Nick Yarras was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to die for a rape and murder he didn t commit at the age of 21. He spent 22 years on death row before DNA evidence exonerated him. Nick shares his story of how he escaped from prison and became the FBI s most wanted man in the country. He also talks about how he got out of prison and how he was exonerated by DNA evidence. He also shares how he almost died at the hands of the police officer who falsely accused him of the murder of a woman he didn't even know. Nick also shares the story of the cold case that finally led to his exoneration, and how DNA evidence finally cleared him of this crime. Nick's story is an incredible one, and I hope you enjoy listening to it live on this episode of Stir It Up! -Joe & Nick Thank you so much to Nick for coming on the show and sharing his story with us. I know it was a privilege to have him on our show and I can't wait to do it again in 2020. Thank you Nick for being a part of the podcast and for being brave enough to share his story and courageously fighting for the fight for justice and freedom. I appreciate you. - Thank you for being here! -P.S. - I know you will join us in 2020 for the next episode, we're going to do a live show on the podcast, we'll do it better than ever before. Thanks for listening and supporting us, we can t wait to bring you the best version of Stir it Up! - Joe and Nick -PSPODD - - . . . Thank you, Joe & Joe - PODD P. PODCAST MUSIC - POOOT - POTTERCASTS - PANDORA - POOOR - PENARDO - PEEOTCH - PUNDSET - PASCO - PANEL - PIEOTCHES - PASTORCHE CHECKOUT PODCASH - PORTAL - PICK MEETING - PRAINING - PRODCAST - PEDCAST - GOSCHEPSYCHE - PADDSET PODDS - PUSCO - GAS CHECK OUT THE SONGS - PAPORCH - BECAUSE WE'S TALKING ABOUT THIS EPISODES - COURSES
00:00:56.000My name is Nick Yarris and I was, as Joe said, convicted and sentenced to die for a rape and murder I didn't commit at the age of 21. In 1981, a woman named Mrs. Craig was murdered in Delaware.
00:01:53.000I'm facing life imprisonment and I'm a junkie because all of my life I was destroyed by what happened to me at the age of seven.
00:02:01.000I had my head beaten by a man with a rock in his hand after he sexually assaulted me.
00:02:08.000And I did all the stupid things that people can do in the aftermath.
00:02:11.000I kept it a secret and I let it foster all the anger in me.
00:02:15.000I became very aggressive as a child and I ended up in trouble all the time.
00:02:20.000And when I was in prison on these unrelated charges to the murder, I stupidly fell into that mindset of desperation of trying to get out of it.
00:02:29.000So the police put a prisoner in the cell next to me.
00:02:49.000I was being transported to court and the sheriffs were being cool with me at first.
00:02:54.000They were talking about what was going on in Philly.
00:02:57.000They were two nice guys, like 68, 67. And we drove five hours from one of the hardest prisons in America called Huntington.
00:03:07.000And I left there after spending two years of my first two years in silence.
00:03:13.000So if you opened your mouth, they would come in and beat your head in.
00:03:16.000So I was so glad to get in the car because my mom was waiting in my lawyer's office because they were going to give me a review of my trial because they withheld so much evidence.
00:03:26.000So I was eager to go to court and it was the coldest day of 1985, February 15th.
00:03:33.000We stop at a gas station in Exton, Pennsylvania.
00:03:37.000And as I got out of the car, the officer driving pulled past the cubicles.
00:03:43.000Now, we all got out of the car and ran over to the cubicle together, and I went in and started peeing.
00:03:48.000And the officer's holding the door for me, and my eyeglasses start fogging up.
00:03:54.000Because you go from the freezing cold to the warm to the cold, your eyeglasses.
00:03:58.000So all I know is I turn around and I come out, and he has the door like that, and I put my head down, go under his arm, and I turn left and go back to the car.
00:04:07.000And the dude smoking a cigarette doesn't know that his partner went into the cubicle to piss.
00:04:12.000And as I'm running back to the dude, he pulls his pistol out and point-blank shoots at me, Joe, like pow!
00:04:19.000And as it went past my face, I was like, oh shit!
00:05:08.000Then I ran like 400 yards, 400 yards, 400 yards and I hid behind the car I just escaped from.
00:05:16.000And I was laying in the weeds behind the gas station about 50 yards from them while they were screaming, who was the bigger idiot for letting this happen?
00:05:22.000And I was thinking, oh my God, like, what am I doing?
00:06:05.000I stole a dude's wallet in New York, and I got on an airplane, and I went down to Florida, and I tried to rob a drug dealer, and I tried to do this.
00:06:13.000I was sitting there, I was so angry, I was going to kill myself.
00:06:21.000I didn't want my folks to see me in prison handcuffs no more, you know?
00:06:25.000So I was going to buy a raft and I was going to go out in the ocean and I was going to have one last party with all the foods that I loved.
00:06:31.000Then I was going to stab the raft, wait for the sharks after I cut my wrist, you know?
00:06:36.000Then I was going to cap myself and go.
00:07:50.000And aphasia can be through trauma or through genetics.
00:07:55.000And aphasia affected my life so much as a young person, I never had the respect to listen to people because I couldn't function, I couldn't articulate, I couldn't speak.
00:08:03.000When I was at trial, people spoke words that I didn't understand and it frustrated me.
00:08:09.000And when I tried to speak and I'd stutter, people would be like, duh, duh, duh, come on, retard, what do you got to say?
00:08:15.000So, after that beating, well, they beat me for four minutes and they broke my face.
00:08:22.000I began practicing speaking to myself.
