On today's show, Glenn Beck and Stu discuss the latest in the Joe Biden scandal, the latest on the Biden Bracket, and how to protect yourself from being burglarized. Glenn also talks about how to keep your title safe from being stolen and why you should be worried about it.
00:03:30.040Get protection for your home title with Home Title Lock.
00:03:33.620Hey, I want to talk to you a little bit about SimpliSafe.
00:03:35.660You know, homes are burglarized all the time.
00:03:38.880So last night on TV, and we're going to try to make this episode available on YouTube sometime during the show today, because I want everybody to see it.
00:03:51.980Because you have to understand what's happening.
00:03:54.040And I would so appreciate if you would alert the people in Congress that you trust, have them send them this episode so they can watch it, and alert them to what's really going on.
00:04:10.780Last night, I was talking about the president.
00:04:13.880He is getting to a point now where he's willing to do whatever it takes to secure the border.
00:04:30.420There were two chalkboards that I have done when I was at Fox, and they were both very, very important, and they still stand the test of time.
00:04:39.200Because one of them has just finished being true.
00:04:44.840Everything that I put on there was a prediction, and it's all now complete.
00:04:52.120And it's a really important chalkboard.
00:12:23.420We were so close to an election crisis in the last three years or two years.
00:12:28.520We have been told that this election was stolen, that this election wasn't legit, that this election was hacked by the Russians, and Donald Trump was part and parcel of that.
00:12:47.000They wanted this election crisis so badly, that when it has been proven that Donald Trump did not collude with the Russians, they're disappointed.
00:13:37.420Now, we're starting to see this big move about the Electoral College.
00:13:41.700I have not checked into this, but I will bet you that big money is coming from George Soros on that front as well.
00:13:47.840And when we talk about accuse fraud and begin protests, do I need to say anything more than the women's march that happened the weekend of inauguration?
00:16:10.900Without the caliphate, without the Middle East on fire, you wouldn't have had the mass migration, which would later then, as we now know, set the entire European continent on fire and lead to things like Brexit.
00:16:30.240The last part of that is, it would then spread to the rest of the world.
00:17:01.420And my research department has buttoned it up.
00:17:04.740And I will give you those facts in one minute.
00:17:07.400Okay, it is really important to understand that top-down, bottom-up, inside-out is a movement that must have people in the government coordinating with the people on the ground to turn a country inside-out.
00:17:28.900Now, to tear it apart, it can be torn apart by accident, but to turn it inside-out, it has to have carefully laid plans.
00:17:37.520So, last year, it was almost exactly a year ago that we started talking about the caravans.
00:17:43.440At the time, I said, these caravans are what is coming.
00:17:49.720Now, this is something that I have not told you, I think, until this week.
00:17:55.020I've never said this on the air before.
00:17:57.440But I believe there is a time that is coming, and Stu will tell you I've talked about this for probably 10 years, but I've never said it on the air.
00:18:06.100I believe there is a time that is coming that our borders are going to be so overwhelmed, and people are going to be coming into our country, and it is going to change and become very ugly, and people are going to demand their land back.
00:18:20.820People from Central and South America and Mexico are going to demand their land back, and they will kill farmers, and they will take that land.
00:18:35.260Now, I hope to God that that never happens.
00:18:41.120I've believed that for 10 years plus, but I've not said that because there was no indication that that kind of stuff would happen, except you have to extrapolate so much.
00:18:53.200But you are now getting real anger, you're getting desperation, and a volatile situation to where you're starting to, you have people feeding people hatred.
00:19:06.960Our open borders policy, the sanctuary cities, the migrant caravans, they are all designed to overload the system almost in a cloward and piven way.
00:19:19.220And the president needs to understand and needs to fight this a different way.
00:19:55.320Hey, it's Glenn, and I want to tell you about something that you should either end your day with or start your morning with, and that is the news and why it matters.
00:20:05.160If you like this show, you're going to love the news and why it matters.
00:20:08.420It's a bunch of us that all get together at the end of the day and just talk about the stories that matter to you and your life.
