died in a car crash committing a robbery in the Netherlands but I just remember them talking about when they get out of prison, they're going to do this, that, that. They want to stab this person. This person's done this. And I just thought, do you know what? I can't be around these people anymore. I just do not want to even be near these people. And I was lost. Like I genuinely was lost. I didn't know what I could do to get me out of this horrible, toxic environment. I was going through this process of wanting something else, but I didn't know what that was. I'm still driven, still focused, but my whole identity is wrapped up in this crime world. Like my ego, people

respecting me, my name, that my set, as you say, was so important, your name. If you don't have a name, you're a piece of shit. Everything's wrapped up in this world. And I'm in this prison and I'm like, I don't want this anymore. I want to let go of it. I don't want to be living this existence. I was so lucky that I went down to prison gym and there was a prisoner on an indoor rail machine

called Mickey Steele from North London in Tottenham. And he had gym every day. And I never, because in prison,ham and he had gym every day and I never because in prison you don't get gym every day because they they try to keep all the wings apart from each other because of gang activity but he was on that rowing machine every time I went to the gym and he wasn't on my wing and I said to him what you doing and he said I'm rowing a million meters for a charity so I have a special note they allow me to come down the wing and sort of come down to the gym and row five car day ten car row five car a day, 10 car a day,

five car a day, two car a day. And he was just chipping it off to row the million meters. He said, you should do it. And he put that little seed in my head. And I thought, you know what? I've never been on a ram machine in my life.

I'm 26 years old. And I went to ask the gym manager called Craig. And I remember it, I had bald heads and I went in there and I said to Craig, can I do what Mickey's doing? He said, John, you're on the wing, you get sponsorship, you can come down here, you can do it.

So I did it. Right. We should say that when we were talking about the story earlier, you hadn't even been sentenced yet. So ultimately you end up with a double life sentence. Yes. Right. So two life terms.

I don't know how the British system differs from the United States. So I'd be interested in hearing how you even got out to begin with, because that doesn't seem like a predicament that anybody comes out of, no matter how good your behavior is. But ultimately you find this opportunity

to get into the gym with quite a bit of bandwidth to use this rowing machine. And this is really the inflection point for everything that follows. Yeah, so going back to the sentences, I was in that unit for two and a half years waiting to go on trial. I realized that the cards were completely stacked against me. My legal team said,

you've got to make a decision. You either fight it, and if you fight it and you get found guilty you're probably not going to get out of prison until you're in your mid-30s I was like okay I'm 22 years old and you have to then start assessing all this stuff from like 35 being 22 feels a long way away and then they then come back to me my my legal team I was on the wing and the prison officer the SO SO, the senior officer, come to my cell and said, Mr McAvoy, you need to phone up.

This is important. So I said, okay. Got on the phone, rang him up. And he said, John, I'm going to ask you something. I know what you're going to say to me, but I have to ask you it. I'm legally bound to ask you. I said, okay. He said, the police have contacted us.

And if you give evidence against your co-defendant, you'll get a substantial reduction in your sentence. And I said, you know what I'm going to say to you, don't you? And he said, yeah. And I said, but can you pass this message on to them? And he said, yeah. I said, go tell them to fuck themselves. And he said, okay.

And he laughed. He said, I'll tell them what you've said. And he went back, told them that. So I could have had a massively reduced sentence. I probably wouldn't have got life. And then we'd go to court. I ended up going guilty because I really didn't have any,

I had to weigh out all the scenarios. I'm in this high security unit. I'm surrounded by terrorists looking at not getting out of prison until I'm in my mid-30s um all my 20s are going to be gone no matter what I knew that I knew like I was 22 going on 23 at this point need yeah 23 so I knew all my 20s was going to go I knew that so I had to start assessing that it was damage limitation now and then went to court to get sentenced and before we went to get sentenced the prosecution stood up and said my honor there was something like a public community interest request so i

didn't know what that even meant they clear the whole court out we go back down to the cells a maximum security so we're in a special little sort of part of the cells under the courthouse where no one can come near us the only people that can interact with us are prison officers that are brought us from prison my legal team rushed straight down i said what is this and they said basically the whole courtroom gets cleared out the prosecution the police and the judge are left in that room right and i said well what does that mean and it was like ongoing investigations that they don't want you to be aware of um because it might be like they're putting other people on surveillance, things they think you've been involved with. So then obviously I know what's coming.

We go back up to the court after about an hour or so of recess and I stand in front of the judge. He calls me up first to stand up. All the police are in the gallery. My mum's in the public gallery, prosecution, everyone that was involved in the case from the Serious and Organised Crime Agency,

robbery squad. And the judge asked me to stand up and he starts talking and and then suddenly when he starts getting to the nuts and bolts of what he's doing with his summing up he started saying about my age the level of offending my links to the criminal underworld and i thought he's coming and he said mr mcavoy i believe you will always pose a risk to the public. The likelihood of you being rehabilitated is very remote. And if you do get released from prison, the likelihood of you reoffending to the higher end of the statutory book is very high. He went, and I believe the public will always need protection from you. He said, I'm giving you a life sentence.

And he said, I'm also giving you a license for possession of firearms. And I'm like, OK. And then you then wait for the tariff. So people that don't understand how life sentences work, a life sentence is 99 years. Now, if you commit murder in the UK with a firearm, the minimum starting point of a life sentence is 30 years. That means you have to serve a minimum of 30 years in prison

before you can be considered for parole. Some people get whole life terms. It's very rare that people in the UK get whole life terms. There's only about 40 prisoners. So when he gave me my life sentence, what that technically means is you sign your life over to the state. So when you get released from prison on that tariff, whatever he sets it at, you can't travel, you can't live where you want. They don't have to prove you've been involved in crime. They just have to suspect you've been involved in crime. So that would mean if I was under a surveillance operation

and I was seen with a criminal that was a drug trafficker and the police were watching that person saw me with him, that person gets arrested for drug trafficking and they go to my probation officer and goes, John McAvoy has been involved or hanging around with organized criminals. I'm recalled back to prison. That's it.

I'll go straight back to prison. They don't have to prove I've been involved in anything. So the judge gave me one life sentence. Then he gave me another life sentence. And then when he gave me both life sentences, he set the tariff of a minimum of five years. Because he said, if I were to give you a fixed term, I would give you 10 years.

But the five-year tariff doesn't really make any difference. No one gets out on their tariff. And I knew that when he gave it to me. So he gave me these life sentences and I sat back down and then my co defendant stood up. He was older than me. He had more previous convictions. So he got life with a minimum tariff of 10 years. So we go downstairs and I remember the prison officers like, how are you and stuff? I said, yeah, I'm actually fine. Because in my head, I was like, there's no way you're getting these life sentences out of me. The minute I get an opportunity to run for that gate, I'm gone. There's no way I'll get released from prison and then spend my life living in the UK and be recalled back to prison every five minutes. Because these are the stories that you get fed

by other prisoners and people that have experienced the system so i'll go back to the um back to the unit they take us back there and then someone comes and sees you to make sure you're not suicidal because you've just been i said i'm fine i'm all good i'm all good um and again it was put in that provider one um but again you do sit there because you've got no release date like you've got a tariff but no one gets out on the tariff. So now I'm in this, this, this, this sort of like,

you're in this sort of world where you haven't got any control of your existence to a degree, like your environment, should I say, and you've got no actual date of when you're ever going to get out of this place. So a lot of people psychologically really struggle because they're like, when's this ever going to end?

Because you've haven't got like, before I had a release date, I knew on that day I was out. That was it. Nine o'clock in the morning, you're walking me to reception. You let me back out into the street. This situation,

the whole game has changed because I know technically they could keep me in there. If they don't think I've been rehabilitated, I'm not getting out of prison. They will keep me in there for the rest of my life because they can.

They don't have to let you out. So I go back to the unit. They then transfer me to a maximum security prison up north in the UK and obviously Rich you're processing your environment right what cards have I got to play it and I didn't have many I wasn't going to be able to escape they made that impossible like I had access to mobile phones when I was in prison and I was talking to friends outside on a mobile phone and they were saying we get you if you there's an opportunity we come and get you and I said they've boxed everything a mobile phone and they were saying, we get you. There's an opportunity, we'll come and get you.