00:08:25.000Every day I learned new words and I taught myself how to correctly articulate that word into a sentence beautifully for my own self and myself every day.
00:08:39.000And then I became very, very good at writing.
00:10:13.000It would ruin what happened in Fear of 13. It's now out on Netflix.
00:10:18.000But they finally closed down the old prison I was in for 12 years where the average rate of survival was only 5. And I was one of the hardest dudes there and I made it.
00:10:30.000They closed the prison down and they opened up Greene County Supermax and the courts ordered that every prisoner in Pennsylvania be allowed out of their cell for eight hours.
00:10:39.000The administration looked at each other and said, fuck that, not the crazy cannibals and not the serial killers, not the dudes that have been assaulting and raping each other.
00:10:47.000So they picked 48 of us out and they put us in Pittsburgh in a special penitentiary setting in which we were in a sealed unit.
00:10:55.000And they put all these guards in there that weren't allowed to touch other prisoners because they were so violent.
00:11:00.000And told them, we're giving you the craziest of the crazy.
00:11:04.000You know, Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lamb was a real man, right?
00:11:09.000He abducted black women in Philadelphia and put them in a pit under his house and fed one of them to the other survivors because he was building a master race.
00:11:19.000Like, so they started torturing us and doing all this psychological crazy shit to us where they were feeding us to each other like wolves.
00:11:26.000So I kept it all quiet until this year when, once again, misfortune fell on my life and I released Monsters and Mad Men, the new book that I was going to give you today.
00:11:35.000And I thought, you know, I got to tell that story, you know?
00:11:39.000But it's been so hard to come back from these moments, Joe.
00:11:43.000It's just like I look at what they did to me and how I went to that moment where the DNA is gone.
00:12:11.000I did everything in piety my mother asked me to do while I was in prison.
00:12:17.000I don't want to die like Dale Carter did with the guards coming to his cell and taunting him, you know, teasing him and listening to a man scream in agony because the bile in his belly is killing him.
00:12:30.000So I wrote to the courts and I asked to be executed.
00:12:37.000I want to die as a man I love who can respect himself.
00:12:43.000The court intervened and ordered the DNA testing that was going to be done on the evidence expelled.
00:12:51.000In July of 2003, the DNA test came back and they proved me innocent.
00:12:56.000So the evidence spilled and they just captured it once it spilled?
00:13:01.000It was in a box with all this evidence.
00:13:03.000And Dr. Edward Blake, who did the O.J. Simpson trial DNA, said that there would be challenges to it if he did the DNA in 1999, 1998. In 2003, they had advanced mitochondrial DNA separation so well that he felt confident in his results.
00:13:20.000So the federal court got involved and said, look, I don't want to have this man executed.
00:13:57.000You want to take away my joy now, man?
00:14:00.000So I was really downcast that the day I called my mother, my brother Mikey was having a seizure at her feet because he was an alcoholic after he fell off the roof and he died shortly after.
00:14:10.000So it just went fucking crazy from there.
00:14:15.000They take me off death row and they put me in a psychological cell and they tell me they can't trust me.
00:14:22.000That no human being who has done to them what we've done to you cannot be angry.
00:14:29.000That if we open this door up and we let you out, you're going to get us.
00:14:33.000So we're going to leave you until the day they let you out.
00:14:36.000We're going to leave you in this cell because we don't trust you not to kill us for what we did to you.
00:15:49.000I've been stabbed, strangled, beaten senseless.
00:15:53.000The guards used to taunt me because I was accused of a psychological murder, of going out and stalking this poor woman because she looked like my girlfriend, they said.
00:16:03.000So I was never treated like a prisoner.
00:16:05.000I was treated with deference, the worst word I know in the English dictionary.
00:16:10.000The way I was treated was so harsh that it was cruel beyond cruel.
00:16:14.000And yet, All I wanted to do was have enough within me to learn to beautifully speak so that on the day that they executed me, I could tell them how much I cared about myself.
00:16:28.000That was more important to me than living because somehow when you suffer like I have suffered, your head cracks open and you have a hypersensitivity to life.
00:16:45.000So that when you touch the human beings, you never forget the 14 years no one was allowed to touch you.
00:18:24.000I go do a podcast in England with my good friend Brian from True Geordie and I start to spread my message again and I want to get all these young kids to believe in themselves.
00:18:36.000Then one day I put the baby down for a nap and I get Laura to lay on my arms because she's sick and we get up 20 minutes later and the baby's dead and I'm coming down the steps with the dead baby and I'm getting, you know, all fucked up again and then people are so cruel that in the village they started,
00:18:54.000you know, Maybe the baby was killed by the guy on death row and all this shit.
00:18:59.000And I have a stalker ex-wife, Karen, who just won't leave me alone, contacts the police and tells them that I put out a tweet that night.
00:19:08.000And it only happened because my good friend Anthony Samandani, who's in the green room, told me the day before my daughter died about a good close friend of his, they lost a baby that day.
00:19:20.000And so when our baby died, I put out a tweet just saying, you know, appreciate the people in your life because they're so precious.
00:19:27.000And the police came to our house and humiliated me and wanted to know how I could tweet about something because my clock was nine hours off because I was living on the streets of Los Angeles and my time was still on LA time because Anthony and I are developing a major motion picture about my life.
00:22:21.000Not only that, I just came from speaking before the United Nations, sitting next to the president and former presidents of Switzerland.
00:22:29.000And I have a security clearance from that.
00:22:31.000I worked in a high-profile job in England, going around speaking all over to governments, but Canada holds it against me because I escaped from death row.