00:20:16.020Look for it now wherever you download your favorite podcasts.
00:20:18.520Blake Harris, he's an author of a book, The History of the Future, Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution that Swept Virtual Reality.
00:20:27.580You know, I am so fascinated by virtual reality because it is once you really experience great virtual reality, you see how powerful this is going to be.
00:20:42.020I mean, I don't see people really leaving their house very much after virtual reality, quite honestly.
00:20:47.200But the story of the guy who came up with Oculus has really been lost.
00:20:53.780I didn't even know this, and it is a fascinating story.
00:21:07.140And I'm not sure, I mean, it's going to change it in good ways, and I also see us kind of ending up like, what was that Pixar movie where they're all big fat on a spaceship?
00:22:01.160The thing that was like, you know, a sci-fi trope that was maybe going to happen but never did, and it was simply that we ever thought it would.
00:22:07.480And most people had just given up caring about it, thinking it would happen, except there was a young man out there, a guy named Palmer Luckey, which is a real name, even though it sounds kind of like a fictional character name that's perfect for my book.
00:22:20.620And so this kid, this 19-year-old kid, Palmer Luckey, he was living in a trailer in Long Beach, California, and he was just obsessed with virtual reality.
00:22:31.040He once described his trailer to me, and I said, Palmer, that basically sounds like the meth fan on Breaking Bad, except your trailer has been retrofitted to build virtual reality.
00:22:42.340And so he said, yeah, that's pretty much exactly what it looked like.
00:22:44.460And so imagine this little 19-year-old mad scientist building virtual reality headsets, and he basically, like, cracked the code that had eluded so many scientists and tech people and sci-fi lovers for years, and built this virtual reality headset called the Oculus Rift.
00:23:04.440And, you know, I would say the rest is history, but the rest is a book, and the rest is this company, Oculus, that less than two years later, he sold the Facebook for over $2 billion.
00:23:16.220And, you know, we're still in the early phases of virtual reality and where it's headed.
00:23:20.880But, you know, you really got to admire the young man for having this ambition and this passion for this thing that we all thought was kind of silly back then.
00:23:27.940Okay, so I was at Facebook right after they purchased this, and they were all excited.
00:24:17.940And then once they sold to Facebook, you know, Facebook's interest was not so much the gaming.
00:24:21.920It was insert, whatever you want to describe, you know, social engineering or, you know, communication, whatever the case may be.
00:24:31.700And so that's a big part of why it's stalled out for the past few years.
00:24:35.480But they actually are releasing a headset called the Oculus Quest, which is going to be the most affordable and most technologically sophisticated headset that will cost $400.
00:25:32.000So, you know, Mark announced about a year and a half ago that he was doing, that he was going to give 99% of his money away to charity, which sounds a lot nicer and simpler than it actually is.
00:25:45.040Not to say there's a nefarious plot behind it, but basically he still has the majority voting share because of how he structured the stock.
00:25:52.700And I would say that Facebook is more like a dictatorship than any other Silicon Valley company that I've ever researched.
00:25:59.760And I'm sure we'll get to it in terms of why Palmer ended up leaving Facebook against his will and the politics of it all.
00:26:08.700But that was really all driven by Mark directly.
00:26:11.220Yeah, because the politics of it are really interesting.
00:26:13.320There's a Trump tie to the story and it's a fascinating one.
00:26:16.840It's one we've heard many times in other industries.
00:26:20.160It's fascinating that it is this level and you've never heard it.
00:27:22.340I mean, to me, I don't know how familiar you are with my writing, but everything I write, I always try to write with my grandmother in mind.
00:27:28.780You know, how could I get her interested in this tech story?
00:27:30.700How could I get her interested in Sega Nintendo?
00:27:32.280And so to me, this was always just a story of the American dream in 2012, 2016, 2019, more so than it was about virtual reality.
00:27:40.980And then the final third of the book becomes this other monstrosity, which I guess might actually be, you know, a good lens into the perversion of the American dream, just with how politics weighs into everything.
