Latest / INSPIRE STORY / #0110 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman, with Andrew Jarecki

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#0110 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman, with Andrew Jarecki · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: What's happening, man?
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: How are you? I'm good.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: How are you? I'm great. I watched your documentary, The
• 0:19
  Alabama Solution, last night, and it was wild. It's very,
• 0:22
  very disturbing. I'm kind of shocked I hadn't heard more
• 0:26
  about it, you know, because it's such a terrible, terrible story.
• 0:31
  It's such a Just unbelievably awful situation. And I think
• 0:37
  you covered it really well. It's very, very heartbreaking. Yeah.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: Thanks for watching it.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: It's sort of a question of why people don't know
• 0:49
  about things that are happening with our tax dollars in
• 0:52
  our backyards. Are there things that we don't want to know?
• 0:55
  there's a reason why people sort of drive by prisons
• 0:58
  on the highway and they see the little metal sign
• 1:00
  and it says, you know, XYZ correctional. And they probably think,
• 1:04
  as I did for many years, well, I'm sure it's
• 1:06
  not great back there, but it doesn't need to be great.
• 1:09
  And if anything terrible was happening back there, somebody would
• 1:11
  probably tell me about it. But because of the secrecy
• 1:14
  that surrounds prisons, you know, we treat them sort of
• 1:17
  like black sites. There's no way for us to really
• 1:20
  look inside. So the press doesn't get let in and
• 1:23
  the public doesn't understand what's happening. And we know that,
• 1:26
  you know, when you give people total control over other people,
• 1:30
  bad things happen.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Bad things happen every single time. And this is one
• 1:33
  of the worst things. What's really terrifying is the sheer
• 1:38
  numbers of people that died there with no investigation. That's
• 1:42
  what's really terrifying. Yeah. Because, you know, you even detail
• 1:46
  that at the end, like since then, how many people
• 1:50
  have died. And it's just like, good Lord, you're, you're, thousands. Yeah.
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: Well, there's an attorney general in Alabama named Steve Marshall,
• 2:00
  who's always run on like tough on crime strategies and saying,
• 2:04
  you know, we got to lock more people up and
• 2:06
  people who are in prison for violent crime should potentially
• 2:11
  never get out of prison ever. And he says in
• 2:15
  the film, as you remember, that I ask him about
• 2:19
  the nature of crime. And he says, well, I think
• 2:22
  there are evil people in this world, people who have
• 2:25
  absolutely no regard for human life. And this is a
• 2:27
  guy who's presided over a system that's killed, that's led
• 2:31
  to the deaths of 1,500 people just since we started
• 2:34
  making the film. So this question of like, who are
• 2:37
  the good guys and who are the bad guys? And
• 2:39
  what's the nature of cruelty? What's the nature of punishment?
• 2:43
  Are we putting people there to try to make them better,
• 2:45
  rehabilitate them? Are we putting them there because they're drug
• 2:49
  addicts and we're trying to get rid of them as
• 2:52
  opposed to rehabilitate them or as opposed to try to
• 2:54
  get them off of drugs. So obviously prisons have become
• 2:57
  pretty much a catch-all for the ills of society. So
• 3:01
  if you have mental illness, much more likely to go
• 3:03
  to prison. Once you're in prison, if you're mentally ill
• 3:06
  or you have bad social skills, you're much more likely
• 3:09
  to get into a scrape with a guard who probably
• 3:11
  isn't trained to deal with somebody who's mentally ill. And
• 3:14
  you're much more likely to get murdered, which is what
• 3:16
  we saw happening in Alabama.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: Well, you even... It's the old expression, who's going to
• 3:22
  watch the watchers, right? Because one of the things that
• 3:25
  you detail is very obviously nonviolent people who spend all
• 3:32
  their time writing and reading. And they're getting retribution because
• 3:37
  they're calling attention to the terrible conditions at the prison.
• 3:40
  So the one guy with the glasses who was beaten blindly,
• 3:45
  what was his name? Robert O.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: Council.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's... So many stories that you show in
• 3:53
  this documentary from smuggled cameras. So these guys all get
• 3:57
  contraband cameras from the guards.
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: From the guards, yeah. The guards sell the phones to
• 4:03
  the men inside.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: Which is also crazy. Yeah.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: I mean, there's so many drugs in the Alabama state
• 4:08
  prison system. And I spoke to one of the people
• 4:12
  who was incarcerated there early on, on a contraband cell phone.
• 4:16
  And I said, You know, where are all the drugs
• 4:18
  coming from, the amount of drugs here? This is an incredible,
• 4:22
  you know, human wasteland. You're seeing just high, high percentage,
• 4:27
  maybe 80 percent of the people are addicted to drugs,
• 4:29
  many of whom were not addicted to drugs before they
• 4:31
  came in. And how are you getting all the cell phones?
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  And the guy looked at me like I was, you know, stupid.
• 4:38
  And he said, you know, we don't leave, right? And
• 4:43
  I thought, oh, I get it. The people that come
• 4:45
  and go are the guards. Those are the ones that
• 4:47
  go out. They get the packages. They bring them in.
• 4:50
  And I've spoken to guards who said, you know, we
• 4:52
  make $ 36, 000 a year without the drugs, without the cell phones. So,
• 4:58
  of course, we got to sell the cell phones and
• 5:00
  the drugs because that takes us up to $ 70, 000 or $ 75, 000.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: Oh, God. Yeah. So what are the main drugs these
• 5:11
  guys are addicted to? What are they getting them?
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: Well, there's originally, right, it was sort of more traditional
• 5:18
  drugs and people were using heroin and using whatever they
• 5:21
  could get a hold of. But as the drugs have
• 5:23
  gotten more complicated and easier to bring in, now they
• 5:28
  can actually put, there's a drug called Flaco, which is
• 5:31
  a very significant problem there, fentanyl obviously also, but these
• 5:36
  drugs can be brought in on a piece of paper.
• 5:39
  So somebody could send you a letter and it could
• 5:42
  be in the letter. They can actually put the drug
• 5:44
  into the paper.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Oh, sort of like acid when they put acid on paper?
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And so, you know, there's this effort to kind
• 5:52
  of stop that. But then does it lead to people
• 5:55
  being unable to communicate with their loved ones? Ultimately, the
• 5:59
  easiest way to get the drugs is for the officers
• 6:02
  to sell the drugs. And so, you know, we say,
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  And I think it's sadly true that the Alabama Department
• 6:07
  of Corrections, and it's not just in Alabama, but obviously
• 6:11
  we use that as the lens through which we saw
• 6:13
  incarceration more generally. But the Alabama Department of Corrections is
• 6:18
  the largest law enforcement agency in the state of Alabama,
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  and it's also the biggest drug dealing operation. You're much
• 6:27
  more likely to die of an overdose inside the prison
• 6:30
  than you are out on the street in Alabama.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: Really? Statistically? Yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, boy. You know,
• 6:39
  one of the things that is– what was very heart-wrenching
• 6:44
  is this callous– you showed at the one time where
• 6:49
  all these prisons were on strike. So they all communicated
• 6:52
  with each other through these contraband cell phones. They all
• 6:55
  got from the guards. So I guess it's ubiquitous throughout
• 6:57
  the state. It's not just this one. And these people
• 7:01
  on the radio were like, well, it's prison. It's supposed
• 7:03
  to suck. You know, maybe if they had saw your film,
• 7:08
  they wouldn't have such a cavalier attitude about it. Yeah.
• 7:11
  But it's that attitude. It's like these are human beings
• 7:15
  and some of them barely did anything. Like one guy
• 7:19
  that wound up dying from you think they did something
• 7:23
  to or they think they did something to a cigarette
• 7:25
  that they gave this guy. All he did was break
• 7:30
  into an abandoned building. Yeah.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: He didn't steal anything. Entering an unoccupied building.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: His name is James.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: I mean, I don't even know if he broke in. Right.
• 7:39
  It was unoccupied. It might have even been open. Yeah.
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: It said entering.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: So he entered a building that he wasn't supposed to enter.
• 7:44
  And he got 15 years in a cage. And then
• 7:48
  on his way out, at least they're inferring that they
• 7:53
  killed him because he had too much information about what
• 7:57
  was going on inside. And he was going to get out.
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: This goes back to.
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: The story of a woman who we had met and
• 8:03
  her son. when we were first communicating with the men
• 8:07
  using these contraband cell phones and they were telling us
• 8:11
  what was going on inside the prison, inside the various prisons,
• 8:16
  we sort of, in the early days, we couldn't believe
• 8:18
  it because the way we got into the prisons to
• 8:19
  begin with is I had gone down to Alabama because
• 8:24
  I was always interested in incarceration and the problems of
• 8:27
  that system and the justice system. I made other films
• 8:30
  about the justice system. And, and, and, I was always
• 8:34
  curious about Alabama because it's sort of famously maybe the
• 8:37
  worst prison system in the country. But it mirrors a
• 8:39
  lot of others. And my daughter was 14 at the time, Jeremy.
• 8:43
  And she said, you know, I'm reading this book by
• 8:46
  a guy named Anthony Ray Hinton. And it's a book
• 8:49
  about his wrongful imprisonment in Alabama. And maybe you should
• 8:53
  read this with me. So we end up reading the
• 8:55
  book together. And then we both sort of just spontaneously
• 8:58
  decided to take a road trip to Montgomery because we
• 9:01
  just didn't know anything about it. It had never been there.
• 9:04
  She was growing up in New York and it was
• 9:06
  just not in her frame of reference. So we went
• 9:09
  down there and we met a man who was the
• 9:11
  first black prison chaplain in the state of Alabama, Chaplain Browder.
• 9:16
  And I said, well, I'm really curious about what's going
• 9:18
  on in the prisons. And he said, well, you should
• 9:21
  just come in with me. And I said, well, I'm
• 9:23
  a filmmaker. They're not going to let me just walk
• 9:25
  into the prison in Alabama. And he said, well, just
• 9:27
  don't come in as a filmmaker. You just Don't have
• 9:30
  to bring a camera. Just come in and talk to
• 9:32
  some of the guys. So I went in to film. Ultimately,
• 9:36
  we were allowed to film ultimately in one of the prisons.
• 9:40
  And when we were in there to film this revival meeting,
• 9:42
  just because we were lucky enough to find a warden
• 9:45
  who felt like he wanted to show an example of
• 9:50
  how Christianity was active and important in the prison system,
• 9:55
  which I agreed with. But then while we're in there
• 9:58
  filming with like five cameras, which was just unheard of,
• 10:03
  the men inside couldn't believe that there were any cameras
• 10:05
  in there. And they started taking us aside and saying, listen,
• 10:09
  what they're showing you here is a very curated version
• 10:12
  of what's going on in this prison. You have to
• 10:14
  get into these other buildings. You've got to see what's
• 10:17
  going on in that dorm over there called the the
• 10:20
  behavior modification dorm where guys have been killed by guards.
• 10:23
  And you've got to look in that dorm where people
• 10:25
  have been in solitary confinement for five years at a time.
• 10:29
  You know, don't let them show you just what they
• 10:31
  want to show you. And I felt much safer, you know,
• 10:34
  even though the warden had said to us, when you
• 10:36
  go in there, you know, don't talk to any of
• 10:38
  the men. They're all very dangerous. I immediately felt safer
• 10:41
  talking to the inmates than I did talking to any
• 10:43
  of the guards. And when we left... it was really
• 10:47
  because we got kicked out, right? We start, you saw
• 10:50
  in the beginning of the film, we sort of start
• 10:52
  getting nosy and we start trying to look in some
• 10:54
  of these other areas and then they shut down the filming,
• 10:57
  they throw us out. And then we thought, well, you know,
• 11:00
  maybe we're stuck now. How are we going to make
• 11:01
  a film about this? We feel we have to because
• 11:04
  we're the only people that know what's going on in here,
• 11:07
  but they're not going to let us back. So it
• 11:10
  was then that we found out that there was this
• 11:11
  network of men inside who had access to these contraband
• 11:15
  cell phones who were documenting what was going on. So
• 11:18
  that was our way of getting into those buildings that
• 11:20
  we couldn't see inside. And one of the first things
• 11:23
  we learned was one of the guys inside, Melvin Ray,
• 11:30
  texted us to say, hey, you know, this guard, it
• 11:35
  was a guard that we had been tracking already who
• 11:37
  was a particularly violent guard, He just beat somebody very badly.
• 11:41
  And he's now, that person, the victim is at UAB Hospital.
• 11:45
  So we jumped in a car and we went to
• 11:47
  UAB Hospital and just walked up. I just put my
• 11:50
  iPhone in my pocket and we just walked up to
• 11:52
  the intensive care unit. And when we got there, we
• 11:56
  found that this young man, Stephen Davis, had died from
• 11:59
  his injuries. And as we started to get deeper into it,
• 12:03
  we went and visited his mother because we didn't even
• 12:06
  know if she knew that she had lost her son.
• 12:10
  But in fact, she had been with him when he
• 12:11
  passed away. She had sort of turned off the life support.
• 12:15
  And we said, we want to make a film about this.
• 12:19
  We're trying to tell the story. And she immediately said,
• 12:24
  I'm in. I want to help you. I don't want
• 12:25
  this to happen to any other mothers. You know, and
• 12:28
  this is a very nice white lady from Uniontown, Alabama
• 12:32
  with an oxygen tank. I mean, she's not somebody that
• 12:35
  you would see ordinarily as kind of a heroic person.
• 12:38
  But when she loses her son, she really becomes so
• 12:43
  activated and she ends up telling us the story. And
• 12:46
  then she says, look, you know, they're lying to me already.
• 12:50
  You know, my son just died last night and they're
• 12:53
  already calling me and telling me things about how he
• 12:55
  was the one that attacked guards. And none of this
• 12:58
  is true. This all seems like it's fate. So teach
• 13:01
  me how to record my phone calls. So this older
• 13:04
  woman suddenly became a really important partner in making the film.
• 13:09
  And this gets back to your question about Stephen Davis.
• 13:12
  So her son, who was a drug addict, didn't kill
• 13:15
  anybody but was in a car when a drug deal
• 13:19
  went bad. He went to try to buy drugs and
• 13:22
  his friend went in the house and they had a
• 13:23
  fight and somebody got shot. And then he got arrested
• 13:27
  and was charged with murder because that's how the felony
• 13:29
  murder statute works. And so here you have a drug
• 13:32
  addict who goes to prison in Alabama and is in
• 13:36
  the highest security prison there and is targeted by a
• 13:41
  particular guard who is especially violent and is just beaten
• 13:44
  to death in front of 70 witnesses. And then, of course,
• 13:50
  as we go through the film, we start tracking that
• 13:53
  in our investigation and we start looking into the cover
• 13:56
  up and why they Lied about how he had died
• 13:59
  and how they scrambled the witnesses and how the Department
• 14:02
  of Corrections is organized so that they prevent people from
• 14:06
  finding out what really happened to their kids or.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: Their loved ones.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: And they avoid liability and so on. And there was
• 14:13
  one person that we ended up hearing from, this guy
• 14:16
  James Sales, who originally tells just the police side of
• 14:20
  the story. Just says, well, you know, yeah, it's exactly
• 14:23
  the way that the guard said. But then he kind
• 14:25
  of hints on the phone, listen, when I get out
• 14:28
  of here, I'll tell the real story.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: Now, do they have access to these communications? Is there
• 14:34
  a way they could be hacking into it and know
• 14:37
  that sales had said that to you?
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: Well, the person that he said it to was the
• 14:42
  lawyer for Sandy Ray. So he was supposed to be
• 14:45
  on a private attorney call. But we do think that
• 14:52
  the Department of Corrections doesn't abide by that. I think
• 14:55
  they do listen to attorney calls. Sales didn't say exactly
• 14:59
  on the phone what he was going to say, but
• 15:01
  I think they knew that he was a problem because
• 15:03
  he was a good person. I mean, Sales, the one
• 15:06
  who entered an unoccupied building and was locked up for
• 15:10
  15 years for that, was obviously a decent person. That's
• 15:13
  why he says, you know, when I get out, I'll
• 15:17
  speak to that. I'm not going to lie to that
• 15:19
  man's mother. But right now, this is their world, bro.
• 15:23
  I'm not going to say more. I'm not going to
• 15:26
  put myself in harm's way.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: But just by saying that might have been his death sentence.
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: He also– as he started to get closer to getting out,
• 15:34
  because he was killed a month before he was going
• 15:38
  to get out. And so as he started getting closer
• 15:41
  to release, he just started to get more. frustrated and
• 15:46
  more angry and started to say things to guards about like,
• 15:49
  you know, you know what I've seen in here and
• 15:51
  I'm going to, you know, and then lo and behold, uh, he,
• 15:55
  he gets found, uh, in a cell that, and you know,
• 16:00
  he's bleeding from orifices in his body. And it was
• 16:03
  pretty clear that he was given what they call a
• 16:05
  hot shot, which is they give you a cigarette that's
• 16:08
  got something bad on it and it, uh, and it
• 16:10
  can kill you.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: Boy. So when you first started– when you first showed
• 16:19
  up with cameras, did you know basically what was going on?
• 16:23
  Do you have an understanding of what was going on?
• 16:25
  Like what were you attempting to do when you got there?
• 16:28
  Were you just going to try to investigate and figure
• 16:31
  it out or did you already have reports?
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: We already– we knew a bunch of stuff. We knew
• 16:37
  because we had had this– we had visited some prisons
• 16:40
  as volunteers and I had gone on the death row.
• 16:44
  with my filmmaking partner, Charlotte Kaufman. We had gone into Easterling.
• 16:49
  We had gone originally into Holman Prison, where they have
• 16:51
  the death row. And we went in there with the chaplain.
• 16:55
  And the lieutenant came down and said, you know, unfortunately,
• 17:00
  we're so understaffed right now, which is an understatement, that,
• 17:05
  you know, we don't have anybody to take you around. But,
• 17:08
  you know, chaplain, I know you want to show your
• 17:10
  friends around the death row. So, you know, just go
• 17:12
  for it. So we ended up walking around the death
• 17:14
  row for like two or three hours just talking to men.
• 17:18
  And those men were very helpful. They weren't– we weren't
• 17:23
  talking to irrational people. We weren't talking to– they're people
• 17:27
  who were trying to get the story out. And so
• 17:29
  we knew going in that there were a lot of
• 17:31
  bad things happening. We didn't know exactly what. And then
• 17:34
  when we went into Easterling and the men started calling
• 17:36
  us aside and saying– they beat me so bad I
• 17:40
  defecated on myself or, you know, I just saw there
• 17:43
  were five stabbings this week and none have been reported.
• 17:48
  We started to realize that it was really a huge crisis,
• 17:51
  but it was just being kept secret.
• 17:53
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  or code Rogan for four extra months. So again, It's
• 19:14
  crazy that you're relying on these guards to get in
• 19:19
  the phones that they're using to expose the crimes of
• 19:22
  the guards. And it's like the guards are aware of
• 19:25
  the phones because they provided them to the inmates and
• 19:29
  they're contraband. They're not supposed to have them, but yet
• 19:31
  they all do. And so they have to ignore it
• 19:34
  if they want to keep selling them phones.
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: Well, another way of looking at it is that there's
• 19:40
  so little accountability that they don't actually think they're going
• 19:44
  to get in trouble for anything. And they're kind of right.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: And if you remember that guard who kills... Stephen Davis,
• 19:51
  Rod Gadsden, who's, you know, this guy might be the
• 19:54
  most violent prison guard in America. He's still working in
• 19:57
  the Alabama state prison system after he has a starring
• 20:00
  role against his will, I'm sure. But after he has
• 20:03
  a starring role in our documentary, which has been seen
• 20:06
  by millions of people, they still have him employed there.
• 20:09
  They still have him interacting with people.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: And he got hired to a higher position. Yeah. Yeah.
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: He's been promoted twice and now he's up for another promotion.
• 20:18
  So I think to some extent the guards just say, well,
• 20:21
  you know, I can do whatever I want. I can
• 20:22
  sell the cell phones. And by the way, not all
• 20:24
  the guards are bad, right? There are guards that we
• 20:27
  met there who were pretty heartbroken because they went into
• 20:31
  the system hoping to make change or trying to– maybe
• 20:35
  they wanted to work in the police department and there
• 20:37
  weren't any jobs. But in their town, they had the
• 20:40
  ability to work in a prison. So they kind of
• 20:41
  went in there and described to us that they wanted
• 20:44
  to help people with addiction. They wanted to see if
• 20:46
  they could help rehabilitate people. But when they got in there,
• 20:49
  they realized very quickly that was not what was in
• 20:52
  the offing. That wasn't an opportunity for them.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: So the guy, this Roderick guy that beat Stephen to death,
• 20:59
  the story was that Stephen had some sort of an
• 21:03
  implemented weapon, correct?
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that he had a plastic knife.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: Right. Was there any evidence of that?
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: He had some kind of like a– some kind of
• 21:12
  plastic thing that he had made. It did not appear
• 21:16
  to be anything very serious because the reason he had
• 21:20
  made it is because somebody had called him gay and
• 21:23
  you have to fight your way out of that, right?
• 21:25
  He wasn't gay as it turns out.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: You have to fight your way out of that? So
• 21:29
  if somebody calls you gay, you have to fight them? Yeah.
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: In other words, you can't put up with that because
• 21:34
  otherwise they're going to turn you into what they call
• 21:36
  a sissy. They're going to turn you into somebody that
• 21:38
  gets raped. And there's so much rape in the prison
• 21:41
  that the DOJ report that came out said that there's
• 21:45
  rape occurring at all hours of the day and night
• 21:47
  in all.