00:22:40.000So I can't enter the country of Canada.
00:22:44.000Robin Sharma tried to have me come up there and speak for him with his conference.
00:22:48.000And I had to humiliatingly do it from my home via Skype.
00:22:52.000It's like I'll never stop being punished for what happened, you know what I mean?
00:23:49.000And I'm back to believing that it doesn't matter how I got in his chair, or it doesn't matter that the man preceding me has everything and I have nothing.
00:24:14.000And for that, man, I'm willing to keep going.
00:24:22.000I can't, I mean, I don't think anybody can imagine what it's like to spend 22 years on death row for something you didn't do.
00:24:31.000I want you to go back to the night that you got arrested and tell us, because you kind of, there's some tissue right beside you if you want it.
00:25:57.000There I am sitting there and the next thing I know, BAM on the window, BAM! And he rips open the door and a track from Bad Company was playing really loud.
00:26:08.000And I can't hear or make focus of what he's saying, you know?
00:26:12.000And the next thing I know, BOOM! Right up out of the car and he's got me on the car and his name is Benny Wright.
00:26:19.000And he's six foot four and he's got me pressed against the top of the car and he's holding me down and I can't breathe so I start resisting.
00:26:26.000I popped his arm off and the adrenaline goes, boom, here comes the beast out of me.
00:26:31.000Because at 6'2 and that age, I was crazy tough, man.
00:27:26.000Dude tells them when they get there, the backup officers get there, he's like, he tried to kill me, he's got my gun, and I got it back from him!
00:29:25.000I told him that a man that I knew in the area had told me he had done the crime and that if they let me out, I would tell them all about it.
00:29:34.000And he told me I was helping the community.
00:29:36.000They were taking me out of solitary confinement and all that.
00:29:40.000They told me that they spoke to Officer Wright and he was going to retract his charges and only charge me resisting arrest and they were going to drop the rest of the charges and everything was going to be good.
00:29:52.000And then three days later they came back and said, dude, you lied.
00:29:56.000And the only reason you lied is because you want to tell us that you did this.
00:29:59.000They put me in a room and start doing all this shit.
00:30:02.000So how did they find out that you lied?
00:30:03.000The dude that I made the story up was no longer a drug addict and he had an owl by me.
00:30:10.000So you just tried to pin the story on some other drug addict?
00:30:14.000The dude that robbed me, he rolled me up in a rug and tried to kill me with a 357 Magnum.
00:30:19.000I figured, I heard the story that he was dead and figured they won't even find him anyway, you know?
00:30:25.000But a 20-year-old doesn't have any concept of, you know, complex stuff like this.
00:31:10.000I went to trial and I was given a three-day trial for the murder of Mrs. Craig after the jury found me not guilty of all my original charges.
00:31:20.000So I was really frustrated that a jury heard the testimony of Officer Wright.
00:31:25.000He would later be fired from the force, being caught up in a drug gang in Chester.
00:31:35.000That prosecutor went mental when that happened and he decided to seek the death penalty.
00:31:41.000So a month after I was found not guilty of all my original charges that I made the stupid story up, they gave me a three-day murder trial that in essence was a joke.
00:31:52.000And what they did was they preyed upon the poor jury and showed them pictures of the victim and stuff like that, man.
00:31:59.000And they had an inmate who burglarized the prosecutor's home And was facing 20 years, come into court and say I confessed to him.
00:32:41.000And then the only mistake I truly think I made was that I told the judge to go to hell when he sentenced me to death because he couldn't look me in the face.
00:32:52.000Because he decided to send me to Huntington Prison, the hardest prison in America at that time.
00:32:56.000And what was he going to do before that?
00:32:58.000I don't know, but he made sure I went to the place that they broke you.
00:33:01.000See, Huntington was designed as the prison.
00:33:03.000If you raped another inmate, they sent you there.
00:33:05.000It was the first SHU program in America.
00:33:08.000It was the first— What is SHU program?
00:33:10.000A special housing unit or security housing unit or level five supermax, you know, like Pelican Bay.
00:33:19.000And your punishment was that you weren't allowed to speak in your cell.
00:33:23.000And if you got caught speaking in your cell, they came in with a nurse and after they beat you down, she jabbed you in the ass with Thorazine and they knocked you out for a week and you lost your mind.
00:34:10.000I had to kill off the person that I was.
00:34:14.000The person that I initially was upon entering prison was a deceitful lying coward with no fortitude because no self-respect resided within me.
00:34:25.000And in utter humbleness, I took everything that they did to me And I paid for every window I broke, everything I stole, every lie I told.
00:35:58.000Robin Sharma is the foremost authority on speaking about neuroplasticity healing.
00:36:04.000And when he found out what I speak about, he said, I am the living embodiment of his teachings.
00:36:10.000That through grace and dignity and kindness, I've developed my own charisma that carries me with confidence.
00:36:17.000And that is the description of what he teaches professionals, billionaires, everyone.
00:36:22.000Can you explain neuroplasticity for people?
00:36:24.000Neuroplasticity is a reward system within your brain wherein your interactions, especially with other human beings, heals you.
00:36:33.000So people who suffer from PTSD, people who have had trauma in their lives, Can actually heal themselves by being meticulously polite.
00:36:43.000And I began all of this when I was released.
00:36:47.000My mother sat me down and she said, Nikki, listen to me.
00:36:53.000For you to get out of prison and not be a nice man is a waste of everyone's time.