00:27:55.800But I also just want to say, you know, you mentioned right before the break that it's sort of astonishing how much Facebook has burned our trust over the past few years.
00:28:08.580You know, they gave me unprecedented, almost unlimited access.
00:28:12.660So I had a pretty high opinion of them just for my own selfish reasons.
00:28:17.060But what I came to discover during my research, before my access was eventually cut off because of what I discovered, was just really, really immoral and terrible.
00:28:29.080And I should mention that, you know, I'm a lifelong liberal, not a fan at all of Trump.
00:28:35.100So, you know, as we'll get into now, like what I found, you know, I certainly wasn't looking for a sympathetic Trump supporter story, but that's what I found.
00:28:50.920Sure. So in September of 2016, so this was like six weeks before the presidential election, there was an article that came out about Palmer Luckey, about the inventor of Oculus.
00:29:02.460And the headline was Facebook billionaire secretly funding Trump's meme machine.
00:29:07.920And the insinuation explicitly and implicitly was that, you know, every terrible meme that you've seen online for the past election season, everything misogynistic, anti-Semitic, hateful, etc., that Palmer was like running a troll factory and that he was the person behind it all.
00:29:28.580The truth was that he made a slightly less than $10,000 donation to a political organization that was pro-Trump, that was planning to put up billboards across the country.
00:29:39.240And that, you know, I always kind of wonder how people would react if they just had known the truth, because in Silicon Valley, they might have reacted just as badly.
00:29:47.980But anyway, he's so unpopular in such a short amount of time, to the extent that, you know, one of my favorite publications, at least previously, Wired, you know, you'd think sort of an even-headed publication, non-intentionalistic.
00:30:03.620Their headline in the midst of this was that Palmer Luckey is the worst.
00:30:09.000That's it. Palmer Luckey is the worst.
00:30:10.920And so there was this, you know, PR crisis, and naturally, you know, Palmer wanted to write a statement to set out what was true and what was not true about the media reports and to say that he was a Trump supporter, but that, you know, this trolling thing and all these other aspects were not true.
00:30:31.200So he wrote a statement. This happened on a Thursday night. He was not allowed to post it. He was not allowed to say that he was a Trump supporter as it went up the flagpole at Facebook to the executive level, which I found, you know, initially hard to believe that that was actually the case.
00:30:47.220But then I certainly believed it was the case because I was able to finally obtain the email records of it, and I learned that the reason that it took so long for him to post his eventual statement was that Mark Zuckerberg weighed in.
00:31:03.980Mark Zuckerberg personally drafted the statement that Palmer had to post, and the statement that he drafted said that Palmer would be voting for Gary Johnson, so not Trump.
00:31:14.540That was too unacceptable to say he was a Trump supporter, and so he had to post a statement saying that he supported Gary Johnson, written by Mark himself, and, you know, he did that in order to save his job.
00:31:26.760Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, but he wasn't voting for Gary Johnson.
00:31:31.820Correct. That makes it illegal and unethical that he would be directed by the head of one of the most powerful organizations to say that he was supporting a politician that he wasn't.
00:32:01.960Well, part of it was at the time, you know, I interviewed over 200 people for the book, and so I talked to some of the people that he confided to and asked for advice from about should he post a statement that was illegal and that he didn't agree with?
00:32:17.120And their response was basically, yes, you know, you could sue Facebook and potentially win, but you wouldn't be at the company anymore, and it would take years.
00:32:25.800And more than anything, Palmer wanted to remain at the company.
00:33:10.480One of my favorite and saddest moments is Palmer's waiting to come back a couple weeks later, and he's, you know, participating in a town hall call by a conference, or actually not participating because he was not allowed to interact with anyone.
00:33:23.960And he was listening, and he found out during this meeting that he had asked for six more weeks of vacation.
00:33:38.400Behind the scenes, inside of Facebook and Palmer Luckey, the guy who invented Oculus and how he was forced out because he was a Trump supporter.
00:33:50.400The name of the book is History of the Future.
00:33:53.620We're talking to Blake Harris, who's really fascinating.