And I said, they've boxed everything off. There's no way I'm getting out doing that. There's no chance. So that was off the table. So then the other way you would play the game is that you can fight them every day, like I did the first time, and never get out of prison. And I didn't want that to be my existence on earth.

So the third way was you play the game. Good behavior. Yeah, you play the game. So I knew if I did what they wanted me to do and did X, Y, and Z, when I go on my sentence plan boards every year, so you sit there in front of like probation, the senior officer, the principal officer on the wing,

everyone basically writes your sentence plan out for that year. And they say, this year, we want you to do like enhanced thinking skills victim awareness we want you to get a b in english we want you to do a b tech we want you to do whatever it is and you do all that it's a tick the box exercise and you go back up the following year and in the following year and it was working after year one i dropped from being a double category a prisoner to a category a prisoner and then they made me take took me to a, then they dropped me to category B, which is less security. So now they can't justify holding me in a maximum security prison anymore.

So I'll get my, I'll get a legal lawyer, like a prison specialist that specializes in prison law, bombarding them with legal letters. Mr. McAvoy should not be kept in your establishment. He's done everything you've asked him to do. He's now like four, three and a half, four years into his tariff. he's only got a five-year tariff you need to progress him through the system and they did well they have to because if they don't advance you in that way then it becomes a referendum on the legitimacy of these policies that they claim are you know the the path to rehabilitation so if you're not rehabilitated and you've done all of that stuff, it means their system doesn't work. Exactly. But you know that. Which it doesn't. But everyone

knows that. So you're in this crazy environment. Like, well, I can remember like when you would do like, there's a course called Enhanced Thinking Skills. So like, I would go on the course for four or five weeks, right? And then you get your prison, the guy next door and the cell next door, he has to go on the course after you, right? The next enhanced finger skills. So he goes, what do they give you? So you give him all of your stuff. And then what he does, he copies it all out basically and changes the index offense to something else. But it was absurd. What are the things people are going to do? But this is it. And when you're in there, you're in this, sometimes you're in this situation, like we was on a victim awareness course.

And I remember it was in the chaplaincy. The chaplain was called Gareth. And again, I hope he's listening to this because he actually messaged me on Instagram. It was really lovely what he said because he remembered me. And we was all sitting in this church in prison or the chaplaincy. He was running it. They brought this old lady to come in. And I remember it, Christmas.

Someone burgled a house, stole all of her husband's like insulin right their christmas was destroyed they stole all the christmas presents under the tree you've got a group of inmates all of us have been involved in organized crime you had drug traffickers armed robbers people in there for like multi-million pound fraud tax evasion and stuff in this maximum. So we're all saying what a piece of shit the person was that stole that, like the old lady's stuff, because that's not what we did. Like we didn't do stuff like that. So we're all sitting there and like, you're, you're thinking, well, if you would ever caught the burglar that did that to that little old lady, and you're in this like mad, crazy world where you've got your own moral compass of what's right and wrong.

That's terrible. Like that's the worst of the worst. That's like scumbags do stuff like that. And you're all engaged. It's such a bizarre situation that you're in. But you know, if you do all these, you do all these tick the box exercises and do everything they want you to do, they have to let you progress.

Because if they don't, like what you've just said, they're then acknowledging the whole thing's farcical. And like, there's no point to it it so they have to let you progress and obviously when you're in there you know that so you all the people that do some people don't the first time i didn't i didn't engage with it whatsoever and there's a lot of people that won't like they will point blank refuse to do anything that they're asked to do in regards to that stuff but because they've got a determinate sentence so they're're gonna get released, they don't need to do it. They don't, they're gonna get released no matter what.

Don't get me wrong, Rich, there are some people that it might work for, but the vast majority that I come across in the situation I was in, in that maximum security prison, it was a complete waste of money. It was a complete waste of money. So how long were you in before your friend passed away? Like you saw that on the news or something like that, right?

So I spoke to my cousin on the phone and he was the one that informed me. I was watching a game of football on the telly in prison and Republic of Ireland playing France. And at half time, I couldn't believe that France was still in the game. Cause I thought France would, I'm sorry, Ireland was still in the game.

I thought France were gonna walk all over them. And they didn't. And I sprung my cousin up half time and said, are you watching this game? And he said, are you on your own? And I said, yeah, of course I am. And then he told me about Aaron dying in the car crash. And I was in disbelief. How long had you been incarcerated though at that point?

Four years. You've been in four years. Four years. So during that four years, you're checking the boxes, but you're still harboring this mentality of defiance. Your friend passes away, this lands on you like a ton of bricks. And that's really, you know, the beginning of you, you know, rethinking your whole approach to life. Yeah. But like I said, it profoundly, it profoundly changed me and how and what I thought was important and what wasn't important.

Obviously, I won't repeat myself, but that story with the prisoners talking about what they were going to do when they got out and me going down that gym and seeing Mickey and then me looking at what he was doing and seeing that form of escapism on that rail machine. There was a portal outside that wall and I got on it and it got green-lighted for me to do it. I got the note and then it got green light for me to do it. And I got the note and I was able to go down the gym every day. The first session I did was 20 miles.

Didn't know what I was doing. Never been on a rowing machine, but you, you had been doing like these CrossFit competitions and stuff like that. I've been doing stuff like that. I was fit. And again, like when I went back to prison the second time, the exercise, the feeling alive, someone said that when you're in prison, you don't live, you just exist. So when I went back to prison the second time, the exercise, the feeling alive, someone said that when you're in prison, you don't live, you just exist. So when I went back the second time, that started again. When I was in that cell, it was the circuits, it was the exercise, it was training. It made me feel like I was a human being. So I had awoken an ability in my body.

I knew I was very fit for being in prison. But when you're in prison, you're in a bubble. It's not reality. Like, you're not in the real world. So I had nothing to test myself against. But suddenly you go on this, this machine and you can actually, which I didn't know at the point, at that point, but you, you can test yourself against other people. Like, cause there's people that do specific distances over a certain time, like over a certain time and how quick you are. And this all become new to me like i had

this awareness of it when the prison officer brought in all these pieces of paper and he showed me all these records but the first time i got on it like and i suppose to a degree what you've said about the spiritual component like to me exercise then made me feel alive it wasn't about performance it wasn't performance driven whatsoever it made me feel alive. It wasn't about performance. It wasn't performance driven whatsoever. It made me feel alive, like I was a human being. And when I got on that round machine for the first time, I remember it transcended me out of that place. Like genuinely, I didn't know, really understand about endorphins and feeling like in flow state. These words, I didn't know. I didn't know. I never heard them before. But when I look back now, reflectively in that process, didn't know i never heard them before um but when i look back now reflectively in that process like being visualization on that ram machine imagining i was running on an ocean and it was like a portal

out of that prison it took me out it removed me and took me out that place so the first month i thought this is amazing and i rode a million meters in a month like mickey he was into four months doing the first and then the next month i asked to do it again and in three months I'd rode three million meters and it was only one day a prisoner went to me you do realize if you row five million meters it's equivalent to rowing across the Atlantic and I and I didn't I didn't know that and then I thought that's quite a cool thing so I've done row five million meters rode across the Atlantic on an indoor rowing machine so I asked if I could continue and the prison officer, Craig, said, John, keep raising money, keep doing it.

Keep coming down there every day. At this point, I had a gym-only job as well. They gave me a job because I was down there so much. And like, Rich, my hands were like claws. Like literally, because I was holding the handle for so many hours a day, I used to have to like snap my fingers out. And I'm genuinely like, they were like,

it was like they seized up. You needed oil in the joints and my body completely transformed more than even doing the circuits I'd lats my shoulders blew up like my body went through this process like I morphed to the machine basically and again one day you call it luck destiny Darren Davis the prison officer walks behind me and I rode 10,000 metres and I pre-programmed it in because normally I used to just row a distance so the clock would go up. But this day I put 10,000 metres in to program it

so it rode down. And then when I stopped on the 10K, Darren walked behind me, the prison officer, and he just stopped and he looked at the monitor and he went, that is really, really, really fast. And I didn't really think anything of it it and then he was the one that went away and printed all those world and British records on the indoor rail machine and he come back to me in the gym and he gave them to me and I and I remember like reading them and I was like they can't be real because I could

nearly break some of them at that point. I knew I could. And he planted the seed in my head and he went away. And I went back to my cell and I was like, I wonder if it's even possible to try to even do him here. And I asked him, he said, let me look into it. And he contacted the people that officiate the records, explained the situation. Because normally you'd have to do it in a public setting.