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: Areas of the prison.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: So rape is such a significant problem. And when Stephen
• 21:54
  Davis– was in there and was accused of being gay,
• 21:58
  he had to make a show of, of fighting the
• 22:01
  person that was calling him gay. He, he never went
• 22:04
  after the guards or anything like that. And everybody that,
• 22:07
  that the lawyer spoke to, um, you know, a dozen
• 22:10
  witnesses who had seen what happened, all of them said he,
• 22:14
  as soon as the guards came in, he immediately laid
• 22:16
  down on the floor and put his weapon about 15
• 22:19
  feet away from him, put his, this plastic knife 15
• 22:22
  feet away. And he, then the guards came in and
• 22:26
  just started beating him, even though there was no threat.
• 22:28
  And he would, and the guards would say, Gadson was
• 22:30
  saying to, to Steven Davis, you know, quit resisting, quit resisting.
• 22:35
  And he wasn't resisting at all. And that's what all
• 22:37
  the witnesses said. So they just have to say that.
• 22:39
  So they yell it out.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: It's almost, I think it was almost like, it was
• 22:43
  almost just a warning to everybody else. Like, look, I
• 22:45
  can do anything that I want. I can say that
• 22:47
  he's resisting. Isn't it funny? You know? And, and the way,
• 22:52
  you know, the way he kills him, He stomps on
• 22:55
  his head with his size 15 boot. This is a
• 22:57
  guy who's almost 300 pounds. I think he's about six
• 23:00
  foot five. And he's been implicated in 24 other excessive
• 23:07
  force cases. And the attorney general in Alabama every single
• 23:10
  time is defending the guard.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: How many other people died in those cases?
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: There have been a lot of other injuries. I think
• 23:18
  that there have been two people who've died out of
• 23:20
  the 24 or 25 cases that we know about. But
• 23:25
  but there are a lot of just maimings. There are
• 23:27
  a lot of situations where people are just damaged, often permanently.
• 23:31
  You saw what happened in kinetic justice when he, you know,
• 23:34
  Robert Earl Council, when he leads a nonviolent work strike,
• 23:38
  the guards come and attack him and and he loses
• 23:42
  sight in one of his eyes. He's dragged out of
• 23:44
  the cell. There's a huge amount of blood. So, you know,
• 23:48
  especially these guys who are leading a nonviolent effort to
• 23:52
  try to improve conditions. They're always met with violence.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: Right. He was the guy that was at the head
• 23:58
  of this strike. Yeah. And then the strike really highlights
• 24:02
  something that I think a lot of people are unaware
• 24:04
  of is how many industries actually use the prison system
• 24:09
  essentially for slave labor. Sure. Yeah.
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: I mean that was a shock to me I think
• 24:13
  is that– I guess we all sort of assume, well,
• 24:16
  if you're in prison and they ask you to mop
• 24:18
  the floor, you need to help serve the meals or something.
• 24:21
  That's a reasonable thing to do. I think what we
• 24:24
  don't realize is that those people are leased out to
• 24:28
  the governor, to the mansion where the governor lives.
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: Crazy. That was crazy. Yeah. People that were denied parole
• 24:35
  were allowed to be on the grounds of the governor's
• 24:38
  mansion doing like groundwork. Exactly. Landscaping and stuff. Yeah.
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: And beyond that, they're used for labor in industry, right?
• 24:49
  So those guys are sent out in the mornings in vans.
• 24:53
  They go work at McDonald's. They work at Burger King.
• 24:56
  They work at Kentucky Fried Chicken. They work at the
• 24:58
  Hyundai plant. They work at the Budweiser distributorship. And it's
• 25:03
  all sort of under the heading of, well, this is
• 25:05
  good for the guys. They get to get out into
• 25:07
  the community. But it's a forced labor situation because if
• 25:11
  they don't, if they don't accept those assignments, then they're
• 25:15
  going to be punished and they're going to be punished
• 25:17
  with long stays in solitary confinement. They're going to be
• 25:19
  given disciplinaries so that their sentences can be extended. They
• 25:25
  are often just beaten for that. So it's really an extension.
• 25:29
  I've heard you on your show talk about the Jim
• 25:34
  Crow laws, which led to convict leasing. And what we're
• 25:37
  seeing in Alabama now, it's not like convict leasing. It
• 25:40
  is exactly convict leasing. They are just selling the labor
• 25:44
  of incarcerated people. To industries.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: For pennies on the dollar of what you would get
• 25:50
  if you had to pay people.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean they get paid well. They get paid well.
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah. But not the– you're saying they meaning the prisons
• 25:58
  get paid well. Yes. But not the prisoners.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: Correct.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: The prisoners get any money?
• 26:03
  Speaker 2: They get a little money. For example, the guy you
• 26:06
  see who's driving a sanitation truck, Danny Dandridge, describes how
• 26:12
  he's getting paid $ 2 a day.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: Now, is that standard across the board for all those
• 26:17
  other jobs?
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: I think for that job, they get paid a little
• 26:23
  bit of money. And then on top of that, they're
• 26:26
  charged for the cost of the van that takes them
• 26:28
  to the workplace. They're charged for the uniform that they
• 26:31
  have to wear. So it's sort of like there are
• 26:34
  kind of fees and fines that knock everything down to
• 26:37
  almost nothing. And in a lot of cases... the $ 2
• 26:40
  a day is a lot. They're required to do lots
• 26:44
  of work unpaid in the prisons. They do all the construction.
• 26:49
  You could see that even the drug dorm where the
• 26:53
  counselor decided to leave his job, there was a professional
• 26:57
  drug counselor in one of the prisons and nobody replaces him.
• 27:02
  And so Raoul Poole, one of the guys in our film,
• 27:06
  just starts running the drug dorm and That's a drug
• 27:09
  dorm that's getting money from the federal government to pay
• 27:13
  for drug treatment program in prison. And that money is
• 27:15
  just not going anywhere or money is just going into
• 27:17
  the coffers of whoever is running the prison system.
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: And is there any accountability for all the money? Is
• 27:24
  there any– do they do an audit of the money?
• 27:26
  Is it just.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: There really is not any meaningful accountability. There's like the
• 27:32
  state auditor who we actually interviewed and spent a lot
• 27:35
  of time with. just sort of threw up his hands.
• 27:38
  You know, he said, there's just no way for me
• 27:40
  to keep track of this money. And, you know, for example,
• 27:45
  they got this incredibly horrible set of findings from the
• 27:50
  Justice Department, right? The DOJ went in to the Alabama
• 27:53
  State Prison System and did an investigation because, for reasons
• 27:56
  I can explain, they're kind of incredible. But anyway, they
• 27:59
  went in there and they investigated the whole prison system,
• 28:02
  which I think they'd never done before. You know, usually
• 28:04
  they investigate an individual prison or something like that. And
• 28:09
  they went in and issued a report that said, this
• 28:13
  is beyond the pale. There's horrific things that are happening
• 28:16
  in your prisons, people being murdered, and there's the highest
• 28:19
  rate of drug overdose and highest rate of rape. And
• 28:23
  Alabama's response was to say, well, we think that's just
• 28:27
  anecdotal and you don't know what you're talking about. And
• 28:30
  then they decided that their solution was the Alabama solution
• 28:34
  that we sort of ironically talk about in the title
• 28:37
  of the film, the one the governor talks about, is
• 28:40
  just to build new prisons. And meantime, the DOJ did
• 28:44
  not say to build any new prisons. The DOJ said,
• 28:47
  your problem is with corruption and brutality, and you're operating
• 28:52
  really a criminal enterprise, and therefore you need to address
• 28:58
  the underlying problems. And Alabama's response was, Well, the DOJ
• 29:02
  says the prisons are no good, so we got to
• 29:03
  build new ones.
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: Well, that– So they get a massive contract. Yeah, exactly.
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: So we always call it the Alabama Department of Construction
• 29:11
  because they don't really change anything unless they have the
• 29:14
  opportunity to build something. And that's really good for all
• 29:18
  the governor's supporters and all the other people who are
• 29:21
  in the construction industry. And they've now started construction on
• 29:27
  these massive new prisons. Alabama is a tiny state. It's like,
• 29:31
  you know, smaller population, I think, than Norway. And they've
• 29:36
  got a tiny budget. And yet they figure out how
• 29:39
  to put together a multibillion-dollar prison construction plan. They can't
• 29:45
  fund it at first. The governor announces she's going to
• 29:48
  build these new prisons, which the DOJ did not ask for.
• 29:52
  And are not going to solve the problem. And they admit,
• 29:54
  by the way, that they're not going to affect overcrowding,
• 29:56
  which is a huge problem. The prisons are operating at
• 29:58
  like 200 percent capacity. And, you know, when they're asked
• 30:02
  about it, the head of the Department of Corrections, they
• 30:05
  ask him, you know, is this going to affect the overcrowding?
• 30:08
  Or is it just the same number of beds? And
• 30:11
  he goes, no, it's the same number of beds. You know,
• 30:13
  it's not going to affect overcrowding. So they're building these
• 30:15
  massive new facilities. The governor can't get them paid for.
• 30:19
  She can't raise the money in a bond offering. So
• 30:22
  they go after the COVID money that they got from
• 30:25
  the government, which is not designed to build prisons, right?
• 30:29
  It's very hard to argue that building prisons is something
• 30:32
  that's going to relieve some other kind of health problem
• 30:35
  or whatever. And then I think they get fined for
• 30:40
  that or you have to pay a fine if you
• 30:43
  use government money for a thing that's not supposed to
• 30:45
  be for. And then when they start construction– They still
• 30:50
  can't raise the money, but they start building the new
• 30:53
  prisons even before they're authorized by the legislature. That's how
• 30:57
  clearly it was communicated that these prisons were going to happen.
• 31:03
  In other words, we had a crew in Alabama that
• 31:07
  was watching this site of this one massive prison that
• 31:10
  they were planning on building. And there were just bean fields.
• 31:14
  And it's quite beautiful actually. And one day I get
• 31:17
  a call from somebody and they say, we got to
• 31:19
  start filming this. because there are 25 earthmovers here. And
• 31:23
  I said, well, that's impossible because the legislature hasn't even
• 31:26
  approved the new prison construction. And they said, well, the
• 31:29
  prison construction companies know what's happening and they're already spending
• 31:33
  hundreds of thousands of dollars just to clear the site.
• 31:36
  So the fix was in on this new prison construction.
• 31:39
  And the governor announced that it was going to cost
• 31:43
  $ 900 million to build three new prisons. So far, they've
• 31:46
  broken ground and are far along on the first prison,
• 31:49
  and it's up to $ 1. 3 billion. So when you open
• 31:55
  that door, a whole lot of commerce comes in, a
• 31:59
  whole lot of companies come in. And they ask them,
• 32:03
  why was it so expensive? How did it go from
• 32:05
  $ 300 million for one prison to $ 1. 3 billion for one
• 32:10
  prison and counting? And they said, well, it's inflation and Meanwhile,
• 32:17
  I'm pretty sure that the government is not going to
• 32:19
  say that we got 400 percent inflation at the moment.
• 32:23
  So it's kind of institutionalized thievery.
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: It's organized crime.
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: It means when you are in charge of deciding what's
• 32:33
  crime and you're running a state like Alabama. Yeah. Yeah.
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: And I think money in the justice system is a
• 32:42
  very perverting factor. I made this film, this series called
• 32:46
  The Jinx and.
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: Robert– Great fucking series by the way.
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: Oh, thank you. Thank you.
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: Crazy. Yeah. Like you watch this going, what? Yeah. Is
• 32:56
  this real?
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, me too. I mean he's an incredible person to watch.
• 33:05
  But one thing about him is, you know, that family's
• 33:08
  worth $ 9 billion. This is not like a regular rich
• 33:11
  person in America. This is an extra super duper rich
• 33:14
  person in America. And he's killed three people over 30
• 33:17
  years and just walking around, gotten away with it. Meantime,
• 33:20
  you have, you know, young women, moms in Brazos County
• 33:24
  Jail in Texas. You know, our mutual friend Jeff Ross
• 33:27
  did a documentary there and he interviews the girls that
• 33:32
  are in there. And he says, what are you in
• 33:33
  here for? And two of them say, I'm in here
• 33:35
  because I stole baby formula. So, you know, that's a money,
• 33:40
  money means a lot in this equation.
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: The money stuff is, is all over the place. You know,
• 33:52
  it's the, the, the perverting of the system with money
• 33:58
  you see because, you know, for example, These big prison
• 34:02
  companies like GeoGroup and CoreCivic make money by having full prisons.
• 34:07
  They're private prison companies. But there are lots of prison–
• 34:11
  there are a lot of companies that provide services to
• 34:13
  public prisons, to state prisons like Cisco and all these
• 34:17
  companies that sell food there. But everybody makes more money
• 34:20
  if the prisons are full. And so you have the
• 34:26
  head of CoreCivic just– did a shareholder call not too
• 34:31
  long ago. And he's Henninger, I think his name is.
• 34:35
  And they said, what do you think, what's the outlook?
• 34:38
  And he said, oh, with all the new immigration prisons
• 34:42
  and all the prisons and all the increased emphasis on
• 34:47
  law enforcement and on incarceration, this is the most exciting
• 34:52
  time in my career.
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: So you're really building this.
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: Prison industrial complex every day, especially right now, I think.
• 35:03
  And all these people are doing, they're all doing bad stuff.
• 35:07
  You know, there's a company called, there's a company called Securus,
• 35:12
  which is run by Tom Gores, who is a big
• 35:17
  team owner, owns the Pistons, Detroit Pistons and some other teams,
• 35:21
  and is a private equity guy worth about $ 10 billion.
• 35:24
  And And his company, Securus, does communications for the prison systems.
• 35:31
  And they made deals that have now been sort of exposed.
• 35:35
  But they made deals with sheriff's departments where they had jails.
• 35:40
  And they said instead of letting kids visit their parents
• 35:44
  in jail and actually get to see them and hug
• 35:47
  them and maybe have some kind of normalcy– Let's install
• 35:51
  video visit terminals. So the cover story was the video
• 35:55
  visits are going to be great because you don't have
• 35:57
  to drive across the state to see your loved one.
• 36:00
  But the contract specifically said that they had to replace
• 36:05
  in-person visits. So when a kid went to go visit
• 36:08
  his dad, even if he was 20 yards away from
• 36:12
  him in the prison waiting room, he had to use
• 36:15
  a video terminal, which cost $ 12. 99 for 20 minutes. And
• 36:19
  he was not allowed to see his dad in person.
• 36:24
  So that's an example of– and that's in the contract.
• 36:28
  That's in the Securus contract that said that they have
• 36:30
  to eliminate the in-person visits. So when you allow that
• 36:34
  for-profit motive to be driving things in these like state
• 36:38
  institutions where theoretically we should have some kind of like
• 36:43
  moral approach that makes sense for society or can help
• 36:47
  community or build our– relationships or help people stay in
• 36:51
  touch with their loved ones when they're incarcerated. When you
• 36:55
  add that for-profit motive there, the system is just designed
• 37:00
  to exploit. It just is natural that all those people
• 37:04
  have to get, you know, they all have, there's a
• 37:07
  kind of a value to every visit. Every time a visit,
• 37:10
  you know, every time a kid comes and visits a parent,
• 37:13
  it's worth $ 12.
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: 99.
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: Well, why do it for free if you can get $ 12.
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: 99 for it? It's one of the darker aspects of
• 37:24
  human nature in regards to our relationship with money. That
• 37:29
  so many people, if unchecked, if you give them the
• 37:32
  opportunity to make more money at the expense of other people,
• 37:35
  they do it. They just do it. Especially under the
• 37:39
  framework of a corporation. The framework of a corporation allows
• 37:44
  you to have a diffusion of responsibility because you don't
• 37:47
  think That you're the one doing this horrible thing. It's
• 37:50
  this thing that you work for and I'm just doing
• 37:53
  my job. Yeah. And also if you're involved in a
• 37:56
  corrupt system and this is your job and you think
• 38:00
  of these people as all good people that are part
• 38:02
  of the corrupt system, it sort of minimizes the horrible
• 38:06
  feelings that you have about that corruption. You just dismiss it.
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: I really believe– I've heard you talk about the fusion
• 38:13
  of responsibility before. I think it's– It's such a huge
• 38:18
  part of what drives all this is that you have
• 38:22
  people who don't really have to ask themselves the hard question.
• 38:27
  Am I the person that's exploiting somebody? Am I the
• 38:30
  person that's overcharging a mom? Am I the person that's
• 38:34
  charging somebody a crazy amount of money for their medication
• 38:37
  or allowing somebody to die from medical neglect? Because once
• 38:42
  you have a corporation and you look at that org chart,
• 38:47
  you know, you could see the org chart as, oh,
• 38:49
  that's a nice orderly way of getting commerce to move forward.
• 38:52
  But it's also a thousand points of responsibility. Every one
• 38:56
  of those persons just takes a tiny measure of responsibility. Well,
• 39:02
  I'm just in the accounting department. I mean, you know,
• 39:04
  I don't make the rules. I don't make the laws,
• 39:07
  you know, and you see that, you know, in the
• 39:09
  healthcare industry, people recording their calls with their healthcare providers
• 39:14
  or their insurance companies saying, Oh, I'm sorry. I really
• 39:17
  can't answer. That's not my job. Somebody else makes that decision.
• 39:21
  And so when you have these massive organizations, there's a
• 39:25
  way for very bad things to happen. And it's like
• 39:29
  the death of a thousand cars.
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: And it's also everybody's trying to maximize profit. And when
• 39:34
  you're trying to maximize profit, you just find some ways
• 39:38
  to justify things. Like your main job is not to
• 39:41
  help people. These prisons aren't rehabilitation centers. You're trying to
• 39:44
  make– like you actually profit off people becoming like functional
• 39:49
  members of society once they get released, that would be amazing.
• 39:52
  Then you would have an incentive to make people better
• 39:54
  people in prison. Like imagine if their profit was based
• 39:58
  on people being rehabilitated, reentering society and becoming functional– Proper
• 40:06
  members of society where they contribute. Sure. Yeah.
• 40:09
  Speaker 2: I mean the incentives are so– They're twisted.
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 40:12
  Speaker 2: They're so twisted.
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: It's like that saying money is the root of all evil.
• 40:15
  It's not the root of all evil. It's the root
• 40:17
  of most of it though. It's like a giant percentage
• 40:19
  of it. Maybe it's 75 percent of evil. The rest
• 40:22
  of it is like what? Lust? Yeah.
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: I mean I guess money is– Anger, jealousy.
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah. That's the root of a lot of evil. Whatever.
• 40:31
  Whatever the other percentage is. But money, 60 percent maybe.
• 40:34
  Let's be charitable. Yeah. the root of a lot of
• 40:37
  fucking evil man it's it's and when you can do
• 40:40
  it inside of this framework of a corporation it's so
• 40:44
  twisted because it's ubiquitous it exists in almost all industries
• 40:49
  there's always whether it's the like this is the reason
• 40:52
  why people celebrated when that health care executive was shot
• 40:56
  right they were like hey man fuck you guys like
• 40:59
  yeah finally one of you guys got it i lost
• 41:01
  my dad i lost my mom i lost my sister
• 41:04
  you know that kind of shit Is in every fucking industry. Yeah.
• 41:10
  Whether it's military industrial complex, whether it's the health insurance complex,
• 41:14
  whether it's pharmaceutical drug industry. When you look at the
• 41:17
  Sackler family and what they did with opioids. I'm sure
• 41:21
  you've seen the Netflix, the Peter Berg Netflix painkiller series.
• 41:25
  Fucking incredible. It's just incredible that that guy's just walking around.
• 41:30
  Irresponsible for the death of who knows how many people.
• 41:33
  Because who knows how many people. People that had relationships
• 41:37
  with the people that got addicted also lost their lives,
• 41:40
  also lost everything because you're dealing with a brother or
• 41:44
  a mom that's completely lost and addicted. You've got– your
• 41:48
  life is hijacked now by this situation. You've lost your dad.
• 41:53
  You've lost your mom. You've lost a spouse. Fuck. Yeah.
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: I mean you know you– I've heard you talk a
• 41:59
  lot about mental health and obviously There are a lot
• 42:03
  of causes of mental health problems and that includes social media.
• 42:09
  It includes sort of alienation. It includes a lot of
• 42:11
  things that are present in society. But the prison industrial
• 42:18
  complex and the experience of having somebody incarcerated has a
• 42:24
  huge impact on mental health. I think people don't realize
• 42:29
  when you have two million people locked up in these
• 42:32
  facilities– And many of them are just being traumatized every day,
• 42:37
  whether they're seeing somebody get killed or they're constantly in
• 42:40
  fear for their life. The idea that those people are
• 42:42
  going to somehow be OK when you want to let
• 42:44
  them out 10 years later and they're going to rejoin society,
• 42:47
  you give them $ 50 and a bus ticket and you say, hey,
• 42:50
  I hope you can become a taxpayer. Meantime, they don't
• 42:52
  have enough money to pay for one red roof in
• 42:55
  for one night. They can't do anything when they get
• 42:59
  out of prison. And then we say, well, why is
• 43:01
  there such high recidivism? I guess that means they're bad people.
• 43:05
  So let's put them back in. So the mental health
• 43:07
  implications for the people that are incarcerated are huge and
• 43:11
  the people who are in their families, as you say.
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: Imagine the anxiety. You don't have any family members and
• 43:16
  they're going to give you $ 50. And now you're out.
• 43:20
  And you have to figure out how to eat, how
• 43:22
  to get a roof over your head and try to
• 43:24
  figure out a way to earn money.
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: With $ 50.
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: And there are ways to do it. You know, there
• 43:30
  are there if you go into the I mean, all
• 43:32
  this sounds very dark and horrible and it is. But
• 43:36
  there are a lot of there are a lot of
• 43:40
  positive developments that you can see when you give them
• 43:43
  a chance to to grow in society, you know. So so,
• 43:48
  for example, like I love what you say about about community,
• 43:53
  you know, about the importance of building community and seeing
• 43:56
  the country. as our community. And, you know, if we're
• 44:01
  torturing people that are in our community, if we're being
• 44:04
  cruel to people that are in our community, what does
• 44:06
  it say about us?
