The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2475 - Andrew Jarecki

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan experience.

00:00:06.000 Drain by Day!

00:00:06.000 Joe Rogan!

00:00:07.000 Podcast by night!

00:00:09.000 All day!

00:00:13.000 What's happening, man?

00:00:14.000 How are you?

00:00:14.000 I'm good.

00:00:15.000 How are you?

00:00:15.000 I'm great.

00:00:16.000 I watched your documentary, The Alabama Solution, last night, and it was wild.

00:00:21.000 It's very, very disturbing.

00:00:24.000 I'm kind of shocked I hadn't heard more about it, you know, because it's such a terrible, terrible story.

00:00:31.000 It's such an unbelievably awful situation.

00:00:36.000 And I think you covered it really well.

00:00:38.000 It's just very, very heartbreaking.

00:00:40.000 Yeah, thanks for watching it.

00:00:42.000 Yeah, it's sort of a question of a question of why people don't know about things that are happening with our tax dollars in our backyards.

00:00:53.000 You know, are there things that we don't want to know?

00:00:55.000 There's a reason why people sort of drive by prisons on the highway and they see the little metal sign and it says, you know, XYZ correctional.

00:01:02.000 And they probably think, as I did for many years, well, I'm sure it's not great back there, but it doesn't need to be great.

00:01:09.000 And if anything terrible was happening back there, somebody would probably tell me about it.

00:01:13.000 But because of the secrecy that surrounds prisons, we treat them sort of like black sites.

00:01:19.000 There's no way for us to really look inside.

00:01:21.000 So the press doesn't get lit in and the public doesn't understand what's happening.

00:01:25.000 And we know that, you know, when you give people total control over other people, bad things happen.

00:01:31.000 Bad things happen every single time.

00:01:33.000 And this is one of the worst things.

00:01:35.000 What's really terrifying is the sheer numbers of people that died there with no investigation.

00:01:42.000 That's what's really terrifying.

00:01:44.000 Yeah.

00:01:45.000 Because, you know, you even detailed at the end, like since then, how many people have died?

00:01:52.000 And it's just like, good Lord, you're thousands.

00:01:56.000 Yeah.

00:01:57.000 Well, there's an attorney general in Alabama named Steve Marshall who's always run on like tough on crime strategies and saying, you know, we've got to lock more people up and people who are in prison for violent crimes should potentially never get out of prison, ever.

00:02:14.000 And he says in the film, as you remember, that I asked him about the nature of crime, and he says, well, I think there are evil people in this world, people who have absolutely no regard for human life.

00:02:27.000 And this is a guy who's presided over a system that's killed, that's led to the deaths of 1,500 people just since we started making the film.

00:02:35.000 So this question of like, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?

00:02:38.000 And, you know, what's the nature of cruelty?

00:02:41.000 What's the nature of punishment?

00:02:43.000 Are we putting people there to try to make them better, rehabilitate them?

00:02:46.000 Are we putting them there because they're drug addicts and we're trying to get rid of them as opposed to rehabilitate them or as opposed to try to get them off of drugs?

00:02:56.000 So obviously prisons have become pretty much a catch-all for the ills of society.

00:03:00.000 So if you have mental illness, much more likely to go to prison.

00:03:04.000 Once you're in prison, if you're mentally ill or you have bad social skills, you're much more likely to get into a scrape with a guard who probably isn't trained to deal with somebody who's mentally ill. 0.71

00:03:13.000 And you're much more likely to get murdered, which is what we saw happening in Alabama.

00:03:18.000 Well, you even the it's the old expression, who's going to watch the watchers, right?

00:03:24.000 Because one of the things that you detail is very obviously nonviolent people who spend all their time writing and reading, and they're getting retribution because they're calling attention to the terrible conditions at the prison.

00:03:41.000 So the one guy with the glasses who was beaten blindly, what was his name?

00:03:45.000 Robert Old Counsel.

00:03:48.000 I mean, there's so many stories that you show in this documentary from smuggled cameras.

00:03:56.000 So these guys all get contraband cameras from the guards.

00:04:00.000 From the guards, yeah, the guards sell the camera, sell the phones to the men inside.

00:04:04.000 Which is also crazy.

00:04:06.000 Yeah.

00:04:06.000 I mean, there's so many drugs in the Alabama state prison system.

00:04:09.000 And I spoke to one of the people who was incarcerated there early on on a contraband cell phone.

00:04:16.000 And I said, you know, where are all the drugs coming from?

00:04:19.000 The amount of drugs here.

00:04:20.000 This is an incredible, you know, human wasteland. 0.99

00:04:25.000 You're seeing just high, high percentage, maybe 80% of the people are addicted to drugs, many of whom were not addicted to drugs before they came in.

00:04:32.000 And how are you getting all the cell phones? 1.00

00:04:34.000 And the guy looked at me like I was, you know, stupid. 0.99

00:04:38.000 And he said, you know, we don't leave, right? 1.00

00:04:42.000 And I thought, oh, I get it.

00:04:45.000 The people that come and go are the guards.

00:04:47.000 Those are the ones that go out.

00:04:48.000 They get the packages.

00:04:49.000 They bring them in.

00:04:50.000 And I've spoken to guards who said, you know, we make $36,000 a year without the drugs, without the cell phones.

00:04:58.000 So, of course, we've got to sell the cell phones and the drugs because that takes us up to $70,000 or $75,000.

00:05:04.000 Oh, God.

00:05:07.000 Yeah.

00:05:10.000 So what are the main drugs these guys are addicted to?

00:05:12.000 What are they getting them?

00:05:14.000 Well, there's originally, right, it was sort of more traditional drugs and people were using heroin and using whatever they could get a hold of.

00:05:22.000 But as the drugs have gotten more complicated and easier to bring in, now they can actually put, there's a drug called Flacco, which is a very significant problem there, fentanyl, obviously, also.

00:05:35.000 But these drugs can be brought in on a piece of paper.

00:05:39.000 So somebody could send you a letter and it could be in the letter.

00:05:43.000 They can actually put the drug into the paper.

00:05:45.000 Sort of like acid when they put acid on paper.

00:05:48.000 Yeah.

00:05:49.000 And so, you know, there's this effort to kind of stop that, but then does it lead to people being unable to communicate with their loved ones?

00:05:58.000 Ultimately, the easiest way to get the drugs is for the officers to sell the drugs.

00:06:03.000 And so, you know, we say, and I think it's sadly true, that the Alabama Department of Corrections, and it's not just in Alabama, but obviously we use that as the lens through which we saw incarceration more generally.

00:06:15.000 But the Alabama Department of Corrections is the largest law enforcement agency in the state of Alabama, and it's also the biggest drug dealing operation.

00:06:26.000 You know, you're much more likely to die of an overdose inside the prison than you are out on the street in Alabama.

00:06:32.000 Really?

00:06:32.000 Statistically?

00:06:34.000 Oh, my God.

00:06:36.000 Oh, boy.

00:06:38.000 You know, one of the things that is very heart-wrenching is this callous approach.

00:06:47.000 You showed at the one time where all these prisons went on strike, so they all communicated with each other through these contraband cell phones that they all got from the guards.

00:06:55.000 So I guess it's ubiquitous throughout the state.

00:06:57.000 It's not just this one.

00:06:58.000 Correct.

00:06:59.000 And these people on the radio were like, well, it's prison. 0.92

00:07:03.000 It's supposed to suck.

00:07:05.000 You know, maybe if they had saw your film, they wouldn't have such a cavalier attitude about it. 0.98

00:07:11.000 But it's that attitude.

00:07:13.000 It's like these are human beings, and some of them barely did anything.

00:07:18.000 Like one guy that wound up dying from you think they did something to, or they think they did something to a cigarette that they gave this guy.

00:07:28.000 All he did was break into an abandoned building.

00:07:32.000 He didn't steal anything.

00:07:32.000 Yeah.

00:07:34.000 And entering an unoccupied building.

00:07:36.000 Yeah.

00:07:36.000 His name is James.

00:07:36.000 Yeah.

00:07:37.000 I mean, I don't even know if he broke in, right?

00:07:39.000 It was unoccupied.

00:07:40.000 It might have even been open.

00:07:41.000 Yeah, it said entering.

00:07:42.000 So he entered a building that he wasn't supposed to enter, and he got 15 years in a cage.

00:07:48.000 And then on his way out, At least they're inferring that they killed him because he had too much information about what was going on inside and he was going to get out.

00:07:58.000 Yeah, this goes back to the story of a woman who we had met and her son.

00:08:04.000 When we were first communicating with the men using these contraband cell phones, and they were telling us what was going on inside the prison, inside the various prisons, we sort of, in the early days, we couldn't believe it because the way we got into the prisons to begin with is I had gone down to Alabama because I was always interested in incarceration and the problems of that system and the justice system.

00:08:29.000 I had made other films about the justice system.

00:08:32.000 And I was always curious about Alabama because it's sort of famously maybe the worst prison system in the country, but it mirrors a lot of others.

00:08:40.000 And my daughter was 14 at the time, Jeremy, and she said, you know, I'm reading this book by a guy named Anthony Ray Hinton, and it's a book about his wrongful imprisonment in Alabama, and maybe you should read this with me.

00:08:54.000 So we ended up reading the book together, and then we both sort of just spontaneously decided to take a road trip to Montgomery because we just didn't know anything about it, had never been there.

00:09:04.000 She was growing up in New York, and it was just not in her frame of reference.

00:09:08.000 So we went down there and we met a man who was the first black prison chaplain in the state of Alabama, Chaplain Browder.

00:09:16.000 And I said, well, I'm really curious about what's going on in the prisons.

00:09:19.000 And he said, well, you should just come in with me.

00:09:22.000 And I said, well, I'm a filmmaker.

00:09:24.000 They're not going to let me just walk into the prison in Alabama.

00:09:26.000 And he said, well, just don't come in as a filmmaker.

00:09:29.000 You just don't have to bring a camera.

00:09:31.000 You just come in and talk to some of the guys.

00:09:32.000 So I went into film.

00:09:35.000 Ultimately, we were allowed to film ultimately in one of the prisons.

00:09:40.000 And when we were in there to film this revival meeting, just because we were lucky enough to find a warden who felt like he wanted to show an example of how Christianity was active and important in the prison system, which I agreed with.

00:09:57.000 But then while we were in there filming with like five cameras, which was just unheard of, the men inside couldn't believe that there were any cameras in there.

00:10:06.000 And they started taking us aside and saying, listen, what they're showing you here is a very curated version of what's going on in this prison.

00:10:14.000 You have to get into these other buildings.

00:10:15.000 You've got to see what's going on in that dorm over there called the behavior modification dorm, where guys have been killed by guards.

00:10:23.000 And you've got to look in that dorm where people have been in solitary confinement for five years at a time.

00:10:29.000 You know, don't let them show you just what they want to show you.

00:10:32.000 And I felt much safer, you know, even though the warden had said to us, when you go in there, you know, don't talk to any of the men.

00:10:38.000 They're all very dangerous.

00:10:40.000 I immediately felt safer talking to the inmates than I did talking to any of the guards.

00:10:44.000 And when we left, it was really because we got kicked out, right?

00:10:49.000 We start, you saw in the beginning of the film, we sort of start getting nosy and we start trying to look in some of these other areas.

00:10:55.000 And then they shut down the filming, they throw us out.

00:10:58.000 And then we thought, well, you know, maybe we're stuck now.

00:11:01.000 How are we going to make a film about this?

00:11:02.000 We feel we have to because we're the only people that know what's going on in here, but they're not going to let us back.

00:11:09.000 So it was then that we found out that there was this network of men inside who had access to these contraband cell phones who were documenting what was going on.

00:11:18.000 So that was our way of getting into those buildings that we couldn't see inside.

00:11:22.000 And one of the first things we learned was one of the guys inside, Melvin Ray, texted us to say, hey, you know, this guard, it was a guard that we had been tracking already, who was a particularly violent guard.

00:11:40.000 He just beat somebody very badly, and he's now, that person, the victim, is at UAB Hospital.

00:11:45.000 So we jumped in a car and we went to UAB Hospital and just walked up.

00:11:49.000 I just put my iPhone in my pocket and we just walked up to the intensive care unit.

00:11:55.000 And when we got there, we found that this young man, Stephen Davis, had died from his injuries.

00:12:01.000 And as we started to get deeper into it, we went and visited his mother because we didn't even know if she knew that she had lost her son.

00:12:10.000 But in fact, she had been with him when he passed away.

00:12:12.000 She had sort of turned off the life support.

00:12:15.000 And we said, We want to make a film about this.

00:12:20.000 We're trying to tell the story.

00:12:21.000 And she immediately said, I'm in.

00:12:24.000 I want to help you.

00:12:25.000 I don't want this to happen to any other mothers.

00:12:27.000 You know, and this is a very nice white lady from Uniontown, Alabama with an oxygen tank. 1.00

00:12:34.000 I mean, she's not somebody that you would see ordinarily as kind of a heroic person.

00:12:38.000 But when she loses her son, she really becomes so activated and she ends up telling us the story.

00:12:46.000 And then she says, look, you know, they're lying to me already.

00:12:50.000 You know, my son just died last night, and they're already calling me and telling me things about how he was the one that attacked guards.

00:12:57.000 And none of this is true.

00:12:58.000 This all seems like it's fake.

00:13:01.000 So teach me how to record my phone calls.

00:13:03.000 So this older woman suddenly became a really important partner in making the film.

00:13:09.000 And this gets back to your question about Stephen Davis.

00:13:12.000 So her son, who was a drug addict, right, didn't kill anybody, but was in a car when a drug deal went bad.

00:13:20.000 He went to try to buy drugs and his friend went in the house and they had a fight and somebody got shot.

00:13:25.000 And then he got arrested and was charged with murder because that's how the felony murder statute works.

00:13:31.000 And so here you have a drug addict who goes to prison in Alabama and is in the highest security prison there and is targeted by a particular guard who is especially violent and is just beaten to death in front of 70 witnesses.

00:13:48.000 And then, of course, as we go through the film, we start tracking that in our investigation and we start looking into the cover-up and why they lied about how he had died and how they scrambled witnesses and how the Department of Corrections is organized so that they prevent people from finding out what really happened to their kids or their loved ones and they avoid liability and so on.

00:14:12.000 And there was one person that we ended up hearing from, this guy James Sales, who originally tells just the police side of the story, just says, well, you know, yeah, it's exactly the way that the guard said.

00:14:25.000 But then he kind of hints on the phone, listen, when I get out of here, I'll tell the real story.

00:14:30.000 Now, do they have access to these communications?

00:14:34.000 Is there a way they could be hacking into it and know that Sales had said that to you?

00:14:39.000 Well, the person that he said it to was the lawyer for Sandy Ray.

00:14:44.000 So he was supposed to be on a private attorney call.

00:14:49.000 But we do think that the Department of Corrections doesn't abide by that.

00:14:55.000 I think they do listen to attorney calls.

00:14:57.000 Sales didn't say exactly on the phone what he was going to say, but I think they knew that he was a problem because he was a good person.

00:15:04.000 I mean, Sales, the one who entered an unoccupied building and was locked up for 15 years for that, was obviously a decent person.

00:15:13.000 That's why he says, you know, when I get out, I'll speak to that.

00:15:18.000 I'm not going to lie to that man's mother.

00:15:20.000 But right now, this is their world, bro.

00:15:24.000 I'm not going to say more.

00:15:25.000 I'm not going to put myself in the middle of the morning.

00:15:26.000 But just by saying that might have been his death sentence.

00:15:31.000 He also, as he started to get closer to getting out, because he was killed a month before he was going to get out.

00:15:40.000 And so as he started getting closer to release, he just started to get more frustrated and more angry and started to say things to guards about like, you know, you know what I've seen in here.

00:15:51.000 And I'm going to, you know.

00:15:52.000 And then lo and behold, he gets found in a cell dead.

00:16:00.000 And, you know, he's bleeding from orifices in his body.

00:16:03.000 And it was pretty clear that he was given what they call a hot shot, which is they give you a cigarette that's got something bad on it and it can kill you. 0.80

00:16:12.000 Boy.

00:16:15.000 So when you first started, when you first showed up with cameras, did you know basically what was going on?

00:16:23.000 Do you have an understanding of what was going on?

00:16:26.000 Like, what were you attempting to do when you got there?

00:16:28.000 Were you just going to try to investigate and figure it out?

00:16:31.000 Or did you already have reports?

00:16:34.000 We already knew a bunch of stuff.

00:16:36.000 You know, we knew because we had had this, we had visited some prisons as volunteers.

00:16:42.000 And I had gone on the death row with my filmmaking partner, Charlotte Kaufman.

00:16:47.000 We had gone into Easterling.

00:16:49.000 We had gone originally into Holman prison where they have the death row.

00:16:53.000 And we went in there with the chaplain.

00:16:55.000 And the lieutenant came down and said, you know, unfortunately, we're so understaffed right now, which is an understatement, that, you know, we don't have anybody to take you around.

00:17:07.000 But, you know, chaplain, I know you want to show your friends around the death row, so, you know, just go for it.

00:17:13.000 So we ended up walking around the death row for like two or three hours just talking to men.

00:17:18.000 And those men were very helpful.

00:17:22.000 They weren't, you know, we weren't talking to irrational people.

00:17:24.000 We weren't talking to, you know, they're people who were trying to get the story out.

00:17:29.000 And so we knew going in that there were a lot of bad things happening.

00:17:32.000 We didn't know exactly what.

00:17:33.000 And then when we went into Easterling and the men started calling us aside and saying, you know, they beat me so bad, I defecated on myself.

00:17:42.000 Or, you know, I just saw there were five stabbings this week and none have been reported.

00:17:48.000 We started to realize that it was really a huge crisis, but it was just being kept secret.

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00:19:13.000 So it's crazy that you're relying on these guards to get in the phones that they're using to expose the crimes of the guards.

00:19:24.000 And it's like the guards are aware of the phones because they provided them to the inmates and they're contraband.

00:19:30.000 They're not supposed to have them, but yet they all do.

00:19:33.000 And so they have to ignore it if they want to keep selling them phones.

00:19:37.000 Well, another way of looking at it is that there's so little accountability that they don't actually think they're going to get in trouble for anything.

00:19:45.000 And they're kind of right.

00:19:47.000 Right.

00:19:47.000 And if you remember that guard who kills Stephen Davis, Rod Gadson, this guy might be the most violent prison guard in America.

00:19:56.000 He's still working in the Alabama state prison system after he has a starring role against his will, I'm sure, but after he has a starring role in our documentary, which has been seen by millions of people, they still have him employed there.

00:20:09.000 They still have him interacting with people.

00:20:11.000 And he got hired to a higher position.

00:20:13.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:20:14.000 He's been promoted twice, and now he's up for another promotion.

00:20:18.000 So I think to some extent the guards just say, well, you know, I can do whatever I want.

00:20:22.000 I can sell the cell phones.

00:20:24.000 And by the way, not all the guards are bad, right?

00:20:26.000 There are guards that we met there who were pretty heartbroken because they went into the system hoping to make change or trying to, maybe they wanted to work in the police department and there weren't any jobs.

00:20:38.000 But in their town, they had the ability to work in a prison.

00:20:41.000 So they kind of went in there and described to us that they wanted to help people with addiction.

00:20:45.000 They wanted to see if they could help rehabilitate people.

00:20:48.000 But when they got in there, they realized very quickly that was not what was in the offing.

00:20:52.000 That wasn't an opportunity for them.

00:20:55.000 So the guy, this Roger guy that beat Stephen to death, the story was that Stephen had some sort of an implemented weapon, correct?

00:21:05.000 Yeah, that he had a plastic knife.

00:21:06.000 Right.

00:21:07.000 Was there any evidence of that?

00:21:09.000 He had some kind of like a some kind of plastic thing that he had made.

00:21:15.000 It did not appear to be anything very serious because the reason he had made it is because somebody had called him gay, and you have to fight your way out of that, right?

00:21:25.000 He wasn't gay, as it turns out.