They have to be independent verifying witnesses. I needed to be weighed because I was doing it as a lightweight man, under 75 kilo. I needed to put a card in the rowing machine to pull the data off to make sure no one cheated. Someone had to take pictures of me on a scale to make sure that I was 70, I was at 72 kilo at that point. But the biggest point was, and the hardest point of all this,

was the governor of the prison. And Gareth Sands, his name was, very religious Christian man. Darren went to him and Darren asked him if I could attempt to do his records. Bear in mind, this had never been done ever. Like this doesn't exist in prison. This does not exist.

No one's ever even asked. There's never been a prisoner in the UK prison system or in the world that i'm aware of that's done something like what i've done it's amazingly even had an erg well that's it but it was it was even like obviously as i as i started loving rowing more and more and more i started used to take care of the machine as best as i could i used to wipe all the slides it was shiny so there was no friction and stuff and darren went to him and and and they was always neglected the cardio suite in the prison was always neglected everyone's in the weights room so I always had the round machine stuff so

it was mine basically I used to look after it and stuff as best as I could and Darren went to him and Darren said I think this could change John's life and the governor said yeah if you think it can change his life you can do it and the first record I broke I attempted to break and broke was the marathon and I broke it by seven minutes. And it was such a profound moment though, Rich. It really was like, I remember I didn't understand about sports nutrition or anything. Like I can remember eating like sugar. Do you know like the sugar sachets? Sugar packs. Because I had no nutrition and I started to blow up like the last 5K. Obviously,

I didn't understand about carbohydrates, glycogen. I'm on this rampage and no heart rate. You have no electrolytes, glycogen. I'm on this ramp. No heart. You have no electrolytes supplements or anything. Nothing whatsoever. Or any coach or any heart rate monitor or any sense of like how to train for something like this or how to execute on that goal. Nothing. It was literally sheer force of will and power. I remember in my head, I knew that's the record. I need to hold that split to beat that record. And all I did was just pound. And I just used brute power and strength

and mental strength to get me through it. And I kept remembering like the police officers. And then this was a very big motivator for me. When the prison officers, or sorry, the police officers, when they said like, you never look out the window, you're never going to see this again.

People thinking I was a piece of shit. So when I was on that rivet and like you get to a point where you're in so much pain, I just kept remembering, like these memories kept coming back to the fore. And I was like, I'm not a piece of shit. I'm not a loser. I can achieve something in my life. And it drove me.

And I remember getting to that last 5K. And I didn't really understand because I was doing all these circuit stuff in my cell. I never really understood what it was like to blow up. Like when you run out of energy. I'd never had this sensation before. And I remember Darren said to one of the prisoners, go and get him some sugar. And I was literally eating sugar out of these sachets.

And it got me to the end. And when I finished that record and I broke it by seven minutes, I was on that mat in that gym. And honestly, it really became clear to me then that it was never about money. I made the attachment as a kid to success and money. It was never about that. I just wanted to be successful at something.

And I attached that to money. When I realized at that moment on that gym mat after just finishing that record, how it made me feel like no one had ever done what I had just done in that moment. And I was the best in the United Kingdom at that. And I just set a British record that stood for like six years before I even tried to break it. And I felt incredible. And then from that moment, I knew I would use my body as a vehicle and that would be the thing to get me out of this place. started going down the library I started getting books about sports nutrition training Darren and

and I know you've had him on your podcast when we spoke about him before we started this podcast but Lance Armstrong had a profound impact over me like really did I didn't even know what tour like I heard the tour de France I didn't know what it was and Darren bought me in his autobiography it's not about the bike Darren printed me off quotes and he's sticking in front of the ram machine about quitting last forever pains temporary i may i used to train and i'd read them and they were literally can you imagine i'm moving up and down the slide i'm just reading these quotes and then i started watching the tour de france whilst i was in prison i started having this awareness of cycling and tour and lance was still riding and i went went on this journey and Darren started bringing me more and more books

of all these athletes. And I remember like reading these autobiographies and all of the characteristics that I had, like from a kid, these group of people had as well. But the only people I saw like me were criminals. I never saw people that did other things other than people that did crime.

But you're identifying, you're finding your sensibility in the stories of all of these athletes. You're like, that's how I think. That's how I approach the problems that I've had. That's, you know, my mindset is like that mindset. Like you're able to see, like you're finding like kinship in all of these people. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And it opened up my eyes. Every time I broke a record on that RAM machine and within like 18 months, I set three world records and eight British records. I basically had the full house. All right. Marathon by seven minutes. So what, what, like 230 or something like that? What are we talking about? It was 237.

237. 237? And then I broke the world and British record for 100,000 meters, which was six and a half hours. And then I set the British record for half marathon, which was 115 or 114. It might've been 10K. I set that. I set the kilometer records.

I set the world record for the most distance road in 24 hours, which was 163 miles. And then the longest continuous road, which was just shy 48 hours nonstop. And this is, what year is this? In 2011, 2010, 2011, it was. Wasn't that long ago.

It really wasn't. Do any of those records still stand? Well, it was quite funny, because when I broke the most amount of distance riding 24 hours, by coincidence, someone else was training for it. He was at Southampton University and Darren come and said,

like I literally set the record and Darren said, someone's trying to break this next week. And I was like, wow, really? And he's like, yeah. And he printed, because I had no access to the internet. So Darren printed all his stuff off and showed me it and brought it to my cell. And I was like, really and he's like yeah and he printed because I had no access to the internet so Darren printed all his stuff off

and showed me it and brought it to my cell and I was like imagine he beats it I've only just set it and I smashed it I broke the last one by 13 miles

so when I was aware of it obviously you're talking to other prisoners and I was saying oh this guy's doing it and then he was doing it I remember he started on a Friday

so Saturday morning doors unlock prison prison doors. Like you're allowed to come out for association, get straight on the phone. And I phoned up my cousin. So he had like a live link, the guy that was doing the cameras and stuff, watching him do it.

So my cousin's feeding me where he's at. So he was on pace with me up until like 20 hours, 19 and a half hours and mushroom clouded and blew up. And my cousin said, he's cracked, he's cracked, he's cracked. And I was so relieved. And I thought, oh, wow, like at least I'll keep the record for a bit. And then I found out a couple of years after that,

a guy at Harvard University, he broke it. And do you know, he broke it 12 meters. This is the most meters in 24 hours record? He was saying, I rode 100, it was 163 miles. It was 12 meters. It was literally a stroke on a round machine. It was one stroke after 24 hours. And does he know that you, like the circumstances under which you set the record?

I doubt, I doubt. No, because do you know when we put the records on, when we said where I was, we never said prison. It was just always Nottingham. Right. I think we talked about this last time. Yeah, like I wanted to know, like how does it show up on the printout?

Yeah, it just comes up as Nottingham Circo because I did it in a privately run prison. So they didn't put down, I did it in prison. It was just that. But your story is out. Yeah, it's out now. And obviously when I got released from prison, I Googled the kid and I saw all the pictures

of when he was doing it. He had massive Gatorade and he had fans everywhere. And I was like in this tiny little prison gym with a tiny little fan with nothing. There was no stimulization around me whatsoever. I was in this machine and the white wall behind it. But yeah, he broke it by like 12 meters, but the world records have all gone, but most of the British records still stand.

Yeah. That's unbelievable, man. I want to talk about Darren a little bit. I mean, this guy, you know, changed your life in ways you can't even comprehend. I mean, it's unbelievable. And he's super impressive in so many ways. Like this guy rode his bike from Norway to Malta, right? Like he's done some epic shit himself. And I'm trying to remember, like I've got a bunch of friends in Malta. Is he Maltese?

No, no, no, no, no, he's from the UK. He is from the UK. Like I think when there was a guy who swam from Sicily to Malta a couple of years ago, did Darren help crew for him? I've seemed to remember stories from my friends in Malta who were familiar with Darren, maybe because of the bike ride but anyway, I mean, he's, you know.

He's a remarkable man. This guy's unbelievable. He's a remarkable man. He is one of the most thoughtful, compassionate human beings I've ever met like this it like my story is like extreme but like when he was a prison officer he's not anymore he's gone now to work for a charity outside of prison that helps with prison reform and helps stop people from going into prison as well but when he was in prison the amount of people that interact with him that

changed their lives he was a one-man rehabilitation machine. Genuinely, like, it was remarkable. Even to a degree, one day, there was a prisoner with mental health problems wanting to attack him. This doesn't happen in prison. Prisoners stopped that prisoner attacking him. That does not happen. Like, that is a big no-no.