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: You know, what does it say about, about, about Christianity?
• 44:12
  What does it say about, you know, about, about God?
• 44:16
  What does it say about forgiveness? And clearly we see
• 44:21
  that there are so many instances where people are trying,
• 44:26
  you know, trying to do something better. There's a woman
• 44:30
  named Erica in Alabama who was a mental health professional.
• 44:34
  And she described to me what it was like to
• 44:37
  try to give mental health services to people who are incarcerated.
• 44:41
  And I was trying to figure out, you know, looking
• 44:44
  at these images of the places that they keep people
• 44:47
  and these cells, these solitary cells with just a little
• 44:50
  tray slot. And, you know, they're in there for, in
• 44:53
  a five-by-eight room with no windows, and they could be
• 44:58
  in there literally for years. And I said to her, well,
• 45:02
  can you tell me, like, when you do a session
• 45:04
  with somebody and you're trying to, you know, talk to
• 45:07
  them about their suicidal ideation or their various problems, you know,
• 45:12
  what does that look like? How does that work? And
• 45:14
  she goes, well, you know, it's a little uncomfortable because,
• 45:16
  you know, I got to be on my knees. And
• 45:18
  I said, wait, why are you on your knees? She said, oh, well,
• 45:22
  I have to be able to talk through the tray slot.
• 45:25
  And I said, so when you're giving a mental health
• 45:27
  counseling session to somebody who's incarcerated, you're not allowed to
• 45:32
  open the door. You're not allowed to see, assuming that
• 45:34
  person's not like having a violent fit or something like that.
• 45:39
  You're not allowed to sit down across from them and
• 45:41
  have that conversation. She said, no, no, no, but it's okay.
• 45:44
  I just put my mouth up to the tray slot
• 45:47
  and I just thought, You know, when you think about
• 45:50
  the idea that that's going to be somehow something that
• 45:53
  will give relief to somebody who's really struggling with a
• 45:56
  mental health crisis in prison, you know, we're doing the
• 46:00
  absolute minimum. You know, we're checking the box that says, yeah,
• 46:04
  once a month this guy has a psychiatric evaluation. But
• 46:07
  nobody's taking a picture of that and showing what it
• 46:09
  really looks like to have this nice, you know, young lady,
• 46:12
  this idealistic young mental health person Kneeling outside of a
• 46:18
  metal cell with bloodstains on it, talking to somebody inside.
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: Through a food slot.
• 46:24
  Speaker 2: Through a food slot.
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: And that's probably the only interaction this person has with
• 46:27
  human beings other than the guards.
• 46:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Who are very cruel. Yeah. And you're alone
• 46:35
  in that cell, which is also terrible for mental health.
• 46:39
  Like there's nothing worse for mental health than complete total isolation. Yeah.
• 46:43
  With no access to anything. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: Have you ever had experiences with people, friends or family
• 46:51
  who have been incarcerated?
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: Quite a few. What's that been like?
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: Well, I had this one friend that I used to
• 47:00
  do martial arts with when I was a kid. And
• 47:04
  when I was probably around 16, 16 or 17, he
• 47:12
  wound up going to jail. I didn't know him that well.
• 47:15
  But I knew him as this guy who competed in
• 47:19
  tournaments and, you know, he would show up and train
• 47:22
  with us. And he's just a pretty tough guy. He
• 47:25
  went into jail and he came out, first of all,
• 47:28
  much bigger. He was just like stacked with muscle. All
• 47:31
  of his tattoos he burned off. So he had scars,
• 47:35
  like these big keloid scars over all of his tattoos now.
• 47:40
  And he was a completely different person. Like a violent animal.
• 47:46
  Like a terrifying guy to spar with. If you spar
• 47:48
  with him, you were in a– it wasn't– there was
• 47:51
  nothing– no holding back. Sparring for the most part, when
• 47:55
  you like people, you're hitting them only a certain percentage
• 48:00
  of your strength. This guy was not doing any of that.
• 48:02
  He was full blast with everything. It was like a
• 48:05
  caged animal. And as I got to be closer to him,
• 48:10
  I actually became closer to him after he got out
• 48:12
  of prison. than he was before, you know, because I
• 48:15
  just spent more time sparring him and hanging out and
• 48:18
  training with him and, you know, being in these group
• 48:20
  classes with him. He started telling me these stories about
• 48:24
  what it was like in jail and just fighting for
• 48:27
  his life. He had to take on three guys and
• 48:29
  he picked up a broomstick and he was beating these guys.
• 48:32
  He was just telling me these crazy stories of guys
• 48:35
  trying to kill him in jail, you know, and he
• 48:37
  was in there for three years for drug selling. And
• 48:39
  then he went right back to selling drugs. And, um,
• 48:43
  He eventually got arrested and I've told this story before.
• 48:47
  It's kind of crazy. They found a guy that had
• 48:52
  every bone in his body broken with hammers and they
• 48:57
  kept him awake by injecting him with cocaine. They kept
• 49:00
  injecting him with cocaine and then they cut his arms off.
• 49:03
  They cut his hands off and then they cut his
• 49:05
  head off and they found his body. But it's like
• 49:07
  all of his bones have been shattered and this guy
• 49:09
  that I knew as a kid got arrested for that.
• 49:14
  They never wound up trying him for that. They brought
• 49:17
  him in for questioning. He definitely knew something. about it.
• 49:20
  He knew either the people that did it or knew something,
• 49:23
  but it was all drug related and he was selling cocaine.
• 49:27
  And then, um, I lost touch with him after that.
• 49:30
  Speaker 2: That's a crazy story.
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah. I knew quite a few guys like that
• 49:34
  because the world of, um, fighting like people that are
• 49:38
  interested in, in, in, entering in competitions with people, you
• 49:42
  get a lot of troubled people, a lot of very
• 49:45
  angry people, a lot of them that come from violent households.
• 49:49
  They were beaten as children or they were bullied as kids,
• 49:53
  depending on where. I came from the most mild of
• 49:58
  those environments. I didn't have anybody abusing me. I lived
• 50:03
  in the suburbs of Boston. I lived in Newton, which
• 50:06
  is a really nice neighborhood. I just was interested in
• 50:09
  martial arts. And then I was fascinated by this idea
• 50:12
  of bettering myself through competition because it was so scary.
• 50:15
  And then all of a sudden I'm around like hit men.
• 50:18
  I knew one guy who was a hit man for
• 50:20
  Whitey Bulger. And he– I would train him. I would
• 50:24
  teach this guy how to do martial arts. And he
• 50:27
  was an assassin. That's amazing. It was very strange. I
• 50:31
  knew a bunch of organized crime figures, mostly with the
• 50:35
  Irish mob. A lot of those guys came and trained.
• 50:38
  And especially because they knew some other guys that we
• 50:42
  knew that were– one of my friends who was a
• 50:44
  professional boxer and he lived in South Boston. He was
• 50:48
  very tight with a lot of these guys. So some
• 50:49
  of these guys came to train with us. It was
• 50:52
  a very weird exposure for me. I've never been around
• 50:54
  any of that. I never had anyone in my family
• 50:57
  that went to jail. No one was a criminal. No
• 51:01
  one was a drug addict. There was nothing really crazy.
• 51:04
  And then all of a sudden I was around a
• 51:06
  lot of these people that either– went to jail eventually
• 51:11
  or had been in jail. Yeah.
• 51:13
  Speaker 2: Cause it's, I think there's that question of, you know,
• 51:17
  people say, well, if you, if you don't like the
• 51:20
  prison system the way it is, or if you don't
• 51:22
  think people should get locked up forever, then, you know,
• 51:24
  you're just soft on crime and, and, you know, obviously, uh,
• 51:28
  you know, you're some kind of a snowflake and, but, uh,
• 51:33
  clearly there's a role for prison. There's a role for jail. Um,
• 51:38
  The question is whether we should be putting people into
• 51:42
  institutions that just further damage them, further re-traumatize them.
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: Right. Just making them hardened. They're going to be worse
• 51:49
  criminals if they get out, if and when they get out.
• 51:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: And there's no emphasis on rehabilitation. So that's the thing.
• 51:57
  It's like if you're releasing them back into the street,
• 51:58
  like what are you doing to the rest of the society?
• 52:01
  If you're taking a person who's committed a violent crime,
• 52:04
  making them way worse in jail and then releasing them.
• 52:07
  This is like a slow– bomb you know it's slow
• 52:10
  release bomb and then also they have no options because
• 52:12
  no one wants to hire an ex-convict especially someone who
• 52:15
  went to jail for like aggravating assault or something like
• 52:17
  that so it's it's very very difficult for these people
• 52:21
  and very very difficult for society to make a decision
• 52:24
  you know you want to make a quick fix of
• 52:26
  something you want to protect people just keep them in
• 52:28
  jail keep everybody in jail but there's zero emphasis on
• 52:33
  how to take a person from a completely broken childhood,
• 52:37
  broken home, violence, drug addiction in the home, all the chaos,
• 52:43
  completely being accustomed to violent crime because it's all around you.
• 52:48
  It's in your neighborhood. Imitate your atmosphere. And then what
• 52:52
  do we do with these people? There's no emphasis whatsoever
• 52:54
  on it. It's just using them as human batteries to
• 52:57
  generate money. And that's evil. That's what's really crazy. And
• 53:01
  this is where people have subverted this idea of, incarceration
• 53:06
  being some sort of a rehabilitation or correction, right? They
• 53:10
  call them correctional facilities. You're not correcting anything. You're just
• 53:13
  making money. You're just making money off of people and
• 53:16
  you're taking advantage of the fact that no one wants
• 53:18
  to pay attention to it because society generally looks at
• 53:21
  people that are criminals and have committed violent crimes as like, oh, well,
• 53:24
  fuck them. Push them aside. And look, there's some people
• 53:28
  that I agree. Yeah, fuck them. If there's people that
• 53:31
  have killed a bunch of people and raped a bunch
• 53:33
  of people and are constantly robbing people and breaking their houses,
• 53:37
  they're violent. Yeah, fuck those people. Fuck those people. But
• 53:40
  that's a small percentage of what's in jail. A large
• 53:43
  percentage is nonviolent drug offenders. And that's where it gets
• 53:46
  really weird. It's like so a person is deciding you
• 53:50
  can have the drugs that we sanction. You can have
• 53:53
  the drugs that we tax. You can have these drugs.
• 53:55
  You can have these prescription drugs. You could have this
• 53:58
  drug that you buy in the liquor store that we
• 53:59
  call alcohol, which is clearly a drug. You could buy
• 54:02
  your cigarettes. You could buy your coffee. You could get
• 54:05
  all these drugs that we like. Adderall, you need Adderall. Andrew,
• 54:09
  I think you have a little ADHD. Maybe you should
• 54:11
  use some fucking speed and we'll sell you that speed
• 54:14
  and we'll tax that speed. Anything else, we'll put you
• 54:18
  in a cage because you're not following our rules. And
• 54:22
  it's like a grown adult saying, telling another grown adult
• 54:26
  what they can or can't do with their life is
• 54:29
  responsible for, what, 50% of the people that are in cages?
• 54:33
  That's kind of crazy. It's almost time for spring break,
• 54:36
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• 55:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: That's really crazy. Yeah.
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: I mean, there's this kind of illusion that everybody that
• 55:49
  is in prison for something that we don't think, the
• 55:54
  average person doesn't think they should be in prison for
• 55:56
  for many, many, many years, like a drug crime or
• 55:59
  being an addict, basically.
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 56:02
  Speaker 2: That all those people have been let out already. That
• 56:07
  somehow like prison activist people have said, well, all the
• 56:11
  people that are in there for drug crimes should be released.
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: But it's not really true.
• 56:17
  Speaker 2: You have an enormous criminalization of drug addiction. So you're
• 56:23
  already making people sort of feel hopeless. Then they're turning
• 56:27
  to drugs and then you're putting them into cages. So
• 56:32
  like Steve Marshall, for example, the AG in Alabama says, well,
• 56:37
  we've already released all of the nonviolent criminals, right? So
• 56:40
  the only people that are locked in there are the
• 56:42
  worst of the worst.
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: Well, that's clearly not true just because of sales from
• 56:46
  your documentary. Yeah, of course.
• 56:48
  Speaker 2: So you have– and he was put into a maximum
• 56:51
  security facility for entering an unoccupied building. That's because there's
• 56:57
  sort of an inflation of this concept of violence. So
• 57:00
  they will– in Alabama, I think there are 44 different
• 57:03
  crimes that are considered violent crimes. And they include crimes
• 57:07
  that you and I would not consider violent. So if
• 57:11
  somebody threatens somebody verbally like most people do in arguments
• 57:15
  with people that they're mad at or whatever but doesn't
• 57:18
  assault somebody, that could be considered a violent crime. If
• 57:22
  somebody enters a building– whether they steal something or not,
• 57:26
  that could be considered a violent crime. And so it
• 57:29
  makes it easier just to, as you say, like, I
• 57:32
  like that image of the battery. I think about it
• 57:35
  as like, sometimes like the matrix that, you know, for
• 57:38
  Alabama to do what it's doing, it's got to have 20,000
• 57:41
  people in suspended animation, because that's how you can use
• 57:46
  them for labor. That's how you can use them to
• 57:48
  sell them stuff. That's how you can charge them for
• 57:51
  fees and fines, that you need that many people.
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: Trevor Burrus I think they did a terrible thing when
• 57:57
  they allowed private prisons. I think it's a terrible thing.
• 58:00
  I think– like if you think about the people that
• 58:03
  founded this country and the people that wrote the constitution,
• 58:07
  they had a great understanding of where– how tyranny can emerge.
• 58:13
  So they tried to create a system– again, 1776. It's
• 58:18
  crazy to think that we're still following those same rules today.
• 58:22
  But they had a great understanding.
• 58:23
  Speaker 2: Trevor Burrus Don't worry. We're not following those rules.
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: Trevor Burrus But the checks and balances and make sure
• 58:28
  that one person couldn't accumulate all of the power. Whoever
• 58:35
  first initiated the policy of allowing and paying for private
• 58:40
  prisons to exist in this country did not think it
• 58:44
  through like that at all, did not think of incentives
• 58:46
  or did not think of how people always, when given
• 58:50
  the chance to make more money, figure out a way
• 58:52
  to justify making that more money and come up with
• 58:56
  rules or regulations or carve-outs, caveats, some reason why they
• 59:01
  can continue to accelerate. And then you don't think about
• 59:04
  the fact that prison guard unions and these private prisons,
• 59:09
  these people that own them actively work to keep some
• 59:13
  laws on the books that maybe the general public would
• 59:17
  not want to be illegal anymore certain things and they
• 59:20
  do that just so they can keep their prisons full
• 59:22
  so they can keep making more money so then they
• 59:25
  take the money that they get from these private prisons
• 59:28
  where they're using people as human batteries and to make
• 59:30
  sure there's still laws in place that are ridiculous so
• 59:34
  that they can keep arresting people, so they can keep
• 59:36
  filling up their buildings and making more. And the fact
• 59:38
  that nobody saw that coming. Nobody saw that coming.
• 59:42
  Speaker 2: They saw it coming.
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: I don't even know if they did. I think they
• 59:45
  probably short-term were just saying, oh, this is a good business.
• 59:49
  We'll get into it. Then the business is like, we've
• 59:51
  got to grow this business, just like everything else. Like
• 59:53
  if you're selling tires, you've got to make better tires,
• 59:56
  sell more tires. We want to be number one in
• 59:59
  the tire business. Well, they're trying to be number one
• 1:00:01
  in the human battery business. And that's what's fucking insane
• 1:00:05
  about allowing that in this country. And how do you
• 1:00:09
  put that genie back in the bottle? I don't know.
• 1:00:11
  But I think it's very sick.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 2: Well, the genies figured out a way to get into
• 1:00:16
  a whole new bottle because a lot of people say
• 1:00:22
  to us, well, this film that you made, The Alabama Solution,
• 1:00:25
  is obviously about Alabama state prisons. Are those private prisons?
• 1:00:30
  And we always say, no, those are state-run institutions. But
• 1:00:35
  they kind of function like private prisons in a way
• 1:00:38
  because they're able to make deals with securists about their
• 1:00:43
  prison phone system. And that makes millions and millions of
• 1:00:47
  dollars that's extracted from the poorest people in the daily
• 1:00:54
  and even per minute fees for being able to communicate
• 1:00:58
  with their families. Then you have companies who are selling
• 1:01:02
  the food to the prisons. You have companies that are
• 1:01:05
  doing healthcare contracts with the prisons. And so there's so
• 1:01:09
  much money in that, that they sort of, even though
• 1:01:12
  the state owns that piece of land, it still kind
• 1:01:16
  of functions the way that private prisons function. So we've
• 1:01:20
  sort of just given over the care of two million
• 1:01:24
  Americans to companies that are accountable to their shareholders, maybe,
• 1:01:30
  but the shareholders don't know.
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: Well, they're certainly not accountable to humane living conditions. That
• 1:01:36
  one scene where kinetic justice, that gentleman, what's his real name?
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 2: Robert Earl Council.
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: When Robert Earl Council was in solitary and you see
• 1:01:45
  the rats swimming in his toilet? Rats are swimming in
• 1:01:48
  his toilet and he has rats in a water jar
• 1:01:51
  and what did he say?
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 2: Eleven caught in one night. And why are they there?
• 1:01:55
  Because he tries to put his food in a bag
• 1:01:58
  that hangs on the door of the cell. But then
• 1:02:01
  they write him a disciplinary for doing that. But if
• 1:02:03
  he takes his food out of the bag and he
• 1:02:05
  puts it on the counter, then the rats are going
• 1:02:08
  to get it during the night.
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: They're just everywhere.
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So there are rats throughout the prison.
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: And so he has to sleep in this room where
• 1:02:16
  these rats are crawling all over him at night. Yeah.
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 2: And people– just to get into him for a second.
• 1:02:22
  I mean he is frankly one of the most– one
• 1:02:26
  of the bravest people I've ever met in my life.
• 1:02:30
  This is a guy who was incarcerated when he was
• 1:02:32
  19 and he was selling drugs in his neighborhood. Somebody
• 1:02:39
  is trying to chase him down with a car and–
• 1:02:43
  almost runs him over, and he shoots the person through
• 1:02:46
  the window and the guy dies. So this is now
• 1:02:48
  30 years ago. In any other condition, you would have
• 1:02:52
  thought that's a self-defense case, right? It was clear that
• 1:02:58
  he was trying to prevent somebody from running him over
• 1:03:00
  with a car. And yet here he is 30 years
• 1:03:03
  later with a life without parole sentence in an Alabama prison,
• 1:03:08
  and he's spending his time trying to organize non-prisoners nonviolent
• 1:03:14
  labor strikes. He's trying to do hunger strikes. He's trying
• 1:03:18
  to use every method that he can use to call
• 1:03:23
  attention to the problem that 20,000 other people have. And
• 1:03:27
  he's using a contraband cell phone to talk to us,
• 1:03:29
  knowing that he's probably going to get retaliated against by
• 1:03:32
  the authorities once the film comes out or once they
• 1:03:34
  know that he's organizing a labor strike. He would be
• 1:03:39
  an unbelievable... asset to society if he were out in
• 1:03:45
  the world, right? He's advocating for nonviolence. He's obviously smart
• 1:03:50
  as a whip, and he's incredibly motivating to other people.
• 1:03:54
  He's got that entire prison system listening to him when
• 1:03:58
  they want to be violent because they're so angry at
• 1:04:00
  the treatment. And the prison system starts bird feeding them,
• 1:04:05
  starts to cut off their food rations to force them
• 1:04:08
  back to work. And kinetic, Robert Earl is the person
• 1:04:11
  who says, you know, that's not going to solve anything.
• 1:04:14
  We don't want to do that. So, you know, you
• 1:04:17
  see this huge level of humanity, talent, thoughtfulness in people
• 1:04:23
  that are locked away. And we just assume, well, if
• 1:04:26
  they're in prison, that means that they're bad people. In
• 1:04:29
  the meantime, there's so many other people on the outside
• 1:04:31
  who don't get locked up for doing things that are
• 1:04:34
  much worse. You know, so it's a very confusing message
• 1:04:38
  to be sending.
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: Well, especially for someone like you who did the Jenks thing.
• 1:04:42
  And then you do this. Yeah.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 2: I mean it's a really good point. I worked for
• 1:04:46
  a long time on the story of Robert Durst. And
• 1:04:50
  when we discovered evidence that showed that he had killed
• 1:04:54
  his wife and his best friend and his neighbor in
• 1:04:58
  Galveston dismembered him, we found the only evidence that proved
• 1:05:03
  that he did those things. And suddenly I was in
• 1:05:07
  a dialogue with the L.A. district attorney, the L.A. PD,
• 1:05:10
  talking about how to get him arrested. And even if
• 1:05:14
  I don't believe in the way that we incarcerate people,
• 1:05:17
  it's clear that there's a role for prison. And there's
• 1:05:20
  clearly a guy like Bob Durst who keeps killing people,
• 1:05:23
  needs to be taken out of society.
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: What kind of prison is he in?
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 2: Well, he died now. And he was locked up in
• 1:05:31
  a facility in Northern California. It was sort of a
• 1:05:35
  facility for senior citizens who had medical problems. So- You know,
• 1:05:40
  a lot of really rich people, as you could tell from,
• 1:05:43
  you know, there have been a bunch of cases on this,
• 1:05:46
  really rich people hire consultants to help them navigate what
• 1:05:51
  prison they're going to end up going to. They can
• 1:05:54
  negotiate for better conditions. And so you end up, you know,
• 1:05:59
  with that sort of situation where a guy who maybe
• 1:06:01
  has stolen $ 100 million and not paid his taxes or
• 1:06:05
  taken money from his workers or committed some horrible act
• 1:06:09
  of fraud, ends up in a prison farm, ends up
• 1:06:13
  in a pretty nice facility where he has access to
• 1:06:17
  lots of things. And then you have poor people that
• 1:06:20
  are locked up in places that have rats in their
• 1:06:22
  cells and vermin. But, yeah, I was always sort of
• 1:06:29
  amazed that Robert Durst was able to get away with
• 1:06:32
  what he got away with for so long.