00:21:28.000 You have to fight your way out of that.

00:21:29.000 So if somebody called you gay, you have to fight them? 0.99

00:21:31.000 Yeah, in other words, you can't put up with that because otherwise they're going to turn you into what they call a sissy. 1.00

00:21:37.000 They're going to turn you into somebody that gets raped. 1.00

00:21:39.000 And there's so much rape in the prison that the DOJ report that came out said that there's rape occurring at all hours of the day and night in all areas of the prison. 0.73

00:21:49.000 So rape is such a significant problem. 1.00

00:21:53.000 And when Stephen Davis was in there and was accused of being gay, he had to make a show of fighting the person that was calling him gay.

00:22:03.000 He never went after the guards or anything like that.

00:22:06.000 And everybody that the lawyer spoke to, you know, a dozen witnesses who had seen what happened, all of them said as soon as the guards came in, he immediately lay down on the floor and put his weapon about 15 feet away from him, put this plastic knife 15 feet away.

00:22:24.000 And then the guards came in and just started beating him, even though there was no threat.

00:22:29.000 And the guards would say, Gadson was saying to Stephen Davis, you know, quit resisting, quit resisting.

00:22:34.000 And he wasn't resisting at all.

00:22:36.000 And that's what all the witnesses said.

00:22:37.000 So they just have to say that, so they yell it out.

00:22:40.000 Yeah, it's almost, I think it was almost like, it was almost just a warning to everybody else.

00:22:44.000 Like, look, I can do anything that I want.

00:22:47.000 I can say that he's resisting.

00:22:48.000 Isn't it funny?

00:22:50.000 You know, and the way, you know, the way he kills him, he stomps on his head with his size 15 boot.

00:22:57.000 This is a guy who's almost 300 pounds.

00:23:00.000 I think he's about six foot five.

00:23:02.000 And he's been implicated in 24 other excessive force cases.

00:23:08.000 And the Attorney General in Alabama, every single time, is defending the guard.

00:23:13.000 How many other people have died in those cases?

00:23:15.000 There have been a lot of other injuries.

00:23:18.000 I think that there have been two people who've died out of the 24, 25 cases that we know about.

00:23:25.000 But there are a lot of just maimings.

00:23:27.000 There are a lot of situations where people are just damaged, often permanently.

00:23:31.000 You saw what happened at Kinetic Justice when he, you know, Robert Earl Counsel, when he leads a nonviolent work strike, that guards come and attack him, and he loses sight in one of his eyes.

00:23:43.000 He's, you know, dragged out of the cell.

00:23:45.000 There's a huge amount of blood.

00:23:48.000 So, you know, especially these guys who are leading a nonviolent effort to try to improve conditions, they're always met with violence.

00:23:56.000 Right.

00:23:56.000 He was the guy that was at the head of this strike.

00:23:59.000 Yeah.

00:24:00.000 And then the strike really highlights something that I think a lot of people are unaware of is how many industries actually use the prison system essentially for slave labor.

00:24:11.000 Yeah.

00:24:11.000 Sure.

00:24:11.000 I mean, that was a shock to me, I think, is that, you know, I guess we all sort of assume, well, if you're in prison and they ask you to mop the floor, you need to help serve the meals or something, you know, that's a reasonable thing to do.

00:24:23.000 I think what we don't realize is that those people are leased out to the governor, to the mansion where the governor lives. 0.54

00:24:31.000 Crazy.

00:24:33.000 That was crazy.

00:24:33.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:24:34.000 People that were denied parole were allowed to be on the grounds of the governor's mansion doing like groundwork.

00:24:40.000 Exactly.

00:24:41.000 Landscaping and stuff.

00:24:43.000 And beyond that, they're used for labor in industry, right?

00:24:49.000 So those guys are sent out in the mornings in vans.

00:24:52.000 They go work at McDonald's.

00:24:55.000 They work at Burger King.

00:24:56.000 They work at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

00:24:58.000 They work at the Hyundai plant.

00:24:59.000 They work at the Budweiser distributorship.

00:25:03.000 And it's all sort of under the heading of, well, this is good for the guys.

00:25:06.000 They get to get out into the community.

00:25:08.000 But it's a forced labor situation because if they don't, if they don't accept those assignments, then they're going to be punished.

00:25:16.000 And they're going to be punished with long stays in solitary confinement.

00:25:19.000 They're going to be given disciplinaries so that their sentences can be extended.

00:25:24.000 They are often just beaten for that.

00:25:27.000 So it's really an extension.

00:25:29.000 I've heard you on your show talk about, you know, talk about the Jim Crow laws, which led to convict leasing.

00:25:36.000 And what we're seeing in Alabama now, it's not like convict leasing.

00:25:40.000 It is exactly convict leasing.

00:25:42.000 They are just selling the labor of incarcerated people to industries.

00:25:47.000 For pennies on the dollar of what you would get if you had to pay people.

00:25:51.000 And they get paid well.

00:25:51.000 Yeah.

00:25:54.000 Yeah.

00:25:55.000 But not the ⁇ you're saying they, meaning the prisons, get paid well, but not the prisoners.

00:26:00.000 Correct.

00:26:01.000 The prisoners get any money?

00:26:03.000 They get a little money.

00:26:04.000 For example, the guy you see who's driving a sanitation truck, Danny Dandridge, describes how he's getting paid $2 a day.

00:26:15.000 Now, is that standard across the board for all those other jobs?

00:26:18.000 I think for that plant, everything?

00:26:19.000 I think for that job, they get paid a little bit of money, and then on top of that, they're charged for the cost of the van that takes them to the workplace.

00:26:29.000 They're charged for the uniform that they have to wear.

00:26:32.000 So it's sort of like there are kind of fees and fines that knock everything down to almost nothing.

00:26:38.000 And in a lot of cases, the $2 a day is a lot.

00:26:42.000 They're required to do lots of work unpaid in the prisons.

00:26:47.000 They do all the construction.

00:26:49.000 You could see that even the drug dorm where the counselor decided to leave his job, there was a professional drug counselor in one of the prisons, and nobody replaces him.

00:27:02.000 And so Raul Poole, one of the guys in our film, just starts running the drug dorm.

00:27:08.000 And that's a drug dorm that's getting money from the federal government to pay for drug treatment program in prison.

00:27:15.000 And that money is just not going anywhere.

00:27:16.000 Or money is just going into the coffers of whoever's running the prison system.

00:27:20.000 God.

00:27:21.000 And is there any accountability for all the money?

00:27:24.000 Do they do an audit of the money or is it just – There really is not any meaningful accountability.

00:27:31.000 You know, there's like the state auditor who we actually interviewed and spent a lot of time with just sort of threw up his hands.

00:27:38.000 You know, he said, there's just no way for me to keep track of this money.

00:27:41.000 And, you know, for example, they got this incredibly horrible set of findings from the Justice Department.

00:27:51.000 The DOJ went into the Alabama state prison system and did an investigation because for reasons I can explain that are kind of incredible.

00:27:59.000 But anyway, they went in there and they investigated the whole prison system, which I think they'd never done before.

00:28:04.000 You know, usually they investigate an individual prison or something like that.

00:28:09.000 And they went in and issued a report that said, this is beyond the pale.

00:28:14.000 There are horrific things that are happening in your prisons, people being murdered, and there's the highest rate of drug overdose and highest rate of rape.

00:28:23.000 And Alabama's response was to say, well, we think that's just anecdotal and you don't know what you're talking about.

00:28:30.000 And then they decided that their solution, the Alabama solution that we sort of ironically talk about in the title of the film, the one the governor talks about, is just to build new prisons.

00:28:41.000 And meantime, the DOJ did not say to build any new prisons.

00:28:46.000 The DOJ said, your problem is with corruption and brutality, and you're operating really a criminal enterprise, and therefore you need to address the underlying problems.

00:28:59.000 And Alabama's response was, well, the DOJ says the prisons are no good, so we've got to build new ones.

00:29:05.000 Well, that, you know, they get a massive contract.

00:29:07.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:29:08.000 So we, you know, we always call it the Alabama Department of Construction because they don't really change anything unless they have the opportunity to build something.

00:29:16.000 And that's really good for all the governor supporters and all the other people who are, you know, in the construction industry.

00:29:22.000 And, you know, they've now started construction on these massive new prisons.

00:29:29.000 You know, Alabama's a tiny state.

00:29:31.000 It's like, you know, smaller population, I think, than Norway.

00:29:34.000 And they've got a tiny budget, and yet they figure out how to put together a multi-billion dollar prison construction plan.

00:29:44.000 They can't fund it at first.

00:29:47.000 The governor announces she's going to build these new prisons, which the DOJ did not ask for, and are not going to solve the problem.

00:29:53.000 And they admit, by the way, that they're not going to affect overcrowding, which is a huge problem.

00:29:57.000 The prisons are operating at like 200% capacity.

00:30:00.000 And, you know, when they're asked about it, the head of the Department of Corrections, they ask him, you know, is this going to affect the overcrowding?

00:30:09.000 Or is it just the same number of beds?

00:30:10.000 And he goes, no, it's the same number of beds.

00:30:13.000 It's not going to affect overcrowding.

00:30:14.000 So they're building these massive new facilities.

00:30:17.000 The governor can't get them paid for.

00:30:19.000 She can't raise the money in a bond offering.

00:30:22.000 So they go after the COVID money that they got from the government, which is not designed to build prisons.

00:30:29.000 It's very hard to argue that building prisons is something that's going to relieve some other kind of health problem or whatever.

00:30:37.000 And then I think they get fined for that, or you have to pay a fine if you use government money for a thing that's not supposed to be for.

00:30:47.000 And then when they start construction, they still can't raise the money, but they start building the new prisons even before they're authorized by the legislature.

00:30:56.000 That's how clearly it was communicated that these prisons were going to happen.

00:31:03.000 In other words, we had a crew in Alabama that was watching this site of this one massive prison that they were planning on building.

00:31:12.000 And there were just bean fields.

00:31:14.000 And it was quite beautiful, actually.

00:31:16.000 And one day I get a call from somebody and they say, we've got to start filming because there are 25 earth movers here.

00:31:23.000 And I said, well, that's impossible because the legislature hasn't even approved the new prison construction.

00:31:29.000 And they said, well, the prison construction companies know what's happening and they're already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars just to clear the site.

00:31:36.000 So the fix was in on this new prison construction.

00:31:39.000 And the governor announced that it was going to cost $900 million to build three new prisons.

00:31:45.000 So far, they've broken ground and are far along on the first prison, and it's up to $1.3 billion.

00:31:54.000 So when you open that door, a whole lot of commerce comes in.

00:31:59.000 A whole lot of companies come in, you know, and they ask them why was it so expensive?

00:32:05.000 How did it go from $300 million for one prison to $1.3 billion for one prison and counting?

00:32:12.000 And they said, well, it's inflation.

00:32:15.000 And, you know, meanwhile, I'm pretty sure that the government's not going to say that we got 400% inflation at the moment.

00:32:23.000 So it's, you know, it's kind of institutionalized thievery.

00:32:27.000 Yeah, it's organized crime.

00:32:29.000 Yeah.

00:32:30.000 I mean, when you are in charge of deciding what's crime.

00:32:34.000 Yeah.

00:32:34.000 And you're running a state like Alabama.

00:32:36.000 Yeah.

00:32:38.000 And I think, you know, money in the justice system is a very perverting factor.

00:32:38.000 Yeah.

00:32:44.000 You know, I made this film, this series called The Jinx.

00:32:47.000 And Rod.

00:32:48.000 Great. 1.00

00:32:48.000 Great fucking series, by the way. 1.00

00:32:49.000 Oh, thank you. 0.99

00:32:50.000 Thank you. 0.98

00:32:51.000 Crazy. 0.59

00:32:52.000 Like, you'll watch this going, what?

00:32:52.000 Yeah.

00:32:55.000 Yeah.

00:32:56.000 Is this real?

00:32:57.000 Yeah, me too.

00:32:59.000 I mean, you know, he's an incredible person to watch.

00:33:05.000 But one thing about him is, you know, that family's worth $9 billion.

00:33:10.000 This is not like a regular rich person in America.

00:33:12.000 This is an extra super duper rich person in America.

00:33:15.000 And he's killed three people over 30 years and just walking around, gotten away with it.

00:33:20.000 Meantime, you have, you know, young women moms in Browsers County Jail in Texas. 1.00

00:33:26.000 You know, our mutual friend Jeff Ross did a documentary there.

00:33:30.000 And he interviews the girls that are in there.

00:33:32.000 And he says, what are you in here for?

00:33:34.000 And two of them say, I'm in here because I stole baby formula.

00:33:38.000 So, you know, that's a money.

00:33:40.000 Money means a lot in this.

00:33:42.000 That's crazy.

00:33:44.000 Yeah.

00:33:46.000 Yeah.

00:33:49.000 The money stuff is all over the place.

00:33:52.000 You know, it's the perverting of the system with money you see because, you know, for example, these big prison companies like Geo Group and Core Civic make money by having full prisons.

00:34:07.000 You know, they're private prison companies, but there are lots of prisoners.

00:34:11.000 There are a lot of companies that provide services to public prisons, to state prisons like, you know, Cisco and all these companies that sell food there.

00:34:19.000 But everybody makes more money if the prisons are full.

00:34:22.000 And so you have the head of Core Civic just did a shareholder call not too long ago.

00:34:33.000 And he's Heninger, I think his name is.

00:34:36.000 And they said, you know, what do you think, what's the outlook?

00:34:38.000 And he said, oh, with all the new immigration, prisons, and all the prisons and all the increased emphasis on law enforcement and on incarceration, this is the most exciting time in my career.

00:34:54.000 So, you know, you're really building this prison industrial complex every day, especially right now, I think.

00:35:03.000 And all these people are doing, they're all doing bad stuff.

00:35:07.000 You know, there's a company called Securus, which is run by Tom Gores, who is a big team owner, owns the Pistons, the Detroit Pistons, and some other teams.

00:35:21.000 And is a private equity guy worth about $10 billion.

00:35:25.000 And his company, Securis, does communications for the prison systems.

00:35:31.000 And they made deals that have now been sort of exposed, but they made deals with sheriff's departments where they had jails.

00:35:40.000 And they said, instead of letting kids visit their parents in jail and actually get to see them and hug them and maybe have some kind of normalcy, let's install video visit terminals.

00:35:53.000 So the cover story was the video visits are going to be great because you don't have to drive across the state to see your loved one.

00:36:00.000 But the contract specifically said that they had to replace in-person visits.

00:36:07.000 So when a kid went to go visit his dad, even if he was 20 yards away from him in the prison waiting room, he had to use a video terminal, which costs $12.99 for 20 minutes.

00:36:19.000 And he was not allowed to see his dad in person.

00:36:24.000 So that's an example of, you know, and that's in the contract that's in the Securist contract that said that they have to eliminate the in-person visits.

00:36:32.000 So when you allow that for-profit motive to be driving things in these state institutions where theoretically we should, you know, have some kind of like moral approach that makes sense for society or, you know, can help community or build our relationships or help people stay in touch with their loved ones when they're incarcerated.

00:36:55.000 When you add that for-profit motive there, the system is just designed to exploit.

00:37:01.000 It just is natural that all those people have to get, you know, they all have, there's a kind of a value to every visit.

00:37:09.000 Every time a visit, you know, every time a kid comes and visits a parent, it's worth $12.99.

00:37:15.000 Well, why do it for free if you can get $12.99 for it?

00:37:22.000 Is it one of the darker aspects of human nature in regards to our relationship with money that so many people, if unchecked, if you give them the opportunity to make more money at the expense of other people, they do it.

00:37:36.000 They just do it.

00:37:37.000 Yep.

00:37:37.000 They do it, especially under the framework of a corporation.

00:37:41.000 The framework of a corporation allows you to have a diffusion of responsibility because you don't think that you're the one doing this horrible thing.

00:37:50.000 It's this thing that you work for, and I'm just doing my job.

00:37:55.000 And also, if you're involved in a corrupt system and this is your job and you think of these people as all good people that are part of the corrupt system, it sort of minimizes the horrible feelings that you have about that corruption.

00:38:08.000 You just dismiss it.

00:38:10.000 Aaron Trevor Brandeis, I really believe, I've heard you talk about diffusion of responsibility before.

00:38:15.000 I think it's such a huge part of what drives all this is that you have people who don't really have to ask themselves the hard question.

00:38:27.000 Am I the person that's exploiting somebody?

00:38:29.000 Am I the person that's overcharging a mom?

00:38:32.000 Am I the person that's charging somebody a crazy amount of money for their medication or allowing somebody to die from medical neglect?

00:38:42.000 Because once you have a corporation and you look at that org chart, you know, you could see the org chart as, oh, that's a nice, orderly way of getting commerce to move forward.

00:38:52.000 But it's also a thousand points of responsibility.

00:38:56.000 Every one of those persons just takes a tiny measure of responsibility.

00:39:02.000 Well, I'm just in the accounting department.

00:39:04.000 I mean, I don't make the rules.

00:39:06.000 I don't make the laws.

00:39:08.000 And you see that in the healthcare industry, people recording their calls with their health care providers or their insurance companies saying, oh, I'm sorry, I really can't answer.

00:39:18.000 That's not my job.

00:39:19.000 Somebody else makes that decision.

00:39:21.000 And so when you have these massive organizations, there's a way for very bad things to happen.

00:39:28.000 And it's like the death of a thousand cuts.

00:39:31.000 It's also everybody's trying to maximize profit.

00:39:34.000 And when you're trying to maximize profit, you just find some ways to justify things.

00:39:38.000 Like your main job is not to help people.

00:39:41.000 These prisons aren't rehabilitation centers.

00:39:43.000 You're trying to make like you actually profit off people becoming like functional members of society once they get released.

00:39:51.000 That would be amazing.

00:39:52.000 Then you'd have an incentive to make people better people in prison.

00:39:55.000 Like imagine if their profit was based on people being rehabilitated, re-entering society and becoming functional, proper members of society where they contribute.

00:40:09.000 Sure.

00:40:09.000 I mean, the incentives are so good.

00:40:09.000 Yeah.

00:40:12.000 Yeah, they're so twisted.

00:40:13.000 It's like saying money is the root of all evil.

00:40:15.000 It's not the root of all evil.

00:40:16.000 It's the root of most of it, though.

00:40:18.000 It's like a giant percentage of it.

00:40:20.000 Maybe it's 75% of evil.

00:40:22.000 The rest of it's like what, lust?

00:40:24.000 Yeah.

00:40:25.000 I mean, anger, jealousy.

00:40:27.000 That's the root of a lot of evil.

00:40:27.000 Yeah.

00:40:29.000 You know, whatever, whatever the other percentage is.

00:40:32.000 But money, 60% maybe.

00:40:35.000 Let's be charitable. 1.00

00:40:35.000 It's the root of a lot of fucking evil, man. 1.00

00:40:39.000 And when you can do it inside of this framework of a corporation, it's so twisted because it's ubiquitous. 0.99

00:40:47.000 It exists in almost all industries.

00:40:49.000 There's always, whether it's the, like, this is the reason why people celebrated when that healthcare executive was shot.

00:40:56.000 Right. 1.00

00:40:57.000 They were like, hey, man, fuck you guys. 1.00

00:40:59.000 Like, yeah, finally one of you guys got it. 1.00

00:41:01.000 I lost my dad.

00:41:02.000 I lost my mom.

00:41:03.000 I lost my sister. 1.00

00:41:04.000 You know, that kind of shit is in every fucking industry. 1.00

00:41:09.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:41:10.000 Whether it's military industrial complex, whether it's the health insurance complex, whether it's pharmaceutical drug industry, when you look at the Sackler family and what they did with opioids.

00:41:21.000 I'm sure you've seen the Netflix, the Peterberg Netflix painkiller series. 0.96

00:41:25.000 Fucking incredible. 0.96

00:41:26.000 It's just incredible that that guy's just walking around. 1.00

00:41:30.000 You're responsible for the death of who knows how many people.