If a prisoner wants to attack a prison officer, you know everyone would step out. Like, no one's stepping in and then fighting prisoner wants to attack a prison officer you know everyone would step out like no one's stepping in and then fighting the prisoners to stop the prison officer getting been up but that's the impact he had over so many people like the respect like within the prison he worked once i got released i went back to the prison i couldn't believe what he'd done like he he created his own gym within the prison and there was like pictures of me and him every prisoner that he ever worked with that he he helped with rehabilitation when they got out and got jobs set up their own

gym chains it's incredible professional fighters there's another guy in there called k musa that's an mma ufc fighter or an mma fighter um can we turn his life around right and and darren darren was was was the catalyst for a lot of this change. A lot of people come out and got jobs, never went back to prison, all because he interacted with them. He is an amazing man. And when we used to sit in the gym together, it went past,

like me and his relationship went past the point. It wasn't just performance and running records. I used to sit with him in the gym and he would talk about his family and his kids and he'd open up to me. And this was like, this does not happen. Right. Prison guards are never going to tell you about their personal life. Right. And since I've been out, I've met his, I've met his daughter, I've met his wife. He's come on, he's come out to France with me. He's like, we've, he's been to all of my races. Like we've forged this bond with each other, this connected bond, like even my own

charity, like he was a trustee on that. It honestly like he means so much to me and he was the first male positive role model I ever had in my life and I was 26 years old I never had anyone in my life like a male that wasn't in my life for like other than my mate that died that there wasn't a vested interest there wasn't something they were getting out of it they weren't just there because they thought a lot of you. They were there because there was something that might've been you helping to make money or whatever it was. But Darren was there purely

because he wanted me to succeed. There was no money. There was no nothing. And even when I wrote my book, obviously you sit there, I sat there with a ghostwriter. And I remember like, I could tell sometimes I'm telling these stories and we're talking about things and he would look at me and go yeah and he's writing

down and then he said would it be possible to meet darren i said i can ask him darren said yeah of course he went up to nottingham and he was with darren and obviously like i could tell you this story i could tell all these stories and people go around go he's not telling the truth but obviously darren's then verifying it because because Darren's the other side of the fence. Like Darren was on the other side perceiving it from his perspective. It's the same story. What he couldn't understand, the ghostwriter,

was why Darren did it. Because there was no money involved. There's no accolades. Like he wasn't getting anything out of it. I'm a guy serving two life sentences in prison. Like he's not getting anything out of that. Like coming on his day off, which he was, not being paid to sit with me on an exercise bike for 24 hours behind me with a bandana on coaching me through sitting on this ram machine because rich i'd never done

like an ultra endurance event before up to this point like i had to keep my body awake for 24 hours on a on a ram machine on a pace to set a record. Darren had like been to like, um, Greenland. He'd done expeditions. He'd done ultra endurance effect, like walks, hikes,

mountain climbs. He understood the process of what the body goes through. I didn't. So I remember being on that round machine four o'clock in the morning. My body wants to go to sleep, screaming for me to sleep. So now I'm having to fight an urge that's like wired into my brain. And I remember Darren said, I promise you, whether the storm, six o'clock, seven o'clock,

your body snap back out of it and you'll be fine. And you'll feel a million times better. And I said, please just don't talk to me then. And he said, I won't talk to you, but just keep remembering in a few hours, your body will come back out of that cycle of wanting to sleep and you'll feel fine. Someone pressed the light switch, seven o'clock, bang, I was up. I was wide awake on that round machine. I weathered the storm. I went all the way through. And then when I got to like one o'clock, half one, I set the world record.

And Darren said, now you just got to fucking drop the hammer and go as hard as you can and put as much time as you can into that record. And that's why I broke it by the distance I ended up breaking it by. Sure, he had experience. He understood these things. Like you can't, back to the spirituality thing, like, you know, the idea that this guy

gets put in your path, right? And you have this innate facility for this type of endeavor. I mean, what are the chances of that? Yeah, I think it's energy as well. Like Darren, Darren saw that I was a man that wanted to turn my life around and had a talent. He believed that talent could help me change my life and he supported it and he facilitated it. And like I said, like without him, there'd be no me. Sure. He's the catalyst. You're like the pilot program.

Then your picture ends up on the wall in the gym that then ends up with a lot more equipment and you become the lighthouse. Like the other people who are coming in, Darren can tell that story, they can look at you. And then with that, that seed of belief can start to germinate. Like, oh, that guy did it.

Like there is a path forward here. If I, you know, listen to this guy and allow myself to be mentored and start contemplating a different way of being. Yeah, like I gotta be honest with you, Rich. I never really realized the impact that my life would have over other people. I genuinely didn't.

Like I'm me, I don't, I'm not special. I'm just who I am. I do what I do. I've got character flaws. Everyone has. No one's perfect. I know that. I've got great awareness of my own life. And I think sometimes people get lost on that and they think they put you up on a pedestal and they think you're perfect. And I'm really, really not. I get the way I am allowed me to do what I did years ago. Other people wouldn't want to live the life that I live. But some people might think, do you ever get lonely and stuff like that? And I never, ever do. I love being on my own. I love spending time on my own. I love doing things on my own. I do rides and runs and I just like being on my own. I know a lot of people can't deal with that and

they struggle, but that helped me when I was in that situation on that round machine, doing what I did, being in that segregation cell, that's what's got me through my life. And that's what makes me who I am. But I never realized the sort of the impact that mine and Darren's journey and the way it's sort of inspired people, not just even in similar, like similar situations as me. Like, I remember a few, it was quite a few years ago, I remember a few, it was quite a few years ago, I received an email, right, from a woman. And mate, honestly, like even now, I remember, like I never thought for a moment what the story I'm about to tell you, it wouldn't even compute that it would be possible. So this woman was raped. He never got caught who did it. It was a stranger rape. And she read my book and she sent me this email and she said in the book the person that did that to me was never caught and she said I really hope like you he

changed his life and he never did it again and she said that's what I took out of your story that if you manage to do it maybe he changed his life and he never did that again to anyone else and I'm like how like I never thought for a moment, like maybe some kids that were involved in gangs or, but you read these stories sometimes from people and that one stood out, but the amount of mums that have messaged me where their sons are in prison

and it sort of changed their mindset on what's possible. Like you can achieve things with your life. You can turn your life around. You can be positive and a beacon of hope. And it isn't the end. Just because you make one bad decision in your life, you can always come back from it and achieve something with your life. And if that means you're just not wasting your life and having belief in yourself a little bit more. But I never thought for a moment that my life or mine and Darren's journey and story together would have that sort of positive impact in the world. But I do think that when I did have that realization, it becomes a duty then

to sort of, to help lift people up. Like I've said to you before, that's my definition of what life's about. We're only on this planet for such a brief moment of time. I want other people to live a happy, healthy lifestyle where they believe in themselves and they've got confidence in themselves and they make the most of the short amount of time that they've got on this earth. Yes, it's a duty, but it's also the thing that gives you the most joy. Like we started this conversation with you

sharing stories about being with these kids over the last two days and how much that lights you up. So, you know, it's curious, like you on some level, you know, are carrying on Darren's legacy in this living a man's way. Like you all took potshots at, you know, the criminal who, who stole the Christmas presents and all of that. But in truth, like the crimes that you perpetrated had downstream

negative implications on a lot of people's lives. right? So part of resurrecting yourself and creating a new path is to make peace with the past and try to the extent that you're capable of making things right, right? And so mentoring these kids, your foundation, these initiatives, that's all part and parcel of that. And what's curious is how much those are the things that actually make you the happiest

and give your life meaning and kind of direct you in this purposeful way. Yeah. Like even yesterday, like being around those kids and seeing the impact and like, because of my actions and the way I, because again, I think in life you learn from every experience. When sometimes I embrace when negative things happen, because they do, they happen to all of us, like bad situations and things happen, you haven't got control over them and you can perceive them as a negative,