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: Why do you think that is? Well, you know, how
• 1:06:39
  much did you know about it before you started the
• 1:06:41
  documentary series?
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 2: Well, I knew a lot because I had made a film,
• 1:06:46
  a narrative film called All Good Things about sort of
• 1:06:50
  Robert Durst's origin story, his relationship with his beautiful wife
• 1:06:54
  when they were both young, before all the bad stuff
• 1:06:57
  started happening and he became the guy that he became.
• 1:07:02
  There was this kind of strange love story between this
• 1:07:05
  kind of, difficult man and this very lovely girl, Kathleen McCormick.
• 1:07:12
  And I made this film, Ryan Gosling played the Bob
• 1:07:16
  Durst character and Kirsten Dunst played his wife and really
• 1:07:22
  investigated that story so that we could tell the tale
• 1:07:26
  of what had happened to them in an accurate way.
• 1:07:28
  And while I was doing that, we reached out to
• 1:07:33
  Robert Durst, to the real Robert Durst, and I said,
• 1:07:36
  you know, we're making this film about, I guess we
• 1:07:37
  spoke to his lawyer, so we're making this film about you,
• 1:07:40
  about your client, and we'd like to talk to him,
• 1:07:44
  get his input, make sure that we're trying to tell
• 1:07:45
  the story accurately.
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: What was the premise of the film?
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 2: It was basically the story about him and his wife
• 1:07:50
  when they first met, this rich guy and this girl
• 1:07:53
  from sort of the other side of the tracks, and
• 1:07:55
  then how eventually that relationship got toxic, eventually he kills her,
• 1:08:00
  and then later his best friend, Susan Berman, who knows
• 1:08:05
  about what happened to his wife, starts to become problematic.
• 1:08:09
  Then he kills her. And then later he moves to Galveston,
• 1:08:13
  Texas and disguises himself as a deaf mute woman, if
• 1:08:16
  you remember this. And he ends up becoming friends with
• 1:08:22
  his elderly neighbor and this guy named Morris Black. And
• 1:08:26
  they go out shooting on Pelican Island and so on.
• 1:08:30
  And eventually they have a little altercation because– he figured
• 1:08:34
  out who Bob Durst was and that he was sort
• 1:08:36
  of on the run and he dismembers that man. He
• 1:08:40
  kills him and dismembers him.
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: This movie with Kristen Dunst, when was that released?
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 2: I guess we started working on that in around 2005
• 1:08:48
  and it came out in 2010. So in 2010, it's
• 1:08:52
  about to come out in theaters, this film, and there
• 1:08:55
  was a big article in The New York Times about
• 1:08:57
  how accurate it was and how much we had done
• 1:08:59
  to make sure that the details were right and so on.
• 1:09:02
  And the real Robert Durst reads the article and calls
• 1:09:07
  me out of the blue. And I had tried to
• 1:09:11
  get in touch with him before without any success. And
• 1:09:14
  he actually calls the distributor of the film first, Magnolia Pictures,
• 1:09:18
  and he asks for the president, Eamon Bowles. And Eamon
• 1:09:26
  and I would use Bob's voice like when we would
• 1:09:30
  talk to each other because Bob had a very recognizable voice.
• 1:09:34
  So when I would call him, we would hang up
• 1:09:36
  and I would say, bye-bye. And that was always sort
• 1:09:39
  of Bob's tone. And then one day somebody calls Eamon's
• 1:09:43
  office and says, this is Robert Durst. And so his
• 1:09:46
  secretary walks in the office and says, like, you know,
• 1:09:48
  in air quotes, like, it's Robert Durst on the phone
• 1:09:50
  thinking that it's me. And he picks up the phone.
• 1:09:53
  He's like, hey, Bob, you know, I'm not surprised you're calling.
• 1:09:55
  I think we did a hell of a job on
• 1:09:56
  the film. And there's a long pause. And he says,
• 1:09:59
  the guy says, who am I talking to? And Eamon says, oh,
• 1:10:04
  who's this? And he says, this is Robert Durst. And
• 1:10:08
  so he reaches out to me. I knew that he
• 1:10:11
  was trying to reach me so I could record my
• 1:10:14
  very first phone call with him. And I call him
• 1:10:16
  and I say, listen, I'm keen to talk to you.
• 1:10:20
  I've been making this film about you for the last
• 1:10:22
  five years. And he said, well, I would like to
• 1:10:24
  see the film. So I arranged for him to see
• 1:10:26
  the film. And he calls me immediately after he sees
• 1:10:31
  the film. And he says, I want you to know
• 1:10:33
  I like the movie very much. The movie kind of
• 1:10:37
  shows him killing people, right? And I said, well, why
• 1:10:41
  did you like it? And he said, well, you did
• 1:10:44
  a beautiful job explaining what I was going through as
• 1:10:47
  a child and the difficulty I had and losing my mother.
• 1:10:51
  And Kirsten Dunst was just like my wife, Kathy. And
• 1:10:55
  I cried three times. And I would like to do
• 1:10:58
  something with you. I would like there to be something
• 1:11:01
  out there from me, my ability to sort of tell
• 1:11:05
  my story. And I said, All right. Well, why don't
• 1:11:08
  we sit down? I'll ask you a bunch of questions.
• 1:11:10
  And he said, that's fine. OK, let's do that. So
• 1:11:12
  I so I end up sitting with him for three days.
• 1:11:15
  I've just finished a movie about him, a dramatic film,
• 1:11:18
  which is now in theaters. And I sit down with
• 1:11:21
  him and interview him for 21 hours. And you think
• 1:11:26
  you do long interviews. He's 21 hours with this one person.
• 1:11:30
  And he is fascinating. I mean absolutely extraordinary. He is
• 1:11:36
  incredibly honest about things that most people would never be
• 1:11:39
  honest about. He talks about how he had violent arguments
• 1:11:46
  with his wife or he says that he– he says
• 1:11:50
  crazy stuff. I mean he explained to me that– I said,
• 1:11:52
  you know, I think you were kind of offensive when
• 1:11:54
  you went to visit her mother. She had this mother
• 1:11:58
  who was in her 80s and you went to visit
• 1:12:01
  her mother. And, you know, I think you did some
• 1:12:05
  odd things. He goes, well, yeah, you know, I visited
• 1:12:08
  those people and they were, you know, that woman, she
• 1:12:10
  reads Yankee magazine. And, you know, and she asked me
• 1:12:16
  how I liked her daughter. And I told her that
• 1:12:19
  Kathy had come out of the shower and my penis
• 1:12:22
  was hard. Like you said that to her aging mother? Yeah, yeah, me.
• 1:12:28
  What am I going to, sure. That's what I thought,
• 1:12:30
  you know. You know, or you say to him, well,
• 1:12:34
  what did you say– you know, why did you tell
• 1:12:37
  the police that after your wife– after you put your
• 1:12:42
  wife on the train, you went to the neighbor's to
• 1:12:44
  have a drink when that clearly wasn't– oh, yes, I
• 1:12:47
  lied about that. I said, well, why did you lie
• 1:12:49
  to the police? Well, I needed to be somewhere and
• 1:12:52
  I wanted them to stop asking me questions. So I
• 1:12:55
  told them that I went to the neighbors. I said, well,
• 1:12:57
  that was so easy to disprove. They just talked to
• 1:12:59
  the neighbor. Well, yeah, but people don't usually do that.
• 1:13:03
  So he's very candid. He speaks very, very openly, almost
• 1:13:08
  like having a level of sort of Asperger's.
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: Did you believe him at any moment while he's telling
• 1:13:14
  you this? Because obviously he's proclaiming his innocence, right? Yeah.
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 2: I mean, he is so good at telling the story
• 1:13:26
  his way. And he tells you so many facts that
• 1:13:29
  are true that when he occasionally lies about really critical things, um,
• 1:13:35
  I think a lot of people just didn't pay attention
• 1:13:37
  to that. I did because I already researched the story.
• 1:13:40
  So I knew when he was trying to tell me
• 1:13:43
  something that was, that was bullshit, that, that it was bullshit. Um, But,
• 1:13:48
  you know, I did have to put myself in a
• 1:13:49
  position of giving him the benefit of the doubt whenever
• 1:13:53
  I could, partly because that was the only, you know,
• 1:13:56
  you got to just get into that mode where you're
• 1:13:58
  trying to hear his version without debating it the whole time.
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 2: Because otherwise he's not going to tell you his version. And,
• 1:14:07
  you know, you want to hear his theory about all
• 1:14:10
  this stuff. And in the course of that, He really
• 1:14:15
  indicts himself. I mean he sort of came into it
• 1:14:17
  with the attitude that he wanted to tell his version
• 1:14:20
  of the story so people would stop thinking he was
• 1:14:22
  a murderer. But during the course of it, he admits
• 1:14:26
  to so many bad things that you just pretty quickly
• 1:14:31
  assume that he is guilty.
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: How old is he when you first started filming him?
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 2: I guess he was in his– He was in his
• 1:14:39
  early 70s.
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: So he's probably already experiencing some kind of cognitive decline.
• 1:14:45
  And then you have the years and years of hiding
• 1:14:48
  all this, which wears on you. Yeah.
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And I do think there was a– I think
• 1:14:53
  he had a compulsion to confess. Yeah.
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: I think most people that aren't complete sociopaths, they get
• 1:15:01
  to a certain point in time where it's almost too
• 1:15:03
  much and they want to tell people. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 2: I mean and that ultimately what happened with him, as
• 1:15:09
  you may remember, is he– we find this evidence. The
• 1:15:16
  evidence I thought was determinative. I thought it was going
• 1:15:19
  to be something that police would ultimately use to convict
• 1:15:22
  him for murder.
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: But we– What was that evidence again?
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 2: So there was a famous note that the killer of
• 1:15:30
  Susan Berman, this friend of Bob Durst in California– had
• 1:15:35
  left behind when he shot Susan Berman. And the note said,
• 1:15:41
  1527 Benedict Canyon, cadaver. And it was sent to the
• 1:15:47
  Beverly Hills Police Department. And that very seldom happens, but
• 1:15:51
  people speculated a lot. Well, why would somebody who killed
• 1:15:54
  somebody have sent a note.
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: To the police?
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 2: Well, maybe if he liked the person, if it was
• 1:15:59
  his best friend, this woman, Susan Berman, and it was
• 1:16:01
  Bob Durst that did it, Then maybe he wouldn't want
• 1:16:04
  her body to lie there and she has dogs. They
• 1:16:07
  didn't want the dogs to mess with the body. So
• 1:16:10
  he may have just killed her and then left this note.
• 1:16:13
  But then later when he was asked about it, he said,
• 1:16:15
  I have no knowledge about that note. So when we're
• 1:16:18
  doing our investigation, we discover a letter that he had
• 1:16:23
  written to Susan Berman that has almost the exact same
• 1:16:26
  words on it because it's addressed to her at 1527
• 1:16:29
  Benedict Canyon. So we can see the handwriting there. On that,
• 1:16:33
  not just a handwriting sample, but a handwriting sample that's
• 1:16:36
  saying exactly what it said on the.
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: Letter that— Right, with the same misspelled words, right?
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 2: Exactly. And he writes, 1527 Benedict Canyon, Beverly Hills, California.
• 1:16:46
  He misspells the word Beverly, puts in an extra E
• 1:16:49
  at the end. And, of course, this letter that we find,
• 1:16:54
  he also misspells the word Beverly. So nobody had ever
• 1:16:59
  seen or the police hadn't known about this letter. So
• 1:17:02
  we find it and then I immediately start planning a
• 1:17:06
  way for me to show it to him in a
• 1:17:07
  second interview. And he had always said to me like, oh,
• 1:17:10
  if you ever need me to sit down again, I'm
• 1:17:12
  happy to come back and I'll ask– I'll answer any
• 1:17:14
  question you want. But I start to call him about
• 1:17:18
  doing the second interview and he gets very skittish. And
• 1:17:21
  then this goes on for two years. And so we
• 1:17:25
  have this evidence, but we need to show it to him.
• 1:17:28
  And I had had done a bunch of research. I
• 1:17:30
  talked to Marcia Clark, for example, you know, who is
• 1:17:33
  smart about how the L.A. district attorney's office works. And
• 1:17:37
  she said, if you had the opportunity to sit down
• 1:17:40
  with him and show him the evidence, do that before
• 1:17:42
  you go to the police, because it's going to be
• 1:17:45
  very the police not going to be able to do
• 1:17:47
  something like that. And he's going to lawyer up. But
• 1:17:49
  you guys, before you're even in contact with law enforcement.
• 1:17:53
  You could show him the evidence and he's going to
• 1:17:54
  have to react to it and I bet it's going
• 1:17:56
  to be interesting. So we finally get him to sit
• 1:17:58
  for the second interview and I show him the evidence
• 1:18:01
  in the interview and he has this incredible meltdown. I
• 1:18:05
  don't know if you remember this, but he starts burping
• 1:18:08
  uncontrollably and he starts rubbing his face and breathing and
• 1:18:13
  he's obviously very, very surprised to see that there's this
• 1:18:18
  letter that matches the cadaver note that he admitted could
• 1:18:22
  only have been written by the killer. So he's sort
• 1:18:24
  of in a, he's trapped. And I finished the interview
• 1:18:29
  with him and he gets up and goes to the
• 1:18:31
  bathroom and he leaves his microphone attached. And while he's
• 1:18:37
  in the bathroom, he confesses to the murder. He's a
• 1:18:40
  guy who talks to himself a lot. And he always
• 1:18:42
  said that to me. He said, oh, sometimes I talk
• 1:18:44
  to myself for long periods of time and I get
• 1:18:46
  in fights with people because they think that I'm hassling them,
• 1:18:49
  but it's just... me. I just talk to myself. So
• 1:18:52
  when he goes in the bathroom, the first thing he
• 1:18:54
  says when he goes in is, there it is. You're caught.
• 1:18:59
  He says that to himself and it's– and then he
• 1:19:06
  goes on to say, killed them all. I killed them all,
• 1:19:08
  of course. And it's such an extraordinary thing to have.
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: Did you have your headphones on while he was doing that? No.
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 2: And that's kind of fascinating. So I didn't know that
• 1:19:21
  he said anything when he went to the bathroom. And
• 1:19:25
  so we're working with the LAPD. We're giving them the
• 1:19:28
  printed evidence, the letter that matches the cadaver note. And
• 1:19:32
  it's a pretty strong case already. And we don't know
• 1:19:36
  that he's said a word in the bathroom. And- It's
• 1:19:40
  not until 26 months later that we have an editor,
• 1:19:46
  Shelby Siegel, who is just going through audio and kind
• 1:19:51
  of cleaning up old tracks because we're getting ready to
• 1:19:54
  deliver the film to HBO. And she sees on the
• 1:20:00
  editing system that there's a little waveform. There's a little
• 1:20:03
  squiggle that shows that there's some audio when he's in
• 1:20:06
  the bathroom. So the problem was that I had a microphone.
• 1:20:10
  There was a microphone in the room and he had
• 1:20:12
  a microphone on. So there's a lot of noise. We're finishing.
• 1:20:15
  I just finished the interview. I'm incredibly excited that I
• 1:20:19
  got him to give this crazy reaction. And it's pretty
• 1:20:22
  obvious that that's going to be part of proving that
• 1:20:25
  he's guilty. And so I'm out there kind of whispering.
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: To the crew.
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 2: There's noise in the room and there's noise.
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: In the bathroom.
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 2: And so she mutes the other microphones. And she hears
• 1:20:36
  him say, there it is, you're caught. And she screams.
• 1:20:41
  And she runs to the next room to where my other,
• 1:20:45
  our main editor was, Zach. And she says, you have
• 1:20:49
  to hear this. And he listens to it. And he says,
• 1:20:51
  wait a minute. I was there that day. And we
• 1:20:54
  have audio that's a continuation of that. That audio stops
• 1:20:59
  at there it is, you're caught. But he was in
• 1:21:02
  the bathroom for seven minutes. So they go and get
• 1:21:06
  the drive that has the other seven minutes of audio
• 1:21:09
  on it and it's this long rambling confession. I come
• 1:21:14
  over and I listen to it and I can't believe
• 1:21:18
  what we're hearing. I mean it was extraordinary. I had
• 1:21:21
  to call the LAPD and the LA district attorney and say, hey,
• 1:21:26
  I know literally two days ago we gave you the documents.
• 1:21:30
  We gave you the letter so that you could start
• 1:21:32
  this prosecution. We found something else. And so they come
• 1:21:36
  to New York and they listen to this confession and
• 1:21:38
  it's just absolutely mind-blowing that that happened. And then when
• 1:21:43
  the film– when the series comes out, we've been working
• 1:21:47
  with the police then for a couple of years while
• 1:21:50
  they were building the prosecution. And when the film finally
• 1:21:53
  comes out, when the series comes out on HBO, he
• 1:21:57
  is arrested the day before the final episode. So it's
• 1:22:01
  in the final episode that he makes that confession and
• 1:22:04
  they arrest him right before because they knew that he
• 1:22:07
  was going to go on the run.
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: Was he aware that you had the audio of the confession?
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 2: I don't think he remembered saying anything. I don't think
• 1:22:14
  he's even all that aware that he sometimes just burbles
• 1:22:18
  out with these.
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: Do you think he started– I mean this is pure speculation.
• 1:22:22
  But do you think he started going crazy after he
• 1:22:24
  started killing people? Just like the ability to– shut that
• 1:22:30
  part of your brain off and put that aside and
• 1:22:33
  lie about it? Just the struggle of having that information
• 1:22:39
  in your head.
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 2: I think the way that he would have thought about it,
• 1:22:45
  you know, from inside the killer, right? He doesn't think
• 1:22:49
  of himself as a murderer, right? Steve Marshall in Alabama
• 1:22:52
  doesn't think of himself as, you know, this incredibly amoral person.
• 1:22:57
  He thinks of himself as law enforcement, right? Bob Durst
• 1:23:00
  thinks of himself as just a guy trying to get along,
• 1:23:03
  you know, like we all are. So I think what
• 1:23:06
  happened was in 1982, he and his wife were having
• 1:23:10
  problems in part, in large part, because he had big
• 1:23:14
  personality problems. I mean, he was a he was not
• 1:23:16
  a he was not an easy person to deal with
• 1:23:18
  at all and was also very spoiled and was also,
• 1:23:22
  you know, had all these resources.
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 2: And had a lot of power over her. And so
• 1:23:27
  I think something happened between the two of them where
• 1:23:30
  they were at their lake house and there was an altercation.
• 1:23:34
  He admitted to me that they had had a pushing
• 1:23:36
  and shoving argument that night. The night she died. Yeah.
• 1:23:43
  And then he says he took her to the train
• 1:23:46
  and sent her into the city. But none of that
• 1:23:48
  makes any sense. So I think what happened was he
• 1:23:52
  either accidentally or semi-accidentally killed her. I think they had
• 1:23:57
  a fight. They ended up getting into some altercation and
• 1:24:00
  she landed on the, you know, maybe on the stone
• 1:24:02
  of the fireplace or something like that. And she was dead.
• 1:24:07
  And then he thought, well, it doesn't make any sense
• 1:24:11
  for two people to go down. I mean, unfortunate that
• 1:24:14
  this had to happen, but I got to get rid
• 1:24:16
  of the body. And so he found a way to
• 1:24:19
  make her disappear. We don't know exactly what happened to her,
• 1:24:22
  but we know that you know, he alleged that he
• 1:24:25
  had put her on the train to go in the
• 1:24:27
  city and they never found the body. So after that,
• 1:24:31
  he's sort of widely believed to be a likely victim
• 1:24:35
  person to have killed his wife. There's no other explanation
• 1:24:38
  for it.
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 1: And how long did it take before they realized the
• 1:24:40
  wife was missing? And when did they determine that she
• 1:24:43
  was dead?
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 2: It was a few days later because he kept sort of,
• 1:24:48
  he held off on telling anyone. And then later he said, oh, Kathy,
• 1:24:52
  you know, I put her on the train to go
• 1:24:54
  in the city and then I haven't heard from her.
• 1:24:56
  What's going on? So he had a bunch of explanations
• 1:25:00
  about why, you know, somehow she had run off with
• 1:25:04
  a drug dealer or she had run off with some
• 1:25:07
  boyfriend or something like that. But none of those really
• 1:25:09
  held water. But it took him a while to report
• 1:25:12
  her missing. He waits five days to report her missing
• 1:25:16
  and does a brilliant thing, which is he reports her
• 1:25:19
  missing in New York City, even though the last time
• 1:25:23
  she's ever seen is in Westchester. So they were at
• 1:25:25
  their house, their lake house in Westchester. She disappears and
• 1:25:29
  he goes into the city five days later and he says, oh,
• 1:25:32
  my wife was at our apartment So he complete– this
• 1:25:35
  is why I'm saying he's very smart. He completely redirects
• 1:25:38
  the police so that they make– because the police aren't
• 1:25:42
  organized for a guy to come in and give a
• 1:25:47
  phony story about what happened to his wife. Most of
• 1:25:49
  the time somebody comes in and says, my wife is
• 1:25:51
  missing and they say, oh, where did you last see her?
• 1:25:53
  Let's help you try to find her. So I think
• 1:25:55
  he was smart enough to flip that on his head
• 1:25:58
  and he says that my wife was in the city.