00:41:33.000 Because who knows how many people that had relationships with the people that got addicted also lost their lives, also lost everything.

00:41:42.000 Because you're dealing with a brother or a mom that's completely lost and addicted.

00:41:48.000 Your life is hijacked now by this situation.

00:41:52.000 You've lost your dad.

00:41:53.000 You've lost your mom.

00:41:54.000 You lost a spouse. 1.00

00:41:55.000 Fuck. 1.00

00:41:56.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:41:57.000 I mean, you know, I've heard you talk a lot about mental health.

00:42:01.000 And obviously, there are a lot of causes of mental health problems.

00:42:06.000 And, you know, that includes social media.

00:42:09.000 It includes sort of alienation.

00:42:11.000 It includes a lot of things that are present in society.

00:42:16.000 But the prison industrial complex and the experience of having somebody incarcerated has a huge impact on mental health.

00:42:28.000 I think people don't realize when you have 2 million people locked up in these facilities and many of them are just being traumatized every day, whether they're seeing somebody get killed or they're constantly in fear for their life.

00:42:41.000 The idea that those people are going to somehow be okay when you want to let them out 10 years later and they're going to rejoin society, you give them $50 and a bus ticket and you say, hey, I hope you can become a taxpayer.

00:42:51.000 Meantime, they don't have enough money to pay for one red roof in for one night. 0.99

00:42:56.000 They can't do anything when they get out of prison.

00:43:00.000 And then we say, well, why is there such high recidivism?

00:43:03.000 I guess that means they're bad people.

00:43:05.000 So let's put them back in.

00:43:06.000 So the mental health implications for the people that are incarcerated are huge and the people who are in their families, as you say.

00:43:14.000 Imagine the anxiety.

00:43:15.000 You don't have any family members and they're going to give you $50 and now you're out.

00:43:20.000 And you have to figure out how to eat, how to get a roof over your head, and try to figure out a way to earn money with $50.

00:43:27.000 Yeah.

00:43:28.000 And there are ways to do it.

00:43:29.000 You know, if you go into the I mean, all this sounds very dark and horrible, and it is, but there are a lot of positive developments that you can see when you give them a chance to grow in society.

00:43:48.000 So, for example, like I love what you say about community, you know, about the importance of building community and seeing the country as our community.

00:43:59.000 And, you know, if we're torturing people that are in our community, if we're being cruel to people that are in our community, what does it say about us?

00:44:08.000 Right.

00:44:08.000 You know, what does it say about Christianity?

00:44:12.000 What does it say about God?

00:44:16.000 What does it say about forgiveness?

00:44:19.000 And clearly, we see that there are so many instances where people are trying, trying to do something better.

00:44:28.000 There's a woman named Erica in Alabama who was a mental health professional.

00:44:34.000 And she described to me what it was like to try to give mental health services to people who were incarcerated.

00:44:42.000 And I was trying to figure out, you know, looking at these images of the places that they keep people in, these cells, these solitary cells with just a little tray slot.

00:44:51.000 And, you know, they're in there in a five by eight room with no windows, and they could be in there literally for years.

00:45:01.000 And I said to her, well, can you tell me like when you do a session with somebody and you're trying to talk to them about their suicidal ideation or their various problems, what does that look like?

00:45:13.000 How does that work?

00:45:14.000 And she goes, well, you know, it's a little uncomfortable because I got to be on my knees.

00:45:18.000 And I said, wait, why are you on your knees?

00:45:21.000 She said, oh, well, I have to be able to talk through the tray slot.

00:45:25.000 And I said, so when you're giving a mental health counseling session to somebody who's incarcerated, you're not allowed to open the door.

00:45:33.000 You're not allowed to see, assuming that person's not having a violent fit or something like that.

00:45:39.000 You're not allowed to sit down across from them and have that conversation.

00:45:42.000 She said, no, no, no, but it's okay.

00:45:44.000 I just put my mouth up to the tray slot.

00:45:46.000 And I just thought, you know, when you think about the idea that that's going to be somehow something that will give relief to somebody who's really struggling with a mental health crisis in prison, you know, we're doing the absolute minimum.

00:46:01.000 You know, we're checking the box that says, yeah, once a month this guy has a psychiatric evaluation.

00:46:07.000 But nobody's taking a picture of that and showing what it really looks like to have this nice, you know, young lady, this idealistic young mental health person kneeling outside of a metal cell with bloodstains on it talking to somebody inside.

00:46:22.000 Through a food slot.

00:46:24.000 Through a food slot.

00:46:25.000 And that's probably the only interaction this person has with human beings other than the guards.

00:46:29.000 Yeah.

00:46:31.000 Yeah.

00:46:31.000 I mean, they're very cruel.

00:46:33.000 Yeah.

00:46:34.000 And you're alone in that cell, which is also terrible for mental health.

00:46:39.000 Like, there's nothing worse for mental health than complete total isolation with no access to anything.

00:46:45.000 Yeah.

00:46:47.000 Have you ever had experiences with people, friends or family who've been incarcerated?

00:46:53.000 Oh, yeah.

00:46:53.000 Yeah.

00:46:54.000 Quite a few.

00:46:55.000 What's that been?

00:46:56.000 What's that been like?

00:46:57.000 Well, I have this one friend that I used to do martial arts with when I was a kid.

00:47:04.000 And when I was probably around 16, 16 or 17, he wound up going to jail.

00:47:13.000 I didn't know him that well, but I knew him as this guy who competed in tournaments and he would show up and train with us and he's just a pretty tough guy.

00:47:25.000 He went into jail and he came out, first of all, much bigger.

00:47:28.000 He was just like stacked with muscle.

00:47:31.000 All of his tattoos, he burned off, so he had scars, like these big keloid scars over all of his tattoos now. 0.92

00:47:40.000 And he was a completely different person, like a violent animal, like a terrifying guy to spar with.

00:47:48.000 If you spar with him, you were in a, it wasn't, there was nothing, no holding back.

00:47:52.000 Sparring, for the most part, when you like people, you're hitting them only a certain percentage of your strength.

00:48:01.000 This guy was not doing any of that.

00:48:02.000 He was full blast with everything.

00:48:04.000 It was like a caged animal.

00:48:07.000 And as I got to be closer to him, I actually became closer to him after he got out of prison than he was before.

00:48:15.000 You know, because I just spent more time sparring him and hanging out and training with him and, you know, being in these group classes with him.

00:48:22.000 He started telling me these stories about what it was like in jail and just fighting for his life.

00:48:28.000 He had to take on three guys and he picked up a broomstick and he was beating these guys.

00:48:32.000 He's just telling me these crazy stories of guys trying to kill him in jail.

00:48:37.000 And he was in there for three years for drug selling.

00:48:39.000 And then he went right back to selling drugs.

00:48:41.000 And he eventually got arrested.

00:48:45.000 And I've told this story before.

00:48:47.000 It's kind of crazy.

00:48:48.000 They found a guy that had every bone in his body broken with hammers.

00:48:56.000 And they kept him awake by injecting him with cocaine.

00:48:59.000 They kept injecting him with cocaine.

00:49:02.000 And then they cut his arms off. 0.80

00:49:03.000 They cut his hands off and then they cut his head off.

00:49:05.000 And they found his body.

00:49:06.000 But all of his bones had been shattered.

00:49:09.000 And this guy that I knew as a kid got arrested for that.

00:49:14.000 They never wound up trying him for that.

00:49:16.000 They brought him in for questioning.

00:49:18.000 He definitely knew something about it.

00:49:20.000 He knew either the people that did it or knew something about it.

00:49:23.000 It was all drug-related.

00:49:24.000 And he was selling cocaine.

00:49:27.000 And then I lost touch with him after that.

00:49:30.000 That's a crazy story.

00:49:31.000 Oh, yeah.

00:49:32.000 I knew quite a few guys like that.

00:49:34.000 Because the world of fighting, like people that are interested in entering in competitions with people, you get a lot of troubled people, a lot of very angry people.

00:49:46.000 You know, a lot of them that come from violent households.

00:49:50.000 They were beaten as children or they were bullied as kids, depending on where.

00:49:55.000 I came from the most mild of those environments.

00:50:00.000 I didn't have anybody abusing me.

00:50:02.000 I lived in the suburbs of Boston.

00:50:05.000 I lived in Newton, which is a really nice neighborhood.

00:50:08.000 I just was interested in martial arts.

00:50:10.000 And then I was fascinated by this idea of bettering myself through competition because it was so scary.

00:50:15.000 And then all of a sudden I'm around like hit men.

00:50:18.000 I knew one guy who was a hitman for Whitey Bulger.

00:50:21.000 And I would train him.

00:50:24.000 I would teach this guy how to do martial arts. 0.86

00:50:26.000 And he was an assassin.

00:50:29.000 That's amazing.

00:50:30.000 It was very strange.

00:50:31.000 I knew a bunch of organized crime figures, mostly with the Irish mob.

00:50:36.000 A lot of those guys came and trained.

00:50:38.000 And especially because they knew some other guys that we knew that were a couple of one of my friends who was a Bach, he was a professional boxer.

00:50:46.000 And he lived in South Boston.

00:50:48.000 He was very tight with a lot of these guys.

00:50:49.000 So some of these guys came to train with us.

00:50:51.000 It was very weird exposure for me.

00:50:53.000 I'd never been around any of that.

00:50:55.000 I never had anyone in my family that went to jail.

00:51:00.000 No one was a criminal.

00:51:01.000 No one was a drug addict.

00:51:02.000 There's nothing, nothing really crazy.

00:51:04.000 And then all of a sudden I was around a lot of these people that either went to jail eventually or had been in jail.

00:51:13.000 Because I think there's that question of, you know, people say, well, if you don't like the prison system the way it is, or if you don't think people should get locked up forever, then, you know, you're just soft on crime.

00:51:13.000 Yeah.

00:51:26.000 And, you know, obviously, you know, you're some kind of snowflake.

00:51:31.000 But clearly, there's a role for prison.

00:51:35.000 There's a role for jail.

00:51:38.000 The question is whether we should be putting people into institutions that just further damage them, further re-traumatize them.

00:51:47.000 Right.

00:51:47.000 You're just making them hardened.

00:51:49.000 They're going to be worse criminals if they get out, if and when they get out.

00:51:53.000 Yeah.

00:51:54.000 And there's no emphasis on rehabilitation.

00:51:56.000 So that's the thing.

00:51:56.000 It's like if you're releasing them back into the street, like what are you doing to the rest of society?

00:52:00.000 If you're taking a person who's committed a violent crime, making them way worse in jail and then releasing them.

00:52:06.000 This is like a slow bomb.

00:52:09.000 You know, it's a slow release bomb.

00:52:11.000 And then also they have no options because no one wants to hire an ex-convict, especially someone who went to jail for like aggravated assault or something like that.

00:52:18.000 So it's very, very difficult for these people and very, very difficult for society to make a decision.

00:52:24.000 You know, you want to make a quick fix of something.

00:52:26.000 You want to protect people.

00:52:27.000 Just keep them in jail.

00:52:28.000 Keep everybody in jail.

00:52:29.000 But there's zero emphasis on how to take a person from a completely broken childhood, broken home, violence, drug addiction in the home, all the chaos, complete accustom, completely being accustomed to violent crime because it's all around you.

00:52:48.000 It's in your neighborhood.

00:52:49.000 You imitate your atmosphere.

00:52:51.000 And then what do we do with these people?

00:52:53.000 You know, there's no emphasis whatsoever on it.

00:52:55.000 It's just using them as human batteries to generate money. 0.59

00:52:58.000 And that's evil.

00:52:59.000 That's what's really crazy.

00:53:01.000 And this is where people have subverted this idea of incarceration being some sort of a rehabilitation or correction, right?

00:53:09.000 They call them correctional facilities.

00:53:12.000 You're not correcting anything.

00:53:13.000 You're just making money. 1.00

00:53:14.000 You're just making money off of people and you're taking advantage of the fact that no one wants to pay attention to it because society generally looks at people that are criminals and have committed violent crimes as like, oh, well, fuck them. 1.00

00:53:26.000 Push them aside. 0.99

00:53:27.000 And look, there's some people that I agree. 1.00

00:53:29.000 Yeah, fuck them. 1.00

00:53:30.000 If there's people that have, you know, killed a bunch of people and raped a bunch of people and are constantly robbing people and breaking into houses that are violent, yeah, fuck those people. 1.00

00:53:39.000 Fuck those people. 1.00

00:53:39.000 But that's a small percentage of what's in jail. 1.00

00:53:43.000 A large percentage is nonviolent drug offenders.

00:53:46.000 And that's where it gets really weird.

00:53:48.000 It's like, so a person is deciding, you can have the drugs that we sanction.

00:53:52.000 You can have the drugs that we tax.

00:53:54.000 You can have these drugs.

00:53:55.000 You can have these prescription drugs.

00:53:57.000 You could have this drug that you buy in the liquor store that we call alcohol, which is clearly a drug.

00:54:02.000 You could buy your cigarettes.

00:54:03.000 You could buy your coffee.

00:54:04.000 You could get all these drugs that we like.

00:54:06.000 Adderall, you need Adderall.

00:54:08.000 Andrew, I think you have a little ADHD. 1.00

00:54:10.000 Maybe you some fucking speed and we'll sell you that speed and we'll tax that speed. 1.00

00:54:16.000 Anything else, we'll put you in a cage because you're not following our rules. 0.99

00:54:22.000 And it's like a grown adult telling another grown adult what they can or can't do with their life is responsible for what, 50% of the people that are in cages?

00:54:33.000 That's kind of crazy.

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00:55:42.000 Yeah, that's really crazy.

00:55:44.000 Yeah, I mean, there's this kind of illusion that everybody that is in prison for something that we don't think that the average person doesn't think they should be in prison for for many, many, many years, like a drug crime or being an addict, basically, that those people, that all those people have been let out already.

00:56:06.000 You know, that somehow like prison activist people have said, well, you know, all the people that are in there for drug crimes should be released.

00:56:15.000 But it's not really true.

00:56:17.000 You have an enormous criminalization of drug addiction.

00:56:23.000 So you're already making people sort of feel hopeless.

00:56:27.000 Then they're turning to drugs and then you're putting them into cages.

00:56:31.000 So like Steve Marshall, for example, the AG in Alabama, says, well, we've already released all of the nonviolent criminals, right?

00:56:40.000 So the only people that are locked in there are the worst of the worst.

00:56:43.000 But, you know, that's clearly not true just because of sales from your documentary.

00:56:47.000 Yeah, of course.

00:56:48.000 So you have, you know, and he was put into a maximum security facility for entering an unoccupied building.

00:56:55.000 That's because there's sort of an inflation of this concept of violence.

00:57:00.000 So they will, in Alabama, I think there are 44 different crimes that are considered violent crimes.

00:57:06.000 And they include crimes that you and I would not consider violent.

00:57:10.000 You know, so if somebody threatens somebody verbally, like most people do in arguments with, you know, people that they're mad at or whatever, but doesn't assault somebody, that could be considered a violent crime.

00:57:22.000 If somebody enters a building, whether they steal something or not, that could be considered a violent crime.

00:57:28.000 And so it makes it easier just to, as you say, like, I like that image of the battery.

00:57:34.000 I think about it as like sometimes like the matrix, that, you know, for Alabama to do what it's doing, it's got to have 20,000 people in suspended animation because that's how you can use them for labor.

00:57:47.000 That's how you can use them to sell them stuff.

00:57:49.000 That's how you can charge them for fees and fines, you know, that you need that many people.

00:57:55.000 I think they did a terrible thing when they allowed private prisons.

00:57:58.000 I think it's a terrible thing.

00:58:00.000 I think, like, if you think about the people that founded this country and the people that wrote the Constitution, they had a great understanding of how tyranny can emerge.

00:58:13.000 And so they tried to create a system.

00:58:15.000 And again, 1776, crazy to think that we're still following those same rules today, but they had a great understanding.

00:58:23.000 Don't worry, we're not following those rules.

00:58:26.000 But the checks and balances and make sure that one person couldn't accumulate all of the power.

00:58:33.000 Whoever first initiated the policy of allowing and paying for private prisons to exist in this country did not think it through like that at all.

00:58:45.000 Did not think of incentives, did not think of how people always, when given the chance to make more money, figure out a way to justify making that more money and come up with rules or regulations or carve-outs, caveats, some reason why they can continue to accelerate.

00:59:03.000 And then you don't think about the fact that prison guard unions and these private prisons, these people that own them, actively work to keep some laws on the books that maybe the general public would not want to be illegal anymore, certain things.

00:59:19.000 And they do that just so they can keep their prisons full, so they can keep making more money.

00:59:24.000 So then they take the money that they get from these private prisons where they're using people as human batteries to make sure there's still laws in place that are ridiculous so that they can keep arresting people so they can keep filling up their buildings and making more.

00:59:38.000 And the fact that nobody saw that coming.

00:59:41.000 Nobody saw that coming.

00:59:42.000 They saw it coming.

00:59:43.000 I don't even know if they did.

00:59:45.000 I think they probably short term were just saying, oh, this is a good business.

00:59:49.000 We'll get into it.

00:59:50.000 Then the business is like, we've got to grow this business, just like everything else.

00:59:53.000 Like if you're selling tires, you got to make better tires, sell more tires.

00:59:57.000 We're trying to, yeah, we want to be number one in the tire business.

01:00:00.000 Well, they're trying to be number one in the human battery business. 0.96

01:00:03.000 And that's what's fucking insane about allowing that in this country. 0.79

01:00:08.000 And how do you put that genie back in the bottle? 0.95

01:00:10.000 I don't know.

01:00:11.000 But I think it's very sick.

01:00:14.000 Well, the genies figured out a way to get into a whole new bottle because a lot of people say to us, well, this film that you made, the Alabama Solution, is obviously about Alabama State Prisons.

01:00:28.000 Are those private prisons?

01:00:30.000 And we always say, no.

01:00:32.000 Those are state-run institutions.

01:00:35.000 But they kind of function like private prisons in a way because they're able to make deals with Securius about their prison phone system.

01:00:45.000 And that makes millions and millions and millions of dollars that's extracted from the poorest people in the country, right, who are being charged high, you know, daily and even per-minute fees for being able to communicate with their families.

01:01:00.000 Then you have companies who are selling the food to the prisons.

01:01:04.000 You have companies that are doing health care contracts with the prisons.

01:01:08.000 And so there's so much money in that that they sort of, even though the state owns that piece of land, it still kind of functions the way that private prisons function.

01:01:19.000 So we've sort of just given over the care of 2 million Americans to companies that are accountable to their shareholders, maybe, but the shareholders don't know.

01:01:32.000 Well, they're certainly not accountable to humane living conditions.

01:01:35.000 That one scene where Kinetic Justice, that gentleman, what's his real name?

01:01:40.000 Robert Earl Counsel.

01:01:41.000 When Robert Earl Counsel was in solitary and you see the rats swimming in his toilet, rats are swimming in his toilet and he has rats in a water jar and what did he say?

01:01:51.000 Like catches 11 caught in one night.

01:01:54.000 And why are they there?

01:01:55.000 Because he tries to put his food in a bag that hangs on the door of the cell, but then they write him a disciplinary for doing that.

01:02:03.000 But if he takes his food out of the bag and he puts it on the counter, then the rats are going to get it during that night.

01:02:08.000 They're just everywhere.

01:02:09.000 Yeah.

01:02:10.000 So there are rats, there are rats throughout the prison.

01:02:10.000 Yeah.

01:02:14.000 And so he has to sleep in this room where these rats are crawling all over him at night.

01:02:19.000 Yeah.

01:02:20.000 You know, and people, just to get into him for a second, I mean, he is, frankly, one of the most, one of the bravest people I've ever met in my life.

01:02:30.000 You know, this is a guy who was incarcerated when he was 19, and he was selling drugs in his neighborhood.

01:02:38.000 Somebody is trying to chase him down with a car and almost runs him over, and he shoots the person through the window, and the guy dies.