but I've always used it as fuel. To me, it fuels me. I take a learning from everything. Bad people come into my life, I learn from it. Yeah, it's not been a great experience, but I'm going to turn this now into a positive and use it as fuel. I use the fact that all those years when I was put in prison by my own doing like bad life choices, but I accept responsibility for my own actions. I put myself in that situation by doing what I did, breaking the law. But all of this,

all of this energy that I've gathered over the years and for the experience and turning it into a positive, it's led to like now me being able to be part of an initiative that works with thousands of kids across the UK and then they look up to you as a role model and when I was in that school yesterday like they hang off every word that you say they're so malleable and for me to be in a position in my life now where sort of you can get massive brands behind me that will facilitate and help me drive that agenda and message like it is incredible and it is amazing and it's the greatest achievement I've ever done in my life like the records everything don't get me wrong the records have facilitated the movement because without the story there would be no big brands coming in and helping me do this stuff

but to me that that is that is legacy. And it took me so long to understand that. Legacy to me, like I said, is about helping people realize their own potential. And when I'm dead, because that person's had an interaction with me or something I've been part of that's positive, their life is better. Sure. It's not your name on a building. No. It's the manner in which the lives that you impacted are then living their lives on a higher plane and passing that on to future generations. And that's truly how you become a mortal, right? Like the downstream impact of positive lives altered

because of your choice to try to make an impact on young people. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, it's really a beautiful thing. your choice to try to make an impact on young people. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, it's really a beautiful thing. There's gaps in the story that we've told. I mean, ultimately you get paroled, you get out, you end up going down to the London rowing club. And we kind of told a little bit of that story last time.

You find your way into Ironman and, you know, kind of are still continuing to participate. As far as the brands, you've been with Nike now for a long time, right? Five years. Five years, yeah. And you've got, I think you got your Cervelo as your bike sponsor. You have Volvo too. But do you know, with everyone that I've worked with, they've all like bought into what I'm doing and they've all facilitated me continuing that work. Like Nike put a huge investment into Open Doors

and they've supported me a hundred percent. It's not about you being on podiums. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's about you carrying on this message and living a certain lifestyle and kind of walking your talk. Yeah. But you still, like we were texting earlier

and you're like, I'm just finished my training. Are you training now for anything? Yeah. So next summer, I want to take part in a race called the Race Across France, which is a bike race. I want to go to win it. I want to try to break the record, which is four days and 22 hours, which is 2,600 kilometers with 33,000 meters of climbing. Wow. But the most important thing, as of now, I'm a fellow vegan. Yeah.

I want to demonstrate that you can do that event plant-based. So I've been vegan now for two years. And obviously, we're probably going to preach to the converted now. But performance-wise, I'm 39 years old. I'm in the best shape I've ever been in. I've had no major injuries. I don't get sick that much. I recover great. Power numbers on the bike are best shape i've ever been in i've had no major injuries i don't get sick that much i recover great power numbers on the bike are the best they've ever been uh did an

ultra endurance bike race a couple weeks ago to tour de mont blanc like i burnt 12 000 calories of energy in 13 hours absolutely fine and i want to demonstrate that you are able to compete and perform to a high level on a on a plant- diet. So that's my big goal for next June. They haven't fixed the date yet when the start of it, but you start off in the South of France and you basically go like West up to like Calais. So you go like diagonally across the country and then you go through Provence, Mont Ventoux,

all the Alps, and then slingshot across the country to the ocean, to the coast, and you go up towards like Calais. Wow. So you're taking the hard route. If you're going west, like what, and then north. So you go like, you go like west. Yeah, so you start down in South France,

go through Provence, and then you kind of like go around the hardest mountains there, and then go into the high mountain Alps, and then go diagonally across the country. So it's 33, so you're climbing Mount Everest four times. Wow. And like, if it takes me five days, it takes me five days. But that's the plan.

I would like to beat the record of four days and 22 hours. Nice. And walk me through the decision to begin this vegan journey. Well, when I was on the last time, I was a meat eater. Never really even, I never even processed ever becoming a vegan. By the way, we didn't even, I have nothing to do with this. No, you have nothing to do with it no you have nothing to do with it you have absolutely nothing to do with it but yeah never never in my mind never I was never really conscious of the world in that regards very performance

driven rowing then Ironman was in that environment where like a lot of coaches would probably recommend that you don't like saying there's not that many world-class vegan athletes. But again, it was never even in my mind. Like I never even had the conversation about doing it. Moved to France, probably the worst country if you want it to become vegan, in the mountains. And the journey and the story and the way it worked out was I'm out there, like I said, in June, 2020,

after COVID, when the first lockdowns were hitting everyone and there was a little gap where we could travel a bit so i'm out there i was on my own and there's a little like there's a little like place where i go and watch the sunset in the mountains and it's beautiful it just drops behind this lake anyway go up there every night and there was an equestrian center and next year equestrian center there was like these stables. And I saw these, like these horses walking around, four horses. And I went up one night and the horses like come over. I went up the next night, took a little bag of carrots and apples, fed them, did it again the next night, next night, next night. Instinctively, the minute I started going up there, the horses would recognise me straight away to the degree that when a couple of friends come out, I said, watch this. So they

didn't believe me. So literally the minute I got out the car friends come out I said watch this so they didn't believe me so literally the minute I got out the car and I walked up to like this like field these horses obviously sensing they come over my mate was like that is unbelievable and they come up and I was stroking the horse's nose and stuff and then mate like I had never in my life ever grown up around animals like I'd I'd never like having a dog or a cat like I've never been in nature never really been exposed to it whenever I went on holiday it was always to cities or when I lived in the south of Spain or like I'd never been in like profound, strong, powerful nature in the outdoors. I never experienced that as a kid. I never experienced as an adult till I was like my late thirties.

And then one night I'm there, there's this horse and I'm looking into the horse's eyes and I had this connection with this horse. And I obviously at this point realised the horse was sensing me or the horses were sensing me. And I felt like a hypocrite and I didn't like seeing cows and sheep behind electric fences. When I watched the cattle trucks go in and their little noses poking out the holes in the cattle trucks. And it profoundly affected me and it reminded me of being in prison. It's the only way I can really explain it. And I just didn't like how it made me feel. And that night with that horse, when I was looking into the horse's eyes, I just made the decision that night I would never eat or drink, consume any animal products ever again. And I didn't. The only thing I found tough- So it really was like a lightning bolt sort of thing.

And I didn't. The only thing I found tough- So it really was like a lightning bolt sort of thing. A hundred percent. Like the only thing that it was challenging afterwards, I didn't miss any food groups. It was the force of habit of like, when you go into a coffee shop, deliberately saying, I don't want milk in my coffee.

But like, I then took that on. I don't eat honey. Like I went to the full extreme. I didn't even realize there was levels of veganism. It was only like, so like I went horse riding once riding once never do it again I'd never ride a horse again because I didn't like I did it once before I went vegan but then I didn't like the exploitation of sitting on a horse and it to me like the horses that I saw they looked like they were sedated and I just didn't like it and I thought I'm never doing that again so I did it once never

again but I went to the full extreme veganism. I don't preach to people. We go out for dinner sometimes and people look and go, oh, do you mind if I have ham and stuff? And I go, look, of course, it's your body. You have to make your own choices and decisions. I make my decisions based on my reasoning. This is why I did it. It's up to you whether you do it. I don't force it on other people. But for me, it was more of a moral issue. And I didn't like how it made me feel being around those animals. And the fact that even when I go walking and stuff like when you're in the mountains and you're in such powerful, profound, strong nature and you're seeing butterflies flying around and how all these creatures have evolved to inhabit the same planet as we are right now. how all these creatures have evolved to inhabit the same planet as we are right now.

And I look at the fish in the water and stuff and it changes you so profoundly. I know I keep saying that word, but it really, really did. McAvoy going vegan was not on my 2020 bingo card. You know, like it's like, it's so funny. I could have never anticipated like hearing a monologue like that coming from you. Like not just vegan, like compassionate vegan,

like doing it for the animals and being like pretty hardcore about it. Yeah, but I didn't realize there was levels. I've learned this afterwards. Like when you meet certain vegans, like I've been in situations before where like I've had an acai bowl and they brought honey.

I said, not eating it. Can you take it back? I don't have honey. And then I'm with another vegan. We don't eat honey. I said, not eating it. Can you take it back? I don't have honey. And then I'm living off vegan. We don't eat honey. I said, but you do. Oh yeah, but I do. I didn't realize there was levels to this stuff.