• 1:26:01
  And so they do their whole investigation in the city.
• 1:26:03
  They don't look at the lake house. They don't figure
• 1:26:05
  out where she really truly might have been.
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: Did they ever do an examination of like a forensic
• 1:26:11
  on the lake house? Yeah, they did.
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 2: And they– it was sort of– because it was so
• 1:26:16
  late in the game, because it had taken so long
• 1:26:19
  for him to report her missing, they didn't find anything
• 1:26:23
  that showed that she had been killed in the house.
• 1:26:28
  And she may very well have been killed somewhere else.
• 1:26:29
  But they never find the body ever. And so her
• 1:26:33
  family is bereft and they don't know what to do.
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: Did he ever confess to that? He didn't.
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 2: But during the course of his interview with me, I mean,
• 1:26:45
  he never did it publicly. But in the bathroom, he says,
• 1:26:50
  killed them all, of course. So he's being accused of
• 1:26:53
  three murders, his wife, his best friend, and his neighbor
• 1:26:56
  in Galveston, who he then cuts up. And his confession
• 1:27:00
  in the bathroom is killed them all, of course. So
• 1:27:02
  I think we, you know, we, I think we know
• 1:27:05
  what happened. We don't know how it happened.
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: Did they find his neighbor's body or his best friend, brother? Yeah.
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 2: His best friend's body was in her house where somebody
• 1:27:13
  shot her. And that's where they left that cadaver note,
• 1:27:16
  the note saying 1527 Benedict Canyon. And then in Galveston,
• 1:27:21
  when his elderly neighbor disappears, the reason they find this
• 1:27:26
  out is because a bunch of black trash bags wash
• 1:27:30
  up in Galveston Bay and a little kid is fishing
• 1:27:34
  with his dad and they see something bobbing around in
• 1:27:37
  the water and they see these bags and the police
• 1:27:40
  come and they look in the bags and there are
• 1:27:41
  all these body parts so he had actually taken off
• 1:27:44
  the legs and the arms and all that so I
• 1:27:47
  mean I think you know I think it's fair to
• 1:27:50
  say that there are people like Bob Durst who need
• 1:27:52
  to be out of society you know and are and
• 1:27:55
  are repeatedly causing problems for others and But that's– as
• 1:28:01
  you say, that's the extraordinarily rare case. And I think
• 1:28:06
  a lot of the sort of tough on crime politicians
• 1:28:08
  will say, so you guys just want to let Jeffrey
• 1:28:11
  Dahmer out on the street? Nobody thinks that. Nobody really
• 1:28:15
  believes that. People are saying, well, no. What we're saying
• 1:28:18
  is that people who are in prison for having entered
• 1:28:21
  an unoccupied building probably never should have been in prison
• 1:28:24
  at all. And the people who are in prison with
• 1:28:27
  good reason because they robbed somebody or something, we don't
• 1:28:30
  necessarily have to believe that those people can never, ever
• 1:28:34
  have a chance to come out of prison and be
• 1:28:36
  productive citizens. You just have to take a nuanced view.
• 1:28:42
  You can't just say, well, they're bad people and they're
• 1:28:43
  good people, especially because we've got so many bad people
• 1:28:45
  walking around and so many good people locked up and
• 1:28:48
  vice versa.
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah. The nuanced part is so important because But the
• 1:28:52
  real question is like what causes so many people to
• 1:28:57
  become bad people and how come no one is examining
• 1:28:59
  the root of this? How come no one is looking
• 1:29:02
  at these deeply impoverished, crime-ridden communities that have remained that
• 1:29:06
  way for decades and decades and decades and offered up
• 1:29:10
  some sort of a solution? It's almost like you have
• 1:29:13
  to financially incentivize a company to radically improve the economic
• 1:29:19
  and the justice system. situation in any random community that's
• 1:29:25
  experiencing a lot of crime. It's almost like you have
• 1:29:27
  to figure out a way to privatize peace and safety.
• 1:29:33
  It's almost like the one way– I mean it's really
• 1:29:38
  what I was saying before. Like imagine if these prison
• 1:29:41
  companies got paid based on the amount of productive citizens
• 1:29:45
  emerge from their prisons and then wind up doing really well.
• 1:29:50
  Like you get incentivized. Like this is– he's never committed
• 1:29:53
  another crime. Now he started his own business. He's doing
• 1:29:56
  this and that. He's got a family. His kids all
• 1:29:58
  get straight A's. Everybody is happy. This is a success
• 1:30:02
  and we got a bonus because of that success. Yeah.
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 2: I mean you're right in a way that it's the
• 1:30:06
  root of some way we are– we sort of are
• 1:30:08
  privatizing it because like in my neighborhood in New York,
• 1:30:13
  there's a group called the Doe Fund, which has been
• 1:30:16
  around for a couple of decades I think. And they–
• 1:30:20
  Take guys who are– who are– have had severe drug addiction,
• 1:30:25
  have ended up in prison and are released and have
• 1:30:30
  no starting place as you were describing. And they give
• 1:30:34
  them a bed. They give them a bank account where
• 1:30:38
  they give them a certain amount of money each week
• 1:30:40
  for working. And it's not a huge amount of money,
• 1:30:43
  but it sort of is the first step toward even
• 1:30:45
  being able to sort of have a checkbook and be
• 1:30:48
  able to say, oh, OK, so I've got $ 100 and
• 1:30:50
  I've spent $ 50 and this is what I have left.
• 1:30:53
  And they give them a job, which is they make
• 1:30:56
  deals with neighborhoods around New York for them to come
• 1:30:58
  and do like street cleaning and clean up the neighborhood.
• 1:31:02
  And they give them a uniform, which is clean, and
• 1:31:04
  they put them out on the street with a big
• 1:31:05
  blue trash bucket and some functional equipment. broom and things
• 1:31:13
  like that. And sometimes they'll put them out in pairs
• 1:31:15
  so that they have, you know, they can work in tandem.
• 1:31:20
  And these neighborhoods become incredibly clean. The guys stay in
• 1:31:25
  this facility for as long as they need to until
• 1:31:28
  they sort of get back on their feet. They can't
• 1:31:30
  do drugs when they're in the facility. So there's a
• 1:31:33
  little bit of tough love going on there too. But
• 1:31:37
  they end up bringing people back. They end up bringing
• 1:31:40
  people back who were otherwise abandoned and who otherwise would
• 1:31:44
  have been additional homeless people lying on the street in
• 1:31:46
  San Francisco or additional people who are bothering people outside
• 1:31:51
  an ATM or whatever because there's a level of desperation
• 1:31:54
  that you have. We all know like if we absolutely
• 1:31:58
  had absolutely nothing and we thought that our kids were
• 1:32:01
  going to starve, we would do a bunch of things
• 1:32:03
  that would probably get us in trouble.
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: 100 percent. Yeah. Taking care of people that are in
• 1:32:11
  that situation and providing them some sort of a vehicle
• 1:32:16
  for improving their life is going to be a good
• 1:32:19
  thing and it's going to have some impact. But the real,
• 1:32:23
  real impact is going to be when you address the
• 1:32:25
  environment in which they came from.
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: Like if, again, if we're our community, if we're this
• 1:32:31
  entire country as a community, why do we have these
• 1:32:34
  places that have been fucked for 50, 60, 70 years? Like,
• 1:32:38
  Why haven't we put resources into community centers and education
• 1:32:42
  and providing some method for these people to get peace
• 1:32:47
  and safety? Why aren't we doing something about that if
• 1:32:49
  we really care?
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 2: Well, there is a lot that can be done. One
• 1:32:55
  of the places, for example, this can be done inside
• 1:32:58
  and outside of prison, obviously, and I think you're pointing
• 1:33:01
  out a really important thing, which is the earlier the better.
• 1:33:05
  So when you look at Head Start programs– which are
• 1:33:08
  one of the first things that people go to cut
• 1:33:10
  because you can't put your finger on exactly what they do.
• 1:33:13
  But if you track people that got early education, you
• 1:33:17
  see that it dramatically reduces the likelihood that those people
• 1:33:22
  are going to go to prison later in life. And
• 1:33:25
  if you look at people who are even in prison,
• 1:33:29
  like in the main state prison system, which is a
• 1:33:31
  very humane prison system, I have pictures on my phone
• 1:33:37
  of Of guys who are sitting at a bench working
• 1:33:41
  on models of tall ships, these beautiful, stunning pieces of
• 1:33:46
  art that they've been trained by other prisoners to build
• 1:33:50
  and they give them a proper workbench and they give
• 1:33:52
  them some time to do this work and they give
• 1:33:55
  them training. And then they sell that stuff in the
• 1:33:58
  prison store and they make a couple million dollars a
• 1:34:01
  year that goes back into rehabilitation programs.
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: Oh, wow. So where people– Is Maine one of the
• 1:34:06
  best places for that?
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 2: I think Maine is the best prison system I've seen
• 1:34:10
  in the US. And partly it's because it's run by
• 1:34:13
  this very brilliant guy. Randy Liberty is his name.
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: That's crazy.
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 2: And he first went to– he first visited the Maine
• 1:34:21
  State Prison when he was 14 because his dad was
• 1:34:24
  locked up there. And later in life, you know, he
• 1:34:27
  became a sheriff. And I think his dad was in
• 1:34:30
  his jail at some point. And it was like, Randy,
• 1:34:32
  get me a coffee.
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: Sorry, dad. That's crazy.
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 2: But over time, he just said, well, why are we
• 1:34:37
  throwing people away when we put them into prison for
• 1:34:40
  having made a mistake of some kind or even a
• 1:34:42
  series of mistakes?
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 2: You know, what can we do to bring these people out?
• 1:34:46
  Because 95 percent of the people are coming out. And,
• 1:34:49
  you know, are these people that we want to be
• 1:34:52
  our neighbors, you know? And that's– this issue of community
• 1:34:56
  is so important because, you know, how are we going
• 1:34:59
  to get back to some kind of brotherhood in this country?
• 1:35:02
  You know, it's so important. And if we can demonize
• 1:35:05
  people so quickly and just say, well, look, my neighbor–
• 1:35:08
  you know, he put his tractor on my lawn and
• 1:35:10
  therefore he's a horrible person and I'm going to go
• 1:35:13
  over and smash his tractor. And, you know, as opposed
• 1:35:15
  to the guy saying, oh, I couldn't put my tractor
• 1:35:16
  in my garage because it had a flood.
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 1: Oh, you had a flood?
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 2: Let me help you. You know, that there's a level of,
• 1:35:22
  you know, rage right now that we're tapping into. It
• 1:35:26
  seems like a higher percentage of the people are like
• 1:35:28
  the martial arts people that are going into it because
• 1:35:32
  of damage that they suffered it's like more Americans are
• 1:35:35
  becoming like that you know more Americans.
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: Are sort of well we're getting radicalized by the internet
• 1:35:40
  for sure yeah 100% on both sides of the aisle
• 1:35:44
  people are being radicalized by hate and anger and frustration
• 1:35:48
  online and a lot of it isn't even real people
• 1:35:51
  that are writing these things or it's state actors and
• 1:35:54
  organizations that push certain narratives and you're being fed a
• 1:35:59
  lot of hate porn And people are sucking it up
• 1:36:04
  and it's highly addictive. So it's consuming an enormous percentage
• 1:36:09
  of your available resources in terms of your attention span.
• 1:36:14
  The people that I know that are addicted to Twitter, X, whatever,
• 1:36:18
  are like genuinely mentally ill. Like whether they realize it
• 1:36:22
  or not because they're still functional, they still do their jobs,
• 1:36:25
  but they are fully addicted to a thing that That
• 1:36:30
  is just people bitching back and forth with each other
• 1:36:33
  and they check responses all the time. They can't wait
• 1:36:36
  to type in another response and they're sitting there looking
• 1:36:38
  at someone else's response and getting angry. It's illness. It's
• 1:36:42
  an illness. It's like this is not in your life.
• 1:36:44
  Like if you put that down and look around, what
• 1:36:47
  do you see? You see the people that you know.
• 1:36:49
  You see the neighborhood that you live in, the stores
• 1:36:52
  that you visit, and none of that exists. It exists now.
• 1:36:56
  In this weird fucking cloud world that you choose to
• 1:37:00
  enter to get upset for no fucking reason. And if
• 1:37:04
  you put it down, you will feel better. But yet
• 1:37:07
  you think you're missing out on something. So you have
• 1:37:09
  to go check it. When you're on the toilet. Well,
• 1:37:11
  I'm on the toilet. What am I going to do?
• 1:37:13
  Let me check to see what people are pissed off at.
• 1:37:15
  And I don't fucking agree with that at all. This
• 1:37:18
  guy's an idiot. And then you're mentally ill. And then
• 1:37:22
  it becomes because we have this bizarre thing. political system
• 1:37:26
  in our country where we have two sides, only two.
• 1:37:29
  We only have two perspectives and then you have a
• 1:37:32
  conglomeration of ideas that are attached to each perspective that
• 1:37:36
  you might not agree with at all but you have
• 1:37:39
  to because you're a right-wing this or a left-wing that.
• 1:37:42
  So you have to say whatever the fucking party wants
• 1:37:45
  you to say and if you don't, you're a Nazi
• 1:37:48
  or if you don't, you're whatever you are, a communist,
• 1:37:50
  whatever it is.
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 2: I loved your– in your comedy special, which was so
• 1:37:55
  fucking funny. And, you know, I'm like a big fan
• 1:37:58
  of comedy. But in your last special, you sort of
• 1:38:01
  talk about how people like sign up for, oh, yeah, well,
• 1:38:04
  I agree with that. That makes perfect sense. Oh, yeah,
• 1:38:06
  I agree with that. Oh, and by the way, if
• 1:38:07
  you're going to agree with that, you know, you're also
• 1:38:09
  going to have to agree that, you know, that– Men
• 1:38:12
  can get pregnant.
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the men can get pregnant. You're like, what?
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 2: Wait, so those are my choices? I have to go
• 1:38:18
  along with like, you know, trans people should be allowed
• 1:38:21
  to be in every sport and it doesn't matter. I
• 1:38:25
  have to go along with that one too if I
• 1:38:26
  want to be part of my tribe? Oh yeah, that's
• 1:38:29
  part of the tribal environment.
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: Ritual.
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 2: You're going to have to sign up for that. I
• 1:38:32
  think it's a really great way of delivering it also
• 1:38:35
  because it makes people laugh at themselves.
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and everybody wants to be on a team. Yeah.
• 1:38:39
  And you're like, you know, oh, we believe that everybody should,
• 1:38:42
  you know, be free to do whatever you want as
• 1:38:44
  long as you're not hurting anybody. I agree, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:38:48
  You start going along with it. This sounds great. Hey,
• 1:38:51
  I'm with you guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 2: And then you're like, oh, fuck.
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 1: That's right. Is this a package deal? I have to– yeah,
• 1:38:58
  and that's what people are agreeing to and then you
• 1:39:00
  get groupthink and then you get also ostracization. You get
• 1:39:03
  ostracized from the community if you don't do it. So
• 1:39:06
  you get kicked out of the kingdom. You don't want that. Yeah.
• 1:39:10
  Because being excommunicated from whatever group that you identify with
• 1:39:14
  is terrifying because then what are you going to do?
• 1:39:16
  Are you going to join the fucking Nazis?
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: I'm going to join those people on the right because
• 1:39:21
  the left kicked me out because I don't think that
• 1:39:23
  men can get pregnant. Maybe I should just apologize. And
• 1:39:27
  then you wind up apologizing for something you don't even
• 1:39:30
  believe in. You're like, God, I can't believe I have
• 1:39:31
  to say this. And it's just– it's a bad way
• 1:39:36
  of communicating. Online communication is a terrible way of communicating.
• 1:39:42
  And it's the primary source that young people experience. Young
• 1:39:45
  people– like my kids they don't even fucking text each
• 1:39:49
  other they snapchat you know they're all snapchatting with pictures
• 1:39:53
  and shit i'm like this is like the minimal amount
• 1:39:56
  of communication you can do and when they have to
• 1:40:00
  talk to people just put their phone down and talk
• 1:40:03
  to people they're lost they're always like reaching for their
• 1:40:05
  phone oh yeah they always want to grab their phone
• 1:40:07
  in the middle of utah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
• 1:40:09
  they have to check like it's like you're actually distracted. Yeah.
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah. It's going to get worse, I think, when you
• 1:40:14
  have glasses and you could be walking down the street
• 1:40:17
  or you can meet somebody and be like, hi, Joe.
• 1:40:20
  So when you went to college at and then you learned,
• 1:40:24
  you know, it's like they're there. This idea that the
• 1:40:26
  information is more available and therefore it's better. My kids
• 1:40:30
  are like constantly deleting Instagram or deleting TikTok.
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of kids are doing that now. Yeah.
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 2: And then it comes back for some reason or they'll say, well,
• 1:40:40
  I felt like I needed to do this or whatever.
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 1: FOMO.
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 2: But it's very encouraging to see them recognize that you
• 1:40:47
  have to go cold turkey on social media.
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: Well, that narrative is out there. Fortunately for a lot
• 1:40:54
  of kids, Twitter, which I think is maybe the most
• 1:40:57
  toxic in terms of what it can do. Most beneficial
• 1:41:01
  in terms of like whistleblowers, getting news. Like if anything
• 1:41:03
  is happening in the world, I almost immediately go to Twitter.
• 1:41:07
  It used to be a little better for that because
• 1:41:10
  now part of the problem is with AI-generated content. There's
• 1:41:15
  a lot of weird stuff when it comes to like
• 1:41:18
  especially war stuff. There's a lot of videos that are
• 1:41:21
  just completely fake and it's hard to tell. Or they
• 1:41:23
  take a video that is real and highly exaggerated and
• 1:41:28
  they add AI to it. It's very strange and you've
• 1:41:31
  got to wonder like who's doing that and why are
• 1:41:33
  they doing this? Is this our government doing it? Is
• 1:41:36
  it the Iranian government? Who's fucking– who's releasing these fake videos?
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 2: And are we doing it to ourselves by the way?
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 1: A hundred percent. A lot of people are doing that
• 1:41:44
  just for clicks because there is an actual economy based
• 1:41:48
  on engagement. So you can make money if you're putting
• 1:41:53
  up these posts and these posts are getting millions and
• 1:41:54
  millions of interactions. You're going to get more money. And
• 1:41:57
  so there's a lot of people doing that. So it
• 1:41:59
  used to be better because it used to be just
• 1:42:01
  pure information. And if it was a video, it was
• 1:42:04
  just a video that someone took with their cell phone generally.
• 1:42:07
  Now it's like a lot of weirdo stuff, a lot
• 1:42:10
  of weird fake stuff. So it's hard.
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 2: Also, there was a piece in the paper today that
• 1:42:14
  talked about how like Trump gets like a few-minute video
• 1:42:19
  every day that's a compilation of all the attacks and
• 1:42:22
  all the explosions that have happened in Iran. But he's
• 1:42:27
  not getting a more nuanced picture of it. So to
• 1:42:30
  some extent, he's kind of drinking his own Kool-Aid.
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 1: How do they know what he gets?
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 2: I think that there was enough of a leak to
• 1:42:38
  say that he was given a– that each day he's
• 1:42:41
  given a chunk of video to watch. And that I
• 1:42:43
  think historically has been something that happens with him is
• 1:42:46
  he'd rather watch it than read it, right? And that
• 1:42:49
  by putting together just– It's not even that they're saying
• 1:42:52
  they're fake videos. I mean, obviously, there are a lot
• 1:42:54
  of fake videos.
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: But he's only getting the positive videos.
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 2: He's just getting explosions.
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 2: He's just getting a lot of pictures of explosions. So
• 1:43:00
  he's saying, you know, we're destroying their.
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: Here it is. Inside Trump's daily video montage briefing on
• 1:43:07
  the Iran war. This is NBC News. The montage typically
• 1:43:10
  runs for about two minutes. That's enough time to give
• 1:43:13
  you a nuanced perspective on a fucking international war. has
• 1:43:16
  raised concerns amongst those of the president's allies that he
• 1:43:20
  may not be receiving the complete picture of the war. Yeah. Yeah,
• 1:43:25
  of course he's not.
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: And, of course, the people that tricked him into doing
• 1:43:29
  this in the first place don't want him to get
• 1:43:31
  a full nuanced perspective of the war. I mean, nobody
• 1:43:36
  thinks it's a good idea. Yeah.
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 2: The people he videos a series of clips of stuff
• 1:43:40
  blowing up.
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: Hilarious. That's the world we're living in. It's a TikTok president.
• 1:43:45
  Or a TikTok briefing for the president.
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 2: But video– I mean what we saw in Alabama– and
• 1:43:51
  I know you have some clips of this and I
• 1:43:53
  think if you feel like running one, there's– the level
• 1:43:58
  of depravity that's going on in our prison system is
• 1:44:04
  so much higher. than the average person thinks it is.
• 1:44:07
  And one of the reasons why we've seen so much
• 1:44:09
  outrage from people, finally millions of people have seen the
• 1:44:12
  Alabama Solution because people have HBO or they have watched
• 1:44:14
  it in theater. And it's the first time they've been
• 1:44:17
  able to see inside. It's the first time they've been
• 1:44:19
  able to really see it as opposed to reading a
• 1:44:21
  statistic about a lot of people die in prison or whatever.
• 1:44:25
  And I think it does tap into our sense of
• 1:44:28
  humanity and it taps into our sense of community and
• 1:44:31
  the feeling that Like, I don't want to be a
• 1:44:33
  part of that. I don't want to be part of
• 1:44:35
  doing that to other people. You know, I could be
• 1:44:38
  tough on crime. You know, we've shown the film to
• 1:44:40
  a lot of conservative viewers, including one of the founders
• 1:44:45
  of CPAC and various people who are, you know, pretty
• 1:44:48
  right-wing people and have said, look, I might be tough
• 1:44:52
  on crime. That's not what I'm talking about. That's a
• 1:44:56
  human rights crisis. And where's the DOJ and where's the government?