01:02:47.000 So this is now 30 years ago.

01:02:50.000 In any other condition, you would have thought that's a self-defense case, right?

01:02:57.000 It was clear that he was trying to prevent somebody from running him over with a car.

01:03:01.000 And yet here he is 30 years later with a life without parole sentence in an Alabama prison.

01:03:08.000 And he's spending his time trying to organize nonviolent labor strikes.

01:03:16.000 He's trying to do hunger strikes.

01:03:17.000 He's trying to use every method that he can use to call attention to the problem that 20,000 other people have.

01:03:26.000 And he's using a contraband cell phone to talk to us, knowing that he's probably going to get retaliated against by the authorities once the film comes out or once they know that he's organizing a labor strike.

01:03:39.000 He would be an unbelievable asset to society if he were out in the world, right?

01:03:47.000 He's advocating for nonviolence.

01:03:49.000 He's obviously smart as a whip, and he's incredibly motivating to other people.

01:03:54.000 He's got that entire prison system listening to him when they want to be violent because they're so angry at the treatment.

01:04:02.000 And the prison system starts bird feeding them, starts to cut off their food rations to force them back to work.

01:04:09.000 And Kinetic, Robert Earle, is the person who says, you know, that's not going to solve anything.

01:04:14.000 We don't want to do that.

01:04:16.000 So, you know, you see this huge level of humanity, talent, thoughtfulness in people that are locked away.

01:04:25.000 And we just assume, well, if they're in prison, that means that they're bad people.

01:04:29.000 And meantime, there's so many other people on the outside who don't get locked up for doing things that are much worse.

01:04:36.000 So it's a very confusing message to be sending.

01:04:39.000 Aaron Trevor Barrett.

01:04:40.000 Well, especially for someone like you who did the Jinx, and then you do this.

01:04:44.000 Yeah, I mean, it's a really good point.

01:04:46.000 I worked for a long time on the story of Robert Durst.

01:04:50.000 And when we discovered evidence that showed that he had killed his wife and his best friend and his neighbor in Galveston dismembered him, we found the only evidence that proved that he did those things.

01:05:04.000 And suddenly I was in a dialogue with the L.A. District Attorney, the L.A.PD, talking about how to get him arrested.

01:05:13.000 And even if I don't believe in the way that we incarcerate people, it's clear that there's a role for prison.

01:05:19.000 And there's clearly a guy like Bob Durst who keeps killing people needs to be taken out of society.

01:05:25.000 What kind of prison is he in?

01:05:27.000 Well, he died now, and he was locked up in a facility in Northern California.

01:05:34.000 It was sort of a facility for senior citizens who had medical problems.

01:05:39.000 So, you know, a lot of really rich people, as you could tell from, you know, there have been a bunch of cases on this.

01:05:46.000 Really rich people hire consultants to help them navigate what prison they're going to end up going to.

01:05:53.000 They can negotiate for better conditions.

01:05:57.000 And so you end up, you know, with that sort of situation where a guy who maybe has stolen $100 million and not paid his taxes or taken money from his workers or committed some horrible act of fraud ends up in a prison farm, ends Ends up in a pretty nice facility where he has access to lots of things.

01:06:18.000 And then you have poor people that are locked up in places that have rats in their cells and vermin.

01:06:25.000 But yeah, I was always sort of amazed that Robert Durst was able to get away with what he got away with for so long.

01:06:35.000 Why do you think that is?

01:06:37.000 Well, you know, did you, how much did you know about it before you started the documentary series?

01:06:43.000 Well, I knew a lot because I had made a film, a narrative film called All Good Things, about sort of Robert Durst's origin story, his relationship with his beautiful wife when they were both young, before all the bad stuff started happening and he became the guy that he became.

01:07:01.000 There was this kind of strange love story between this kind of difficult man and this very lovely girl, Kathleen McCormick.

01:07:12.000 And I made this film.

01:07:14.000 Ryan Gosling played the Bob Durst character and Kirsten Dunst played his wife and really investigated that story so that we could tell the tale of what had happened to them in an accurate way.

01:07:28.000 And while I was doing that, we reached out to Robert Durst, to the real Robert Durst, and I said, you know, we're making this film about, I guess we spoke to his lawyer, so we're making this film about you, about your client, and we'd like to talk to him, get his input, make sure that we're trying to tell the story accurately.

01:07:46.000 What was the premise of the film?

01:07:47.000 It was basically the story about him and his wife when they first met, this rich guy and this girl from sort of the other side of the tracks, and then how eventually that relationship got toxic.

01:07:58.000 Eventually he kills her.

01:08:00.000 And then later, his best friend, Susan Berman, who knows about what happened to his wife, starts to become problematic. 0.99

01:08:09.000 Then he kills her.

01:08:10.000 And then later, he moves to Galveston, Texas, and disguises himself as a deaf mute woman, if you remember this. 0.85

01:08:18.000 And he ends up becoming friends with his elderly neighbor and this guy named Morris Black.

01:08:26.000 And they go out shooting on Pelican Island and so on.

01:08:30.000 And eventually they have a little altercation because he figured out who Bob Durst was and that he was sort of on the run.

01:08:37.000 And he dismembers that man.

01:08:40.000 He kills him and dismembers him.

01:08:41.000 This movie with Kristen Dunst, when was that released?

01:08:45.000 I guess we started working on that in around 2005 and it came out in 2010.

01:08:51.000 So in 2010, it's about to come out in theaters, this film.

01:08:55.000 And there was a big article in the New York Times about how accurate it was and how much we had done to make sure that the details were right and so on.

01:09:02.000 And the real Robert Durst reads the article and calls me out of the blue.

01:09:09.000 And I had tried to get in touch with him before without any success.

01:09:13.000 And he actually calls the distributor of the film first, Magnolia Pictures, and he asks for the president, Eamon Bowles.

01:09:25.000 And Eamon and I would use Bob's voice, like when we would talk to each other, because Bob had a very recognizable voice.

01:09:34.000 So when I would call him, we would hang up and I would say, bye-bye.

01:09:38.000 And that was always sort of Bob's tone.

01:09:41.000 And then one day somebody calls Amon's office and says, this is Robert Durst.

01:09:45.000 And so his secretary walks in the office and says, like, you know, in air quotes, like, it's Robert Durst on the phone, thinking that it's me.

01:09:52.000 And he picks up the phone.

01:09:53.000 He's like, hey, Bob, I'm not surprised you're calling.

01:09:55.000 I think we did a hell of a job on the film.

01:09:57.000 And there's a long pause, and he says, the guy says, who am I talking to?

01:10:02.000 And Eamon says, oh, who's this?

01:10:05.000 And he says, this is Robert Durst.

01:10:07.000 And so he reaches out to me.

01:10:10.000 I knew that he was trying to reach me so I could record my very first phone call with him.

01:10:15.000 And I call him and I say, listen, I'm keen to talk to you.

01:10:20.000 I've been making this film about you for the last five years.

01:10:23.000 And he said, well, I would like to see the film.

01:10:25.000 So I arranged for him to see the film.

01:10:28.000 And he calls me immediately after he sees the film.

01:10:32.000 And he says, I want you to know I like the movie very much.

01:10:36.000 The movie kind of shows him killing people, right?

01:10:40.000 And I said, well, why did you like it?

01:10:41.000 And he said, well, you know, you did a beautiful job explaining what I was going through as a child and the difficulty I had and losing my mother.

01:10:51.000 And Kirsten Dunst was just like my wife, Kathy, and I cried three times.

01:10:57.000 And I would like to do something with you.

01:10:59.000 You know, I would like there to be something out there from me, my ability to sort of tell my story.

01:11:06.000 And I said, all right, well, why don't we sit down?

01:11:08.000 I'll ask you a bunch of questions.

01:11:10.000 And he said, that's fine.

01:11:11.000 Okay, let's do that.

01:11:13.000 So I end up sitting with him for three days.

01:11:15.000 I've just finished a movie about him, a dramatic film, which is now in theaters.

01:11:20.000 And I sit down with him and interview him for 21 hours.

01:11:25.000 And you think you do long interviews.

01:11:27.000 He's 21 hours with this one person.

01:11:30.000 And he is fascinating.

01:11:33.000 I mean, absolutely extraordinary.

01:11:35.000 He is incredibly honest about things that most people would never be honest about.

01:11:41.000 You know, he talks about how he had violent arguments with his wife.

01:11:47.000 Or he says, you know, that he says crazy stuff.

01:11:50.000 I mean, he explained to me that I said, you know, I think you were kind of offensive when you went to visit her mother.

01:11:55.000 You know, she had this mother who was in her 80s.

01:12:00.000 And you went to visit her mother.

01:12:03.000 And, you know, I think you did some odd things.

01:12:06.000 He goes, well, yeah, you know, I visited those people and they were, you know, that woman, she reads Yankee magazine.

01:12:12.000 And, you know, and she asked me how I liked her daughter. 0.99

01:12:18.000 And I told her that Kathy had come out of the shower and my penis was hard. 0.99

01:12:24.000 Like, you said that to her aging mother? 1.00

01:12:27.000 Yeah, yeah, I'm me.

01:12:28.000 What am I going to do?

01:12:29.000 Sure, that's what I thought, you know.

01:12:31.000 You know, or you say to him, well, what did you say?

01:12:36.000 You know, why did you tell the police that after your wife, after you put your wife on the train, you went to the neighbors to have a drink when that clearly wasn't true?

01:12:46.000 Oh, yes, I lied about that.

01:12:48.000 I said, well, why did you lie to the police?

01:12:50.000 Well, I needed to be somewhere and I wanted them to stop asking me questions.

01:12:54.000 So, you know, I told him that I went to the neighbors.

01:12:57.000 I said, well, that was so easy to disprove.

01:12:58.000 They just talked to the neighbor.

01:13:00.000 Well, yeah, but people don't usually do that.

01:13:03.000 So he's very candid.

01:13:06.000 He speaks very, very openly, almost like having a level of sort of Asperger's.

01:13:11.000 Did you believe him at any moment while he's telling you this?

01:13:14.000 Because obviously he's proclaiming his innocence, right?

01:13:17.000 Yeah.

01:13:18.000 I mean, he is so good at telling the story his way.

01:13:27.000 And he tells you so many facts that are true that when he occasionally lies about really critical things, I think a lot of people just didn't pay attention to that.

01:13:37.000 I did because I had already researched the story. 0.99

01:13:40.000 So I knew when he was trying to tell me something that was bullshit that it was bullshit. 0.98

01:13:48.000 But, you know, I did have to put myself in a position of giving him the benefit of the doubt whenever I could. 0.99

01:13:54.000 Partly because that was the only, you know, you got to just get into that mode where you're trying to hear his version without debating it the whole time.

01:14:03.000 Right.

01:14:04.000 Because otherwise he's not going to tell you his version.

01:14:07.000 And, you know, you want to hear His theory about all this stuff.

01:14:11.000 And in the course of that, he really indicts himself.

01:14:16.000 I mean, he sort of came into it with the attitude that he wanted to tell his version of the story so people would stop thinking he was a murderer.

01:14:23.000 But during the course of it, he admits to so many bad things that you just pretty quickly assume that he is guilty.

01:14:33.000 How old is he when you first started filming him?

01:14:35.000 I guess he was in his early 70s.

01:14:40.000 So he's probably already experiencing some kind of cognitive decline.

01:14:45.000 And then you have the years and years of hiding all this, which wears on you.

01:14:51.000 Yeah.

01:14:52.000 And I do think there was a, I think he had a compulsion to confess.

01:14:55.000 Yeah.

01:14:56.000 I think most people that aren't complete sociopaths, they get to a certain point in time where it's almost too much and they want to tell people.

01:14:56.000 You know.

01:15:05.000 Yeah.

01:15:06.000 I mean, and that ultimately what happened with him, as you may remember, is he we find this evidence.

01:15:06.000 Yeah.

01:15:16.000 The evidence I thought was determinative.

01:15:18.000 I thought it was going to be something that police would ultimately use to convict him for murder.

01:15:23.000 But we … Trevor Burrus What was that evidence again?

01:15:26.000 Trevor Burrus So there's a … So there was a famous note that the killer of Susan Berman, this friend of Bob Durst in California, had left behind when he shot Susan Berman.

01:15:39.000 And the note said 1527 Benedict Canyon, cadaver.

01:15:45.000 And it was sent to the Beverly Hills Police Department.

01:15:49.000 And that very seldom happens, but people speculated a lot.

01:15:53.000 Well, why would somebody who killed somebody have sent a note to the police?

01:15:57.000 Well, maybe if he liked the person, if it was his best friend, this woman Susan Berman, and it was Bob Durst that did it, then maybe he wouldn't want her body to lie there.

01:16:05.000 And, you know, she has dogs. 0.99

01:16:07.000 They didn't want the dogs to mess with the body.

01:16:09.000 So he may have just killed her and then left this note.

01:16:13.000 But then later, when he was asked about it, he said, I have no knowledge about that note.

01:16:17.000 So when we're doing our investigation, we discover a letter that he had written to Susan Berman that has almost the exact same words on it because it's addressed to her at 1527 Benedict Canyon.

01:16:30.000 So we can see the handwriting on that, not just a handwriting sample, but a handwriting sample that's saying exactly what it said on the letter that with the same misspelled words, right?

01:16:41.000 Exactly.

01:16:42.000 And he writes, 1527 Benedict Canyon, Beverly Hills, California, misspells the word Beverly, puts in an extra E at the end.

01:16:51.000 And of course, this letter that we find, he also misspells the word Beverly.

01:16:57.000 So nobody had ever seen or the police hadn't known about this letter.

01:17:01.000 So we find it, and then I immediately start planning a way for me to show it to him in a second interview.

01:17:09.000 And he had always said to me, like, oh, if you ever need me to sit down again, I'm happy to come back and I'll ask, you know, I'll answer any question you want.

01:17:16.000 But I start to call him about doing the second interview and he gets very skittish.

01:17:21.000 And then this goes on for two years.

01:17:23.000 And so we have this evidence, but we need to show it to him.

01:17:28.000 And I had done a bunch of research.

01:17:30.000 I talked to Marsha Clark, for example, who was smart about how the L.A. District Attorney's Office works. 1.00

01:17:37.000 And she said, if you have the opportunity to sit down with him and show him the evidence, do that before you go to the police, because it's going to be very, the police are not going to be able to do something like that.

01:17:48.000 And he's going to lawyer up.

01:17:49.000 But you guys, before you're even in contact with law enforcement, you could show him the evidence and he's going to have to react to it.

01:17:55.000 And I bet it's going to be interesting.

01:17:57.000 So we finally get him to sit for the second interview.

01:18:00.000 And I show him the evidence in the interview.

01:18:02.000 And he has this incredible meltdown.

01:18:05.000 I don't know if you remember this, but he starts burping uncontrollably and he starts rubbing his face and breathing and he's obviously very, very surprised to see that there's this letter that matches the cadaver note that he admitted could only have been written by the killer.

01:18:24.000 So he's sort of in a he's trapped.

01:18:27.000 And I finished the interview with him and he gets up and goes to the bathroom and he leaves his microphone attached.

01:18:36.000 And while he's in the bathroom, he confesses to the murder.

01:18:39.000 He's, you know, he's a guy who talks to himself a lot.

01:18:42.000 And he always said that to me.

01:18:43.000 He said, oh, sometimes I talk to myself for long periods of time and I get in fights with people because they think that I'm hassling them, but it's just me.

01:18:50.000 I just talk to myself.

01:18:51.000 So when he goes in the bathroom, the first thing he says when he goes in is, there it is, you're caught.

01:19:00.000 He says that to himself. 0.98

01:19:02.000 And it's, it's, and then he goes on to say, killed them all. 1.00

01:19:08.000 I killed them all, of course. 0.99

01:19:10.000 And it's such an extraordinary thing to have. 0.99

01:19:15.000 Did you have your headphones on while he was doing that?

01:19:17.000 No.

01:19:17.000 And that's kind of fascinating.

01:19:19.000 So I didn't know that he said anything when he went to the bathroom.

01:19:25.000 And so we're working with the LAPD.

01:19:27.000 We're giving them the printed evidence, the letter that matches the cadaver note.

01:19:32.000 And it's a pretty strong case already.

01:19:35.000 And we don't know that he's said a word in the bathroom.

01:19:40.000 And it's not until 26 months later that we have an editor, Shelby Siegel, who is just going through audio and kind of cleaning up old tracks because we're getting ready to deliver the film to HBO.

01:19:56.000 And she sees on the editing system that there's a little waveform.

01:20:02.000 There's a little squiggle that shows that there's some audio when he's in the bathroom.

01:20:07.000 So the problem was that I had a microphone.

01:20:10.000 There was a microphone in the room and he had a microphone on.

01:20:13.000 So there's a lot of noise.

01:20:14.000 We're finishing.

01:20:15.000 I just finished the interview.

01:20:16.000 I'm incredibly excited that I got him to give this crazy reaction.

01:20:21.000 And it's pretty obvious that that's going to be part of proving that he's guilty.

01:20:26.000 And so I'm out there kind of whispering to the crew.

01:20:29.000 There's noise in the room and there's noise in the bathroom.

01:20:32.000 And so she mutes the other microphones and she hears him say, there it is, you're caught.

01:20:39.000 And she screams. 0.82

01:20:41.000 And she runs in the next room to where my other, our main editor was, Zach.

01:20:47.000 And she says, you have to hear this.

01:20:50.000 And he listens to it.

01:20:51.000 And he says, wait a minute.

01:20:52.000 I was there that day.

01:20:54.000 And we have audio that's a continuation of that.

01:20:57.000 That audio stops at There It Is You're Caught.

01:21:01.000 But he was in the bathroom for seven minutes.

01:21:04.000 So they go and get the drive that has the other seven minutes of audio on it.

01:21:09.000 And it's this long rambling confession.

01:21:14.000 And I come over and I listen to it.

01:21:16.000 And I can't believe what we're hearing.

01:21:19.000 I mean, it was extraordinary.

01:21:20.000 And I had to call the LAPD and the LA District Attorney and say, hey, I know literally two days ago, we gave you the documents.

01:21:30.000 We gave you the letter so that you could start this prosecution.

01:21:33.000 We found something else.

01:21:35.000 And so they come to New York and they listen to this confession.

01:21:38.000 And it's just, you know, absolutely mind-blowing that that happened.

01:21:43.000 And then when the film comes, when the series comes out, you know, we've been working with the police then for a couple of years while they were building the prosecution.

01:21:51.000 And when the film finally comes out, when the series comes out on HBO, he is arrested the day before the final episode.

01:22:01.000 So it's in the final episode that he makes that confession and they arrest him right before because they knew that he was going to go on the run.

01:22:08.000 Was he aware that you had the audio of the confession?

01:22:11.000 I don't think he remembered saying anything.

01:22:14.000 You know, I don't think he's even all that aware that he sometimes just burbles out with these do you think he started, I mean, this is pure speculation, but do you think he started going crazy after he started killing people?

01:22:26.000 Just like the ability to shut that part of your brain off and put that aside and lie about it.

01:22:35.000 Just the struggle of having that information in your head.

01:22:41.000 I think the way that he would have thought about it, you know, from inside the killer, right?

01:22:48.000 He doesn't think of himself as a murderer, right?

01:22:51.000 Steve Marshall in Alabama doesn't think of himself as, you know, this incredibly amoral person.

01:22:57.000 He thinks of himself as law enforcement, right?

01:22:59.000 Bob Duris thinks of himself as just a guy trying to get along, you know, like we all are.

01:23:05.000 So I think what happened was in 1982, he and his wife, who were having problems, in part, in large part, because he had big personality problems.

01:23:15.000 I mean, he was not an easy person to deal with at all, and was also very spoiled and was also, you know, had all these resources and had a lot of, yeah, and had a lot of power over her.

01:23:27.000 And so I think something happened between the two of them where they were at their lake house and there was an altercation.

01:23:34.000 He admitted to me that they had had a pushing and shoving argument that night.