00:33:56.720He's written a book called The History of the Future, Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution that Swept Virtual Reality.
00:34:05.040But it is interesting to me that he is a liberal, doesn't necessarily like Donald Trump, and really liked Facebook going in, had unprecedented access.
00:34:16.560And then when the inventor of Oculus, this entrepreneur, this, you know, 20-some-year-old kid, sells to Facebook and the election heats up, all of a sudden he is in trouble with Facebook.
00:34:37.480And they force him to put out a deal that says he's not voting for Trump, he's voting libertarian, when that wasn't the truth.
00:34:53.660He's on a conference call, and he finds out that he had asked for even more vacation.
00:35:00.280And you know what's coming at the end of this.
00:35:03.580We pick it back up with Blake Harris, who, Blake, I have to tell you, I love people who, you know, I may disagree with, sometimes vehemently on things, but are open-minded enough to go, well, yeah, but this part is true, or this part is true.
00:35:21.680And just let the chips fall where they may.
00:36:17.440But then I talked to other journalists, and I understand why, you know, these are journalists I know under the context of they read my first book about Sega Nintendo and loved it.
00:36:28.740So, you know, I think they have a somewhat positive opinion of me.
00:36:31.700And I reached out to a lot of them to tell them that they had the story wrong.
00:36:35.940And, you know, I offered to send them evidence.
00:36:38.880I told them I was the only person who actually interviewed all the participants in this and had all the archival information.
00:36:43.460And they basically said, yeah, but who cares?
00:36:50.920And, you know, if I had told that to my mom and she said that, I still would be kind of bummed that she didn't care about what was true and what was not.
00:37:01.220And then when I told them, you know, not only was the reporting about Palmer wrong, but the reason he was fired was for political discrimination, they almost left my faith to say, yeah, but that's not the kind of discrimination I care about.
00:37:15.640And, yeah, political discrimination is perhaps probably, you know, less of a persistent issue than other forms of discrimination.
00:37:52.800I will say that they're screwed up here because this is insane.
00:37:56.620Are you finding anybody that is starting to open their eyes to what is being created?
00:38:02.880Unfortunately, less than you'd expect.
00:38:07.080You know, being a liberal and existing in probably some sort of, you know, liberal bubble, election day was a wake-up call for me.
00:38:15.460You know, I was very upset, but my thought was, okay, you know, the voice of half the country, the majority, the electoral college has spoken.
00:38:23.960I should actually listen to them because I find Trump repugnant, but they don't, and they are my fellow citizens.
00:38:31.680Let me figure out what I'm missing, and I tried to do that.
00:38:34.920And I feel like for the 24 hours after the election, a lot of other liberals were in a similar boat of, you know, we've got to talk to the other side.
00:38:41.360And then they instead decided to just double down and say, no, no, no, these people are just stupid or they don't understand that they're voting against their self-interest or whatever.
00:38:51.380And so you would have thought that more people would be waking up and just want to call balls and strikes and say, all right, I don't like Trump or I don't agree with his approach on this, but I actually think a strategy here was a good one.
00:39:06.140Like, you know, you mentioned right before you had me on that your show from last night was now on YouTube talking about the border in a nonpolitical way.
00:39:14.780And I found myself almost laughing because on the left, there's no such thing as nonpolitical.
00:39:20.500Specifically in Silicon Valley, you know, there was a story last week that two weeks ago, Google had put together an ethics board for artificial intelligence.
00:39:31.340Within less than a week later, it was disbanded because there was so much outrage internally at Google because one of the participants was a conservative.
00:39:39.720Yeah, the Heritage Foundation, which is not the Heritage Foundation.
00:40:22.560It's all, it needs to be fought against, which is kind of crazy.
00:40:26.060Does it concern you that the people like this, or Zuckerberg, a guy who you went in admiring, the power that they have, and now the growing collusion or partnering with the United States government, does that keep you up at night?
00:40:55.060Yeah, I mean, I think you see now that people, you know, Facebook is no longer the tech darlings, you know, maybe connecting in the world didn't turn out to be the best idea.