00:36:59.000Every prayer, every time someone called me the mother of a monster, every time a woman spit in my face, Everything that I went through is a waste of time for you not to be a nice man.
00:37:11.000So I want you to promise me one thing.
00:37:15.000Every day, I want you to go out and say, yes ma'am, yes sir, and thank you.
00:37:20.000Because I want you to show respect for who you are in that way.
00:37:28.000I didn't know that she handed me the tool to healing.
00:37:31.000Because neuroplasticity is the self-contrived act of rewarding yourself for being a nice person.
00:37:39.000And my gift over the last 14 years is that I made myself so amazingly pliable and gifted at helping others find the good within them.
00:37:51.000That's the reason I'm truly here today.
00:37:54.000The thing that I've been able to accomplish through my writing and through my efforts is to show people that you take things personally in life, you'd be then a fool.
00:38:05.000Because what you've done is you've taken all the hurts and you've made them the justified reason why you have to be an asshole to somebody.
00:38:14.000Whereas you keep forgetting that you've been given a break over and over just to be here, man.
00:38:20.000Dude, I've been shot, stabbed, strangled, run over by a car.
00:38:23.000I hung myself in prison, two drug overdoses, and I had a cannibal trying to murder me for two solid years.
00:38:29.000I know that I could fall at any moment from my own hand.
00:39:09.000I told people last year, I told everybody on Facebook something bad was going to happen, and it did when my daughter broke her elbow.
00:39:20.000So I told everybody before it happened.
00:39:24.000Two years ago, I told my wife, Laura, I was coming back here to meet Anthony Samandani and go on the Good News Network and do a thing with Maymay Ali, who's a good friend of mine.
00:39:34.000And I told him how things would happen.
00:39:38.000And sure enough, every time it's played out.
00:39:43.000Why did you think something bad was going to happen when you said something bad was going to happen and your daughter broke her arm?
00:39:48.000Dude, I'm in a meeting with a guy named Kevin and John and I look at them and I say, I have to...
00:41:16.000He's been able to help me just put this in context and I'm doing this badly, but I just think that somehow I went through an experience so intense that it has truly cracked open something that has given me a hypersensitivity to things.
00:41:32.000I think that it has allowed me truly to be humble enough to really give my life for a purpose and not be ego-driven.
00:41:41.000Like, I have nothing at this moment where we sit here, but I am so proud of the fact that that doesn't ever stop me from believing in good.
00:42:00.000I don't care how much I got to struggle from this point on or what graces I'm granted.
00:42:05.000I just want one thing to stay true in my life that I don't lose who I am.
00:42:10.000I fought so hard to be this man through a childhood of feeling so inadequate because another man raped me.
00:42:18.000To the feelings that I was so low of being cast aside as a condemned human being to then rise up and go and speak before governments to the point that Kofi Annan told me that I was one of the finest speakers in the world.
00:42:33.000To then go and follow that and stand at the base of the Coliseum where human beings were put to death for entertainment and blow 20,000 people away and have it flawlessly done.
00:42:45.000And to recognize that I had it all within me to do because of one thing.
00:42:49.000That neuroplasticity gave me charisma.
00:44:06.000Somewhere around 22. But there's just the fact that it was so difficult, that it taught me hard work, taught me focus, and I didn't have anything before that.
00:45:53.000But you're saying that people held me back, and that's not really the case.
00:45:59.000I'm sure people judged me one way or another because of fear factor or some of the other things, but the thing about going through the martial arts competition and everything when I was young, I don't give a fuck how other people view me.
00:46:23.000A lot of people don't have the confidence to do that, to shut off that noise, that thing that makes us all react to everyone else's opinion.
00:46:32.000I mean, I most certainly feel it, but I just don't let it change the way I go through life.
00:46:40.000And I think because of the lessons that I've learned, I try to express that as much as possible for people that haven't gone through those same lessons.
00:46:50.000So I can express that information and maybe people can absorb some of it without having to go through what I went through.
00:46:59.000I think what you went through is infinitely more difficult, more trying, and I think that your message and your story Can show people that in the worst possible scenario the beginning of your life as a man You're wrongfully committed to life in prison You are going to spend the rest of your life until they execute you on death row and
00:47:29.000all the horrors that you've gone through to come out of that and And to come out of that with a purpose of being a nice person and learning how to speak and learning how to speak clearly and confidently.
00:47:42.000Like, there's a lesson in that that's at a...
00:47:57.000What you've done is you've figured out a way, despite all this raging hurricane of emotion that goes through your mind that causes you to cry when you think about these things, you can express yourself In a very clear way that lets people at least peer through the window into what you've experienced in your life.
00:48:20.000And it can give people a perspective that it's very, very rare that someone gets fucked over in life as bad as you did.
00:48:51.000He really changed his whole life since meeting me.
00:48:55.000Even my close friends have told me that I've changed their life.
00:49:01.000And I appreciate it because I recognize a lot of times it's the good within them that's resonating.
00:49:09.000And I'm proud of the fact that I have sat and listened to the words I kind of deserve for what I've tried.
00:49:19.000And I'm going to learn in the future to accept the graces that you just did for me because in the past I always tried to, as you see, diminish it.
00:49:30.000I have worked very hard to craft my work into writing.
00:49:35.000And like your drawings, I was so proud of having a number one bestseller in my first book.
00:49:42.000And I was so proud of using my talent as a writer to then articulate what it's like to lose a baby in my journey through her eyes or to use this last effort in Monsters and Mad Men to tell people it's okay to have a bigger secret than the one that people know you by and still live with it.