01:23:40.000 And she died.

01:23:41.000 Yeah.

01:23:42.000 And then he, and then, you know, he says he took her to the train and sent her into the city, but none of that makes any sense.

01:23:50.000 So I think what happened was he either accidentally or semi-accidentally killed her.

01:23:56.000 I think they had a fight.

01:23:57.000 They ended up getting into some altercation and she landed on the, you know, maybe on the stone of the fireplace or something like that, and she was dead.

01:24:07.000 And then he thought, well, it doesn't make any sense for two people to go down.

01:24:12.000 I mean, unfortunate that this had to happen, but I got to get rid of the body.

01:24:17.000 And so he found a way to make her disappear.

01:24:21.000 We don't know exactly what happened to her, but we know that, you know, he alleged that he had put her on the train to go in the city and they never found the body.

01:24:29.000 So after that, he's sort of widely believed to be a likely person to have killed his wife.

01:24:37.000 There's no other explanation for it.

01:24:39.000 And how long did it take before they realized the wife was missing?

01:24:41.000 And when did they determine that she was dead?

01:24:43.000 It was a few days later because he kept sort of held off on telling anyone.

01:24:50.000 And then later he said, oh, Kathy, you know, I put her on the train to go in the city.

01:24:54.000 And then I haven't heard from her.

01:24:56.000 What's going on?

01:24:57.000 So he had a bunch of explanations about why, you know, somehow she had run off with a drug dealer or she had run off with some boyfriend or something like that.

01:25:08.000 But none of those really held water.

01:25:11.000 But it took him a while to report her missing.

01:25:13.000 He waits five days to report her missing and does a brilliant thing, which is he reports her missing in New York City, even though the last time she's ever seen is in Westchester.

01:25:25.000 So they were at their house, their lake house in Westchester.

01:25:28.000 She disappears.

01:25:29.000 And he goes into the city five days later and he says, oh, my wife was at our apartment.

01:25:34.000 So he completely, this is why I'm saying he's very smart.

01:25:37.000 He completely redirects the police so that they make, because, you know, the police aren't organized for a guy to come in and give a phony story about what happened to his wife.

01:25:49.000 Most of the time, somebody comes in and says, my wife is missing.

01:25:51.000 And they say, oh, where did you last see her?

01:25:53.000 Let's help you try to find her. 0.64

01:25:55.000 So I think he was smart enough to flip that on his head.

01:25:58.000 And he says that my wife was in the city.

01:26:01.000 And so they do their whole investigation in the city.

01:26:03.000 They don't look at the lake house.

01:26:04.000 They don't figure out where she really truly might have been.

01:26:08.000 Did they ever do an examination of a forensic on the lake house?

01:26:12.000 Yeah, they did.

01:26:13.000 And it was sort of because it was so late in the game, because it had taken so long for him to report her missing, they didn't find anything that showed that she had been killed in the house.

01:26:27.000 And she may very well have been killed somewhere else, but they never find the body ever.

01:26:32.000 And so her family is bereft and they don't know what to do.

01:26:36.000 Did he ever confess to that?

01:26:38.000 He didn't.

01:26:41.000 But during the course of his interview with me, I mean, he never did it publicly, but in the bathroom, he says, killed them all, of course.

01:26:51.000 So he's being accused of three murders, his wife, his best friend, and his neighbor in Galveston, who he then cuts up.

01:26:59.000 And his confession in the bathroom is killed them all, of course.

01:27:02.000 So I think we, you know, I think we know what happened.

01:27:06.000 We don't know how it happened.

01:27:07.000 Did they find his neighbor's body?

01:27:09.000 Or his best friend, rather, his first friend?

01:27:11.000 Yeah, his best friend's body was in her house where somebody shot her, and that's where they left that cadaver note, the note saying 1527 Benedict Canyon.

01:27:19.000 And then in Galveston, when his elderly neighbor disappears, the reason they find this out is because a bunch of black trash bags wash up in Galveston Bay, and a little kid is fishing with his dad, and they see something bobbing around in the water, and they see these bags, and the police come and they look in the bags, and there are all these body parts.

01:27:43.000 So he had actually taken off the legs and the arms and all that.

01:27:47.000 So, I mean, I think, you know, I think it's fair to say that there are people like Bob Durst who need to be out of society, you know, and are repeatedly causing problems for others.

01:28:00.000 But that's, as you say, that's the extraordinarily rare case.

01:28:06.000 And I think a lot of the sort of tough on crime politicians will say, so you guys just want to let Jeffrey Dahmer out on the street.

01:28:13.000 Nobody thinks that.

01:28:14.000 Nobody really believes that.

01:28:16.000 People are saying, well, no.

01:28:17.000 What we're saying is that people who are in prison for having entered an unoccupied building probably never should have been in prison at all.

01:28:25.000 And the people who are in prison with good reason because they robbed somebody or something, we don't necessarily have to believe that those people can never, ever have a chance to come out of prison and be productive citizens.

01:28:37.000 You know, you just have to take a nuanced view.

01:28:42.000 You can't just say, well, they're bad people and they're good people, especially because we've got so many bad people walking around and so many good people locked up and vice versa.

01:28:49.000 Yeah, the nuance part is so important because the real question is, like, what causes so many people to become bad people?

01:28:58.000 And how come no one's examining the root of this?

01:29:00.000 How come no one's looking at these deeply impoverished, crime-ridden communities that have remained that way for decades and decades and decades and offered up some sort of a solution?

01:29:11.000 You know, it's almost like you have to financially incentivize a company to radically improve the economic and the justice situation in any random community that's experiencing a lot of crime.

01:29:26.000 Like, it's almost almost like you have to figure out a way to privatize peace and safety.

01:29:32.000 You know, it's almost like the one way.

01:29:37.000 I mean, it's really what I was saying before.

01:29:39.000 Like, imagine if these prison companies got paid based on the amount of productive citizens emerge from their prisons and then wind up doing really well.

01:29:50.000 Like, you get incentivized.

01:29:51.000 Like, he's never committed another crime.

01:29:54.000 Now he started his own business.

01:29:55.000 He's doing this and that.

01:29:56.000 He's got a family.

01:29:58.000 These kids all get straight A's.

01:29:59.000 Everybody's happy.

01:30:00.000 This is a success.

01:30:02.000 And we got a bonus because of that success.

01:30:04.000 Yeah.

01:30:04.000 I mean you're right in a way that it's – in some way we are – we sort of are privatizing it because like in my neighborhood in New York, there's a group called the Doe Fund, which has been around for a couple of decades I think.

01:30:18.000 And they take guys who have had severe drug addiction, have ended up in prison, and are released and have no starting place, as you were describing.

01:30:33.000 And they give them a bed.

01:30:36.000 They give them a bank account where they give them a certain amount of money each week for working.

01:30:42.000 And it's not a huge amount of money, but it sort of is the first step toward even being able to sort of have a checkbook and be able to say, oh, okay, so I've got $100 and I've spent $50 and this is what I have left.

01:30:53.000 And they give them a job, which is they make deals with neighborhoods around New York for them to come and do like street cleaning and clean up the neighborhood.

01:31:01.000 And they give them a uniform, which is clean, and they put them out on the street with a big blue trash bucket and some functional broom and things like that.

01:31:13.000 And sometimes they'll put them out in pairs so that they can work in tandem.

01:31:20.000 And these neighborhoods become incredibly clean.

01:31:24.000 The guys stay in this facility for as long as they need to until they sort of get back on their feet.

01:31:30.000 They can't do drugs when they're in the facility.

01:31:33.000 So there's a little bit of tough love going on there, too.

01:31:36.000 But they end up bringing people back.

01:31:40.000 They end up bringing people back who were otherwise abandoned and who otherwise would have been additional homeless people lying on the street in San Francisco or additional people who are bothering people outside an ATM or whatever, because there's a level of desperation that you know you have.

01:31:56.000 We all know if we absolutely had absolutely nothing and we thought that our kids were going to starve, we would do a bunch of things that would probably get us in trouble.

01:32:06.000 100%.

01:32:07.000 And taking care of people that are in that situation and providing them some sort of a vehicle for improving their life is going to be a good thing, and it's going to have some impact.

01:32:21.000 But the real impact is going to be when you address the environment in which they came from.

01:32:27.000 Sure. 0.97

01:32:28.000 Like, again, if we're our community, this entire country is a community, why do we have these places that have been fucked for 50, 60, 70 years?

01:32:37.000 Like, why haven't we put resources into community centers and education and providing some method for these people to get peace and safety?

01:32:48.000 Why aren't we doing something about that if we really care?

01:32:51.000 Well, there is a lot that can be done.

01:32:54.000 You know, one of the places, for example, this can be done inside and outside of prison, obviously.

01:33:00.000 And I think you're pointing out a really important thing, which is the earlier the better.

01:33:05.000 So when you look at Head Start programs, which are one of the first things that people go to cut because you can't put your finger on exactly what they do.

01:33:13.000 But if you track people that got early education, you see that it dramatically reduces the likelihood that those people are going to go to prison later in life.

01:33:25.000 And if you look at people who are even in prison, like in the Maine state prison system, which is a very humane prison system, I have pictures on my phone of guys who are sitting at a bench working on models of tall ships, these beautiful, stunning pieces of art that they've been trained by other prisoners to build.

01:33:50.000 And they give them a proper workbench and they give them some time to do this work and they give them training.

01:33:57.000 And then they sell that stuff in the prison store and they make a couple million dollars a year that goes back into rehabilitation programs.

01:34:04.000 Oh, wow.

01:34:05.000 So where people are.

01:34:05.000 Is Maine one of the best places for that?

01:34:08.000 I think Maine is the best prison system I've seen in the U.S.

01:34:12.000 And partly it's because it's run by this very brilliant guy, Randy Liberty is his name.

01:34:17.000 And he first visited the Maine state prison when he was 14 because his dad was locked up there.

01:34:17.000 That's crazy.

01:34:26.000 And later in life, you know, he became a sheriff.

01:34:28.000 And I think his dad was in his jail at some point.

01:34:31.000 And it was like, Randy, get me a coffee.

01:34:33.000 Oh, sorry, dad.

01:34:34.000 That's good.

01:34:35.000 But over time, he just said, well, why are we throwing people away when we put them into prison for having made a mistake of some kind or even a series of mistakes?

01:34:44.000 What can we do to bring these people out?

01:34:46.000 Because 95% of the people are coming out.

01:34:49.000 And are these people that we want to be our neighbors?

01:34:53.000 And this issue of community is so important because how are we going to get back to some kind of brotherhood in this country?

01:35:03.000 It's so important.

01:35:04.000 And if we can demonize people so quickly and just say, well, look, my neighbor, he put his tractor on my lawn and therefore he's a horrible person and I'm going to go over and smash his tractor.

01:35:14.000 And as opposed to the guy saying, oh, I couldn't put my tractor in my garage because it had a flood.

01:35:18.000 Let me help you.

01:35:18.000 Oh, you had a flood?

01:35:20.000 You know, that it's, it's, that there's a level of, you know, rage right now that we're tapping into.

01:35:26.000 It seems like a higher percentage of the people are like the martial arts people that are going into it because of damage that they suffered.

01:35:34.000 It's like more Americans are becoming like that.

01:35:36.000 You know, more Americans are sort of.

01:35:38.000 Well, we're getting radicalized by the internet for sure.

01:35:40.000 Yeah.

01:35:41.000 100% on both sides of the aisle.

01:35:44.000 People are being radicalized by hate and anger and frustration online.

01:35:49.000 And a lot of it isn't even real people that are writing these things or it's state actors and organizations that push certain narratives.

01:35:58.000 And you're being fed a lot of hate porn. 0.97

01:36:03.000 And people are sucking it up. 0.99

01:36:04.000 And it's highly addictive.

01:36:06.000 So it's consuming an enormous percentage of your available resources in terms of your attention span. 0.98

01:36:14.000 The people that I know that are addicted to Twitter, X, whatever, are genuinely mentally ill.

01:36:20.000 Like whether they realize it or not, because they're still functional, they still do their jobs, but they are fully addicted to a thing that is just people bitching back and forth with each other. 0.91

01:36:33.000 And they check responses all the time.

01:36:35.000 They can't wait to type in another response.

01:36:37.000 And they're sitting there looking at someone else's response and getting angry.

01:36:40.000 It's illness.

01:36:42.000 It's like, this is not in your life.

01:36:42.000 It's an illness.

01:36:44.000 Like, if you put that down and look around, what do you see?

01:36:48.000 You see the people that you know.

01:36:49.000 You see the neighborhood that you live in.

01:36:51.000 The stores that you visit.

01:36:53.000 And none of that exists. 0.99

01:36:55.000 It exists in this weird fucking cloud world that you choose to enter to get upset for no fucking reason. 0.99

01:37:03.000 And if you put it down, you will feel better. 0.99

01:37:07.000 But yet you think you're missing out on something.

01:37:09.000 So you have to go check it.

01:37:10.000 And when you're on the toilet, well, I'm on the toilet.

01:37:12.000 What am I going to do?

01:37:13.000 Let me check to see what people are pissed off at. 0.92

01:37:15.000 And I don't fucking agree with that at all. 1.00

01:37:17.000 Well, this guy's an idiot. 1.00

01:37:19.000 And then you're mentally ill. 1.00

01:37:21.000 And then it becomes because we have this bizarre political system in our country where we have two sides, only two. 0.99

01:37:29.000 We only have two perspectives.

01:37:31.000 And then you have a conglomeration of ideas that are attached to each perspective that you might not agree with at all, but you have to because you're a right-wing this or a left-wing that. 0.98

01:37:42.000 So you have to say whatever the fucking party wants you to say. 0.97

01:37:46.000 And if you don't, you're a Nazi or if you don't, you're whatever you are, a communist, whatever it is. 0.99

01:37:52.000 And I loved your, when, in your comedy special, which was so fucking funny. 0.97

01:37:57.000 And, you know, I'm like a big fan of comedy.

01:37:59.000 But in your last special, you sort of talk about how people like sign up for, oh, yeah, well, you know, I agree with that.

01:38:05.000 That makes perfect sense.

01:38:06.000 Oh, yeah, I agree with that.

01:38:07.000 Oh, and by the way, if you're going to agree with that, you know, you're also going to have to agree that, you know, that men can get pregnant.

01:38:12.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:38:13.000 Men could get pregnant. 1.00

01:38:14.000 You're like, what?

01:38:15.000 Wait, so those are my choices?

01:38:18.000 I have to go along with like, you know, trans people should be allowed to be in every sport and it doesn't matter.

01:38:24.000 Like, I have to go along with that one too.

01:38:26.000 If I want to be part of my tribe, oh, yeah, that's part of the tribal initiation ritual.

01:38:30.000 You're going to have to sign up for that.

01:38:32.000 I think it's a really great way of delivering it also because it makes people laugh at themselves.

01:38:37.000 Yeah, and everybody wants to be on a team.

01:38:39.000 And you're like, you know, oh, we believe that everybody should, you know, be free to do whatever you want.

01:38:39.000 Yeah.

01:38:44.000 And as long as you're not hurting anybody, I agree.

01:38:46.000 You know?

01:38:47.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:38:48.000 Start going along with it.

01:38:49.000 This sounds great.

01:38:50.000 Hey, I'm with you guys.

01:38:51.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1.00

01:38:52.000 And you're like, oh, fuck. 1.00

01:38:55.000 That's right. 1.00

01:38:55.000 Is this a package deal? 1.00

01:38:57.000 I have to.

01:38:58.000 Yeah, and that's what people are agreeing to.

01:38:59.000 And then you get groupthink, and then you get also ostracized.

01:39:03.000 You get ostracized from the community if you don't do it.

01:39:06.000 So you, you know, you get kicked out of the kingdom.

01:39:09.000 And you don't want that.

01:39:10.000 Yeah.

01:39:11.000 Because being excommunicated from whatever group that you identify with is terrifying.

01:39:15.000 Because then what are you going to do? 1.00

01:39:16.000 You're going to join the fucking Nazis? 1.00

01:39:18.000 I'm going to join those people on the right because the left kicked me out because I don't think that men can get pregnant. 1.00

01:39:25.000 Maybe I should just apologize.

01:39:27.000 And then you wind up apologizing for something you don't even believe in.

01:39:30.000 You're like, God, I can't believe I have to say this.

01:39:34.000 And it's just, it's a bad way of communicating.

01:39:38.000 Online communication is a terrible way of communicating.

01:39:42.000 And it's the primary source that young people experience. 0.97

01:39:45.000 You know, young people, like my kids, they don't even fucking text each other. 0.96

01:39:50.000 They Snapchat. 1.00

01:39:51.000 You know, they're all Snapchatting with pictures and shit. 0.98

01:39:54.000 I'm like, this is like the minimal amount of communication you can do. 0.98

01:39:58.000 And when they have to talk to people, just put their phone down and talk to people, they're lost.

01:40:04.000 They're always like reaching for their phone.

01:40:06.000 Oh, yeah.

01:40:06.000 They always want to grab their phone in the middle of you talk.

01:40:08.000 Yeah, They have to check.

01:40:10.000 Like, it's like you're perpetually distracted.

01:40:13.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:40:13.000 It's going to get worse, I think, when you have glasses and you could be walking down the street or you could meet somebody and be like, hi, Joe.

01:40:20.000 So when you went to college at, and then you learned, you know, it's like this idea that the information is more available and therefore it's better.

01:40:29.000 My kids are like constantly deleting Instagram or deleting TikTok.

01:40:35.000 Yeah, a lot of kids are doing that now.

01:40:37.000 Yeah.

01:40:37.000 But, you know, and then it comes back for some reason or they'll say, well, I felt like I needed to do this or whatever.

01:40:42.000 FOMO.

01:40:44.000 But it's very encouraging to see them recognize that you have to go cold turkey on social media.

01:40:51.000 Well, that narrative's out there.

01:40:52.000 Fortunately, for a lot of kids, Twitter, which I think is maybe the most toxic in terms of what it can do, most beneficial in terms of like whistleblowers getting news.

01:41:03.000 If anything is happening in the world, I almost immediately go to Twitter.

01:41:07.000 It used to be a little better for that because now part of the problem is with AI generated content.

01:41:15.000 There's a lot of weird stuff when it comes to like, especially war stuff.

01:41:20.000 There's a lot of videos that are just completely fake and it's hard to tell.

01:41:23.000 Or they take a video that is real and highly exaggerated and they add AI to it.

01:41:30.000 It's very strange.

01:41:31.000 And you got to wonder who's doing that and why are they doing this?

01:41:34.000 Is this our government doing it?

01:41:36.000 Is it the Iranian government?

01:41:39.000 Who's releasing these fake videos?

01:41:40.000 And are we doing it to ourselves, by the way?

01:41:42.000 100%.

01:41:43.000 Because a lot of people are doing that just for clicks because there is an actual economy based on engagement.

01:41:50.000 So you can make money if you're, you know, if you're putting up these posts and these posts are getting millions and millions of interactions, you're going to get more money.

01:41:57.000 And so there's a lot of people doing that.

01:41:58.000 So it used to be better because it used to be just pure information.

01:42:02.000 And if it was a video, it was just a video that someone took with their cell phone generally.

01:42:07.000 Now it's like a lot of weirdo stuff, a lot of weird fake stuff.

01:42:11.000 So it's hard.

01:42:12.000 Also, there was a piece in the paper today that talked about how Trump gets a few minute video every day that's a compilation of all the attacks and all the explosions that have happened in Iran, but is not getting a more nuanced picture of it.

01:42:29.000 So to some extent, is kind of drinking his own Kool-Aid.

01:42:33.000 How do they know what he gets?

01:42:35.000 I think that there was enough of a leak to say that he was given a, that each day he's given a chunk of video to watch.

01:42:43.000 And that I think historically has been something that happens with him is he'd rather watch it than read it.

01:42:48.000 And that by putting together just it's not even that they're saying they're fake videos.

01:42:48.000 Right.

01:42:53.000 I mean, obviously there are a lot of fake videos.