00:41:04.380Now people are starting to look into Facebook and discover these scandals.
00:41:08.180A lot of times there's things that happened years ago.
00:41:10.120So, and it's not surprising that these things happen.
00:41:14.560It's such a sloppy company, and they don't, like, I guess one of the first ways that I really realized that what I was uncovering actually fit with the culture there was, you know, one of their top executives who had been there since the beginning, he would routinely share stories during the election season, like, there's no such thing as a good Trump supporter.
00:41:38.420Well, I mean, there's Trump supporters of Facebook, and they learned pretty quickly not to talk about it.
00:41:45.240In fact, you know, the Palmer one is kind of interesting because four months before, you know, he was outed as a Trump supporter, as the worst person, you know, part of the issue was that he made his donation for $10,000 anonymously.
00:41:59.440And four months earlier, he had been at a Trump rally and been willing to appear on camera at a Trump rally.
00:42:07.560You know, like, he seemed to have no issue with being associated with Trump.
00:42:09.860But then in between what happened was Peter Thiel was revealed to be a Trump supporter.
00:42:15.700Everyone at Facebook, not everyone, a lot of people at Facebook tried to get him fired off the board for that reason alone.
00:42:21.020And not just employees, but Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, who was also a board member, believed that that demonstrated enough bad judgment that Peter should not be on the board.
00:42:30.560And so Palmer realized, oh, I should probably not be vocal about my support.
00:42:35.840And that was probably wise, because when it was revealed that he was a Trump supporter, he didn't end up at the company anymore.
00:42:44.800First of all, you know, the idea that every there's no such thing as a good Trump supporter was pretty widespread at this time, particularly in the media and through a lot of these tech companies.
00:42:54.340And obviously, that's, you know, a completely unfair thing.
00:42:58.240However, at that time, there was a lot of really bad stuff on the Internet that was associated with Trump supporters.
00:43:04.000Was there any evidence that Palmer Luckey participated in anything really bad when it comes to, you know, some of the darkest sides of that election?
00:43:16.040And I have essentially staked my career on this.
00:43:19.480So, you know, like I said, I spent an extra two years on this.
00:43:22.760I didn't just willy nilly decide, oh, no, he's a good guy or he didn't do anything wrong.
00:43:26.800Like, I looked very deeply into his online activities and spent, I think, 20 hours interviewing the founder of the organization that he donated to because, you know, it was alleged that these were white supremacists.
00:43:39.700And I didn't want to just have one phone call because, you know, who knows, maybe he was lying to me to try to protect his image.
00:43:46.360But, like, I've spoken to Palmer almost every day for the past three years.
00:43:51.740I've spent years looking into all this stuff.
00:43:55.680There is no evidence of any wrongdoing.
00:43:58.500And I would bet my life that he did not do anything, like, that we would consider beyond the pale or, you know, unacceptable.
00:44:39.420That's pretty much what I expect to happen.
00:44:41.820But, you know, the only thing I published while I was sort of undercover in Facebook for these past couple of years was an article called This Is How Fake News Happens.
00:44:53.000And it was all publicly available information.
00:44:55.100I wanted everyone to just be able to see here's what we – here's what actually happened, and here's how it was reported,
00:45:00.940and here's how this crazy game of telephone happened to make it even worse.
00:45:04.860And the response to that, you know, was like 50% of people saying, oh, thank you for pointing out that the media messed up here with Palmer.
00:45:11.920And then 50% of people calling me a Nazi, even though I was happily bar mitzvahed.
00:50:32.560I remember when they sent you back, and I read that story, and I thought, how is this happening?
00:50:39.220First of all, the guy's turned into a model citizen, and how is he dealing with that?
00:50:44.120When you heard you had to go back and serve 10 years, what was that like?
00:50:50.160I was disappointed, a little bit discouraged, because at the time I had already served nearly 22 years and had been out for two years, and because the government had appealed it and successfully won, I was being sent back.
00:51:06.240And the fact that they couldn't take into account any rehabilitation that had taken place within me during that period caused me to be very disappointed and discouraged.