• 1:45:00
  doing anything to protect.
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: Where are the inspectors? Yeah. How are they allowing any
• 1:45:04
  of that? Yeah.
• 1:45:06
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 1:45:06
  Speaker 1: Well, that's one of the great things about your documentary
• 1:45:10
  is it's clear. I mean, there's no ambiguity at all.
• 1:45:15
  It's like laid out there, full color. You could see
• 1:45:19
  the blood on the ground. You could see, I mean,
• 1:45:22
  it's horrific. When kinetic justice, when that guy's beaten in
• 1:45:26
  his cell and you see how they dragged him out,
• 1:45:29
  face his face down bleeding all they thought he was
• 1:45:32
  dead and he managed to live and he's being dragged
• 1:45:37
  out and you're following the blood trail from his cell
• 1:45:41
  with the contraband cameras from the cell phones and had
• 1:45:45
  those cell phone cameras not existed you'd have zero idea
• 1:45:50
  like if those guards only decided to sell money bringing
• 1:45:54
  drugs in and not not phones with cameras who knows
• 1:45:59
  what you would know. You would know very little. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:46:02
  And it does.
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I would like to believe that
• 1:46:06
  the average American does not want to harm the average
• 1:46:09
  other American, you know, and even if you get hyped
• 1:46:12
  up on Twitter or you get to see, you know,
• 1:46:15
  too many videos of people blowing up stuff or whatever,
• 1:46:19
  ultimately people have that experience of saying, you know, I
• 1:46:22
  went to that like coffee at the church and I
• 1:46:26
  sat there with that guy who I've really can't stand. And,
• 1:46:28
  you know, we ended up having a conversation, you know,
• 1:46:31
  people are, are, they're kind of amazed at how much
• 1:46:36
  commonality they can feel with people where if they just
• 1:46:39
  see the person, I mean, we all know, like if
• 1:46:40
  you text somebody, your kids or your wife or whatever,
• 1:46:46
  there's just some places where texts are not good. It's
• 1:46:50
  not enough. It's not enough. It's going to make somebody's
• 1:46:52
  feelings hurt. You know, But when you get to sit
• 1:46:56
  down across from somebody, you realize that it's another person
• 1:47:00
  you can kind of relate to. So it's really disturbing
• 1:47:04
  that whether it's social media or just the demonization of people,
• 1:47:09
  the way that we just turn people into these one-dimensional
• 1:47:12
  figures and then we could just rage at them and
• 1:47:15
  just hate them.
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: And distract yourself from your own problems. That's a big
• 1:47:19
  part of it. People love something that takes the focus
• 1:47:22
  away from whatever shortcomings they have or whatever things in
• 1:47:25
  their life they don't like. They'll focus on external things.
• 1:47:28
  I know some people whose lives are completely fucked up
• 1:47:32
  in so many ways. Their health is fucked up. Their
• 1:47:34
  relationships are fucked up. Their job is fucked up. And
• 1:47:37
  all they want to talk about is politics. Like, hey, man,
• 1:47:40
  clean up your backyard. Clean up your life. Why are
• 1:47:44
  you spending so much time paying attention to what's going
• 1:47:47
  on with USAID? How much does that affect you? Does it?
• 1:47:51
  Does it really affect you that much? All this fucking fraud. Right.
• 1:47:54
  But what about your life, man? Your life is a
• 1:47:57
  fucking disaster. And all you care about is the government,
• 1:48:02
  you know, and what they're doing to fuck the people over. Like,
• 1:48:05
  I don't think that's really the problem. I think you
• 1:48:08
  you're getting in your own way, son. You know, and
• 1:48:11
  that's a lot of people out there in this world.
• 1:48:13
  And anything that you do to distract yourself, whether it's
• 1:48:16
  start drinking, gamble, get on pills, whatever it is, people
• 1:48:20
  find ways to distract themselves from whatever is wrong with
• 1:48:24
  their life. And that's part of what social media is
• 1:48:27
  providing you. It's providing this alternative avenue for your attention
• 1:48:32
  to divert you from all the things that really are
• 1:48:35
  making your life a fucking disaster. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 2: There's also that– I think sort of nuance falls into
• 1:48:40
  that also because people are made calm by the idea
• 1:48:46
  that they can just identify problems and that they're simple, right?
• 1:48:50
  So if you say to somebody, hey, like locking people
• 1:48:53
  up for 75 years probably doesn't make a lot of sense,
• 1:48:56
  that's complicated. Wait, now I got to make a determination
• 1:49:00
  of what's the right thing to do with another person
• 1:49:02
  and– So you end up with a lot of politicians
• 1:49:06
  who say, well, I know. This is– these are the
• 1:49:08
  bad people. These are the good people. We got to
• 1:49:10
  promote the good people and get rid of the bad people.
• 1:49:13
  Not recognizing that like everybody is a little of both
• 1:49:16
  and that some people certainly do a lot more bad
• 1:49:18
  stuff in the world than good stuff and vice versa.
• 1:49:21
  But you have to see yourself. As you're describing, like
• 1:49:25
  you have to recognize what's happening in your backyard in
• 1:49:28
  order for the community to work. You can't say, well, look,
• 1:49:31
  I'm always right. My neighbor is always wrong. And therefore,
• 1:49:35
  I'm just going to keep raging over this. You have
• 1:49:37
  to say like, you know, I could see myself doing something.
• 1:49:41
  I could see myself. Boy, if I really got out
• 1:49:44
  of hand, I could see myself having a, you know,
• 1:49:47
  taking a swing at somebody. And it's probably not a
• 1:49:50
  good thing. But I don't want to say that somebody
• 1:49:52
  else that did it is automatically just a horrible person.
• 1:49:56
  And that's why, you know, if you see this attorney
• 1:49:59
  general in Alabama, you know, this idea that He says
• 1:50:03
  there are these horrible people in the world, people who
• 1:50:05
  have no respect for human life, and yet he's presiding
• 1:50:09
  over 1,500 of them dying. But he doesn't imagine that
• 1:50:12
  he's part of the problem.
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: Respect for human life while human life is dying in
• 1:50:17
  these places where people are taken if they show no
• 1:50:20
  respect for human life. And they're being killed by the
• 1:50:22
  people who are watching over them. Yeah.
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 2: So it's a very topsy-turvy kind of world. And also
• 1:50:28
  cruelty plays a part in it. You know– We know
• 1:50:31
  that if you– sometimes we say about this film that
• 1:50:35
  it's about what we do to each other when no
• 1:50:37
  one is watching. Like all human beings have a little
• 1:50:41
  bit of a propensity to want to put a firecracker
• 1:50:44
  in a frog's mouth and just see what happens. There's
• 1:50:47
  a level of cruelty that I think we have intrinsically.
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 1: You certainly want to other a person, right? Absolutely.
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 2: And that's to some extent why– when it's exposed, right?
• 1:51:00
  When there's transparency, when the press is allowed to report
• 1:51:03
  on what's happening inside prisons, people kind of get a
• 1:51:07
  conscience because they start realizing, eh, I wouldn't want to
• 1:51:10
  do that in front of my kid, or I wouldn't
• 1:51:11
  want to do that if it ends up in the paper.
• 1:51:13
  I wouldn't want to, you know, and I think that
• 1:51:16
  is kind of a balancing effect, which is one of
• 1:51:18
  the reasons why this like war on, you know, on,
• 1:51:22
  on transparency is a It's a huge problem, right? We're
• 1:51:26
  not allowed to see what's happening in prisons even though
• 1:51:28
  we're paying for them. The Supreme Court had this ruling
• 1:51:32
  that said that wardens could deny access to journalists simply
• 1:51:37
  by citing safety and security. But meantime, the last 20 years,
• 1:51:42
  no journalist has been harmed inside a prison. So who's
• 1:51:45
  all the secrecy keeping safe, right? We're sort of perpetuating
• 1:51:50
  the system. Our job going into the Alabama state prison
• 1:51:54
  system was to shine a light on that. It shouldn't
• 1:51:56
  be that these guys who are incarcerated have to take
• 1:51:59
  life and death risks using contraband cell phones to show
• 1:52:03
  what's happening in institutions that I'm paying for and you're
• 1:52:05
  paying for. We're spending $ 116 billion a year in the
• 1:52:11
  United States on prisons, jails, parole. That is an insane number.
• 1:52:18
  And- if we're spending that much money, we should sort
• 1:52:22
  of know what every one of those dollars is going to.
• 1:52:25
  And we should have watchdogs who will say, Hey, guess what?
• 1:52:28
  In Alabama, they're supposed to be paying for a drug
• 1:52:30
  treatment program. We don't know where the money's going.
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 1: Right. You know? Yeah. Transparency is always good, especially in
• 1:52:36
  something like that. I mean, to me, the idea of
• 1:52:40
  preventing journalists from it, it almost is akin to these
• 1:52:44
  ag gag laws that, That they've slapped in states that
• 1:52:47
  have factory farming to prevent people from filming the horrific
• 1:52:51
  treatment of some of these animals because they would be
• 1:52:54
  bad for business, which is fucking crazy. Like it should
• 1:52:57
  be bad for business and people shouldn't tolerate it. They
• 1:53:00
  should take their business elsewhere, which is what transparency is
• 1:53:02
  all about. You don't want to buy chickens from a
• 1:53:04
  place that brutally beats their chickens or pigs or whatever
• 1:53:08
  it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 2: And I mean– and a lot of people say, oh, well,
• 1:53:12
  it's going to upset– we don't need to upset the public.
• 1:53:15
  What are you doing something for inside a slaughterhouse that
• 1:53:20
  would upset the public? Like there are ways to– if
• 1:53:23
  you want to euthanize an animal or something like that,
• 1:53:25
  there are ways to do it where you're not using
• 1:53:27
  like a bolt and smashing your skull with it.
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: Well, the bolt is actually the most humane way. It
• 1:53:32
  kind of instantaneously kills them. The other way is when
• 1:53:35
  they hang them by their ankles and slip their neck.
• 1:53:37
  That's a little rougher. But that's if you want kosher.
• 1:53:41
  There's a lot of weird ways that they kill animals.
• 1:53:44
  But it's really the beating and it's the horrific torture
• 1:53:48
  that the cruel people that work there sometimes do because
• 1:53:52
  there's been some videos that have been released of people
• 1:53:54
  like beating animals with crowbars and stuff for no fucking reason.
• 1:53:58
  Just sadistic, sick people that just happen to work in
• 1:54:02
  these places. They become very accustomed to treating these animals
• 1:54:05
  badly just like security guards become very accustomed to. To
• 1:54:09
  treating prisoners badly. It's kind of– I totally agree.
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 2: And just imagine what would happen if– what if Tyson
• 1:54:19
  Foods or any of these companies just– the policy was
• 1:54:22
  just if the press wants to come in and photograph
• 1:54:25
  and the press wants to come in and write about it,
• 1:54:26
  they're allowed to come in once a week or whatever
• 1:54:28
  and– Just do whatever they want.
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 1: Well, it should be non-negotiable. It should be a part
• 1:54:32
  of the ability to run a facility like that because
• 1:54:35
  of the consequences. Because if you don't do that, there
• 1:54:38
  is the potential for you being a horrific abuser of animals.
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 2: Of course.
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 1: And nobody wants to buy your chicken or your pork
• 1:54:44
  or whatever it is if you're doing that. And we
• 1:54:48
  should know.
• 1:54:48
  Speaker 2: But like criminalizing taking video of animals being abused. Crazy.
• 1:54:55
  Like how could you justify that?
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 1: You would only do it if you value profit over ethics,
• 1:55:01
  over morals. That's the only thing. If profit is more
• 1:55:04
  important than educating people on the horrific nature of how
• 1:55:09
  these animals are treated. It's more important– well, what's really
• 1:55:12
  important is we have cheap bacon. OK. Yeah.
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 2: But it is a big– it's like a big tapestry
• 1:55:18
  because the diffusion of responsibility figures into it.
• 1:55:21
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:55:21
  Speaker 2: And the perverting effect of money figures into it. But
• 1:55:26
  it's a very– I mean I.
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: Think there's– Just being accustomed to horrors. I knew a
• 1:55:32
  guy who worked at a slaughterhouse and he told me
• 1:55:36
  like you never get the smell of blood off of you.
• 1:55:39
  And he goes– and you never get– just like the
• 1:55:43
  image of animals dying. He goes, you got to understand
• 1:55:45
  like if you're working at a slaughterhouse, you're seeing who
• 1:55:48
  knows how many thousands of cows die a week. Just thousands.
• 1:55:53
  Just thousands of death, constant death. Most farmers never saw that.
• 1:55:59
  Like the way people used to raise animals for food,
• 1:56:03
  you know, you would kill a cow and you would
• 1:56:06
  eat it for six months. You know what I mean?
• 1:56:09
  Like you could kill the occasional chicken. You weren't seeing
• 1:56:15
  thousands of dead animals a week. You weren't like seeing
• 1:56:19
  thousands of them get disemboweled a week. It's like after
• 1:56:22
  a while, like, And you're in a factory. They're going
• 1:56:25
  by on hooks on a conveyor belt. What are we doing?
• 1:56:29
  This is crazy.
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 2: I went to visit a prison. I went sort of
• 1:56:33
  on a series of prison visits in Berlin and Norway
• 1:56:36
  and a few other places. And I was there with
• 1:56:40
  this sort of elderly woman that was like a deputy commissioner,
• 1:56:44
  I think, in North Carolina in the prison system, Virginia, Ginny.
• 1:56:49
  And I loved her. She was so smart. And the
• 1:56:51
  first thing they do is they bring you to a
• 1:56:54
  concentration camp. So they bring you to Sachsenhausen before they
• 1:56:59
  take you to the prisons to see how the prisons
• 1:57:00
  are run. And we're standing there in this concentration camp
• 1:57:04
  with the guide. And the woman says, well, this is
• 1:57:08
  where they would bring in the people on the trains
• 1:57:11
  and then they would take them out. And then this
• 1:57:13
  is where they would, you know, shave their heads and
• 1:57:16
  then they would strip them down and they would spray
• 1:57:18
  them with fire hoses and water, and then they would
• 1:57:20
  put powder, disinfectant powder on them. They would take away
• 1:57:23
  all of their, you know, any kind of distinguishing marks
• 1:57:28
  that put them all in the same outfit. And they
• 1:57:31
  would give them a number instead of their name. They
• 1:57:33
  would be, you know, and everybody started looking at it
• 1:57:35
  like very disturbed. And Ginny leans over to me and
• 1:57:38
  she says, you know, Andrew, we do every one of
• 1:57:42
  those things in our prisons today. And you realize that
• 1:57:47
  this This dehumanization, this homogenization, this like making everybody look
• 1:57:53
  the same is part of just desensitizing us to what
• 1:57:57
  we're going to do to those people because they just
• 1:57:59
  look like they're– look like bad people because that's what
• 1:58:03
  happens when you shave your head and you're pale and
• 1:58:05
  you have the same outfit and you look like a convict.
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 1: You've turned them into another. Yeah.
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 2: You've turned them into another.
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 1: And because of the tribal nature of ancient human civilization,
• 1:58:15
  we have almost like a deep-seated DNA that allows us
• 1:58:20
  to other people because those people were coming and they
• 1:58:22
  were going to kill your tribal members and steal your
• 1:58:26
  resources and do whatever they could to the survivors, and
• 1:58:30
  it was all horrific. And so we have this thing
• 1:58:33
  that we're able to do that allows us to attack
• 1:58:36
  or to go after people and just to not think
• 1:58:39
  of them as your brothers and sisters and neighbors and
• 1:58:42
  fellow human beings sharing this wonderful spinning ball. No. These
• 1:58:46
  are evil people. These are others. You kill them. These
• 1:58:49
  are fill in the blank. These are the Japanese. These
• 1:58:52
  are the Germans. These are the this. These are the that.
• 1:58:55
  Whatever it is that we're at war with, Those are
• 1:58:57
  the people that are not us and we kill them.
• 1:59:00
  And that's how you feel about prisoners. And then there's
• 1:59:03
  the other side where you go too far the other
• 1:59:06
  way and you have these crazy no cash bail policies
• 1:59:10
  where you've got violent offenders in and out of jail constantly.
• 1:59:15
  You've got people that have been arrested 40 times, pushing
• 1:59:19
  old people in front of the train in New York City.
• 1:59:23
  You've got people that are just like mentally ill, violent criminals,
• 1:59:26
  punching women on the street in Seattle. And they just
• 1:59:29
  keep getting out of jail. And you go, how is
• 1:59:31
  this possible? How is this OK, too? Yeah. Because that's
• 1:59:35
  not good either.
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 1: You can't.
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 2: But I think to the extent to the extent to
• 1:59:40
  which we could get everybody, which only is going to
• 1:59:45
  happen in little bits and little areas where we can
• 1:59:48
  make an impact. But we're trying. to say, well, look,
• 1:59:53
  it shouldn't be that everybody who says that we shouldn't
• 1:59:58
  be running our prison industrial complex the way we are
• 2:00:02
  is soft on crime. It's okay to be tough on crime.
• 2:00:06
  It's okay to recognize that some people need to be
• 2:00:08
  separated out from society. But if it becomes so polarized,
• 2:00:16
  then you get the progressive DA saying, There are some
• 2:00:20
  very smart ones and then you get some who are
• 2:00:23
  just saying, well, we just should abolish prisons and therefore
• 2:00:26
  we don't need any of this and that scares everybody
• 2:00:29
  and probably doesn't lead to any level because we all
• 2:00:31
  want public safety. Like everybody wants to be serious about
• 2:00:34
  public safety. That's different than being tough on crime.
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 1: Well, it's also like if you're not addressing the root
• 2:00:41
  of crime, if you're not addressing the– again, the same
• 2:00:45
  neighborhoods where it happens over and over and over. You
• 2:00:48
  don't have like this rampant crime that's developing in Beverly Hills, right?
• 2:00:52
  It's all happening in these impoverished gang-infested neighborhoods. Like why
• 2:00:57
  has there been no resources put into that? Imagine the
• 2:01:01
  amount of return that you would get. Like I always
• 2:01:04
  say if you want to make America great again, here's
• 2:01:06
  the best way. Have less losers. How do you have
• 2:01:09
  less losers? Give more people an opportunity to succeed. Well,
• 2:01:13
  it's not like we're all at the same starting block.
• 2:01:16
  We all know that. No one will say that. No
• 2:01:19
  one will say everybody is at the same line and
• 2:01:21
  how you get by in this life is depending upon
• 2:01:24
  how much work you put in once you're at the line. Well,
• 2:01:26
  that's not true. So how do we figure out these
• 2:01:30
  people that are at the farthest end of the starting line,
• 2:01:33
  the most fucked? Put some money into that. Fix that.
• 2:01:38
  Put some engineering into that. Put some actual thought in
• 2:01:43
  trying to devise some sort of a method to increase
• 2:01:48
  the odds of having more productive people come out of
• 2:01:52
  these places and give them hope. And you would have
• 2:01:55
  better neighbors. You would have more people that are thriving
• 2:01:59
  in whatever business, more people that are artists, more people
• 2:02:02
  in the economy. The world would be a better place.
• 2:02:04
  Like why wouldn't you invest in that? Well, because there's
• 2:02:08
  no money in it. You have to spend money on it.
• 2:02:11
  Speaker 2: Or there's money in it but nobody really wants to
• 2:02:15
  do the work to figure out.
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 1: There's money in it but you can't make that money.
• 2:02:18
  They're going to make that money, right? You're going to
• 2:02:20
  help people make money and it will contribute to the GDP.
• 2:02:23
  It will contribute to the tax base, to the overall economy.
• 2:02:26
  But it's not a business where you can like say, oh,
• 2:02:29
  if I get into that business of helping people, I
• 2:02:31
  can get rich. And that's the problem. Yeah.
• 2:02:35
  Speaker 2: I mean, if you try to make the, if every,
• 2:02:37
  if the, if the, if the, you know, the ultimate
• 2:02:41
  adjudicator of everything is whether it is turning a profit,
• 2:02:46
  you know, you sort of race to the bottom, right?
• 2:02:48
  Everybody's sort of, nobody really wants to do anything smart.
• 2:02:52
  They just want to do things that enable them to
• 2:02:54
  get the most money the quickest. But ultimately, right now,
• 2:02:58
  spending $ 116 billion a year on our prison system, you know,
• 2:03:04
  we've got Five percent of the world's population. We've got 20,
• 2:03:07
  25 percent of the world's prisoners.
• 2:03:09
  Speaker 1: Crazy.
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 2: Like this fucking wild. What a wild statement. Yeah, it's incredible.
• 2:03:15
  Speaker 1: That's a broken society. Like if that's not evidence of
• 2:03:19
  a broken society. Look, not like it's better in some
• 2:03:23
  of these other places that don't have a high percentage
• 2:03:25
  of people because they just kill them. There's a lot
• 2:03:27
  of places where you do something bad. They just kill you.
• 2:03:30
  There's no thinking about, you know.
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 2: But I mean in terms of like modern civilized society,
• 2:03:37
  we don't do this well. No.
• 2:03:39
  Speaker 1: We don't rehabilitate well. That's for damn sure.
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 2: We don't– as you're saying, we don't invest in kids.
• 2:03:45
  We don't– like how are we in a situation where
• 2:03:49
  we are– paying teachers so little money that they have
• 2:03:54
  to use their own money to buy books and school supplies.
• 2:03:59
  We're beating the shit out of our teachers who are
• 2:04:02
  the people that are going to turn our kids into
• 2:04:04
  part of our community. How can we be surprised we
• 2:04:07
  don't have a community?