Like how I just thought when you was a vegan, that's it. Like you don't have leather seats in your car. You don't. So I went like the whole extreme of a version. I even revolved. I said, I need all the leather seats taken out of my car. Oh, there's more levels. You have no idea.

What's the highest? Well, I mean, there are some that would argue that it's your obligation to get a vasectomy. Okay. Yeah, like we can go, how far do you wanna go, John? I didn't realize it was that, I thought I was at the top level, I didn't realize there was another one past that.

Well, also like all the consumer choices that you make every single day, it's not just food, but it's obvious, clothing is an obvious example, but what are the downstream consequences of a certain product? Like you buy a garment and it's not leather, but it was made in a factory overseas

where toxic dyes end up in the waterways, in the rivers and that poisons the fish, right? So we all, like none of us walk the earth harm free or cruelty free, we all participate because we're living, breathing animals and we need to consume certain things. So it's a question of how far you kind of telescope that out. Yeah, I didn't- But it makes you more conscious like,

oh, the decisions that you make and, you know, how you exercise your purchasing power, do you have, you know, those implications may be subtle and they may be invisible to you, but still they're real. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's always a learning experience, learning about how things are processed, made, designed,

where they're coming from, the implications it's having far greater, yeah, than what you're just physically putting into your body. It's interesting, your experience with this is sort of the inverse of mine, because I got into it initially due to vanity and health concerns. Like I didn't like being a fat slob,

I didn't like how I looked, I didn't like how I felt, and then going vegan, plant-based resolved that for me, but now I've been doing it for, it's been 15 years at this point. And now the animal welfare piece and the environmental piece are probably more important to me than the health piece. And that's just an evolution. And know, and I think when people make

these healthy lifestyle changes, certain in-groups are very quick to judge them. And I think that that's really wrongheaded. Like everybody has to, you know, find their way to a new thing and be encouraged to continue their learning experience with it. Yeah, most definitely. Yeah. When you

look back on all of this, do you have, like, what is the emotional resonance of it? Like, is it gratitude for everything that has happened? Are there regrets? Is there any lingering feelings of guilt or shame associated with it? Like how do you think about that? Yeah, it's a complex one. Like regret, do I have regret? Yes, I have regret in regards of like the ramifications of my actions years ago affected other people's lives. But then the journey that I've been on for myself,

I don't regret things I've done. It's a complex thing. I think you learn from everything, but I obviously understand my story, my life's been extreme where it wasn't just about me. My actions had a negative impact on other people's lives. I've got a tremendous amount of gratitude for the people that sports brought into my life.

Again, this is something that I didn't really consciously think about. I used to think it was everything was like performance being fast breaking records being quick at running marathons and stuff like that but what I've realized over my life that the power of sport is about the power of the people it's brought into my life because it was Darren that changed my life and since I got out who you met last time and it come on the podcast, who was sitting with me, Terry, these people massively changed my life. And I've had incredible life experiences. I've met incredible people along the journey through sport.

And it's not the sport itself. It's not because I've rung really quick or anything. It's the people it's brought in. But gratitude is up there as the biggest thing I've probably got out of my life experience of being appreciative of the fact that I was very fortunate to come across individuals at certain points in my life that have led me to having the life I've got today but yeah the regret thing yeah I regret what I did

because it wasn't just about me it wasn't like I fucked my own life up and I it didn't have any real ramifications in other people's lives so I regret the fact that by my negative behavior that impacted other people's lives but I don't regret going to prison and if you I said this in the last podcast if honestly if you said to me now you go back to being 22 years old and I can let you out of here I would want to go through that journey again I would I would want to spend the 10 years in there because I learned so much about myself, about life. It gave me an awareness of life. And I've got a lot of life lessons out of that.

And that's helped me be the person I am today. So I needed to go through that journey. I just regret that the fact that those, that behavior affected other people's lives. But you've made peace with who that person was at that time. Yes. Because I think I've heard you say affected other people's lives. But you've made peace with who that person was at that time. Yes. Because I think I've heard you say in other podcasts that you've done maybe, you know, in the last year or two, you're telling a story and you're like,

oh, I'm so ashamed of, you know, this, like that I was this person or whatever. Like there were hints of like, like you feeling like, like suddenly you're tightening up because you got to tell a story about something that you did that still brings that up. Like what I said to you earlier on about when i was 12 years old watching that film about my uncle like that i feel i do feel embarrassed like i feel embarrassed i get i was

a young kid but like to say that i would watch an individual like that and watch a film like that and that would motivate and inspire me as the person i am today right it feels so alien from who i am and what I stand for as a person today that I do feel embarrassed by it. Like I look, how on earth was I even had that thought process? Again, I was 12 years old, but it still does make me feel like that because my life is so profoundly different. But you can give that 12 year old a break, right? You can, you know. You can give it. And that was an important moment in the assembly of the person that you are today. Yes.

I mean, I guess what I'm getting at is I did hear like some sense of still like, you know, whinging over like talking about who you were as that young person. And in that, like I see, or I hear an opportunity for you for a little bit of self-love exploration, right? Can you feel compassion for that young John who came up in certain circumstances

where the decisions that you made were almost foregone conclusions all along the way? Yeah, and it also gives me a great self-awareness and also it's given me great skills where like I can put myself in the position of other people at that age. And I understand. Makes you a much more empathetic person. A hundred percent. I totally understand that I can sit there with them and I totally get, even as extreme as it is, like going back to what we're speaking about with the guys that

were convicted of terrorism, like as extreme as it is and some, you do not agree with what they've done. You do understand how they've got to that point because you was once very similar to that and you you understand how they've got to that position in their minds of thinking a certain way because you've also been that sort of person and I've been able to come out of that and have that awareness of that situation and and sort of better my life so there is a way out even if you could be the most hateful, resentful, bitter, twisted person in the world, but you can always find ways out of that. There is another path. But you are somebody who has such a deep facility for mental toughness,

like your mental game is so off the charts, right? So in terms of empowering somebody else who feels right? So in terms of empowering somebody else who feels stuck, like your message really is look at my life, all these things happened, and I still was able to change how I was living. And if I can do it, certainly anybody can do it. The retort to that would be, well, you're this unbelievably gifted athlete,

or you have a mental strength that is superhuman. So what am I supposed to do? I don't think it is superhuman. I don't think it's superhuman. The way I process me as a person in this universe and in this world, it's just that I'm like everyone else. And I think a lot of it's been patience, time, being open, susceptible to different events um when i went for that journey of wanting something different for my life being open to different things interacting with different groups of people not being so sort of like blinkered into one thing and putting myself out there and opening up myself to new experiences which brought these amazing people into my life that shaped me that gave me advice and being more open-minded because probably years ago i say

probably i was i was very closed-minded. It was one track mind, that was it. There was nothing else. It was just that one thing. But you had this willingness to challenge yourself. Like I'm gonna stay in solitary or I'm gonna prove to myself that I'm stronger physically and mentally than anybody else.

And that would stem back from childhood. But that comes from anger. Yeah, that was driven. yeah that was that was driven that's and that that was very negative emotions which again retrospectively when i look back on that situation like to to that could have quite easily broken me that he could have done that i could have gone in that situation and come out with an alitany of mental health problems by doing that to myself like isolate myself having very limited human contact for that period of time but rich i wouldn't say i'm any different to anyone else it was just that when i went for

that journey of like of processing everything that had gone on in my life my friend dying it was just the fact that i was more susceptible and i opened up my eyes more to stuff and the moment i did that and changed that mindset and let people come into my life and trusted people which is something that i really struggled with because I was always brought up not to trust people, being very distrusted of why someone wanted to associate and be with you and be close to you. But when I went for that journey of having this realization that a short life is and being more open,

that all of these incredible people come into my life, which shaped my life, that showed me a different way of living. And it opened up my eyes to a different way of living. And the advice that they give me has changed my life profoundly. When we look at, this is the last thing I wanna talk about, which is prison reform. This is really close to your heart for obvious reasons.

You've been to 10 Downing Street. You talk about this all the time. When you look at incarceration, there's really three pillars to justify it. It's like, we need to punish people, punitive. It needs to prevent crime from happening, right? Preventative. And then it's meant to be rehabilitative.