00:51:16.420Now, why couldn't they take into account anything that you had done and anything that you had become?
00:51:21.360Because at the time, there was no actually incentives for rehabilitation.
00:51:27.960It was just about incapacitation, where you take a person out of society for a particular period of time, and then when that time is up, whether they're changed or not, you release them.
00:51:38.260And because I was released, based on the changes made to the 2010 sentencing guidelines, they had not been made retroactive to me, so therefore I was still required to serve 85% of my sentence.
00:51:49.720Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. So, Matthew, you got back into prison, and how long were you in prison before this prison justice reform happened?
00:52:02.680It took seven months. I went back May 14th and was released January 3rd.
00:52:08.320And how did you find out about, you know, when you were released? Where were you? What happened?
00:52:12.820I was in Kentucky at a holding facility waiting to go back to federal prison to serve that remaining 10 years.
00:52:21.520And during the time that I was rearrested, I was being held in Kentucky.
00:52:26.560And at the time, the inmates there were speaking about the First Step Act, and they were talking about the different incentives that it had,
00:52:35.060as well as the discretion that the judges had in their own courtrooms to go below the mandatory minimums.
00:52:40.900But I didn't know that it was going to actually affect me until late November, early December,
00:52:46.900when I seen that one of the provisions was that it made retroactive the changes to the 2010 sentencing guidelines.
00:52:54.860And so did you apply for it? Did somebody else apply?
00:52:58.380The Public Defender's Office in Nashville, Tennessee, Mr. Michael Holley and Ms. Mariah Wooten,
00:53:05.500because they were already appealing my reincarceration, they had already had petitions before the court.
00:53:13.020So once President Donald Trump signed it December the 21st and it became applicable after his signature,
00:53:20.260they just went on to file the motion to the district court since they were already doing filings on my behalf,
00:53:25.980asking them to release me based on the First Step Act.
00:53:29.820So, Matthew, I mean, I'd like to hear you talk about the—I was sitting in the chamber during the State of the Union.
00:53:39.760First of all, how did you get there? Did the president call you? How did you end up at the State of the Union?
00:53:46.900It would have been nice to get a call directly from the president, but I had actually been invited by his staff via email.
00:53:55.300I was invited twice. I was invited to the first one, but it didn't take place because there was a government shutdown.
00:54:00.340And the second time, they re-invited me. And once I went there, I was able to go to the White House and meet him
00:54:07.820prior to going over to the State of the Union at Congress. So it was an experience,
00:54:14.460but I had actually got the invite from his staff on his wife, Melania Trump's behalf.
00:54:19.740So now you are—you're sitting there. The president speaks about you. We all stand up and give you a standing ovation.
00:54:30.800What was that moment like to a guy who had spent 21 years in prison, nobody was thinking of?
00:54:40.880You are—you're released, then you're pulled back, and the system is just grinding you down.
00:54:46.600What was that moment like to have the president tell your story, have you stand up, and every—you know,
00:54:56.400the members of Congress and the Senate and the White House, the justices, everybody standing up, giving you a round of applause?
00:55:08.140It was a moment that would never be forgotten by me. It was like I was in awe.
00:55:12.840The only thing, as you was expressing those words, the picture that came to my mind was like a cartoon character
00:55:19.340where the roof of the head of the character just takes off and shoots toward the sky because it was, like, unbelievable.
00:55:26.720So for me, it just felt like that. It was pleasantly overwhelming. I was like, wow, just completely amazed.
00:55:33.380Never thought in a million years that I would be at the State of the Union,
00:55:36.880let alone having President Trump to actually speak about that and state welcome home to me.
00:55:42.860I will tell you that what it said to me as I was watching you stand there and in the same room with you.
00:55:53.320As I'm watching that, I thought, this is what the American justice system should be.
00:56:25.780Tell me about the pastor. Tell me about your conversion from, you know,
00:56:33.940guy that belonged in prison to guy that didn't belong in prison.
00:56:39.360What it took place was I got arrested in December of 1995 for selling crack cocaine.