01:42:54.000 But he's only getting the positive videos.

01:42:56.000 He's just getting explosions.

01:42:58.000 He's just getting a lot of pictures of explosions.

01:42:58.000 Right.

01:43:00.000 So he's saying, you know, we're destroying their daily video montage briefing on the Iran war.

01:43:08.000 This is NBC News.

01:43:09.000 The montage typically runs for about two minutes.

01:43:12.000 That's enough time. 0.99

01:43:13.000 Just give you a nuanced perspective on a fucking international war. 0.98

01:43:16.000 Has raised concerns amongst those of the president's allies that he may not be receiving the complete picture of the war. 0.99

01:43:25.000 Yeah, of course he's not.

01:43:25.000 Yeah.

01:43:26.000 Yeah.

01:43:27.000 And of course the people that tricked him into doing this in the first place don't want him to get a full nuanced perspective of the war.

01:43:36.000 I mean, nobody thinks it's a good idea.

01:43:37.000 Yeah.

01:43:38.000 Literally videos, a series of clips of stuff blowing up.

01:43:41.000 Hilarious.

01:43:42.000 That's the world we're living in.

01:43:43.000 It's a TikTok president or a TikTok briefing for the president.

01:43:48.000 You know, but video, I mean, what we saw in Alabama, and I know you have some clips of this, and I think if you feel like running one, there's the level of depravity that's going on in our prison system is so much higher than the average person thinks it is.

01:44:07.000 And one of the reasons why we've seen so much outrage from people, finally, millions of people have seen the Alabama solution because people have HBO or they have watched it in theater.

01:44:15.000 And it's the first time they've been able to see inside.

01:44:18.000 It's the first time they've been able to really see it as opposed to reading a statistic or a lot of people die in prison or whatever.

01:44:25.000 And I think it does tap into our sense of humanity and it taps into our sense of community and the feeling that, like, I don't want to be a part of that.

01:44:34.000 I don't want to be part of doing that to other people.

01:44:37.000 You know, I could be tough on crime.

01:44:39.000 You know, we've shown the film to a lot of conservative viewers, including one of the founders of CPAC and various people who are pretty right-wing people and have said, look, I might be tough on crime.

01:44:53.000 That's not what I'm talking about.

01:44:55.000 That's a human rights crisis.

01:44:57.000 And where's the DOJ?

01:44:59.000 And where's the government doing anything to protect?

01:45:01.000 Where are the inspectors?

01:45:03.000 Yeah.

01:45:03.000 How are they allowing any of that?

01:45:05.000 Yeah.

01:45:06.000 Well, that's one of the great things about your documentary is it's clear.

01:45:11.000 I mean, there's no ambiguity at all.

01:45:15.000 It's like laid out there in full color.

01:45:18.000 You could see the blood on the ground.

01:45:21.000 You could see, I mean, it's horrific when kinetic justice, when that guy's beaten in his cell and you see how they dragged him out, he's face down, bleeding all they thought he was dead and he he managed to live and he's being dragged out and you're following the blood trail from his cell with the contraband cameras from the cell phones.

01:45:45.000 And had those cell phone cameras not existed, you'd have zero idea.

01:45:50.000 Like if those guards only decided to sell money bringing drugs in and not phones with cameras, who knows what you would know.

01:46:00.000 You would know very little.

01:46:01.000 Yeah.

01:46:02.000 Yeah.

01:46:02.000 And it does, I mean, you know, I would like to believe that the average American does not want to harm the average other American, you know, and even if you get hyped up on Twitter or you get to see, you know, too many videos of people blowing up stuff or whatever, that ultimately people have that experience of saying, you know, I went to that like coffee at the church and I sat there with that guy who I really can't stand.

01:46:28.000 And, you know, we ended up having a conversation.

01:46:31.000 You know, people are, they're kind of amazed at how much commonality they can feel with people where if they just see the person.

01:46:40.000 We all know, like if you text somebody, your kids or your wife or whatever, there's just some places where texts are not good.

01:46:49.000 It's not enough.

01:46:51.000 It's not enough.

01:46:51.000 It's going to make somebody's feelings hurt, you know.

01:46:55.000 But when you get to sit down across from somebody, you realize that it's another person you can kind of relate to.

01:47:02.000 So it's really disturbing that whether it's social media or just the demonization of people, the way that we just turn people into these one-dimensional figures, and then we could just rage at them and just hate them.

01:47:16.000 And distract yourself from your own problems.

01:47:19.000 That's a big part of it.

01:47:20.000 People love something that takes the focus away from whatever shortcomings they have or whatever things in their life they don't like.

01:47:27.000 They'll focus on external things. 0.98

01:47:29.000 I know some people whose lives are completely fucked up in so many ways. 1.00

01:47:33.000 Their health is fucked up. 1.00

01:47:34.000 Their relationships are fucked up. 1.00

01:47:35.000 Their job is fucked up. 1.00

01:47:37.000 And all they want to talk about is politics. 1.00

01:47:39.000 Like, hey, man, clean up your backyard.

01:47:42.000 Like, clean up your life.

01:47:43.000 Like, why are you spending so much time paying attention to what's going on with USAID?

01:47:48.000 Like, how much does that affect you?

01:47:50.000 Does it?

01:47:51.000 Does it really affect you that much? 1.00

01:47:52.000 All this fucking fraud. 1.00

01:47:54.000 But what about your life, man? 1.00

01:47:54.000 Right. 1.00

01:47:56.000 Your life is a fucking disaster. 1.00

01:47:59.000 And all you care about is the government, you know, and what they're doing to fuck the people over. 1.00

01:48:05.000 Like, I don't think that's really the problem. 0.98

01:48:07.000 I think you're getting in your own way, son.

01:48:10.000 You know, and that's a lot of people out there in this world.

01:48:13.000 And anything that you do to distract yourself, whether it's start drinking, gamble, get on pills, whatever it is.

01:48:20.000 People find ways to distract themselves from whatever is wrong with their life.

01:48:26.000 And that's part of what social media is providing you. 0.99

01:48:28.000 It's providing this alternative avenue for your attention to divert you from all the things that really are making your life a fucking disaster.

01:48:37.000 Yeah, there's also that, I think, sort of nuance falls into that also, because people are made calm by the idea that they can just identify problems and that they're simple, right?

01:48:50.000 So if you say to somebody, hey, like locking people up for 75 years probably doesn't make a lot of sense, that's complicated.

01:48:58.000 Wait, now I got to make a determination of what's the right thing to do with another person.

01:49:03.000 And, you know, so you end up with a lot of politicians who say, well, I know this is these are the bad people.

01:49:09.000 These are the good people.

01:49:10.000 We've got to promote the good people and get rid of the bad people.

01:49:13.000 Not recognizing that like everybody is a little of both and that some people certainly do a lot more bad stuff in the world than good stuff and vice versa.

01:49:21.000 But you have to see yourself, you know, as you're describing, like you have to recognize what's happening in your backyard in order for the community to work.

01:49:30.000 You can't say, well, look, I'm always right.

01:49:32.000 My neighbor's always wrong.

01:49:34.000 And therefore, I'm just going to keep raging over this.

01:49:37.000 You have to say, like, you know, I could see myself doing something.

01:49:41.000 I could see myself.

01:49:43.000 Boy, if I really got out of hand, I could see myself having a, you know, taking a swing at somebody.

01:49:49.000 And that's probably not a good thing.

01:49:50.000 But I don't want to say that somebody else that did it is automatically just a horrible person.

01:49:56.000 And that's why, you know, if you see this Attorney General in Alabama, you know, this idea that he says there are these horrible people in the world, people who have no respect for human life, and yet he's presiding over 1,500 of them dying.

01:50:11.000 But he hasn't imagined that he's part of the problem.

01:50:15.000 Respect for human life while human life is dying in these places where people are taken if they show no respect for human life and they're being killed by the people who are watching over them.

01:50:24.000 So it's a very topsy-turvy world. 0.52

01:50:24.000 Yeah. 0.52

01:50:27.000 And also cruelty plays a part in it.

01:50:30.000 We know that if you, sometimes we say about this film that it's about what we do to each other when no one's watching.

01:50:38.000 Like, you know, all human beings have a little bit of a propensity to want to put a firecracker in a frog's mouth and just see what happens.

01:50:47.000 You know, there's a level of cruelty that I think we have intrinsically.

01:50:53.000 Certainly once you other a person.

01:50:55.000 Absolutely.

01:50:55.000 Right.

01:50:56.000 And that's to some extent why when it's exposed, right, when there's transparency, when the press is allowed to report on what's happening inside prisons, people kind of get a conscience because they start realizing, eh, I wouldn't want to do that in front of my kid, or I wouldn't want to do that if it ends up in the paper.

01:51:13.000 I wouldn't want, you know.

01:51:15.000 And I think that is kind of a balancing effect, which is one of the reasons why this war on transparency is a huge problem, right?

01:51:26.000 We're not allowed to see what's happening in prisons, even though we're paying for them.

01:51:30.000 And the Supreme Court had this ruling that said that wardens could deny access to journalists simply by citing safety and security.

01:51:40.000 But meantime, the last 20 years, no journalist has been harmed inside a prison.

01:51:45.000 So who's all the secrecy keeping safe?

01:51:49.000 We're sort of perpetuating a system.

01:51:51.000 Our job going into the Alabama state prison system was to shine a light on that.

01:51:56.000 It shouldn't be that these guys who are incarcerated have to take life and death risks using contraband cell phones to show what's happening in institutions that I'm paying for and you're paying for it.

01:52:07.000 We're spending $116 billion a year in the United States on prisons, jails, parole.

01:52:15.000 That is an insane number.

01:52:18.000 And if we're spending that much money, we should sort of know what every one of those dollars is going to.

01:52:25.000 And we should have watchdogs who will say, hey, guess what?

01:52:28.000 In Alabama, they're supposed to be paying for a drug treatment program. 0.82

01:52:31.000 We don't know where the money's going.

01:52:33.000 Right.

01:52:34.000 Yeah, transparency is always good, especially in something like that. 0.97

01:52:37.000 I mean, to me, the idea of preventing journalists from almost as akin to these ag gag laws that they've slapped in states that have factory farming to prevent people from filming the horrific treatment of some of these animals because it would be bad for business, which is fucking crazy.

01:52:57.000 Like it should be bad for business, and people shouldn't tolerate it.

01:53:00.000 They should take their business elsewhere, which is what transparency is all about.

01:53:03.000 You don't want to buy chickens from a place that brutally beats their chickens or pigs or whatever it is.

01:53:09.000 And I mean, and a lot of people say, oh, well, you know, it's going to upset, we don't need to upset the public.

01:53:09.000 Yeah.

01:53:15.000 Well, what are you doing something for inside a slaughterhouse that would upset the public?

01:53:22.000 Like, there are ways to, if you want to euthanize an animal or something like that, there are ways to do it where you're not using like a bolt and smashing their skull with it.

01:53:30.000 Well, the bolt is actually the most humane way because it instantaneously kills them.

01:53:34.000 The other way is when they hang them by their ankles and slip their neck. 0.74

01:53:37.000 That's a little rougher.

01:53:38.000 But that's if you want kosher.

01:53:41.000 There's a lot of weird ways that they kill animals, but it's really the beating and it's the horrific torture that the cruel people that work there sometimes do. 0.98

01:53:51.000 Because there's been some videos that have been released of people like beating animals with crowbars and stuff for no fucking reason. 0.92

01:53:58.000 Just sadistic, sick people that just happen to work in these places and become very accustomed to treating these animals badly, just like security guards become very accustomed to treating prisoners badly. 0.98

01:54:10.000 It's kind of along the same lines.

01:54:13.000 I totally agree.

01:54:14.000 And just imagine what would happen if Tyson Foods or any of these companies just, the policy was just if the press wants to come in and photograph and the press wants to come in and write about it, they're allowed to come in once a week or whatever and just do whatever they want.

01:54:30.000 Well, it should be non-negotiable.

01:54:31.000 It should be a part of the ability to run a facility like that because of the consequences.

01:54:36.000 Because if you don't do that, there is the potential for you being a horrific abuser of animals.

01:54:41.000 Of course.

01:54:42.000 And nobody wants to buy your chicken or your pork or whatever it is if you're doing that.

01:54:47.000 And we should know.

01:54:48.000 But like criminalizing taking videos of animals being abused.

01:54:54.000 Crazy.

01:54:55.000 Like, how could you justify that?

01:54:57.000 You would only do it if you value profit over ethics, over morals.

01:55:02.000 That's the only thing.

01:55:03.000 If profit is more important than educating people on the horrific nature of how these animals are treated, it's more important to you.

01:55:11.000 Well, what's really important is we have cheap bacon.

01:55:15.000 Okay.

01:55:16.000 Yeah, but it is a big, it's like a big tapestry because the diffusion of responsibility figures into it.

01:55:21.000 And, you know, the perverting effect of money figures into it.

01:55:21.000 Right.

01:55:25.000 But it's a very just being accustomed to horrors.

01:55:31.000 You know, I knew a guy who worked at a slaughterhouse, and he told me, like, you never get the smell of blood off of you.

01:55:39.000 And he goes, and you never get just like the image of animals dying.

01:55:44.000 He goes, you got to understand, like, if you're working in a slaughterhouse, you're seeing who knows how many thousands of cows die a week.

01:55:51.000 Just thousands, just thousands of deaths, constant death.

01:55:56.000 Most farmers never saw that.

01:55:59.000 Like the way people used to raise animals for food.

01:56:03.000 You know, you would kill a cow and you would eat it for six months.

01:56:08.000 You know what I mean? 0.50

01:56:09.000 Like you could kill the occasional chicken.

01:56:14.000 You weren't seeing thousands of dead animals a week.

01:56:18.000 You weren't like seeing thousands of them get disemboweled a week.

01:56:22.000 It's like after a while, and you're in a factory, they're going by on hooks on a conveyor belt.

01:56:27.000 Like, what are we doing?

01:56:29.000 This is a good thing.

01:56:30.000 I went to visit a prison.

01:56:32.000 I went sort of on a series of prison visits in Berlin and Norway and a few other places.

01:56:38.000 And I was there with this sort of elderly woman that was like a deputy commissioner, I think, in North Carolina and the prison system, Virginia, Ginny. 0.94

01:56:49.000 And I loved her.

01:56:50.000 She was so smart.

01:56:51.000 And the first thing they do is they bring you to a concentration camp.

01:56:55.000 So they bring you to Soxenhausen before they take you to the prisons to see how the prisons are run.

01:57:01.000 And we're standing there in this concentration camp with the guide, and the woman says, well, this is where they would bring in the people on the trains, and then they would take them out.

01:57:12.000 And then this is where they would, you know, shave their heads, and then they would strip them down, and they would spray them with fire hoses and water, and then they would put powder, disinfectant powder on them.

01:57:23.000 They would take away all of their, you know, any kind of distinguishing marks.

01:57:28.000 They'd put them all in the same outfit.

01:57:30.000 And they would give them a number instead of their name.

01:57:33.000 They would be, you know.

01:57:34.000 And everybody started looking at it like very disturbed.

01:57:37.000 And Ginny leans over to me and she says, you know, Andrew, we do every one of those things in our prisons today.

01:57:45.000 And you realize that this dehumanization, this homogenization, this like making everybody look the same is part of just desensitizing us to what we're going to do to those people because they just look like they look like bad people because that's what happens when you shave your head and you're pale and you have the same outfit and you look like a convict.

01:58:07.000 You've turned them into another.

01:58:09.000 Yeah, you've turned them into another.

01:58:10.000 And because of the tribal nature of ancient human civilization, we have almost like a deep-seated DNA that allows us to other people because those people were coming and they were going to kill your tribal members and steal your resources and do whatever they could to the survivors. 0.73

01:58:29.000 And it was all horrific.

01:58:31.000 And so we have this thing that we're able to do that allows us to attack or to go after people and just to not think of them as your brothers and sisters and neighbors and fellow human beings sharing this wonderful spinning ball.

01:58:45.000 No, these are evil people.

01:58:47.000 These are others. 1.00

01:58:48.000 You kill them. 1.00

01:58:49.000 These are fill-in-the-blank. 1.00

01:58:51.000 These are the Japanese.

01:58:52.000 These are the Germans. 0.86

01:58:53.000 These are the this.

01:58:54.000 These are the that. 1.00

01:58:55.000 Whatever it is that we're at war with, those are the people that are not us and we kill them. 1.00

01:58:59.000 Yeah. 0.94

01:59:00.000 And that's how you feel about prisoners.

01:59:02.000 And then there's the other side where you go too far the other way and you have these crazy no-cash bail policies where you've got violent offenders in and out of jail constantly.

01:59:15.000 You've got people that have been arrested 40 times, pushing old people in front of the train in New York City.

01:59:23.000 You've got people that are just like mentally ill, violent criminals, punching women on the street in Seattle, and they just keep getting out of jail.

01:59:30.000 And you go, how is this possible? 0.98

01:59:32.000 How is this okay too?

01:59:33.000 Yeah.

01:59:35.000 But that's not good either.

01:59:36.000 Yeah, you can't.

01:59:37.000 But I think to the extent to which we could get everybody, which only is going to happen in little bits and little areas where we can make an impact, but we're trying, to say, well, look, it shouldn't be, you know, it shouldn't be that everybody who says that we shouldn't be running our prison industrial complex the way we are is soft on crime.

02:00:03.000 It's okay to be tough on crime.

02:00:06.000 It's okay to recognize that some people need to be separated out from society.

02:00:13.000 But if it becomes so polarized, then you get that progressive DA who, you know, there are some very smart ones, and then you get some who are just saying, well, you know, we just should abolish prisons and therefore, you know, we don't need any of this.

02:00:27.000 And that scares everybody and probably doesn't lead to any level because we all want public safety.

02:00:32.000 Like everybody wants to be serious about public safety.

02:00:36.000 That's different than being tough on crime.

02:00:38.000 Yes.

02:00:39.000 Well, it's also like, if you're not addressing the root of crime, if you're not addressing the, again, the same neighborhoods where it happens over and over and over, you know, you don't have like this rampant crime that's developing in Beverly Hills, right?

02:00:52.000 It's all happening in these impoverished, gang-infested neighborhoods.

02:00:56.000 Like, why has there been no resources put into that?

02:01:00.000 Imagine the amount of return that you would get.

02:01:03.000 Like, I always say, if you want to make America great again, here's the best way. 0.91

02:01:07.000 Have less losers. 0.94

02:01:09.000 How do you have less losers?

02:01:10.000 Give more people an opportunity to succeed.

02:01:13.000 Well, it's not like we're all at the same starting block.

02:01:16.000 We all know that.

02:01:18.000 No one will say that.

02:01:19.000 No one will say everybody's at the same line and how you get by in this life is depending upon how much work you put in once you're at the line.

02:01:26.000 Well, that's not true. 0.64

02:01:27.000 So how do we figure out these people that are at the farthest end of the starting line, the most fucked, Put some money into that. 0.80

02:01:37.000 Fix that. 0.97

02:01:38.000 Put some engineering into that.

02:01:39.000 Put some like some actual thought in trying to devise some sort of a method to increase the odds of having more productive people come out of these places and give them help.

02:01:54.000 And you would have better neighbors.

02:01:56.000 You'd have more people that are thriving in whatever business, more people that are artists, more people in the economy.

02:02:03.000 The world would be a better place.

02:02:04.000 Like, why wouldn't you invest in that?

02:02:07.000 Well, because there's no money in it.

02:02:09.000 You have to spend money on it.

02:02:10.000 Okay, I mean, there's more.

02:02:12.000 There's money in it, but nobody really wants to do the work to fix it.

02:02:16.000 There's money in it, but you can't make that money.

02:02:18.000 They're going to make that money, right?

02:02:19.000 You're going to help people make money.

02:02:21.000 And it'll contribute to the GDP.

02:02:23.000 It'll contribute to the tax base, to the overall economy.

02:02:26.000 But it's not a business where you can say, oh, if I get into that business of helping people, I can get rich.