• 2:04:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's almost like it's a conspiracy. I mean that's–
• 2:04:10
  you realize why people slap that tinfoil hat on and
• 2:04:13
  tighten it down with a chin because like at a
• 2:04:15
  certain point on, like why wouldn't we put more money
• 2:04:18
  into schools? It seems kind of crazy. When you've got–
• 2:04:22
  like in California, they've got programs that like spend hundreds
• 2:04:25
  of billions of dollars and go nowhere. Like where's the railroad?
• 2:04:29
  You spend so much money. Where's all the tiny houses?
• 2:04:32
  Didn't you guys get hundreds of millions of dollars for
• 2:04:34
  tiny– where the fuck is the tiny houses? No tiny houses?
• 2:04:37
  It's like not a one tiny house has been built.
• 2:04:40
  There's a lot of that stuff, the 24 billion to
• 2:04:43
  the homeless, the homeless people increase. Like imagine if they
• 2:04:45
  put 24 billion into the education system. Guess what? you
• 2:04:50
  would probably ultimately wind up with less homeless. If you
• 2:04:54
  put $ 24 billion into education and community centers, God, imagine
• 2:04:59
  the work that you could do in California with $ 24
• 2:05:01
  billion just in education. California would have the greatest education
• 2:05:06
  system in the country. If you just paid teachers an
• 2:05:09
  exorbitant amount a month, amount a year, had fantastic oversight,
• 2:05:14
  these incredibly well-structured education systems, great counseling, social workers that
• 2:05:20
  can help work with kids, people that can give them
• 2:05:23
  productive ways to expel some of this excess energy that
• 2:05:26
  they have, figure out how to focus, figure out what
• 2:05:29
  kind of jobs they maybe excel at based on their
• 2:05:32
  personality type, educate them towards that. You could get a
• 2:05:37
  lot done. You could get so much done with $ 24 billion. Instead,
• 2:05:42
  it just disappears like Kaiser Sosae. There's fucking– no one
• 2:05:48
  knows where it went. There's no accountability. They veto. Everybody
• 2:05:51
  tries to put an audit on it. Yeah.
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 2: How did Alabama's prisons go from $ 300 million for one
• 2:05:58
  to $ 1. 3 billion? And they described it as inflation.
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 1: And no one's like– no one's investigated. No one's going
• 2:06:04
  to jail. No one– like fuck you.
• 2:06:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:06:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 2: I mean there's– and I think that when you say
• 2:06:13
  it's a conspiracy, I really believe that You know, conspiracies
• 2:06:17
  do not have to include people in dark back rooms, right?
• 2:06:22
  It's very often just everybody sitting around the table. Everybody
• 2:06:24
  knows what the motivation is and they just go, OK,
• 2:06:27
  I'll do the thing. You do the thing. There's not–
• 2:06:30
  nobody has to be rubbing their hands together and having
• 2:06:33
  secret meetings. They all know what's in their financial interest.
• 2:06:37
  Speaker 1: Well, clearly if you beat prisoners to death and then
• 2:06:40
  lie about it and you all agree that you're going
• 2:06:42
  to lie about it, you're conspiring, right? Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:06:45
  Speaker 2: I mean that happens obviously all the time.
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 1: Clearly.
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 2: There are meetings like that all the time.
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 1: Clearly.
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 2: But I think there's an insidious element to the fact
• 2:06:52
  that people are agreeing that $ 24 billion should be spent
• 2:06:59
  on X, Y, or Z. Nobody really needs to get
• 2:07:02
  like a secret memo saying how they're going to steal
• 2:07:04
  that money. Like they just go, okay, in Alabama, what now?
• 2:07:07
  We're allowed to spend $ 1. 3 billion on one prison?
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 1: Great. Okay. Okay.
• 2:07:12
  Speaker 2: Well, I'm not personally taking the $ 1. 3– I'm not personally
• 2:07:15
  taking the billion-dollar overage myself. But it's going into the system.
• 2:07:19
  Speaker 1: The way that– Well, your first red flag is they
• 2:07:22
  start construction before the deal is even signed. They already start.
• 2:07:27
  So the fix is in. They know what's going on. Look,
• 2:07:30
  I grew up in Boston and Boston was a part
• 2:07:33
  of the most corrupt construction site in the history of
• 2:07:36
  the country, the Big Dig.
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 2: Big Dig, right.
• 2:07:39
  Speaker 1: Fucking thing was supposed to take. Like, I don't know
• 2:07:41
  how long it was supposed to take, but it went
• 2:07:44
  on long after I moved out and then came back
• 2:07:47
  to Boston like 10 years later. It was still going on.
• 2:07:50
  I'm like, this is crazy. Yeah. And by the time
• 2:07:53
  it did it, the population in Boston increased, so it
• 2:07:55
  didn't even really alleviate traffic. But there's always going to
• 2:08:00
  be stuff like that. If you have no oversight or
• 2:08:02
  if you have people that can figure out a way
• 2:08:05
  to inflate this and add on to that and da-da-da-da-da-da,
• 2:08:09
  next thing you know it.
• 2:08:11
  Speaker 2: Well, the press is extremely important, which is why government,
• 2:08:16
  this government or prior government, they don't like the press.
• 2:08:19
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 2: Nobody likes getting in trouble because the press does when
• 2:08:23
  it operates at its best. And when you have the
• 2:08:28
  people that are able to make a living being journalists
• 2:08:31
  and you're not firing everybody who's a good investigative reporter,
• 2:08:35
  then that should be. It's one of the reasons why
• 2:08:37
  the country was founded in that way, why freedom of
• 2:08:40
  the press is so important, is because it's the only disinfectant.
• 2:08:45
  It's the only way. And it doesn't mean people don't
• 2:08:47
  use the press in malevolent ways or people don't.
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 1: Bullshit in the press. Of course. People bullshit everything. Yeah.
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 2: But like the public kind of has a sense or
• 2:08:55
  at least used to have a sense and hopefully will
• 2:08:57
  again that when somebody does an investigative story and they
• 2:09:02
  are able to produce the facts and figure out who's
• 2:09:05
  really responsible for a certain kind of.
• 2:09:07
  Speaker 1: Corruption, that it reduces the corruption.
• 2:09:10
  Speaker 2: Just is the case. And it's like you can't really
• 2:09:13
  regulate it or you can regulate it. But if you
• 2:09:15
  regulate it, nobody's paying attention to it. then the press
• 2:09:18
  has to identify that people are breaking the rules. The
• 2:09:21
  DOJ right now is supposed to be the monitor of
• 2:09:29
  making sure that government institutions and others don't defy the Constitution, right?
• 2:09:35
  So in Alabama, clearly, every time you see one of
• 2:09:38
  these events that happens in our film, those are all crimes.
• 2:09:42
  Those are being committed by a state actor by a
• 2:09:46
  prison guard, right? Those are crimes being committed against our
• 2:09:49
  fellow citizens. The fact that some of these people are
• 2:09:51
  incarcerated doesn't mean they're also supposed to be killed or named, right?
• 2:09:56
  And so who really monitors that is the U.S. Department
• 2:09:59
  of Justice because at the end of the day, their
• 2:10:01
  job is to maintain a constitutional level of care. And
• 2:10:06
  it's not, by the way, that's not that great, right?
• 2:10:08
  It's like you have to make sure that there's no
• 2:10:10
  cruel and unusual punishment. Well, clearly in Alabama, there is.
• 2:10:14
  Speaker 1: Well, they started Which is really crazy. During the strike,
• 2:10:18
  they were giving them like a tiny ration.
• 2:10:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:10:21
  Speaker 1: Sometimes no food for days. Yeah.
• 2:10:24
  Speaker 2: And so the DOJ's job is to do that. What
• 2:10:26
  was the DOJ doing, you know, a few years back
• 2:10:29
  is they were doing a kind of a sort of
• 2:10:31
  an OK job pursuing just the worst actors, the worst
• 2:10:35
  of the worst. So they would find a police station
• 2:10:37
  that was just regularly harming people in its jails, arresting
• 2:10:43
  people for no reason, you know. They were finding prison
• 2:10:48
  systems where people were getting murdered like in Alabama and
• 2:10:52
  that was going OK. Well, that whole civil rights division
• 2:10:59
  of the DOJ is now basically gone, right? It's been
• 2:11:03
  totally repurposed. So now it's dealing with reverse racism and
• 2:11:09
  various things like that. But they're not doing those other
• 2:11:12
  cases anymore. They don't care about what's happening in a
• 2:11:15
  police department or what's happening in a– so you don't
• 2:11:18
  even have that level of scrutiny.
• 2:11:20
  Speaker 1: When did all this change?
• 2:11:23
  Speaker 2: I mean I think most recently you've seen the DOJ
• 2:11:25
  just dismantle the Civil Rights Division. So that's been in
• 2:11:28
  the current administration.
• 2:11:29
  Speaker 1: And the Civil Rights Division was in charge of looking
• 2:11:31
  at the prisons? Yeah. So what have they done during
• 2:11:33
  the last four years before that?
• 2:11:35
  Speaker 2: They they didn't they also didn't do a great job,
• 2:11:39
  but they did bring actions that had impact in a
• 2:11:44
  bunch of different states. So, for example, they sued the
• 2:11:46
  state of Alabama, which happened under the first Trump administration. Actually,
• 2:11:51
  the the the the case against Alabama started under Obama.
• 2:11:58
  Then under Trump, Jeff Sessions had to approve the issuance
• 2:12:03
  of these letters, these findings letters. And then they had,
• 2:12:06
  when Alabama said, you know, take a hike, you're wrong,
• 2:12:09
  we don't agree, we're not going to make a consent decree,
• 2:12:11
  we're not going to settle, then they had to sue them.
• 2:12:14
  So that happened under Jeff Sessions. And that was now,
• 2:12:21
  you know, two administrations ago, the Trump administration brought this action.
• 2:12:27
  But It's just being dragged on and dragged on. And
• 2:12:31
  now the DOJ doesn't really care about this kind of litigation.
• 2:12:34
  So the people that were running it are gone, all
• 2:12:36
  those people.
• 2:12:37
  Speaker 1: Well, I have to also imagine that there are so
• 2:12:40
  many cases. And if the press was allowed to weekly–
• 2:12:45
  if there was weekly access the press had to these
• 2:12:47
  correction facilities all over the country, the amount of cases
• 2:12:51
  would be fucking extraordinary. But because they've been allowed to
• 2:12:55
  hide– Because they've been allowed to do this stuff in
• 2:12:58
  complete secrecy with total control over whether or not things
• 2:13:01
  get released or don't get released. Like it's become just
• 2:13:06
  a part of the system. It's like standard operational procedure.
• 2:13:10
  And it's– I mean– But the cases would go down, right? Oh, yeah.
• 2:13:15
  As soon as you can see it. They would have to. Right?
• 2:13:17
  Speaker 2: If you're beating people in your care, if you're a
• 2:13:19
  prison guard like Roderick Gadsen and you've had 24 cases
• 2:13:23
  of excessive force.
• 2:13:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. It's sport for them.
• 2:13:27
  Speaker 2: You know, you would say at one point, well, this
• 2:13:30
  is not working so great for me. So I want
• 2:13:32
  to at least behave somewhat better.
• 2:13:34
  Speaker 1: Of course. Well, I think your film was probably the
• 2:13:38
  first time most people ever got a chance to see.
• 2:13:42
  And I would hope that your film and then also
• 2:13:46
  this conversation and the other ones that you've been having
• 2:13:48
  will move this conversation in a different direction where people
• 2:13:52
  start talking about it openly where they're forced to do
• 2:13:55
  something because it seems like you have to force them
• 2:13:58
  to act and they're probably dealing with so many other
• 2:14:00
  cases as well this is just another burden to them
• 2:14:03
  and if it's the prisoners oh well that's the least
• 2:14:06
  priority situation we have to deal with these people are
• 2:14:09
  bad people they're in jail like those the radio people
• 2:14:12
  that you used their voices like it's god it's like
• 2:14:16
  shut the fuck up like you're listening to them as
• 2:14:19
  a person who's had multiple podcasts with people that were
• 2:14:23
  wrongfully convicted. I've done a ton of them with my
• 2:14:27
  friend Josh Dubin, who was originally with the Innocence Project
• 2:14:30
  and he's now with the Ike Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice.
• 2:14:34
  It's like his passion project is, besides being a successful
• 2:14:38
  attorney outside of that, his passion project is finding these
• 2:14:41
  very obvious cases of people that were wrongfully convicted that
• 2:14:46
  have spent a giant chunk of their life in jail.
• 2:14:49
  And through these podcasts, we've gotten a bunch of these
• 2:14:51
  people out. And you've got a chance to have conversations
• 2:14:55
  with them. I've had a few on here. And you
• 2:14:57
  have these conversations with these people and you realize like, well,
• 2:15:00
  these are brilliant people who lost a giant chunk of
• 2:15:05
  their potential to nonsense. Yeah.
• 2:15:09
  Speaker 2: And I think if it's, first of all, I think
• 2:15:12
  Josh is really smart and I know you've done a
• 2:15:15
  lot with him. And I think that's so important. There's
• 2:15:20
  always a tendency to sort of Think of only wrongful
• 2:15:23
  convictions because everybody can agree that we shouldn't be locked
• 2:15:29
  up for something that we didn't do.
• 2:15:31
  Speaker 1: We've had people on that weren't wrongfully convicted that did
• 2:15:34
  an extraordinary amount of time for a minor crime. Right.
• 2:15:37
  But unfortunately one of them wound up getting out and
• 2:15:40
  then killing a guy.
• 2:15:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:15:41
  Speaker 1: Cutting off his head and wearing a wig. He didn't–
• 2:15:44
  I guess he didn't know what the new cameras could do.
• 2:15:50
  Which is funny, but also not funny.
• 2:15:51
  Speaker 2: So basically, you're saying it's a technology problem.
• 2:15:53
  Speaker 1: He didn't understand the technology he was dealing with because
• 2:15:55
  he put on a wig and he thought, oh, I'm
• 2:15:56
  going to look like a woman. Like, bro, it was
• 2:15:58
  like HD. It's you with a wig. He was learning
• 2:16:02
  from Bob Durst. Yeah. Well, I think he, you know,
• 2:16:06
  he probably acted out of passion and then was trying
• 2:16:08
  to figure out how to rectify this problem that he created.
• 2:16:13
  Speaker 2: But one thing I want to talk, I haven't met Josh,
• 2:16:15
  but I want to talk to him. And one thing
• 2:16:17
  I want to talk to him about is the fact
• 2:16:19
  that There's like a level of conviction on the part
• 2:16:25
  of a lot of prosecutors that they're on the– as
• 2:16:29
  you're saying, they're like– they're on that team and therefore
• 2:16:32
  they have to subscribe to everybody's guilty. Everybody should be
• 2:16:36
  locked up for as long as possible because there are
• 2:16:38
  all these other people that are defense lawyers and people
• 2:16:40
  like that who are on the other team. But then
• 2:16:42
  you end up with people like Steve Marshall who, by
• 2:16:45
  the way, is running for Senate. And we're pushing to
• 2:16:48
  get him to step down from his Senate run because
• 2:16:51
  he's sort of been exposed for what he's– and by
• 2:16:53
  the way, he said that he had never been in
• 2:16:55
  the film. He'd never met me. He just came out
• 2:16:57
  with a whole public statement saying I had nothing to
• 2:16:59
  do with those people. I never met them. I got
• 2:17:01
  like 50 pictures on my phone of him walking me
• 2:17:04
  around the statehouse in Alabama. There's a missing piece there.
• 2:17:10
  That's being very charitable. But why is it that– I'm
• 2:17:15
  a charitable person. But why is it that in Alabama,
• 2:17:18
  for example, there's a guy named Tafaris Johnson who was
• 2:17:22
  arrested for a murder a million years ago. He's been
• 2:17:26
  on death row the entire time. And the evidence against
• 2:17:30
  him totally fell apart. There are a dozen people that
• 2:17:33
  gave him an alibi that said we were with him
• 2:17:35
  at this club that was across town. He had nothing
• 2:17:37
  to do with this crime. And yet– and by the way,
• 2:17:41
  the DA who– That office is the office that should
• 2:17:45
  prosecute that crime. They've asked for a new trial. They've
• 2:17:48
  said that they're not confident that he's guilty. And yet
• 2:17:51
  the attorney general's office is continuing to try to execute him.
• 2:17:55
  They're trying to kill him for something which he clearly
• 2:17:58
  did not do. There's another case, a guy named Chris Barber,
• 2:18:02
  where there's DNA evidence that showed that somebody else committed
• 2:18:05
  the crime and the DA is trying to execute Christopher Barber.
• 2:18:10
  And so there's this teaming where you become part of
• 2:18:18
  law enforcement and then somehow you lose your sense of
• 2:18:23
  judgment or nuance or your ability to decide who's guilty
• 2:18:26
  and who's not guilty. And that's a really dangerous thing
• 2:18:30
  because– Yeah.
• 2:18:30
  Speaker 1: Because your career depends on you getting a win. Your
• 2:18:33
  career advances if you get a win. The way you
• 2:18:35
  get a win is convict people. And not getting convictions overturned,
• 2:18:39
  that's a loss. That fucks up your career. So better
• 2:18:43
  to kill them.
• 2:18:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:18:44
  Speaker 1: Which is really crazy. Yeah.
• 2:18:47
  Speaker 2: Which is– I mean it's disturbing that we haven't come
• 2:18:53
  up with ways to identify fairness, right? That fairness should
• 2:18:59
  be the method by which you judge how a district
• 2:19:02
  attorney performs. It's like we decided to prosecute a certain
• 2:19:05
  number of cases. Some of those cases weren't worth prosecuting.
• 2:19:08
  Some of those cases were going to turn into wrongful convictions.
• 2:19:11
  We're not just going to prosecute everything, which is why
• 2:19:13
  this whole thing about like Brady material where you're supposed
• 2:19:16
  to give the other side anything that comes out in
• 2:19:19
  the investigation that might be used to prove their innocence.
• 2:19:23
  If there's something that goes against the criminal case, you
• 2:19:26
  have to provide it to the lawyer on the other side.
• 2:19:28
  But regularly, prosecutors just bury this information. You have some
• 2:19:32
  witness that said, I was with that person at the time,
• 2:19:34
  and that witness's testimony disappears. Or you have something that
• 2:19:37
  shows that the gun that they thought was used to
• 2:19:40
  commit the crime wasn't the one that was used to
• 2:19:41
  commit the crime. So there's just a– that's the thing,
• 2:19:44
  the teaming, the decision that you have to be part
• 2:19:47
  of one side or another. I really think that that
• 2:19:51
  part of your special where you're sort of like, putting
• 2:19:56
  me in the position of somebody who's having to make
• 2:19:58
  a decision about what team I'm on and where I
• 2:20:01
  lose the thread. You know, that's like, that's a very
• 2:20:05
  significant thing that you did there, you know, because it
• 2:20:08
  was like a way of bringing to the average citizen
• 2:20:11
  that feeling that they're all having right now.
• 2:20:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you all get lumped into it. Everybody gets lumped
• 2:20:17
  into it because there's only two choices in this country
• 2:20:20
  and that's stupid. Or you could be one of those
• 2:20:22
  wacky libertarians. And then you're like, oh, Bob's a libertarian.
• 2:20:27
  That shit's never going to work. What else you get?
• 2:20:30
  Speaker 2: I mean I'm always curious about– I'm always asking myself
• 2:20:36
  what I should be spending my time on and I
• 2:20:39
  get involved in a film and it kind of grabs
• 2:20:43
  you and.
• 2:20:43
  Speaker 1: It could– How do you decide?
• 2:20:46
  Speaker 2: I feel like it decides. I feel like I'm just
• 2:20:49
  sort of walking around thinking– I don't need to make
• 2:20:52
  another one of these things. They're very exhausting. And then
• 2:20:56
  something happens or my shrink says to me, yeah, I
• 2:21:00
  know you always say you're not going to make another movie,
• 2:21:02
  but I think you're better when you're making a movie.
• 2:21:04
  I think you're better when you're engaged in something like this.
• 2:21:07
  And I'm curious for, you know, you've built this incredible
• 2:21:11
  platform and you have access to just a remarkable number
• 2:21:16
  of people in the universe. And what do you feel
• 2:21:20
  like your mission is? What do you feel like is
• 2:21:22
  the– when you get to the end of a week
• 2:21:25
  and you look back and you think like I did
• 2:21:27
  what I was– I did what I set out to
• 2:21:29
  do this week?
• 2:21:31
  Speaker 1: All I ever do is try to talk to people
• 2:21:35
  I'm interested in talking to and that's it. And I
• 2:21:38
  feel like that's what I started with and that's what
• 2:21:41
  I stuck with. And if I deviate from that path,
• 2:21:46
  if I say– Oh, I'll get this guy on because
• 2:21:50
  he's famous and then I'll get more views. Or I'll
• 2:21:54
  get her on because she's controversial and I'll get more views.
• 2:21:58
  I don't think like that at all. I don't allow
• 2:22:02
  it into my head. I get a list of people
• 2:22:06
  on my phone that are interested in coming on the
• 2:22:09
  show and I spend a couple hours a few times
• 2:22:12
  a week just going over this list and then I'll go, hmm.
• 2:22:17
  That's interesting. Let me look into this. And so then
• 2:22:19
  I'll do a search on this person and what they're
• 2:22:22
  interested in. And then maybe I'll watch a documentary or
• 2:22:25
  I'll get an audio book and I'll start listening to
• 2:22:28
  it on the way to work. And then I'll decide
• 2:22:31
  and I'll go, yeah, okay. I like this. This is cool.