00:56:46.440And once I was arrested and taken to the county jail, I was just there awaiting pretrial and sentencing.
00:56:53.580But there was a guy there named Jesus Duran who actually had got his sentence and was being transported out.
00:57:00.740So he had left me some hygiene items, you know, soap, deodorant, toothpaste.
00:57:06.120And he also left me a Bible and it was a Brown Gideon's King James Bible.
00:57:11.340So I didn't even know he had it because we spoke about religion or anything of that nature.
00:57:15.360So I accepted the gifts that he gave me and he left, but I started reading the Bible.
00:57:20.760And through reading the Bible, it started coming, I guess, to reality and awakened my spiritual side of me.
00:57:28.080And I started attending Bible study classes at the county jail.
00:57:32.260And the preacher would come in and do the Bible study and they often left tracks on how to receive salvation.
00:57:37.820So I took one of the tracks and I continued to read that Bible in my own time because, you know, in the county jail, you got a lot of time on your hands.
00:57:45.100So therefore, that led me to stating the words that were on the track, then going to the Bible study classes and openly profess my faith before them as well.
00:57:56.680And that decision that I made in February of 1996, I want to say two months after I was arrested and placed in the county jail, changed my life forever.
00:58:06.400But you still had you still had 21 years before you would see the light of day.
00:58:13.200And when you get out, it's hard for somebody like you to get a job and to acclimate.
00:58:24.780Once I made that decision to surrender my life and heart over to the Lord Jesus Christ, I had, I would say, all of God's help as all of God's children knew.
00:58:33.220So therefore, with God's help, I was able to make the right decisions.
00:58:38.280I was able to be guided and protected by God during that time of my incarceration, because at that time, I didn't know I was going to serve 21 or 22 years.
00:58:47.820I was expected to serve 31 or 32 years because I had a 35-year sentence.
00:58:52.400Matthew, you know, this is such an amazing story.
00:58:58.200And, you know, in the middle of kind of this, you know, somewhat divisive time that we're in, and it's hard to find the path forward.
00:59:04.760Glenn, you've been talking about this forever.
00:59:06.300There's only really one solution to this.
00:59:30.420It's so simple people will dismiss it, but it's the only answer that will save us, because we have to return to the principles of just be decent to each other.
00:59:50.740And that's correct, because through, like I said, through the Bible, through being a Christian and the experience itself, it shows us how to love one another as well as respect one another.
01:00:00.940And as you stated, there is a difference aside than 1995.
01:00:05.440There's a lot of divisiveness and things of that nature.
01:00:08.460So I would say that the only thing that's really going to bring true harmony and peace is once everyone or someone surrenders themselves over to the Lord.
01:00:18.640Matthew, you were the beneficiary of a very rare bipartisan moment as you were able to get out because of what President Trump and Jared Kushner in particular fought very hard for as long as Van Jones.
01:00:38.220There's a lot more that needs to be done because there are still those that are incarcerated that the First Step Act won't even affect because they've already done served the same amount of time I have or a little bit less than that.
01:00:49.780But they still have the extensive sentence that they receive under the harsher penal system, whereas the sentence or the punishment is not equivalent or in proportion to the crime they actually committed.
01:01:01.480So there's the things that we need to do to be able to reach forth and help those people who have also changed and want a second chance.
01:01:08.260And then also those that are now coming into getting in trouble and going through the court system and in the prison, we need to see what type of treatments are divergent to incarceration.
01:01:20.800Maybe they may have a mental illness or a drug addiction where they need treatment and medicine for as opposed to just incarcerating them.
01:01:29.220What do you think the percentage is of people that are in the prison system that are just mentally unwell?
01:01:35.940They're just this is this is a mental illness.
01:01:39.140I would say anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of those because.
01:01:44.880And it's sad to see them there because it's like they're in a completely different world, but yet they're placed in the same, sometimes violent atmosphere like the violent inmates are or the regular inmates are.
01:01:58.520And then because they have those mental problems, they really are not able to cope and they either get they either get hurt or hurt somebody.
01:02:08.300And at the time, there was no separate place to put these people.