00:49:59.000And then when it's right you can share it.
00:50:01.000Or I've made a point that I'm done writing because I've accomplished all my work as a writer and now I want to do one thing well.
00:50:09.000I want to help young students around the world take themselves seriously with their education.
00:50:13.000I did over 500 of them in schools all over England and Europe and stuff.
00:50:20.000I got all these young lads and lasses to come back to me and show me degrees that they got when I showed them how important their education was.
00:50:28.000And I really thrive in that environment because I think that's where everything still is for me.
00:50:37.000Somehow, like I'm that kid, you know, who won't let go of needing to still chase the good in my life.
00:50:47.000And I know there's bad things in the woods.
00:50:50.000And I know there's brilliant things in the woods.
00:50:53.000I'm still willing to walk that path and find something meaningful and that's what I came here to really say is that I want to make an impact with my words but not overdo it.
00:51:05.000So I don't want to do any other podcast after this one except for my friend Brian's but I want to do the meaningful thing without it having to be attached.
00:51:19.000To the social media draw that has hurt my life so much.
00:51:24.000The social media draw that has hurt your life, how has it hurt your life?
00:51:27.000Well, when my daughter broke her arm and we put up a GoFundMe page, I was viciously attacked because people expect me to have funds, but they don't know, you know?
00:51:35.000They expect you to have funds because of the movie and the book?
00:51:55.000Like I hurt their image of me if I don't have wealth in addition to being this person before them.
00:52:02.000Well, I just think people just they don't understand, you know, the people see someone else's life and they like to assume the worst and they like to criticize you whenever they have an opportunity.
00:52:12.000So if they see any vulnerability To pounce.
00:52:16.000You know, what you've gone through is the opposite of what most people go through.
00:52:21.000People have difficult times in their life, but more than difficult times, you know what they have?
00:52:26.000They have long periods where they don't have anything happen.
00:52:31.000Where life is boring and life is just a dull gray and life is just work and coming home from work and the trials and tribulations of that and traffic and The kind of insane experiences that you had being wrongly convicted and spending 22 years confined in a cage forced to fight because of vicious psychopath guards that those
00:53:01.000kind of experiences are the experiences that allowed you to come out of it this Very kind, very open-minded person who's trying to better yourself and wants to see the best in other people.
00:53:16.000The people that go through their life in this dull state of jealousy and bitterness and resentment and just Constantly focused on themselves, the self-obsessive culture that we have.
00:53:32.000And one of the things about social media that's most fucked up is you're looking at all these other people's lives and shitting on them and comparing yourself to them and finding faults in them and attacking them in the comments section and attacking what they...
00:53:47.000And the people that are doing that, they're all doing that because they're in agony.
00:53:51.000They're in a different kind of agony than you, but it's an agony of nothing.
00:53:56.000And I looked at it and I thought, I try to craft a beautiful message on the social medias so that I don't get caught up in the arguments.
00:54:04.000And I always try to show the good in the world.
00:54:07.000And that's why I love like the Good News Network.
00:54:09.000I'll try and deliberately stay away from things that poison my mind because I don't want to contribute.
00:54:14.000I don't want to get caught up in the Trump argument or the previous argument or the new argument.
00:54:19.000I want to post meaningful messages of good because that's my overall message.
00:54:24.000So I thought recently, maybe I can contrive three beautiful messages for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and I could leave out this wonderful message, and then I can go about my business of going back into schools and talking to students because it gets too chaotic.
00:54:40.000In addition to all the lovely messages of the wonderful human beings that listened to me speak or they saw the film Fear of 13, read one of my books, There's also a lot of women out there, man, and they've been harassing me and bothering me,
00:54:56.000and it's put a lot of conflict in my life, and I don't want that.
00:57:32.000The day I meet this man, I'm at a red carpet event in LA and he goes home and watches Fear of 13 and he comes back and he tells me, I'm going to make your movie.
00:58:12.000But I get this amazing chance to come out here and meet all these people for the film being made, and I realize it's all meant to be, man, like all this crazy stuff.
00:58:23.000So maybe if I craft my message right, I can step back and let people appreciate the message I had without distorting it, because I don't want to ruin it.
00:58:33.000I don't want to go too far and end up making a fool of myself when I thought the right thing to do was teach people about neuroplasticity and how to make yourself a really badass outside the ring by being a kind man.
00:58:46.000And how to really make yourself a really nice person to the family and loved ones by having the self-respect about yourself to be patient in life.
00:58:57.000So that's what I... You keep saying don't ruin it.
00:59:00.000You know, when you're talking about social media, I think one thing to take into consideration is when you do something like a GoFundMe or any time there's anything controversial, those are magnets for hate.
00:59:11.000And you might think that everyone hates you, but what you're dealing with is a very small amount of people from a very large amount of people.
00:59:21.000If you're thinking about the whole planet, all the English-speaking people, you're dealing with hundreds and hundreds of millions of people that connect.
00:59:29.000That's why I'm here now, because on my website, nickyarris.org, we organize so today's listeners can go there and download copies of my book.
00:59:47.000What I mean is just, the thing is to not get caught up.
00:59:51.000In the numbers that come at you that are negative.
00:59:53.000Because it's just a sheer matter of volume.
00:59:57.000If you're reaching people through the internet, you're reaching who knows how many human beings.
01:00:02.000I think one out of a hundred is going to be the type of person that wants to send a hateful message because it's easy.
01:00:10.000Because they don't have to look you in the eyes when they do it.
01:00:13.000They don't have to feel any social consequences.