• 2:22:35
  I'm into this. This would be a conversation that I'll
• 2:22:37
  be genuinely curious about. And so that's the only way
• 2:22:41
  I do it. And I've done it that way from
• 2:22:43
  the very beginning. I either talk to my friends. Or
• 2:22:47
  I talk to people who I've seen a documentary that
• 2:22:50
  they did or read one of their books or I've
• 2:22:53
  watched a YouTube video with them in and I thought
• 2:22:55
  they were fascinating. And then I reach out to my
• 2:22:57
  guy and I say, Hey, can you see if this
• 2:22:59
  guy's interested in being on? And that's the only way
• 2:23:01
  I do it. So I feel like as long as
• 2:23:05
  I do that, I will continue to give people this
• 2:23:09
  same service. And this service is. This is an extension
• 2:23:14
  of my curiosity, my honest curiosity to the world. So
• 2:23:19
  whoever I'm honestly curious about, sit them down, talk to them,
• 2:23:24
  do my best. That's it. And if I try to
• 2:23:27
  make it anything more than that, if I try to
• 2:23:30
  change it or distort it or move it in a
• 2:23:33
  general direction or make it have a message or make
• 2:23:36
  it make more money or whatever it is, I'll fuck
• 2:23:39
  it up. That's what I think.
• 2:23:41
  Speaker 2: I think that's really smart. And I think, you know,
• 2:23:44
  this is what's lacking is sort of authenticity. And everybody's like, oh,
• 2:23:48
  authenticity is so important. How can I manufacture that?
• 2:23:50
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:23:51
  Speaker 2: And I think your approach is really smart. I also think,
• 2:23:54
  you know, I think you talked about that you really
• 2:23:57
  like playing pool and that if you weren't doing this,
• 2:23:59
  you might just play pool all day.
• 2:24:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:24:01
  Speaker 2: I like playing pool. But I'm wondering, like, you know,
• 2:24:07
  something's keeping you from playing pool right now.
• 2:24:10
  Speaker 1: Well, I still enjoy this. If I didn't enjoy this,
• 2:24:12
  I would stop. Like I don't need any more money.
• 2:24:15
  I could just stop. If I didn't enjoy it. But
• 2:24:17
  I do enjoy it. I am a very curious person.
• 2:24:20
  I'm fascinated by different people's perspectives, how they view the world,
• 2:24:25
  how they got to where they are, what was their
• 2:24:26
  first step, like why they make these choices. Like what
• 2:24:29
  is it about the way they think that makes them unique? Yeah.
• 2:24:34
  I don't think I'm ever going to lose that. I
• 2:24:35
  think that's a very important part of my understanding of
• 2:24:39
  us as a species, us as a civilization. And I'm
• 2:24:44
  very fascinated with the history of the human race and
• 2:24:47
  how we got to this point and where we are
• 2:24:49
  and how we define what is normal and what is
• 2:24:52
  not normal and what our standards are and how they
• 2:24:55
  get manipulated. I don't think I'm ever going to stop
• 2:24:59
  being curious about those things. I may stop doing this publicly.
• 2:25:02
  I will never stop being I'm curious. I'll never stop
• 2:25:05
  watching all these documentaries or reading books or– I don't
• 2:25:08
  think I'll ever stop trying to have conversations with people
• 2:25:11
  even if I don't do it publicly because it's– I
• 2:25:14
  mean it's– this is totally accidental. I don't know if
• 2:25:17
  you know the history of this podcast. It started out
• 2:25:20
  with me and my friends just bullshitting in front of
• 2:25:22
  a laptop and there was no expectations. It made no
• 2:25:27
  money for years and then it just kind of grew
• 2:25:31
  and I never promoted it. I never went on anywhere
• 2:25:35
  and said, please watch my show. I never took an
• 2:25:37
  ad out anywhere. I just kept doing it. And it
• 2:25:40
  just snowballed to the point where I'm like, all right.
• 2:25:44
  And now I just feel like I have this responsibility.
• 2:25:47
  And I get up and I go, all right, I
• 2:25:49
  got to do this thing today. Let me clear my
• 2:25:51
  mind first. So I go to the gym and I
• 2:25:53
  work out and I get in the cold plunge and
• 2:25:55
  I get in the sauna and I clear my mind out.
• 2:25:57
  And then I'm like, make sure I'm prepared and just
• 2:26:00
  show up at work. Yeah.
• 2:26:03
  Speaker 2: I notice that you're not– like you don't look at shit.
• 2:26:05
  You don't look at your phone.
• 2:26:07
  Speaker 1: No, you can't do that. That distracts people.
• 2:26:09
  Speaker 2: I totally agree. It's very– It's gross.
• 2:26:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Especially if you're talking to someone that has something
• 2:26:15
  really important to say. I mean if I'm looking at
• 2:26:17
  my phone for a brief second, it's because it's something
• 2:26:19
  relevant to what we are talking about. I want to
• 2:26:22
  send it to Jamie so he can pull it up
• 2:26:23
  on the screen. But I think it's one of the
• 2:26:26
  great benefits of having these long conversations with people online.
• 2:26:29
  on a podcast is that that's time where you're not
• 2:26:31
  staring at a fucking device. And most people lack that.
• 2:26:36
  So I've gotten this completely unexpected education in life, in
• 2:26:40
  human beings and how they think and what drives them
• 2:26:43
  and just what, what makes them interesting.
• 2:26:45
  Speaker 2: And, you know, how does it, how does it impact
• 2:26:50
  like your, your, you have girl, you have two girls, three,
• 2:26:54
  you have three girls. How, how does it impact sort
• 2:26:56
  of how you interact with them? You feel like you,
• 2:26:59
  you learn something and then.
• 2:27:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah i'm a way more educated person than i ever
• 2:27:03
  was when i was younger i'm just um i just
• 2:27:06
  know more about humans i know more about myself i
• 2:27:09
  i've just you know you're thinking and you're constantly thinking
• 2:27:14
  so it's just adding to this database of understanding that
• 2:27:17
  you have about human beings and about just life in
• 2:27:19
  general and just education and you know um Unfortunately, my
• 2:27:25
  kids are really smart. And so I have these cool
• 2:27:27
  conversations with them about stuff. And one of my kids
• 2:27:31
  has this crazy recall that my wife insists comes from me. She's,
• 2:27:35
  it's nuts. Like she can recall things about the Titanic
• 2:27:38
  and specifics about like the, the voyages. Cause she's, she's
• 2:27:41
  got down this Titanic kick for a while, you know,
• 2:27:44
  and lately we've been talking about the Mongols because they're, there's,
• 2:27:48
  she's studying Genghis Khan in school. And so we had
• 2:27:51
  these long conversations about Mongols and, And what they did
• 2:27:55
  and what was– and I'm telling her some stuff that
• 2:27:57
  she hasn't known. She tells me some stuff that I
• 2:27:59
  didn't know. I'm like, whoa. How old is she? This
• 2:28:01
  one is 15. But– so it impacts my– not just
• 2:28:06
  my relationship with them but really my relationship with everybody
• 2:28:09
  in my life. And what's really hard is talking to
• 2:28:14
  people that aren't interested in anything and don't engage with
• 2:28:18
  all these different things. And then when you talk to them,
• 2:28:21
  it's like they're operating on this– frequency that's like time and,
• 2:28:28
  and work and life is sort of ground down all
• 2:28:32
  their sensitivity and calloused all of their, their, their senses
• 2:28:37
  to the world or their thoughts of the world, their
• 2:28:40
  perspectives of the world. And they've developed these sort of
• 2:28:43
  placeholder opinions for things. And it's so awkward. And, you know,
• 2:28:48
  and over time, like, you know, Tony Robbins talked about
• 2:28:52
  this once, that if you make small changes in your life,
• 2:28:55
  like if you're both going in parallel lines, right, and
• 2:28:58
  then you make a small deviation, a few degrees to
• 2:29:01
  the right, over time, you'll be way over here where
• 2:29:05
  they're kind of on the same path. And that's what
• 2:29:08
  I find in life that's weird. And then I think
• 2:29:11
  about how many people don't have the opportunity to do
• 2:29:13
  that because they have a job that's like mundane and
• 2:29:16
  it's consuming. And they're involved in it all day long.
• 2:29:19
  When they get done, they're exhausted and they never really
• 2:29:23
  satisfy their curiosity or encourage and engage with their curiosity.
• 2:29:29
  Foster it, you know. And it's what to me makes
• 2:29:33
  people fascinating. When I talk to someone who's curious about
• 2:29:37
  things and it's really like and it went down a while.
• 2:29:40
  I was curious. So then I started researching and this
• 2:29:42
  is what I found out.
• 2:29:43
  Speaker 2: Like that's the kind of.
• 2:29:44
  Speaker 1: Person I want to talk to, you know. Yeah.
• 2:29:47
  Speaker 2: I mean I think it's also you're probably– because it
• 2:29:51
  got big without a plan to get big and because
• 2:29:56
  I think you're– the essence of it is wanting to
• 2:30:01
  express curiosity, wanting to take in information. How do you
• 2:30:05
  deal with the people who say like, oh, you had
• 2:30:09
  so and so on. You should have asked them this
• 2:30:11
  or you should have done this.
• 2:30:12
  Speaker 1: I don't know that they're saying that.
• 2:30:14
  Speaker 2: Because you don't hear it or you don't pay attention.
• 2:30:15
  Speaker 1: I don't pay attention. I gave up on that years ago. Like,
• 2:30:19
  fuck off.
• 2:30:19
  Speaker 2: Because you used to follow, like.
• 2:30:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you realize, like, oh, I'm at the will
• 2:30:23
  of other people's opinions constantly. And some of them aren't logical.
• 2:30:25
  And some of them are petty. And some of them
• 2:30:27
  are shitty. They're just shitty people. They're mean. Like, why
• 2:30:31
  are you being mean for no reason? Like, you know,
• 2:30:33
  why are you being insulting for no reason? And a
• 2:30:35
  lot of it is jealousy. They're not getting enough attention.
• 2:30:38
  They think you're an idiot. Why are you getting so
• 2:30:40
  much attention? I'm brilliant. I should be getting more attention.
• 2:30:43
  There's a lot of that. There's a lot of ego involved.
• 2:30:45
  But there's a lot of, like. very should be nice
• 2:30:53
  like just people with shitty perspectives and you don't want
• 2:30:55
  to engage with that you don't want that in your
• 2:30:57
  head because I think that's contagious and that's why people
• 2:31:00
  that are constantly surrounded by negative shitty people they develop
• 2:31:05
  negative shitty tendencies it's just we imitate our atmosphere which
• 2:31:09
  is why like this idea of pulling yourself up by
• 2:31:12
  your bootstraps is so fucking crazy When you're asking some
• 2:31:15
  kid whose dad's been in jail since he was three
• 2:31:19
  and lives in a crime-infested neighborhood and has 11 kids
• 2:31:23
  living in a one-bedroom apartment and you're saying, well, how
• 2:31:27
  come you went to jail? Shut the fuck up, bitch.
• 2:31:29
  You would have went to jail too if you lived there.
• 2:31:31
  What we need to do is figure out why are
• 2:31:33
  these kids in this situation? Why are so many of
• 2:31:36
  our citizens, people of our community stuck in these situations
• 2:31:40
  with no attention paid to it whatsoever? And then you're
• 2:31:43
  wondering why so many people commit crimes. You're wondering why
• 2:31:46
  your prisons are so full. Like that– when you engage
• 2:31:51
  with people that constantly have shitty perspectives and shitty– a
• 2:31:54
  little about that, a little when you're young is good.
• 2:31:57
  But once you're– by the time you're like 19, 20,
• 2:32:00
  you know what an asshole is. You don't want assholes
• 2:32:03
  in your life. You like– avoid at all costs and online,
• 2:32:08
  if you're engaging with people online– You're getting at least
• 2:32:11
  10% assholes. It's like there's no way of avoiding it.
• 2:32:14
  So I don't pay attention. And it gets in your head.
• 2:32:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it gets in your head.
• 2:32:17
  Speaker 1: I am probably as critical, like logically critical as anybody
• 2:32:22
  is ever going to be about me. Like in what
• 2:32:25
  I do and the way I do it and like
• 2:32:27
  interviews that went well or didn't go well. I examine them.
• 2:32:31
  I think about it. Like when they're done, like that
• 2:32:34
  was like. I should have stopped him from talking about
• 2:32:37
  that because I should have said like, wait, that doesn't
• 2:32:38
  make sense. You let people ramble a little bit too
• 2:32:41
  much and then they change subjects. You want to go
• 2:32:43
  back to it and then something else comes up and
• 2:32:45
  you lose– like I should have really challenged that a
• 2:32:48
  little bit more or I should have done this or
• 2:32:50
  I should have done that. But you're free-balling. You don't
• 2:32:55
  know what– I don't have any like questions I know
• 2:32:58
  I'm going to ask. I just have an understanding of
• 2:33:00
  the subject and I let it play out. And I
• 2:33:03
  think that's why it's good. I just think when you
• 2:33:06
  listen to people, when I know you grew up in,
• 2:33:10
  you did this, you did that. It's like the same tone.
• 2:33:12
  These are just questions. Then the person answers the question.
• 2:33:15
  And then another question comes like, you're not having a conversation.
• 2:33:19
  And I don't think of them as interviews. I think
• 2:33:21
  of them as conversations. And I think that's what I
• 2:33:23
  want to hear. So that's what I do. And if
• 2:33:26
  people like, well, you should have done this and ask them,
• 2:33:28
  it's like, no, you should go get a fucking podcast, bitch.
• 2:33:31
  Make your own podcast and then get popular enough where
• 2:33:34
  you can get that person on. Then you ask them that. Yeah.
• 2:33:37
  I'm going to ask them what I ask them. And
• 2:33:39
  when I'm done, I'm done. That's it. Yeah.
• 2:33:42
  Speaker 2: I mean, I haven't, you know, I do interviews for
• 2:33:45
  when I'm doing documentaries. I'll do an interview for seven, eight,
• 2:33:48
  nine hours at a time. Not that I suggest you
• 2:33:50
  do it, but it's the reason I do it is
• 2:33:53
  because I want to, I want to like converse. I
• 2:33:56
  want to really understand the other person. I want to
• 2:33:58
  give myself time to really hear them out. And also,
• 2:34:01
  you know, to some extent, the most interesting stuff comes
• 2:34:04
  out when everybody just feels comfortable and their defenses go down.
• 2:34:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, Elon was talking about that. He's like, that's
• 2:34:11
  that last hour. The last hour, you can really get them.
• 2:34:14
  Because it's hard for, especially if someone has an agenda.
• 2:34:19
  You know, you could, after a while, you're talking to them.
• 2:34:22
  The tendencies, the way they view the world comes out.
• 2:34:25
  If I really want to know how someone feels about
• 2:34:29
  love or life, I want to ask them how they
• 2:34:32
  got to where they are in life, how they became
• 2:34:35
  who they are. Give them a chance to brag. Give
• 2:34:38
  them a chance to inflate their accomplishments or give them
• 2:34:43
  a chance to pat themselves on the back. Give them
• 2:34:47
  a chance to dismiss other people's accomplishments. Give them a chance.
• 2:34:51
  You'll find out who people are without even pressing them
• 2:34:54
  on certain things.
• 2:34:56
  Speaker 2: No, they want to tell you they are.
• 2:34:57
  Speaker 1: They really do. Yeah. And they also, like a lot
• 2:35:00
  of people, they have an agenda. They really want to
• 2:35:04
  project something to the world. And then there's people that don't,
• 2:35:08
  and those people are amazing. There's some people that come in,
• 2:35:10
  they're just open books. They're just like a mind, a
• 2:35:13
  curious person, just a person who followed a path, an artist,
• 2:35:17
  a singer, a comedian, a this, a that, an athlete,
• 2:35:20
  like whatever it is. Like what made you you? How
• 2:35:23
  did you get there?
• 2:35:24
  Speaker 2: That's why I love comedy so much because– You know,
• 2:35:27
  just listen. There's a joke in Bumping Mics, this little
• 2:35:31
  series that we did with Jeff Ross and Dave Attell.
• 2:35:35
  And I got to watch, you know, six versions of Dave.
• 2:35:39
  It's just incredible. They're both great. But Dave telling the
• 2:35:44
  same joke like six different times.
• 2:35:46
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:35:47
  Speaker 2: Because we filmed it over like a long weekend and
• 2:35:49
  we did two shows a night at the Cellar. And
• 2:35:52
  so he's got this line when he says they're talking
• 2:35:55
  about like in memoriam, you know, people we lost. And
• 2:35:59
  they talk about Stephen Hawking. And Dave says, yeah, Steve Hawking,
• 2:36:05
  the great astrophysicist, you know, we lost him. And Jeff
• 2:36:10
  says that. And Dave says, yeah, I knew something happened
• 2:36:13
  because my printer stopped working. And for some reason, like
• 2:36:17
  this joke. It makes people– so many people laughed at
• 2:36:22
  this joke because it's so insanely like impulsive, right? I
• 2:36:27
  knew that Stephen– I knew Stephen Hawking died because my
• 2:36:29
  printer stopped working. And the next night, he did a
• 2:36:32
  different version of it where he said, oh, because my
• 2:36:34
  computer stopped working and it got no laughs at all.
• 2:36:38
  And just being able to see the spontaneity and the
• 2:36:42
  unlocked quality of Dave's mind.
• 2:36:44
  Speaker 1: The tweaking of the joke.
• 2:36:47
  Speaker 2: But also just the freedom, which maybe some of that
• 2:36:50
  for some people comes with being stoned. But I see
• 2:36:56
  the feeling, like in your comedy special, the feeling that
• 2:37:00
  it's coming in the moment, even though I know a
• 2:37:02
  lot of those things are things that you've been thinking about,
• 2:37:04
  talking about, and honing over a lot of years. It's
• 2:37:07
  the moment when it feels like it's coming naturally. That's
• 2:37:12
  where like the biggest laughs are. It's also like where
• 2:37:15
  the biggest connection, the biggest human connection is. Yeah, that's
• 2:37:17
  where the dance is. The dance is like staying in
• 2:37:20
  the moment no matter how many times you've.
• 2:37:22
  Speaker 1: Talked about a subject. Don't think about that. Think about
• 2:37:25
  the actual subject. You're basically doing like a form of hypnosis.
• 2:37:30
  You're leading people to think the way your mind is working.
• 2:37:35
  And the only way you can do that is if
• 2:37:36
  your mind is actually thinking that way. If you're thinking
• 2:37:38
  about some other stuff, for some reason, even if you're
• 2:37:40
  saying the words the exact same way, they can smell
• 2:37:43
  it on you. They can tell. Well, hey, man. Um,
• 2:37:49
  thank you for everything you've done. Thank you for the
• 2:37:51
  jinx and thank you for the Alabama solution. Cause it's
• 2:37:54
  really awesome. And I really hope that, um, through that film,
• 2:37:59
  a lot of people get outraged and the right people
• 2:38:04
  and a lot enough attention gets put on it where
• 2:38:07
  you force people to do something about it. And I
• 2:38:10
  don't think people have any idea how bad these fucking
• 2:38:12
  prisons are until they see that. Yeah. And I think
• 2:38:15
  those contraband phones and what those inmates have done and
• 2:38:18
  the inmates themselves through the way they conduct themselves and
• 2:38:22
  when you could see how intelligent these people are and
• 2:38:26
  that you realize like this is not right. None of
• 2:38:30
  this is right.
• 2:38:30
  Speaker 2: This is– I mean on the positive side, I would
• 2:38:33
  say just so we don't end on a really negative note,
• 2:38:37
  the– Film has had an impact in Alabama. It's having
• 2:38:43
  an impact in Alabama already. And there are incredible demonstrations
• 2:38:48
  that have been happening. There's actually, I don't know if
• 2:38:50
  you have it. There's a still of this if you
• 2:38:52
  want to look at it. But there's hundreds of people
• 2:38:55
  showed up on the steps of the Capitol. People really
• 2:38:58
  showing up with the intention of showing their loved ones
• 2:39:03
  being there and saying, this is really happening and giving
• 2:39:06
  the rest of the public permission to To understand that
• 2:39:09
  this is– 45 percent of Americans have had an incarcerated
• 2:39:13
  relative or been incarcerated. This is an infection. This is
• 2:39:17
  happening in many, many, many places. So for us, the
• 2:39:20
  film has been unlocking that, giving people a feeling that
• 2:39:24
  there's– that they're not alone, that they don't have to
• 2:39:26
  be ashamed of having somebody. So these are people who
• 2:39:31
  have seen the film who have decided that they want
• 2:39:33
  to express themselves. And this is happening more and more.
• 2:39:37
  And we just saw there was a bipartisan bill that
• 2:39:39
  was just introduced by Senator Larry Stutz, who's a Republican senator,
• 2:39:45
  who said he saw the film. He couldn't unsee it.
• 2:39:49
  And he said this is not– he wrote an op-ed
• 2:39:52
  about it not being an example of Christian values.
• 2:39:54
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:39:56
  Speaker 2: He introduced this bipartisan bill for prison oversight, which is
• 2:39:59
  a real bill.
• 2:40:00
  Speaker 1: It's not a bullshit bill. It's a real bill.
• 2:40:02
  Speaker 2: About how you take the investigations because you saw in
• 2:40:04
  the film the investigations are run by the same department
• 2:40:07
  that commits the crimes. So I think we're seeing a
• 2:40:12
  lot of positive action as a result of the film.
• 2:40:15
  And I think that's what transparency is all about is
• 2:40:18
  if the public can see it. And I appreciate your perspective.
• 2:40:23
  talking about this and having this be in the public
• 2:40:26
  conversation because it's really important. If people see it, they're
• 2:40:30
  not happy about it. They understand that something more humane
• 2:40:34
  needs to be done.
• 2:40:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think universally. I don't think anybody could watch
• 2:40:37
  that and not think something should be done. So thank you.
• 2:40:40
  Really appreciate it. Thanks for being here. Enjoy. Bye, everybody.