And I feel like all of the energy is around punitive. And then, you know, the fact that like crimes aren't committed while people are incarcerated is sort of just a side benefit of that. But when it comes to rehabilitation, that's at best given lip service, these checks that, you know, these boxes that are getting checked

that we talked about before. Like in your mind, what is the path towards truly rehabilitating people who are incarcerated or what changes would you make in the system to make it achieve that goal of turning people out who can become productive members of society? It's a very complex issue.

Like from my experience of what I've seen and stuff I've seen in the background when I've gone and sort of spoken to professors and I've got MPs, members of parliament, youth justice secretary was incredible in the UK called Dr. Philip Lee. So he was a doctor, general practitioner, really saw the emphasis on sport. So you must remember a lot of people in prison have had really bad experiences of the education system before they've most of them been excluded from school gone into pupil referral units this is in the uk but it'd be quite similar

in america i would imagine so they get they get they get chucked out of school and there's a pipeline a clear pipeline so there was 86 000 men in prison in the uk 56 000 were excluded from school so statistically you're going to prison nearly all of them and we was having this conversation about the reform of the system so he put a lot of emphasis on sport because of the life skills that sport could teach them and he wanted to sort of re-change this this whole push now they need to be educated yes but to thread education in through physical activity and through sport, because a lot of young people, a lot of people in prison, if you said to them, what's the most important thing, they would pick food, gym, visits. a co-activity piece that's not all of them becoming that personal trainers it's but it's threading in the learnings that they can learn through sport and tie in some educational learning education where they can get jobs when they get released from prison i think that would

fundamentally change a lot of people's lives in prison from my experience and i feel like in the uk and i'm not just saying this because i'm on your podcast, but I feel like my story has definitely had a positive impact over that narrative because MPs, people in positions of authority and power in the MOJ, like they can look at my story and obviously because it's the bells and whistles, it's definitely encouraged this movement to take place and a prioritization to be put

over people's physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing in prisons and wrapping that up within an educational learning thread. But the challenge is to get people beyond the bells and whistles of your story to learn that this is possible for anybody, not the facts of your experience, but some level of rehabilitation.

And the sports piece, look, it's important to be physically fit and all of that, but it's really the self-esteem. It's a self-esteem building thing. It's a thing where you can give people that level of agency and get them invested in themselves. Because when you start looking after yourself physically, that ends up spilling, obviously, into all these other areas of your life. Yeah, most definitely. And if you spoke to most prison officers in the UK and correctional officers in America,

like I have quite a lot of prison officers in America message me. And like my book somehow found its way into the correctional system in America. Oh, it did, that's cool. Yeah, there was a prison officer, Bobby's name is from Boston. And he's retired now.

So I'll tell you the story, but you can't, I didn't realize this, you can't take books, hardback books into prison. So he used to take the front cover or the back cover of my book off, so it was just the pages, and take them in. And prisoners, and he sent me some pictures a couple of weeks ago of prisoners

that had been released from Boston in the prison correction facility. It's amazing, mate, absolutely amazing. And they read my book in prison in America. Wow. And they've got out, and he said, it's really been a catalyst for one of the prisoners turning his life around and using sport and physical activity.

But I do think it can be a fundamental pillar of rehabilitation because people are passionate about it. They're passionate about fitness in prisons. They really are. Like the gym is one of the most popular things you could want to do in prison. And even prison officers never want to take gym away from prisoners because they understand the benefits it has over them. And the fact that when they do do it violence goes up in the prison you've got all this testosterone anger hatred where there's an outlet in the prison gym now again if you can tie that into a learning piece which there are a lot of sports organizations now going in definitely in the uk definitely

the tide has really turned like when i was in prison 10 years ago, I got released 10 years in September ago. Like it wasn't even a fraction of like now what's going on in the UK prison system. It's incredible. Like Sebastian Vettel, the F1 driver, was in Felton Young Offenders a couple of months ago. Oh, wow. Car workshop.

You've got professional football players going in, professional rugby players going in, professional football clubs. There's a massive initiative in the UK now where football clubs are twinning up with prisons. And then the clubs are going into the local prison, providing educational learning. And then when the prisoners are getting out, they're giving them jobs at the football clubs, working as a groundsman, working in hospitality, stewardship. So there's massive shift that's gone on in the UK, which I'm really proud to have been part of.

Yeah, that's unbelievable. I don't think that that's what's happening in the United States. I mean, if it is, I'm unaware of it and I would be happily disabused of that notion. But I think we have a long way to go. I feel like your book would be well-served to be just sort of a big part of every prison library.

Well, yeah, like when the first lockdown happened, we sent two and a half thousand copies of my book to the Young Offenders Estate. So that meant every person under the age of 21 in the UK got given a copy of my book as a workshop. Like it was all part of a work booklet. So they basically got given the book and then like some prisons did like stuff where like there was book reviews of a work booklet so they basically got given the book and then like

some prisons did like stuff where like there was book reviews it was quite interesting actually because the prison officers were emailing me the book reviews and i had to pick and it was quite fascinating i mean you read how other kids in there perceive your story but every child in that prison under age 21 got a copy of my book to read it whilst they were basically on lockdown because the whole prison system shut down and again it was about trying to teach them that even though they're in that environment that there was things they could do like when i was in that segregation cell doing the cell workout reading books keeping myself active act like my mind active and i wanted that to be like sort of an inspiration to them in that really bad situation and that was where a lot of the mums were messaging me saying my son's

read your book. And also it's gone filtered through because there's 2,500 of them were donated to the prison. That's gone through to prison officers. So then prison officers read the journey. And that's another really important thing as well. Like a prison officer going into work, realising they're not there just to lock someone up. They're there to help change their lives. Yeah. I mean, that goes to this piece about rehabilitation. If you can start with just the mindset of the, like being a prison guard is a really hard job.

Well, I think in the UK, as one of the highest rates of mental health in all of the private sector. I'm sure it's the same in the United States. Yeah, it would be. The jobs, like they're stressed all day. You imagine going into an environment where you don't know if you're gonna get attacked.

Like you're inside all day. You literally got cameras pointing at you. The stress and pressure of people screaming at you every day. Yeah, it's got to be really difficult. You must get insane emails though from people who are incarcerated or who have just gotten out and these young people through your website and stuff like that. Yeah, like, yeah, a lot. And it is very humbling.

Like sometimes when I read them, like again, I don't see myself as being anything special. So when you read an email for someone who said, I read your book when I was in a segregation cell, I read your book when I was in a police, wherever they were. And it's been a catalyst for them doing something with their lives,

coming out, working in a gym the amount of people that again like started taking up rowing right that is actually now in the uk prison system there's an actual a national indoor rowing league oh there is oh that i mean that tracks directly back to you it's crazy like there's actually a national indoor rowing league so then your prisoners like the british indoor rowing championships there were prisoners in prison in the UK, racing people outside of prison. But they know it, the people who are-

Yeah, they're on the same monitor. So they were racing each other like last year. Oh, that's unbelievable. Like in Melbourne, there was a prison in Australia and they sent these pictures of these prisoners indoor rowing. And the guys, and I'm like, what the fuck? Like, it's incredible. It's incredible though. Like to think that I, and I always send what the fuck like it's incredible it's incredible though

like to think that and I always send it to Darren I say look at this and he's like wow and you think we just started off rowing in a prison gym and it's like

it's just spread everywhere and like there's there's an initiative that I set up called Boats Not Bars where rowing clubs go into prisons

and they teach young people to row and row and she's our prisoner it's not just kids under age 21. And then when they go through this sort of journey of learning to indoor row, they're obviously using it to keep fit. And then some of them are getting to the end of their sentences and then they can join the local rowing club.