01:00:15.000They don't have to feel your pain when they insult you or say awful things about you or your family.
01:00:23.000They're doing it because they want to affect you because they're hurting.
01:00:26.000And they're hurting for a very different reason than the way you're hurting.
01:00:30.000But this is what's wrong with social media is because human beings are not meant to communicate that way.
01:00:36.000We lose our humanity in this very shallow form of interaction.
01:00:42.000Because all those parts, what's important about people is looking them in the eyes, talking to them, hugging them, shaking their hand, communicating honestly.
01:00:51.000And anytime you're missing any of those pieces, When you communicate dishonestly, when you don't want to shake someone's hand, when you don't want to look them in the eye, when you don't want to interact with them, when you don't care about them as a person.
01:01:03.000All those things leave you feeling like shit.
01:02:01.000I want you to interact with me because I love you.
01:02:04.000And I want you to recognize that I'm recognizing you, and I appreciate that from people, but they have to understand the volume of people that someone like you is dealing with.
01:02:12.000That's what I try to convey, and I try very sincerely never to be ignorant to people.
01:02:17.000You know, it's fucking mind-blowing, Joe, because I had my mind made up, and now I've realized that I do.
01:02:24.000And it all goes back to a conversation with my boy Jason Daly.
01:02:28.000Me and him were driving along to 405 one day, and the film Fear of 13 is about to come out.
01:02:34.000And I told him I didn't want it to come out.
01:02:36.000And he said,''You don't own that film.'' Every kid that's ever had a shitty childhood owns that film.
01:02:44.000Everybody who's got a broken marriage or a shitty life or is really struggling owns that film.
01:02:48.000If you fuck this up, I'll never be your friend again, man.
01:03:14.000I don't care what I went through to this moment because I truly appreciate the person who wrote me last night and said, two weeks ago, I was released from a mental hospital after trying to kill myself.
01:03:25.000And my mom sat me down and made me watch a film.
01:03:29.000Now, in the last two weeks, I've been going to therapy and I'm getting my shit together.
01:03:34.000I don't own the film, Joe, and I don't own my message.
01:03:37.000I guess my message is taken on by the people who love me, or not.
01:03:41.000And you're right, I'm not going to be bothered by the negatives.
01:03:44.000I had a terrible experience with a stalker for 12 years who won't leave me alone, and it cost me my daughter, and a divorce.
01:03:52.000So it was really affecting me and my current wife, and I didn't like it.
01:03:56.000But I think I'm going to actually beat a dude and just hang around for a little bit longer and make you proud of me for what I do from here on.
01:05:45.000But one day, I get contacted by a man who's seen the fear of 13. And I learned that he went to university out here and he became a lawyer because of a promise to his mother to be a good person.
01:05:56.000He goes to the mosque every Friday and becomes close friends with Muhammad.
01:06:00.000And they go to dinner every night with Maymay on Fridays, you know, and they become real close.
01:06:04.000And he tells me this story how, at a young age, Muhammad looks him in the face and says, you're going to be one of the men that carries my message in life.
01:06:11.000And he's like, I'm 22. What could I possibly have to offer anyone?
01:06:18.000So he goes through this experience and on the day that Muhammad Ali had approval from the government patent office for this bracelet that says, within good there is God.
01:06:29.000He called me in England where I was at the time and he says, I have a question for you.
01:06:34.000I saw your film and I learned a lot about you since then.
01:07:27.000This man is such a lovely guy that I wouldn't be in this chair without him or Anthony or any of these people, right?
01:07:34.000And then Anthony sets up Maymay Ali and he brings me out and we have a podcast and he doesn't tell her a word about me beforehand.
01:07:48.000Now, what's crazy was, I'm doing this interview right behind where I used to sleep on the street, and I kept all that quiet.
01:07:56.000I did some of my best work when I was homeless.
01:07:59.000And I do this thing, and Maymay looks at me and says, no disrespect to my father Muhammad Ali, but you're one of the most influential men I ever met in my life, and within five minutes of meeting you, I'm already changing things about my life.
01:08:13.000I decided right then, Okay, then I have to own that, man.
01:10:30.000Amazing mindset for someone who's been through everything that you've been through that that sentiment that that and then your gratitude that's another very very powerful thing gratitude Love and gratitude are two of the most incredible expressions and Some of the most influential because when you show true gratitude to people and true love to people They feel that.
01:10:53.000That affects the way they interact with the rest of the people that they're going to experience.
01:10:58.000Like if they run into a new person just moments after meeting you, they will be nicer.
01:11:03.000And they will feel that gratitude and feel that love.
01:11:07.000And that's one thing that we all can do.
01:11:09.000You know, this thought that we're all powerless and helpless.
01:11:12.000It's one of the problems with this society, is that this society is so overwhelming.
01:11:18.000We have so much information coming at us, and the message is that what's important is, you know, beautiful girls with short skirts and fast, shiny cars and big, giant houses and private jets and diamond rings and expensive watches and all this horseshit.
01:11:39.000They seek that instead of seeking love and gratitude because it doesn't seem that that's important, but that's way more important.
01:11:47.000It's everything because that literally changes the world.
01:11:50.000You know, I always thought that that expression, the wings of the butterfly eventually become a hurricane, that's fucking stupid because that doesn't work that way.
01:11:57.000A butterfly just generates a very small amount of wind and they're small and it doesn't really work that way.
01:12:01.000But the idea behind it, what it represents...
01:12:08.000As a metaphor, is that you literally by your one person that lives amongst 300 plus million people in this country, one person with love and gratitude and inspiration, especially the way you can express yourself.