02:02:33.000 And that's the problem.

02:02:35.000 Yeah.

02:02:35.000 I mean, if you try to make the, if the, you know, the ultimate adjudicator of everything is whether it is turning a profit, you know, you sort of race to the bottom, right?

02:02:48.000 Everybody's sort of, nobody really wants to do anything smart.

02:02:52.000 They just want to do things that enable them to get the most money the quickest.

02:02:56.000 But ultimately, right now, spending $116 billion a year on our prison system, you know, we've got 5% of the world's population.

02:03:06.000 We've got 20, 25% of the world's prisoners.

02:03:09.000 Crazy.

02:03:10.000 Like, this is wild. 0.63

02:03:12.000 What a wild statement.

02:03:13.000 Yeah.

02:03:14.000 It's incredible.

02:03:15.000 That's a broken society.

02:03:17.000 Like, if that's not evidence of a broken society, look, not like it's better in some of these other places that don't have a high percentage of people because they just kill them.

02:03:27.000 Like, there's a lot of places where you do something bad, they just kill you.

02:03:30.000 There's no thinking about, you know.

02:03:33.000 But I mean, in terms of like modern civilized society, you know, we don't do this well.

02:03:38.000 No, we don't rehabilitate well, that's for damn sure.

02:03:41.000 And we don't, as you're saying, we don't invest in kids.

02:03:45.000 We don't, you know, like, how are we, how are we in a situation where we are paying teachers so little money that they have to use their own money to buy books and school supplies?

02:03:58.000 Right.

02:03:59.000 We're beating the shit out of our teachers who are the people that are going to turn our kids into part of our community. 0.97

02:04:06.000 How can we be surprised we don't have a community? 0.99

02:04:08.000 Yeah, it's almost like it's a conspiracy.

02:04:09.000 I mean, you realize why people slap that tinfoil hat on and tighten it down to the chin.

02:04:15.000 Because like at a certain point in time, like, why wouldn't we put more money into schools?

02:04:19.000 It seems kind of crazy.

02:04:21.000 When you've got, like, in California, they've got programs that like spend hundreds of billions of dollars and go nowhere.

02:04:27.000 Like, where's the railroad?

02:04:29.000 You spend so much money.

02:04:31.000 Where's all the tiny houses?

02:04:32.000 Didn't you guys get hundreds of millions of dollars for tiny? 0.98

02:04:34.000 Where the fuck is the tiny houses? 0.98

02:04:35.000 No tiny houses. 0.99

02:04:36.000 It's like not a one tiny house has been built.

02:04:40.000 There's a lot of that stuff, the 24 billion to the homeless, the homeless people increase.

02:04:44.000 Like, imagine if they put 24 billion into The education system.

02:04:49.000 Guess what?

02:04:50.000 You would probably ultimately wind up with less homeless.

02:04:54.000 If you put $24 billion into education and community centers, God, imagine the work that you could do in California with $24 billion just in education.

02:05:04.000 California would have the greatest education system in the country.

02:05:08.000 If you just paid teachers an exorbitant amount a month, had an amount a year, had fantastic oversight, these incredibly well-structured education systems, great counseling, social workers that can help work with kids, people that could give them productive ways to expel some of this excess energy that they have, figure out how to focus, figure out what kind of jobs they maybe excel at based on their personality type, educate them towards that.

02:05:36.000 You could get a lot done.

02:05:38.000 You could get so much done with $24 billion.

02:05:41.000 Instead, it just, it just disappears like Kaiser Sosi.

02:05:47.000 No one knows where it went.

02:05:49.000 There's no accountability.

02:05:50.000 They veto everybody, tries to put an audit on it.

02:05:53.000 Yeah.

02:05:55.000 How did Alabama's prisons go from $300 million for $1.3 billion?

02:05:59.000 And they described it as inflation.

02:06:01.000 And no one's like, no one's investigated.

02:06:03.000 No one's going to jail. 1.00

02:06:05.000 No one like, fuck you. 1.00

02:06:07.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:06:09.000 I mean, there's, and I think that when you say it's a conspiracy, I really believe that, you know, conspiracies do not have to include people in dark back rooms, right?

02:06:21.000 It's very often just everybody's sitting around the table.

02:06:24.000 Everybody knows what the motivation is.

02:06:26.000 And they just go, okay, yeah, I'll do the thing.

02:06:28.000 You do the thing.

02:06:29.000 There's not, nobody has to be rubbing their hands together and having secret meetings.

02:06:34.000 They all know what's in their financial interest.

02:06:37.000 Well, clearly, if you beat prisoners to death and then lie about it and you all agree that you're going to lie about it, you're conspiring, right?

02:06:45.000 Yeah.

02:06:45.000 I mean, that happens, obviously, all the time.

02:06:48.000 Clearly.

02:06:48.000 Meetings like that all the time.

02:06:49.000 Clearly.

02:06:50.000 But I think there's an insidious element to the fact that people are agreeing that $24 billion should be spent on X, Y, or Z. Nobody really needs to get like a secret memo saying how they're going to steal that money.

02:07:05.000 Like they just go, oh, okay, in Alabama, what now?

02:07:07.000 We're allowed to spend $1.3 billion on one prison.

02:07:10.000 Great.

02:07:11.000 Okay.

02:07:12.000 Well, I'm not personally taking the $1.3 billion.

02:07:14.000 I'm not personally taking the billion-dollar overage myself, but it's going into the system the way that, you know, the first time that the red flag is they start construction before the deal is even signed.

02:07:25.000 They already start.

02:07:27.000 So the fix is in.

02:07:28.000 They know what's going on.

02:07:30.000 Look, I grew up in Boston, and Boston was a part of the most corrupt construction site in the history of the country, the Big Dig.

02:07:38.000 Big Dig, right? 0.96

02:07:39.000 That fucking thing was supposed to take like, I don't know how long it was supposed to take, but it went on long after I moved out and then came back to Boston like 10 years later. 0.99

02:07:49.000 It was still going on. 0.99

02:07:50.000 I'm like, this is crazy.

02:07:53.000 And by the time it did it, the population in Boston increased, so it didn't even really alleviate traffic.

02:07:59.000 But there's always going to be stuff like that.

02:08:01.000 If you have no oversight or if you have people that can figure out a way to inflate this and add on to that and da-da-da-da-da-da.

02:08:09.000 Next thing you know, it.

02:08:11.000 Well, the press is extremely important, which is why government, this government or prior government, they don't like the press, right?

02:08:20.000 Nobody likes getting in trouble because the press does when it operates at its best and when you have the people that are able to make a living being journalists and you're not firing everybody who's a good investigative reporter, then that should be, it's one of the reasons why the country was founded in that way, why freedom of the press is so important, is because it's the only disinfectant.

02:08:45.000 It's the only way.

02:08:46.000 And it doesn't mean people don't use the press in malevolent ways or people don't bullshit in the press, but people bullshit everything.

02:08:52.000 Yeah, but like the public kind of has a sense, or at least used to have a sense, and hopefully will again, that when somebody does an investigative story and they are able to produce the facts and figure out who's really responsible for a certain kind of corruption, that it reduces the corruption, just is the case, you know.

02:09:11.000 And it's like you can't really regulate it, or you can regulate it, but if you regulate it and nobody's paying attention to it, then the press has to identify that people are breaking the rules.

02:09:21.000 The DOJ right now is supposed to be the monitor of making sure that government institutions and others don't defy the Constitution, right?

02:09:35.000 So in Alabama, clearly, every time you see one of these events that happens in our film, those are all crimes.

02:09:42.000 Those are being committed by a state actor, by a prison guard, right?

02:09:47.000 Those are crimes being committed against our fellow citizens.

02:09:50.000 The fact that some of these people are incarcerated doesn't mean they're also supposed to be killed or maimed, right?

02:09:56.000 And so who really monitors that is the U.S. Department of Justice, because at the end of the day, their job is to maintain a constitutional level of care.

02:10:06.000 And it's not, by the way, that's not that great, right?

02:10:08.000 It's like you have to make sure that there's no cruel and unusual punishment.

02:10:12.000 Well, clearly in Alabama, there is.

02:10:14.000 Well, they started starving them, which is really crazy.

02:10:16.000 During the strike, they were giving them like a tiny ration.

02:10:20.000 Yeah.

02:10:20.000 Yeah, they were drinking.

02:10:22.000 No food for days.

02:10:23.000 Yeah.

02:10:24.000 And so the DOJ's job is to do that.

02:10:26.000 What was the DOJ doing a few years back is they were doing a kind of a sort of an okay job pursuing just the worst actors, the worst of the worst.

02:10:36.000 So they would find a police station that was just regularly harming people in its jails, arresting people for no reason.

02:10:46.000 They were finding prison systems where people were getting murdered, like in Alabama, and that was going okay. 1.00

02:10:57.000 Well, that whole civil rights division of the DOJ is now basically gone, right?

02:11:02.000 It's been totally repurposed.

02:11:04.000 So now it's dealing with reverse racism and various things like that.

02:11:11.000 But they're not doing those other cases anymore.

02:11:13.000 They don't care about what's happening in a police department or what's happening in a so you don't even have that level of scrutiny.

02:11:20.000 And when did all this change?

02:11:22.000 I mean, I think most recently you've seen the DOJ just dismantle the Civil Rights Division.

02:11:27.000 So that's been in the current administration.

02:11:29.000 And the Civil Rights Division was in charge of looking at the prisons?

02:11:32.000 Yeah.

02:11:33.000 So what had they done during the last four years before that?

02:11:37.000 They also didn't do a great job, but they did bring actions that had impact in a bunch of different states.

02:11:45.000 So for example, they sued the state of Alabama, which happened under the first Trump administration, actually.

02:11:53.000 The case against Alabama started under Obama.

02:11:58.000 Then under Trump, Jeff Sessions had to approve the issuance of these letters, these findings letters.

02:12:05.000 And then they had, when Alabama said, you know, take a hike, you're wrong.

02:12:09.000 We don't agree.

02:12:10.000 We're not going to make a consent decree.

02:12:11.000 We're not going to settle.

02:12:13.000 Then they had to sue them.

02:12:14.000 So that happened under that happened under Jeff Sessions.

02:12:19.000 And that was now, you know, two administrations ago.

02:12:24.000 The Trump administration brought this action, but it's just being dragged on and dragged on.

02:12:31.000 And now the DOJ doesn't really care about this kind of litigation.

02:12:34.000 So the people that were running it are gone, all those people on the page.

02:12:37.000 Well, I have to also imagine that there are so many cases.

02:12:41.000 And if the press was allowed to weekly, if there was weekly access the press had to these correction facilities all over the country, the amount of cases would be fucking extraordinary.

02:12:54.000 But because they've been allowed to hide, because they've been allowed to do this stuff in complete secrecy with total control over whether or not things get released or don't get released, like it's just it's become just a part of the system.

02:13:07.000 It's like standard operational procedure.

02:13:10.000 And it's, I mean, but the cases would go down, right?

02:13:15.000 Oh, as soon as you could do it.

02:13:16.000 They would have to.

02:13:17.000 If you're beating people in your care, if you're a prison guard like Roderick Gadson, and you've had 24 cases of excessive force, it's sport for them.

02:13:27.000 You know, you would say at one point, well, this is not working so great for me, so I want to at least behave somewhat better.

02:13:34.000 Of course.

02:13:35.000 Well, I think your film was probably the first time most people ever got a chance to see.

02:13:42.000 And I would hope that your film and then also this conversation and the other ones that you've been having will move this conversation in a different direction where people start talking about it openly where they're forced to do something.

02:13:56.000 Because it seems like you have to force them to act.

02:13:59.000 And they're probably dealing with so many other cases as well.

02:14:01.000 This is just another burden to them.

02:14:03.000 And if it's the prisoners, oh, well, that's the least priority situation we have to deal with.

02:14:09.000 These people are bad people.

02:14:10.000 They're in jail.

02:14:10.000 Like those, the radio people that you used, their voices.

02:14:15.000 Like, it's God. 1.00

02:14:16.000 It's like, shut the fuck up. 1.00

02:14:17.000 Like, you're listening to them. 0.99

02:14:19.000 As a person who's had multiple podcasts with people that were wrongfully convicted, I've done a ton of them with my friend Josh Dubin, who was originally with the Innocence Project, and he's now with the Ike Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice.

02:14:35.000 Like his passion project is, besides being a successful attorney outside of that, his passion project is finding these very obvious cases of people that were wrongfully convicted that have spent a giant chunk of their life in jail.

02:14:49.000 And through these podcasts, we've gotten a bunch of these people out, and you've got a chance to have conversations with them.

02:14:55.000 I've had a few on here, and you have these conversations with these people, and you realize, like, these are brilliant people who lost a giant chunk of their potential to nonsense.

02:15:09.000 And I think that's, if it's, first of all, I think Josh is really smart, and I know you've done a lot with him, and I think that's so important.

02:15:09.000 Yeah.

02:15:17.000 There's, you know, there's always a tendency to sort of think of only wrongful convictions because, you know, everybody can agree that we shouldn't be locked up for something that we didn't do.

02:15:31.000 We've had people on that weren't wrongfully convicted that did an extraordinary amount of time for a minor crime.

02:15:37.000 Right.

02:15:37.000 But unfortunately, one of them wind up getting out and then killing a guy, cutting off his head and wearing a wig.

02:15:43.000 He didn't, I guess he didn't know what the new cameras could do, which is funny, but basically you're saying it's a technology problem.

02:15:53.000 He didn't understand the technology he was dealing with because he put on a wig and he thought, oh, I'm going to look like a woman.

02:15:58.000 Like, bro, it was like HD.

02:15:59.000 He was trying to do the wig.

02:16:01.000 He was learning from Bob Durst.

02:16:03.000 Yeah.

02:16:04.000 Well, I think he, you know, he probably acted out of passion and then was trying to figure out how to rectify this problem that he created.

02:16:13.000 But one thing I want to talk, I haven't met Josh, but I want to talk to him.

02:16:13.000 Yeah.

02:16:16.000 And one thing I want to talk to him about is the fact that there is like a level of conviction on the part of a lot of prosecutors that they're on the, as you're saying, they're like, they're on that team and therefore they have to subscribe to everybody's guilty.

02:16:36.000 Everybody should be locked up for as long as possible because there are all these other people, there are defense lawyers and people like that, who are on the other team.

02:16:42.000 But then you end up with people like Steve Marshall, who, by the way, is running for Senate right now.

02:16:47.000 And we're pushing to get him to step down from his Senate run because he's sort of been exposed for what he's.

02:16:53.000 And by the way, he said that he had never been in the film.

02:16:55.000 He'd never met me.

02:16:56.000 He just came out with a whole public statement saying I had nothing to do with those people.

02:16:59.000 I never met them.

02:17:01.000 I got like 50 pictures in my phone of him walking me around the statehouse in Alabama.

02:17:07.000 There's a missing piece there.

02:17:11.000 That's being very charitable.

02:17:13.000 But why is it that I'm a charitable person?

02:17:16.000 But why is it that in Alabama, for example, there's a guy named Tafaris Johnson who was arrested for a murder a million years ago.

02:17:26.000 He's been on death row the entire time.

02:17:29.000 And the evidence against him totally fell apart.

02:17:31.000 There are a dozen people that gave him an alibi that said we were with him at this club that was across town.

02:17:37.000 He had nothing to do with this crime.

02:17:39.000 And yet, and by the way, the DA, who that office is the office that should prosecute that crime, they've asked for a new trial.

02:17:48.000 They've said that they're not confident that he's guilty.

02:17:51.000 And yet, the Attorney General's office is continuing to try to execute him.

02:17:55.000 They're trying to kill him for something which he clearly did not do.

02:17:59.000 There's another case, a guy named Chris Barber, where there's DNA evidence that showed that somebody else committed the crime, and the DA is trying to execute Christopher Barber.

02:18:10.000 And so, you know, there's this teaming, you know, where you become part of law enforcement, and then somehow you lose your sense of judgment or nuance or your ability to decide who's guilty and who's not guilty.

02:18:28.000 And that's a really dangerous thing.

02:18:30.000 Yeah, because your career depends on you getting a win.

02:18:33.000 Your career advances if you get a win.

02:18:35.000 The way you get a win is to convict people and not getting convictions overturned, that's a loss.

02:18:41.000 That fucks up your career. 1.00

02:18:42.000 So better to kill them. 1.00

02:18:44.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:18:45.000 Which is really crazy.

02:18:47.000 Yeah.

02:18:47.000 Which is very, I mean, it's disturbing that we haven't come up with ways to identify fairness, right?

02:18:58.000 That fairness should be the method by which you judge how a district attorney performs.

02:19:03.000 It's like, well, we decided to prosecute a certain number of cases.

02:19:06.000 Some of those cases weren't worth prosecuting.

02:19:08.000 Some of those cases were going to turn into wrongful convictions.

02:19:11.000 We're not just going to prosecute everything, which is why this whole thing about like Brady material, where you're supposed to give the other side anything that comes out in the investigation that might be used to prove their innocence.

02:19:23.000 You know, if there's something that goes against the criminal case, you have to provide it to the lawyer on the other side.

02:19:28.000 But regularly, prosecutors just bury this information.

02:19:31.000 You know, you have some witness that said, I was with that person at the time, and that witness's testimony disappears, or you have something that shows that the gun that they thought was used to commit the crime wasn't the one that was used to commit the crime.

02:19:42.000 So there's just a that's the thing, the teaming, the decision that you have to be part of one side or another.

02:19:49.000 You know, I really think that that part of your special where you're sort of like putting me in the position of somebody who's having to make a decision about what team I'm on and where I lose the thread, you know, that's like that's a very significant thing that you did there, you know, because it was like a way of bringing to the average citizen that feeling that they're all having right now.

02:20:14.000 Yeah, you all get lumped into it. 0.99

02:20:16.000 Everybody gets lumped into it because there's only two choices in this country, and that's stupid. 1.00

02:20:21.000 Or you could be one of those wacky libertarians, you know, and then you're like, oh, Bob's a libertarian. 1.00

02:20:26.000 He's out of the fucking. 1.00

02:20:27.000 That shit's never going to work. 1.00

02:20:29.000 You know, what else do you get? 1.00

02:20:31.000 I mean, I'm always curious about, I'm always asking myself what I should be, you know, what I should be spending my time on.

02:20:39.000 And I get involved in a film and it kind of grabs you and it could be a hold of you.

02:20:46.000 I feel like it decides.

02:20:48.000 I feel like I'm just sort of walking around thinking, maybe I don't need to make another one of these things.

02:20:53.000 They're very exhausting.

02:20:55.000 And then something happens or my shrink says to me, Yeah, I know you always say you're not going to make another movie, but I think you're better when you're making a movie.

02:21:04.000 I think you're better when you're engaged in something like this.

02:21:07.000 And I'm curious for, you know, you've built this incredible platform and you have access to just a remarkable number of people in the universe.

02:21:18.000 And what do you feel like your mission is?

02:21:21.000 What do you feel like is the, you know, when you get to the end of a week and you look back and you think, like, I did what I was, I did what I set out to do this week.

02:21:31.000 All I ever do is try to talk to people I'm interested in talking to, and that's it.

02:21:38.000 And I feel like that's what I started with, and that's what I stuck with.

02:21:43.000 And if I deviate from that path, if I say, oh, I'll get this guy on because he's famous and then I'll get more views, or I'll get her on because she's controversial and I'll get more views.

02:21:58.000 I don't think like that at all.

02:22:01.000 I don't allow it into my head.

02:22:04.000 I get a list of people on my phone that are interested in coming on the show and I spend a couple hours, a few times a week, just going over this list and then I'll go, hmm, that's interesting.

02:22:17.000 Let me look into this.

02:22:19.000 And so then I'll do a search on this person and what they're interested in.

02:22:23.000 And then maybe I'll watch a documentary or I'll get an audio book and I'll start listening to it on the way to work.

02:22:29.000 And then I'll decide.