And some of the stories there where I've seen where people got released, they become rowing instructors and rowing coaches. It's very humbling, Rich. Wow. And it's something I would never, ever, ever take for granted and something I'm tremendously proud of, luck again, to know that my life has aided them to see the light and they're living the best life they can live

and they're not in prison and they're free and they're content. Whatever it is they're doing now, they're content. But because they've interacted with my life story or me as a person, they are now doing something that they're at peace with and they're doing now, they're content, but because they've interacted with my life story or me as a person, they are now doing something that they're at peace with and they're in a good place. And they're not just rotting in a cage,

not living to their potential. And the legacy of that and what they will then pass down. I mean, that's a really profound thing. Oh, mate, yeah. And it's something that like, again, I'm very appreciative of and I've got a tremendous amount of gratitude for. Yeah, when your head hits the pillow at night,

just think about that if you've had a hard day. I do. All right, so 10 Downing Street, you get to talk to all these professional footballers and all kinds of cool stuff. But come on, man, Idris Elba, you got to tell me what's going on there. Yeah, they asked me to be part of a TV program. I get asked to do a lot of stuff, if I'm honest,

and I say no to nearly 99% of it. So I will not do anything with what we've just spoke about that would do any detrimental damage to that. So anything that wants to undermine it in any way, like who I am as a person, will not do. Doesn't matter how much money people want to chuck at me to do it. It has to be to my core beliefs. And like I said, like stuff like TV programs, radio stuff, like magazines, newspaper articles, unless it fits in with what I'm doing and the message I want to spread, I say no. And sometimes you say no, and they think you're saying no because they think you want more money and it isn't the money I don't care how much they offer it's about the authenticity of who I am as a person that come in and they said would you like

to be part of this this show and I was like what is it about and then they explained about the kids that were on this journey of learning to become boxers and using the power of sport to help show them or teach them about life skills and giving them opportunities and did I want to be one of the mentors on it and I said yeah I'll do it and then um yeah I decided to do it and it was a it was a very interesting tv show to be part of it was uh I've never been on tv before like I've never done anything like that it's a completely different alien world to me and actually I think they was actually quite surprised because obviously because I had no backlog of anything they kind of thought that like I'd imagine they must have thought he might go on and he just might

not be that good and then when I did my day they were actually like the guy that was doing like word count and stuff and how much because he was just me speaking all day and he was like you're really good at this stuff and then have you ever have you done a lot of it and i was like no this is the first time and he's like you definitely need to do more but then we were talking about it and i said actually i'll get asked to do a lot of stuff and i say no to everything and he said that is 100 the right decision don't ever sell yourself out and do things that will go against what your core beliefs are and and so sometimes it's like the journey, sometimes of like, I have found it frustrating when you're trying to get a message out and then you're getting given like an opportunity that you

wouldn't take, but an opportunity to sort of magnify your message, but then you know it will do damage to you as a person and the message you're trying to get out in the long run. So it's like short-term gains over long-term gains. And I've always just played the long game in regards to that stuff. And I won't undermine my credibility and what I stand for. You can't. I mean, it's all about that. That's all you, it goes back to the beginning

of like your name, right? Like that's all you have. Like that speech that you got as a young person is actually true in that regard. Like because of the resonance that you carry and the message that you're trying to put out in the world, you have to be true to your word. You've got to walk your talk

and you've got to make sure that your actions are in total alignment with your values. Because then if that gets eroded, then there's no power behind the words that come out of your mouth. Most definitely. Like probably the last, since I've seen you, I've probably had five film contracts put in front of me.

Yeah. Five different film contracts. I'm a little bit familiar with some of that. Yeah. Yeah, because we've talked about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, and every single one, like they're not bad people,

but it's just not the right, it's not been right. And it's like, no, I'm not doing it. And I, there's some of them that have been really lucrative. And I remember one of them in particular I got and I was looking at it and the people that were helping me on my end was like because I haven't got any sort of awareness I don't understand that world whatsoever it's complete alien to me so I thought I better get some help someone guiding me through it and they were even surprised by how lucrative it was for the first round and they said I'm

surmising no one knew but whoever they've pitches to must've been green-lighted because they desperately want you to sign that contract. But it wasn't right. Like I'm not going to erode all the work that I've done in my life. Like I'm not going, I'm not willing to do that and destroy my credibility just because, cause I'm not interested in fame. That doesn't interest me. It doesn't bother me whatsoever. Like red carpets and stuff like that. Like, I just want to be happy living on the mountain with sheep and cows and stuff. Like'm not I'm good like I don't I'm not doing it for that reason if I feel like by getting the right thing made that it's gonna amplify what I stand for and it's gonna people gonna watch it and come out and feel sort of inspired and feel like I can do anything with my life or or not maybe not prejudge people so much and watch a film and at the end of it come out and go,

if I was in any situation as a kid, like not preaching, let them make their own decision. But if I had that sort of environment as a kid, would I have done what he did and make people maybe think a bit differently as well? But yeah, like I've said no to nearly everything that's been put in front of me. It's only now there's a strong possibility I will say yes

because it's with the right people and I'm part of the creative process of making it. And I've always adamantly said I will not glorify that life. Like, I don't want a film that's like Goodfellas or anything, like a film like that that glorifies that negative, toxic world. Now, don't get me wrong, it's obviously a big part of my life, but I don't want the glorification of it. I don't want it to be like a Hollywood sort of crime film and sort of the really important part of the story, mine and Darren's relationship

gets watered down and that doesn't become the essence of what the film's about. Yeah. I mean, that is the movie, that relationship, right? Everything else is like fluff around that. But, you know, look, these things happen when they're supposed to with the people they're supposed to happen with. And I think the best long-term strategy is to continue to double down on your integrity and you will know when it's right.

100%. Yeah, and I'm here to help in any way. If I can be of service to you. You can play me. No, behind the camera. All right, well, we gotta get you back to the mountains. So, let's end this, but maybe a good way to kind of take us out is with a little bit of inspiration for that person who still feels stuck or is in a rut or feels like they're settling in their lot in life. Like, how do we get that person to step outside of their reality,

look at it from a different perspective and perhaps start walking a different path? So again, I can only go from my own perspective of reality and the journey that I've been on. I would say, open yourself up to new experiences, break old habits. I set myself this challenge every week. I like to experience something

different. That's not doing something massive. It's doing tiny little things, interacting with a different human, going to a different place, just experiencing different things and being open-minded to stuff and not so sort of blinkered onto one thing. And sometimes in life, Rich, like it is hard. It is, but you can't give up. You've got to have belief. You've got to look at other people's lives and look at them and go, if they've been able to do that, I'm able to also do it. It's not jealousy.

It's not looking at other people and thinking, oh, why have they got that? Having an open, positive mindset to things and people like, there's people that achieve things in things that I don't really find interesting, but it motivates me because I think they're living what they want to do. They've achieved what they want to achieve.

And it makes me realize that I'm also able to do what I want to do with my life, but just being open to experiences and opportunities and knowing that, again, some people say it's quite morbid, but we're all on a clock and we haven't got that much time. So I want to maximize every single day I've got on this planet by being as content as I can be in my existence. And that's what motivates me now. So I would say to everyone, just remember, re-catch yourself when things get a little bit hard about life.

Just remember, you're not going to be here forever and just make the most of the short time that you've got and act on stuff. Don't put stuff off to tomorrow, to next week, to the week after that, because those weeks might not ever come. And don't be that person at the end where the doctor might say, you've only got a couple of months left to live and you think I've not done anything in my life. Memento mori. Yeah, memento mori. Here we are. Boom. Powerful John McAvoy. Thanks, man. Thank you. Beautiful. Appreciate it. Everybody should pick up his book, Redemption.

You can get it on amazon.com in the US too. And Amazon UK if you're over here. And anywhere else you want to direct people, your Instagram, your Twitter, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I've got that. I can, yeah. It's John McAvoy 2.

Yes, it's Twitter. Yeah, you know that more than I do. And then Instagram is, I think it's John McAvoy 83. No, it's Twitter. Yeah, you know that more than I do. And then Instagram is, I think it's John McAvoy83. No, JohnnyMac83. Is it? I think I wrote it down here. Let's make sure.

I forgot. I mean, we'll link it up. Yeah, Johnny with no H, J-O-N-N-Y Mac 83. Why JohnnyMac83? It was available. I'm giving away my date of birth now. All right, man. I appreciate it. I'm giving away my date of birth now alright man I appreciate it

I'm your biggest fan and I'm here to support you in any way that I can I think your journey in addition to just you know being inspiring and inspiring millions of people it's really your commitment to service your advocacy, your alignment of your actions with your values that really

is so impressive. And I think that the impact that you're leaving will be felt for generations to come. So I just wish you well and wind in your sails, my friend. Thank you, Rich. It means a lot. Thank you. Peace. Peace, mate. Plants. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources

related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify,

and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter,

which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg and Grayson Wilder. Graphic and social media assets, courtesy of Jessica Miranda, Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiette. Thank you, Georgia Whaley,

for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.