01:12:26.000That affects people you come in contact with.
01:12:29.000And that in turn affects people they come in contact with.
01:12:33.000And that literally can change the world.
01:12:57.000Because if you have this powerful message, the more people you reach and the more you express yourself with this message, you're not going to cheapen your message.
01:13:06.000What you're gonna do is you're gonna get it out to more and more people.
01:13:08.000And the more people that you can get out your words and the way you express yourself, that's gonna affect people.
01:13:15.000It's gonna affect people in a very, very positive way.
01:18:11.000I built them up for being part of our military system.
01:18:14.000I made them really respect and honor themselves.
01:18:17.000Then I was on the streets of Berlin hanging out with these Lebanese refugees, and I made them feel so good about the fact that they still believed in each other.
01:18:26.000So I have some magical ability to go around and touch different groups and my message resonates with people who have been in the military or been through trauma or not been through trauma and I have a gift.
01:18:40.000And I've spoken in some of the most prestigious places and one of them is still to this day one of the highest honors.
01:18:47.000I spoke at St. John's Church in London where Thich Nhat Nhan, the Vietnamese monk who marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, Alabama spoke.
01:18:57.000And he used to be my pen pal on death row.
01:19:00.000He was the first man that gave me respect when I was on death row.
01:19:04.000And he questioned why I didn't have respect a lot like you're doing for me today.
01:19:08.000And he taught me to look at myself differently.
01:19:12.000So I went through a whole one-year period of my experiences before I could speak at that church.
01:19:17.000And when I did, I was absolutely flawless because I knew that my friend was there and he was guiding me.
01:19:24.000And somewhere within me I have some magical ability.
01:19:28.000I don't know where it comes from, but I have.
01:19:32.000And once I'm past these dark days, I'm sure I can lay it down well so that I can carry a message beautifully to educational fields, purposefully into the corporate fields or wherever I want to go.
01:19:46.000And I love it that I do have a winning hand and I have a gift behind it that was earned.
01:20:02.000And to learn all of the world's religions so that you understood what it means to speak.
01:20:08.000Do you know in the Sanskrit religion a lot of the words are used as descriptive forms of things, so chair isn't the object, it's the feeling of sitting.
01:20:18.000So you have a responsibility and not only in the words that you choose to speak but in the manner that you deliver them and the vibrations within you that you caringly share with another person because there is a receptor within us all to the truth and it resonates and it rises within us and so I found that powerful ability to talk to myself in that manner so that I could love myself.
01:20:44.000And I would stand in the window of my cell and talk to myself or quote beautiful texts.
01:20:52.000And I loved reading The Prophet by Khalil Gibran.
01:20:55.000I read it over 20 times because I thought his message was so powerful because he lost his entire family while he wrote this book over a three-year journey.
01:21:04.000And although I might have come back from the ashes like Peachy Carnahan and The Man Who Would Be King from Roger Kipling, I still feel like I have a valid message motivating me to go forward.
01:21:18.000And my idea from this morning on is I want to go home to Laura and the kids and regroup, get myself together.
01:21:26.000And I know a lot of people are going to contact me because of your grace to have me on this show.
01:21:32.000And what I plan to do over the next couple years, Joe, is I want to show myself, not just you, sir, that I'm right.
01:21:42.000Being a kind man, being a good-hearted man, being meticulously polite, doesn't mean you're a loser.
01:22:35.000Do you know how hard it is to get a man to be honest with his emotions, thinking that he's weak if he does?
01:22:41.000I would rather have tears on my face walking down the street in frustration than to just rip on somebody and hurt somebody.
01:22:48.000That's the kind of caliber of level of humanity I want to find in myself, and I think we all do.
01:22:54.000I think the message, like you said, has been distorted by the social media so badly that we need more talking.
01:23:01.000And I would dream of having a late-night talk show and play some of my coolest music and talk to people, just average people, and just open it up.
01:23:12.000Like, I want to just share what's good about me because my mother was right.
01:23:17.000Wouldn't it have just been a terrible waste of time if I got out of jail and I was just another asshole on the street?
01:23:25.000You know, one of the things that keeps coming up is you're longing for community.
01:23:31.000And this is something I've been thinking about a lot lately because I think one of the things that people are constantly searching for in this world is happiness, right?
01:23:40.000So one thing that people don't have that they wish they had that comes up over and over again.
01:23:49.000One of the things that's also a big part of this life that we all are living right now is this very recent disconnect between our neighbors, our friends, by commuting to work and being stuck in this stuffy environment where you can't express yourself normally.
01:24:11.000And this is the majority of your life, the majority of your time.
01:27:07.000I stood up for him, for all the bullies, and I told the two men that were abusing him, if they put their hands on him again, I was going to get involved.
01:27:14.000And I started helping Walter with his lawyers, and ever since I got out of prison, I kept my word to stick by him and fight for him.
01:27:21.000So I gave up opportunities, could have changed my life, and now Death Row Stories is back, and they're going to do my story.
01:27:28.000And Walter's still on Death Row right now.
01:29:24.000So I didn't take credit for it, but I really did try to help another man because I felt like I would be so disappointing if I just took and took and took for myself.
01:29:36.000And you know, I'm actually grateful I didn't go on your podcast two years ago.
01:29:40.000I was a homeless person without a family.
01:29:43.000And now I got the two amazing girls, Zara and Bethany, and my wife Laura.
01:29:49.000These two English girls get the dream life change.
01:29:52.000They get to move from Somerset, England out here to Oregon.