02:22:31.000 And I'll go, yeah, okay, I like this.

02:22:33.000 This is cool.

02:22:34.000 I'm into this.

02:22:36.000 This would be a conversation that I'll be genuinely curious about.

02:22:39.000 And so that's the only way I do it.

02:22:42.000 And I've done it that way from the very beginning.

02:22:45.000 I either talk to my friends or I talk to people who I've seen a documentary that they did or I've read one of their books or I've watched a YouTube video with them in it.

02:22:55.000 I thought they were fascinating.

02:22:56.000 And then I reach out to my guy and I say, hey, can't you see if this guy's interested in being on?

02:23:00.000 And that's the only way I do it.

02:23:03.000 So I feel like as long as I do that, I will continue to give people this same service.

02:23:11.000 And this service is, this is an extension of my curiosity, my honest curiosity to the world.

02:23:19.000 So whoever I'm honestly curious about, sit them down, talk to them, do my best.

02:23:25.000 That's it. 0.60

02:23:27.000 And if I try to make it anything more than that, if I try to change it or distort it or move it in a general direction or make it have a message or make it make more money or whatever it is, I'll fuck it up.

02:23:40.000 That's what I think.

02:23:41.000 I think that's really smart.

02:23:43.000 And I think, you know, this is what's lacking is sort of authenticity.

02:23:47.000 And everybody's like, oh, authenticity is so important.

02:23:49.000 How can I manufacture that?

02:23:50.000 Right.

02:23:51.000 And I think your approach is really smart.

02:23:53.000 I also think, you know, I think you talked about that you really like playing pool and that if you weren't doing this, you might just play pool all the time.

02:24:01.000 Yeah, that's what I would do.

02:24:02.000 I like playing pool, but I'm wondering, like, you know, something's keeping you from playing pool right now.

02:24:10.000 Well, I still enjoy this.

02:24:12.000 If I didn't enjoy this, I would stop.

02:24:13.000 Like, I don't need any more money.

02:24:15.000 I could just stop if I didn't enjoy it.

02:24:17.000 But I do enjoy it.

02:24:18.000 I am a very curious person.

02:24:20.000 I'm fascinated by different people's perspectives, how they view the world, how they got to where they are.

02:24:26.000 What was their first step?

02:24:27.000 Like, why did they make these choices?

02:24:28.000 Like, what is it about the way they think that makes them unique?

02:24:32.000 And I don't think I'm ever going to lose that.

02:24:35.000 I think that's a very important part of my understanding of us as a species, us as a civilization.

02:24:42.000 And I'm very fascinated with the history of the human race and how we got to this point and where we are and how we define what is normal and what is not normal and what our standards are and how they get manipulated.

02:24:57.000 I don't think I'm ever going to stop being curious about those things.

02:25:00.000 I may stop doing this publicly.

02:25:02.000 I will never stop being curious.

02:25:04.000 I'll never stop watching all these documentaries or reading books.

02:25:08.000 I don't think I'll ever stop trying to have conversations with people, even if I don't do it publicly.

02:25:13.000 Because it's, I mean, this is totally accidental.

02:25:17.000 I don't know if you know the history of this podcast.

02:25:19.000 It started out with me and my friends just bullshitting in front of a laptop.

02:25:23.000 And there was no expectations.

02:25:26.000 It made no money for years.

02:25:29.000 And then it just kind of grew.

02:25:31.000 And I never promoted it.

02:25:33.000 I never went on anywhere and said, please watch my show.

02:25:36.000 I never took an ad out anywhere.

02:25:38.000 I just kept doing it.

02:25:40.000 And it just snowballed to the point where I'm like, all right.

02:25:44.000 And now I just feel like I have this responsibility.

02:25:47.000 And I get up and I go, all right, I got to do this thing today.

02:25:50.000 Let me clear my mind first.

02:25:52.000 So I go to the gym and I work out and I get in the cold plunge and I get in the sauna and I clear my mind out.

02:25:57.000 And then I'm like, make sure I'm prepared and just show up at work.

02:26:02.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:26:03.000 I noticed that you're not like, you don't look at shit. 0.99

02:26:05.000 You don't look at your phone. 0.99

02:26:07.000 You know, you can't do that.

02:26:08.000 That distracts people.

02:26:09.000 I totally agree.

02:26:10.000 It's very gross.

02:26:12.000 Yeah.

02:26:13.000 Especially if you're talking to someone that has something really important to say.

02:26:16.000 I mean, if I'm looking at my phone for a brief second, it's because it's something relevant to what we are talking about.

02:26:21.000 I want to send it to Jamie so he can pull it up on the screen. 0.98

02:26:24.000 But I think it's one of the great benefits of having these long conversations with people on a podcast is that that's time where you're not staring at a fucking device. 0.96

02:26:33.000 And most people lack that.

02:26:35.000 So I've gotten this completely unexpected education in life and human beings and how they think and what drives them and just what makes them interesting.

02:26:45.000 And, you know, how does it impact like your girls, right?

02:26:53.000 You have three girls.

02:26:55.000 How does it impact sort of how you interact with them?

02:26:58.000 You feel like you learn something and then you're going to be able to do it.

02:27:00.000 Yeah, I'm a way more educated person than I ever was when I was younger.

02:27:04.000 I'm just, I just know more about humans.

02:27:07.000 I know more about myself.

02:27:09.000 I've just, you know, you're thinking and you're constantly thinking.

02:27:14.000 So it's just adding to this database of understanding that you have about human beings and about just life in general and just education.

02:27:21.000 And, you know, unfortunately, my kids are really smart.

02:27:26.000 And so I have cool conversations with them about stuff.

02:27:29.000 And, you know, one of my kids has this crazy recall that my wife insists comes from me.

02:27:35.000 It's nuts.

02:27:36.000 Like, she can recall things about the Titanic and specifics about the voyages because she got down this Titanic kick for a while.

02:27:44.000 You know, and lately we've been talking about the Mongols because she's studying Genghis Khan in school.

02:27:50.000 And so we had these long conversations about Mongols and what they did.

02:27:55.000 And I'm telling her some stuff that she hasn't known.

02:27:57.000 And she tells me some stuff that I didn't know.

02:27:59.000 Whoa.

02:28:00.000 How old is she? 0.98

02:28:01.000 This one's 15.

02:28:03.000 But so it impacts not just my relationship with them, but really my relationship with everybody in my life.

02:28:10.000 And what's really hard is talking to people that aren't interested in anything and don't engage with all these different things.

02:28:20.000 And then when you talk to them, it's like they're operating on this frequency that's like time and work and life has sort of ground down all their sensitivity and callused all of their senses to the world, their thoughts of the world, their perspectives of the world.

02:28:41.000 And they've developed these sort of placeholder opinions for things.

02:28:46.000 And it's so awkward.

02:28:48.000 And, you know, and over time, like, you know, Tony Robbins talked about this once, that if you make small changes in your life, like if you're both going in parallel lines, right?

02:28:58.000 And then you make a small deviation, a few degrees to the right, over time, you'll be way over here where they're kind of on the same path.

02:29:07.000 And that's what I find in life that's weird.

02:29:10.000 And then I think about how many people don't have the opportunity to do that because they have a job that's like mundane and it's consuming and they're involved in it all day long.

02:29:19.000 When they get done, they're exhausted and they never really satisfy their curiosity or encourage and engage with their curiosity.

02:29:29.000 Foster it, you know?

02:29:31.000 And it's what, to me, makes people fascinating.

02:29:35.000 When I talk to someone who's curious about things and it's really like, and it went down all, I was curious, so then I started researching.

02:29:42.000 And this is what I found out.

02:29:43.000 Like, that's the kind of person I want to talk to.

02:29:46.000 You know?

02:29:47.000 Yeah, it's really, I mean, I think it's also, you know, you're probably because it got big without a plan to get big, and because I think you're the essence of it is wanting to express curiosity, wanting to take in information.

02:30:05.000 How do you deal with the people who say like, oh, you know, you had so-and-so on.

02:30:10.000 You should have asked them this or you should have done this.

02:30:12.000 I don't know that they're saying that.

02:30:14.000 Because you don't hear it.

02:30:15.000 I don't pay attention.

02:30:17.000 I gave up on that years ago.

02:30:19.000 Like you used to follow.

02:30:21.000 Yeah, and then you realize like, oh, I'm at the will of other people's opinions constantly.

02:30:24.000 And some of them aren't logical. 0.99

02:30:25.000 And some of them are petty, and some of them are shitty. 1.00

02:30:28.000 They're just shitty people. 1.00

02:30:29.000 They're mean. 1.00

02:30:30.000 Like, why are you being mean for no reason?

02:30:32.000 Like, you know, why are you being insulting for no reason?

02:30:35.000 And a lot of it is jealousy.

02:30:37.000 They're not getting enough attention. 1.00

02:30:38.000 They think you're an idiot. 1.00

02:30:39.000 Why are you getting so much attention? 1.00

02:30:41.000 I'm brilliant.

02:30:42.000 I should be getting more attention.

02:30:43.000 There's a lot of that.

02:30:44.000 There's a lot of ego involved.

02:30:45.000 But there's a lot of like very should be nice. 0.98

02:30:53.000 Like just people with shitty perspectives. 0.55

02:30:55.000 And you don't want to engage with that. 0.99

02:30:56.000 You don't want that in your head.

02:30:58.000 Because I think that's contagious. 0.99

02:30:59.000 And that's why people that are constantly surrounded by negative, shitty people, they develop negative, shitty tendencies. 0.99

02:31:06.000 It's just we imitate our atmosphere. 0.99

02:31:09.000 Which is why like this idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is so fucking crazy.

02:31:14.000 When you're asking some kid whose, you know, dad's been in jail since he was three and lives in a crime-infested neighborhood and has 11 kids living in a one-bedroom apartment. 0.91

02:31:25.000 And you're saying, well, how come you went to jail? 1.00

02:31:28.000 Shut the fuck up, bitch. 1.00

02:31:29.000 You would have went to jail too if you lived there. 1.00

02:31:31.000 You don't know what you're like, what we need to do is figure out why are these kids in this situation?

02:31:35.000 Why are so many of our citizens, people of our community, stuck in these situations with no attention paid to it whatsoever?

02:31:42.000 And then you're wondering why so many people commit crimes.

02:31:45.000 You're wondering why your prisons are so full.

02:31:48.000 Like that. 0.94

02:31:50.000 When you engage with people that constantly have shitty perspectives and shitty, a little about that, a little when you're young is good. 1.00

02:31:57.000 But once you're, by the time you're like 19, 20, you know what an asshole is. 1.00

02:32:02.000 You know, you don't want assholes in your life. 1.00

02:32:04.000 You're like, avoid at all costs. 1.00

02:32:06.000 And online, if you're engaging with people online, you're getting at least 10% assholes. 0.98

02:32:12.000 It's like there's no way of avoiding it. 0.97

02:32:14.000 So I don't want to.

02:32:15.000 Yeah, it gets in your head.

02:32:17.000 I am probably as critical, like logically critical, as anybody's ever going to be about me.

02:32:24.000 Like, and what I do and the way I do it and like interviews that went well or didn't go well, I examine them.

02:32:31.000 You know, I think about it.

02:32:32.000 Like, when they're done, like, that was like, I should have stopped them from talking about that because I should have said, like, wait, that doesn't make sense.

02:32:39.000 Like, you let people ramble a little bit too much, and then they change subjects, you want to go back to it, and then something else comes up, and you lose, like, ah, I should have really challenged that a little bit more.

02:32:49.000 Or I should have done this, or I should have done that.

02:32:51.000 But, you know, you're freeballing.

02:32:54.000 You don't know what I don't have any like questions I know I'm going to ask.

02:32:59.000 I just have an understanding of the subject and I let it play out.

02:33:03.000 And I think that's why it's good.

02:33:05.000 I just think when you listen to people when I know you grew up in Ba-ba-ba.

02:33:10.000 You did this.

02:33:11.000 It's like the same tone.

02:33:11.000 You did that.

02:33:12.000 These are just questions.

02:33:13.000 Then the person answers the question.

02:33:15.000 And then another question comes.

02:33:16.000 Like, you're not having a conversation.

02:33:19.000 And I don't think of them as interviews.

02:33:21.000 I think of them as conversations.

02:33:22.000 And I think that's what I want to hear.

02:33:24.000 So that's what I do.

02:33:26.000 And if people are like, well, you should have done this. 1.00

02:33:27.000 And ask them, it's like, no, you should go get a fucking podcast, bitch. 1.00

02:33:31.000 Make your own podcast and then get popular enough we can get that person on. 1.00

02:33:35.000 Then you ask them that.

02:33:36.000 Yeah.

02:33:37.000 I'm going to ask them what I ask them.

02:33:39.000 And when I'm done, I'm done.

02:33:40.000 That's it.

02:33:41.000 Yeah.

02:33:42.000 I mean, having, you know, I do interviews for when I'm doing documentaries.

02:33:46.000 I'll do interviews for seven, eight, nine hours at a time.

02:33:49.000 Not that I suggest you do it, but it's the reason I do it is because I want to converse.

02:33:56.000 I want to really understand the other person.

02:33:57.000 I want to give myself time to really hear them out.

02:34:00.000 And also, you know, to some extent, the most interesting stuff comes out when everybody just feels comfortable and their defenses go down.

02:34:09.000 Yeah.

02:34:09.000 Elon was talking about that.

02:34:09.000 Yeah.

02:34:11.000 He's like, that's that last hour.

02:34:12.000 The last hour you could really get them.

02:34:15.000 Because it's hard for, especially if someone has an agenda.

02:34:19.000 You know, you could, after a while, you're talking to them.

02:34:22.000 The tendencies, the way they view the world comes out.

02:34:25.000 If I really want to know how someone feels about love or life, I want to ask them, you know, how they got to where they are in life, how they became who they are.

02:34:35.000 Like, give them a chance to brag.

02:34:38.000 Give them a chance to inflate their accomplishments or give them a chance to pat themselves on the back.

02:34:46.000 Give them a chance to dismiss other people's accomplishments.

02:34:50.000 Give them a chance.

02:34:51.000 You'll find out who people are without even pressing them on certain things.

02:34:56.000 No, they want to tell you who they are.

02:34:57.000 They really are.

02:34:58.000 And they also, like a lot of people, they have an agenda.

02:34:58.000 Yeah.

02:35:03.000 They really want to project something to the world.

02:35:07.000 And then there's people that don't.

02:35:08.000 Those people are amazing.

02:35:09.000 There's some people that come in, they're just open books.

02:35:11.000 They're just like just a mind, a curious person, just a person who followed a path, an artist, a singer, a comedian, a this or that, an athlete, like whatever it is.

02:35:21.000 Like, what made you you?

02:35:23.000 How did you get there?

02:35:24.000 That's why I love comedy so much because, you know, just listening, there's a joke in Pumping Mics, this little series that we did with Jeff, you know, Jeff Ross and David Tell.

02:35:35.000 And I got to watch, you know, six versions of Dave, who's just incredible, telling, they're both great, but Dave telling the same joke like six different times.

02:35:46.000 Right.

02:35:47.000 Because we filmed it over like a long weekend and we did two shows a night at the cellar.

02:35:52.000 And so he's got this line when he says they're talking about like an in memoriam, you know, people we lost.

02:35:59.000 And they talk, they talk about Stephen Hawking.

02:36:01.000 And Dave says, yeah, Steve Hawking, the great astrophysicist, you know, we lost him.

02:36:09.000 And JS Jeff says that, and Dave says, he says, yeah, I knew something happened because my printer stopped working.

02:36:16.000 And for some reason, like this joke makes people so many people laughed at this joke because it's so insanely like impulsive, right?

02:36:28.000 I knew Stephen Hawking died because my printer stopped working.

02:36:30.000 And the next night, he did a different version of it where he said, oh, because my computer stopped working, and it got no laughs at all.

02:36:37.000 And just being able to see the spontaneity and the unlocked quality of Dave's mind.

02:36:44.000 The tweaking of the joke.

02:36:47.000 But also just like the freedom, right?

02:36:49.000 Which maybe some of that for some people come with being stoned.

02:36:53.000 Some people, but I see like the feeling, like in your comedy special, the feeling that it's coming in the moment, even though I know a lot of those things are things that you've been thinking about, talking about and honing over a lot of years.

02:37:06.000 It's the moment when it feels like it's coming naturally.

02:37:11.000 That's where like the biggest laughs are.

02:37:14.000 It's also like where the biggest connection, the biggest human being.

02:37:17.000 Yeah, that's where the dance is.

02:37:18.000 The dance is like staying in the moment no matter how many times you've talked about a subject.

02:37:23.000 Don't think about that.

02:37:24.000 Think about the actual subject.

02:37:27.000 You're basically doing like a form of hypnosis.

02:37:30.000 You're leading people to think the way your mind is working.

02:37:34.000 And the only way you could do that is if your mind is actually thinking that way.

02:37:37.000 If you're thinking about some other stuff, for some reason, even if you're saying the words the exact same way, they can smell it on you.

02:37:44.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:37:44.000 They can tell.

02:37:45.000 Yeah.

02:37:46.000 Yeah.

02:37:47.000 Well, hey, man, thank you for everything you've done.

02:37:50.000 Thank you for the Jinx, and thank you for the Alabama solution because it's really awesome.

02:37:55.000 And I really hope that through that film, a lot of people get outraged and the right people.

02:38:03.000 And enough attention gets put on it where you force people to do something about it. 0.98

02:38:09.000 And I don't think people have any idea how bad these fucking prisons are until they see that. 0.95

02:38:14.000 And I think those contraband phones and what those inmates have done and the inmates themselves, through the way they conduct themselves, and when you could see how intelligent these people are, and that you realize this is not right. 0.98

02:38:29.000 None of this is right.

02:38:31.000 This is.

02:38:32.000 I mean, on the positive side, I would say, just so we don't end on a really negative note, the film has had an impact in Alabama.

02:38:43.000 It's having an impact in Alabama already.

02:38:45.000 And there are incredible demonstrations that have been happening.

02:38:49.000 There's actually, I don't know if you have it, there's a still of this if you want to look at it, but there's hundreds of people showed up on the steps of the Capitol, people really showing up with the intention of showing their loved ones being there and saying, listen, is really happening, and giving the rest of the public permission to understand that this is, you know, 45% of Americans have had an incarcerated relative or been incarcerated.

02:39:15.000 This is an infection.

02:39:17.000 This is happening in many, many, many places.

02:39:19.000 So for us, the film has been unlocking that, giving people a feeling that they're not alone, that they don't have to be ashamed of having somebody.

02:39:29.000 So, you know, these are people who've seen the film who've decided that they want to express themselves.

02:39:35.000 And this is happening more and more.

02:39:37.000 And we just saw there was a bipartisan bill that was just introduced by Senator Larry Stutz, who's a Republican senator, who said he saw the film.

02:39:48.000 He couldn't unsee it.

02:39:49.000 And he said, this is not, he wrote an op-ed about it not being an example of Christian values.

02:39:55.000 And he introduced this bipartisan bill for prison oversight, which is a real bill. 0.96

02:40:00.000 It's not a bullshit bill.

02:40:01.000 It's a real bill about how you take the investigations because you saw in the film the investigations are run by the same department that commits the crimes.

02:40:10.000 So I think we're seeing a lot of positive action as a result of the film.

02:40:15.000 And I think that's what transparency is all about, is if the public can see it, and I appreciate your talking about this and having this be in the public conversation because it's really important.

02:40:28.000 If people see it, they're not happy about it.

02:40:31.000 They understand that something more humane needs to be done.

02:40:35.000 Yeah, I think universal.

02:40:36.000 I don't think anybody could watch that and not think something should be done.

02:40:40.000 So thank you.

02:40:40.000 Really appreciate it.

02:40:41.000 Thank you.

02:40:41.000 Thanks for being here.

02:40:42.000 I enjoyed it.

02:40:44.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - March 27, 2026

Joe Rogan Experience #2475 - Andrew Jarecki

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Summary

Transcript