01:29:55.000And my little girl gets on a yellow school bus, Joe.
01:31:45.000Their perspective had no effect on me because by that time I had given myself enough education to know the difference between what was done to me and who I am.
01:31:56.000And this is the problem with a lot of people.
01:31:58.000They failed to stop doing this thing where I am this or I am that.
01:32:06.000So I really have never cared about the perspective of anyone in the negative, except for when they got it wrong for my intent to do good with them.
01:32:19.000And then it just became a battle of my own ego.
01:32:22.000So I realized that the truth is, As long as I know I'm doing right and I'm doing good, it isn't going to matter about their perspective because the same person who thought I was a rapist scumbag murderer now thinks I'm one of the most eloquent speakers they met in their life.
01:32:36.000Their perspective about me changed, but mine surely shouldn't.
01:32:41.000And that's what a lot of people suffer from.
01:32:43.000They let that negative comment make them feel like they have to overcome it or they have to live with it.
01:32:48.000And I tell you what, Joe, I really never expected this, but for the first time in my life from conducting an interview, throughout the whole process, I've been reevaluating who I am and what I'm saying.
01:32:59.000It's like a fucking slap in the face, man.
01:33:01.000Like I came in here bedraggled with my emotions, carrying them on my sleeves and all the stress.
01:33:11.000I didn't do well in articulating and you gave me a wake-up call that I've never had before in any experience.
01:33:19.000You can go back and look through the history of the many experiences I've had of interviews and I've done some outstanding ones.
01:33:26.000I've never had a personal experience where throughout the course of speaking to another man, I started to reevaluate everything I held firmly to.
01:33:35.000And I promise you, I'm gonna go and think a whole lot about this and get my shit together because I do owe it to a lot of people to be one badass motherfucker with a hell of a message.
01:34:23.000Bruce Springsteen's a bad motherfucker.
01:34:23.000He made the nexus point between music and imagery so poignant.
01:34:29.000That I was blown away by it so much so that when we made the documentary, Fear of 13, that's all I kept imagining when I spoke was the imagery we would be lended.
01:34:40.000And I love the fact that I worked very hard to bring the whole audience into my cell one time to spend with me my story in a way that no one ever did before.
01:36:17.000Anybody that understands Shakespeare understands the Globe Theatre is the center of the world for Shakespeare.
01:36:22.000They would perform Titus Antronicus and then after which Cleopatra would come out on stage and introduce me to the cloud.
01:36:31.000Now I had eight minutes, ten minutes tops to do this thing.
01:36:36.000And in eight to ten minutes, I had a crowd who had been spending for three hours long play, crying, putting money in a bucket for what I said to them, and did it flawlessly every time.
01:36:48.000And I did it for a whole summer in London.
01:36:50.000It was the most amazing experience to stand there and look out over this vista of London after you did this amazing thing where people never expected you.
01:36:59.000And you are nothing to do with the theatre.
01:37:02.000You are just a human rights charity chosen by the theatre to come out and speak.
01:37:06.000And I realized at that moment I had a gift.
01:37:09.000If I could get people who had been standing for three hours watching a play to have wet tears in their eyes, put money, shoving it into a bucket for me, Then I knew I had some ability to finally speak.
01:37:22.000I was no longer an aphasia-affected, destroyed, distorted mind, addled by drugs, and used beyond belief to distortions of...
01:37:32.000Like, I was so screwed up to come back to do that.
01:39:54.000I don't really want to then push it and think that I can then lure people into reading more works that I can try because that's not really fair to them.
01:41:01.000So everything in the education field is coming faster and faster.
01:41:05.000So we need to use the analytics of something like Myverse to go ahead and get a child to figure out who they can go and be in their careers and then follow that correct path.
01:41:14.000You can't just throw it against the wall anymore, Joe.
01:41:17.000You have to really work hard to get children to feel good about being a taxi driver, a painter, It's not no shame to be a person who goes out and does a simple manual job.
01:41:30.000If that makes you happy as a human being, you should be able to do that without the stigma, right?
01:41:35.000But the school's not going to tell you that.
01:41:38.000They're going to tell you you could be anything, right?
01:41:40.000But why wouldn't you want to find out what would make you happy in life and be that, right?
01:41:50.000You'll learn that from people and you'll learn that from online more than anything today.
01:41:55.000And that's why I want to be involved in the educational field.
01:41:58.000I think that's my greatest gift is someone who went to prison, who hadn't ever read a book, who accomplished the things that he did, then can share how the purpose of my education was so that I was able to process life enough to handle it.
01:42:13.000To give myself enough separation to realize who I was as a human being is not the sum total of my misery.
01:42:20.000And that I could then help others structure their lives through politeness to go and get a good education.
01:42:27.000And I love that fact that I worked so hard through all these different things to not lose that message, man.
01:42:34.000And it really does work for a lot of young people.
01:42:37.000They find that their self-respect really does grow when someone gives them just a small little bit of a break, man.
01:43:45.000But no, I like it that dudes like Mike Kimball and all these guys have been really supportive to me.
01:43:51.000And everyone, like I said, that knew I was coming on here, I just want to tell them, if I forgot who you are, thank you all for being so supportive.
01:43:58.000And I really want to say thank you to my wife for being so there for me lately.
01:44:03.000And I'm really grateful that we've learned in this wonderful lesson that I might belong to you, sweetheart, but I also have some good left to do.
01:44:12.000And I'm going to try and do both well.
01:44:14.000And I'm very grateful to everyone listening, especially to you, Mr. Rogan.